New Hermeneutic

At the heart of Gadamer’s concern was the premise that the meaning of a text was not the same as the author’s meaning. The author’s meaning was, in any case, inaccessible to us. Instead, the meaning of a text was in its subject matter, which was at once independent of both the author and reader, and somehow also shared by both of them. Moreover, no one could ever say this is the meaning of a text, since the number of possible meanings was practically endless and constantly changing. And, argued Gadamer, what a text meant to an author could not be reproduced in the present. The past was alien to the present, for differences in time necessarily involved difference in being.

Kaiser in Roy Zuck, Rightly Divided (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1996), 47.

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.

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.