Structuralism

This method is unconcerned with the author’s intended meaning and seeks only to uncover the structure behind the writer’s expressed thought, the “common world” of the underlying codes that address us directly. Since appearances do not lead to reality, the interpreter can enter this common world only by uncovering the structures behind the whole rather than behind the parts, the plot development and pluri-signification (many meanings) of the text rather than the past meaning of the surface statements.

Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 473.

Trinitarian Hermeneutics

Postmodern thought has developed an “a/theology” built on the premise that the author/Author is dead, leading to a pluralistic hermeneutic. However, speech act theory in a Christian interpretive approach recognizes that “the Father is the locator, the Son is his preeminent illocution…(and) the Holy Spirit—the condition and power of receiving the sender’s message—is God the perlocutor, the reason that his words do not return to him empty.”

Vanhoozer in Osborne, 495.

Speech Act Theory

J.L. Austin proposed in How to Do Things with Words (1962) that there are three levels of language: locutionary, in which meaning is presented (“go home”); illocutionary, in which an action occurs (a command or request); and perlocutionary, in which an effect is caused on the hearer/reader (departure).

Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 494.

Sociology of Knowledge

Basically, sociology of knowledge states that no act of coming to understanding can escape the formative power of the background and the paradigm community to which an interpreter belongs.

Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 505.

Postmodern Hermeneutics

Think of the text as a playground. On such a field a person can play whatever game they wish—kickball, hide and seek, volleyball, softball. The field has only the possibility of play; the group decides which game they wish to play and what rules they want to govern the game. So it is with a text according to this view. A text has only a possibility of understanding. The actual process and result of interpretation is decided by the reader not the book.

Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 478.

Postmodern Hermeneutics

As an institution, the author is dead: his civil states, his biographical person have disappeared; disposed, they no longer exercise over his work the formidable paternity whose account literary history, teaching, and public opinion had the responsibility of establishing and renewing.

Barthes in Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 476.

Principles of Interpretation

1. A close reading of the text cannot be done without a perspective provided by one’s preunderstanding as identified by a “sociology of knowledge” perspective.
2. I must distinguish presupposition from prejudice.
3. We must seek controls that enable us to work with presuppositions (the positive) rather than to be dominated by prejudices (the negative).
a. We must be open to new possibilities.
b. We must understand the dangers of merely assuming our presuppositions.
c. The interpreter must not only address the text but must allow the text to address him or her (the hermeneutical circle).
d. Polyvalent interpretations per se are unnecessary, but a pluralistic or polyvalent attitude is critical.
4. We must all good hermeneutical principles to shape our exegesis and to control our tendency to read our prejudices into the text.
a. Consider the genre or type of literature and interpret each according to the proper rules of their particular language game.
b. The structural development of the passage provides a control against artificial atomistic exegesis.
c. Semantic research further helps the reader to discover the sense and reference of the passage.
d. A judicious use of background information helps us avoid the opposite error, namely, ignoring the historical aspect in favor of the poetic.
e. The implied author and implied reader in the text provide an indispensable perspective for the intended meaning of a text.
f. The question of verification of competing interpretive possibilities is essential for any system. This is a threefold process: inductively, deductively, sociologically.

Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 516-519.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900)

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are: metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

In Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 483.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg

“To understand it does not mean primarily to reason one’s way back into the past, but to have a present involvement in what is said…Texts do not ask to be understood as a living expression of the subjectivity of their writers…What is fixed in writing has detached itself from the contingency of its origin and its author and made itself free for new relationships.” [According to Gadamer] the interpreter’s prejudgments interrogate the text and are interrogated in turn by the text. Thereby subjectivity and objectivity merge together, and interpretation becomes application as new horizons of possibility are opened. In short, both text and interpreter take part in the historical process of interpretation.

Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 469-470.

Reader's Response Criticism

The relationship between interpretation and text is thus reversed: interpretive strategies are not put into execution after reading; they are the shape of reading and because they are the shape of reading, they give texts their shape, making them rather than, as is usually assumed, arising from them.

In Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 479.

Derrida, Jacques

Derrida defines deconstruction as a “decentering” process in which the central locus of a structure, that which gives it meaning, coherence and presence, has been disrupted and has become a “nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions come into play…Derrida means that there is no actual “presence” of meaning in a text, because the symbols can no longer be identified with the original meaning. In the act of writing, the author’s intention (indeed his very presence) has been “expelled” from the autonomous text, which now “plays” in whatever interpretive playground the reader brings to it.

Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 483.

Deconstructionism

They [deconstructionists] are not hermeneutical anarchists but seek to free the reader/interpreter from the “false” constraints of Western thinking and from the search for final meaning in a text. From their viewpoint, they are liberationists!

Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 485.

Deconstructionism

Five criticisms of deconstructionism from Thiselton:
1) If textual meaning is a community product, texts can never transform readers “from outside"
2) prophetic address has lost its power and in fact achieves the opposite, for its message is constructed by the very community it purports to address
3) notions like grace or revelation are illusions, since there are no givens
4) the “message of the cross” becomes no more than the “linguistic construct of a tradition”
5) nothing can ever be counted as error in the development of doctrine, for it is all little more than a social construct.

In Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 482.

Deconstructionism

Since all language is metaphor, and since metaphor is “dead of meaning at its core,” language is characterized by “absence” (the absence of literal meaning and of hermeneutical constraints). Therefore, multiple meaning necessarily results, as the perceiver provides the content for the autonomous and empty metaphor.

Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 476.