Theology, hermeneutics, and imagination
Subtitle: the crisis of interpretation at the end of modernity
By: Garrett Green.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Cambridge, UK; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 229
Subjects: Bible -- Hermeneutics.
Description: This book explores the contemporary crisis of biblical interpretation by examining modern and postmodern forms of the 'hermeneutics of suspicion'. Garrett Green looks at several thinkers who played key roles in creating a radically suspicious reading of the Bible. After Kant, Hamann, and Feuerbach comes Nietzsche, who marked the turn from modern to postmodern suspicion. Green argues that similarities between Derrida's deconstruction and Barth's theology of signs show that postmodern suspicion ought not to be viewed simply as a threat to theology but as a secular counterpart to its own hermeneutical insights. When theology attends to its proper task of describing the grammar of scriptural imagination, it discovers a source of suspicion more radical than the secular, the hermeneutical expression of God's gracious judgement. Green concludes that Christians are committed to the hermeneutical imperative, the never-ending struggle for the meaning of scripture in the hopeful insecurity of the faithful imagination.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 217-225) and index.
A revised and explanded version of the Edward Cadbury lectures delivered at the Univ. of Birmingham in Feb. and March 1998, under the title: The faithful imagination.