The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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was not a theologian but a philosopher, and he had no hesitation about developing Schleiermacher’s insights into a full-fledged philosophical hermeneutics. His most important accomplishment was to make hermeneutics into the foundational and definitive method of the human or cultural disciplines (Geisteswissenschaften) as distinguished from the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). Whether one believes this distinction to be a great achievement or a confusion with disastrous consequences, one can hardly deny the importance of Dilthey’s conceptual innovations at this point. He argued that the human sciences differ from the natural sciences on the basis of their qualitatively different objects of inquiry. Natural scientists are able to observe their objects from an external perspective, so that the act of observation remains separate from the phenomena observed. The object of the human and cultural sciences, on the other hand, is not the outside world but what Dilthey calls Erlebnis, or lived experience, in which knower and known are related internally. Such an object one must understand, as it were, from the inside out, on the basis of one’s own lived experience. Dilthey refers to the more objective task of the natural scientist as explanation (Erklären), which he contrasts with the hermeneutical task of understanding (Verstehen). In the study of religion today, as in other humanistic disciplines, scholars often divide sharply just at this point. Those who follow Dilthey in emphasizing the difference between natural scientific explanation and hermeneutical understanding are typically critical of scholars who seek the objectivity of scientific explanation in religious studies. The latter, on the other hand, often suspect the former of using questionable hermeneutical theories to legitimate apologetic or uncritical accounts of religion ‘from the inside.’ Most theorists today would acknowledge that in some way both explanation and understanding are required in any adequate approach to the study of religion, though they often disagree fundamentally about the methodological consequences of this hermeneutical situation.

Dilthey’s ideas have been most influential in the continuing tradition of European hermeneutical speculation in the twentieth century, whose most important figures are Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur. The entire philosophical program of Heidegger (1889–1976) can be characterized as hermeneutical (indeed, he originally did so himselfâ), and his philosophy also lies behind the more specifically hermeneutical theories of Gadamer and Ricoeur. Despite his considerable debt to Dilthey, Heidegger believed that he, along with most of the other modern philosophers since Descartes, had failed to escape from psychologism and subjectivity. Heidegger’s alternative is to propose a hermeneutical ontology, a philosophical analysis of Being, starting not from the subjectivity but rather from the existential situation of the interpreter. We humans find ourselves in a unique situation, because unlike other things in the world, which simply ‘are,’ we understand that we are. We exist, says Heidegger, ‘stand out’; he especially likes the implications of the German word for existence, Dasein, since it literally means ‘being there.’ In other words, only humans can raise the question of Being Itself. In the resulting philosophy, interpretation does not appear merely as one among various human activities but rather takes on a foundational role in which existence itself is characterized as interpretation. In so doing, Heidegger revolutionized the meaning of philosophy, as has long been recognized. For our purposes, however, it is more important to note that he also changed the meaning of hermeneutics. By rejecting the Cartesian concept of the ego as thinking subject, he turns away from the Romantic focus on the creative individuality of the author expressed in the text. Since for Heidegger hermeneutics has become the cornerstone of philosophy, its focus shifts away from texts and their interpreters to ontology. Far from being an isolated methodological inquiry, hermeneutics on this account gives us access to the most universal and fundamental truths

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about human life in the world. Heidegger’s approach has some particular implications that have profoundly influenced subsequent reflection on hermeneutics, even by thinkers who do not follow his philosophy in all its ramifications. Because of the existential situation of the human thinker, Heidegger emphasizes that understanding and interpretation never begin ‘in neutral’ without presuppositions but are always undertaken by people who are already involved, and who therefore have interests, presuppositions, and pre-understanding of the subject they are interpreting. But this situation implies that understanding is always circular in form; it can never begin in a hermeneutical vacuum. It is especially important to understand that for Heidegger and his successors this hermeneutical circle is not something negative; its circularity is not ‘vicious.’ Rather, it is a warning against any hermeneutical theory that tries to deny or ignore that necessary circularity of interpretation.

Heidegger ’s hermeneutical legacy

Relatively few students of religion are likely to master the difficult philosophy of Heidegger, but his ideas are nevertheless of major importance in religious studies, largely through the mediation of two thinkers who have appropriated significant aspects of his thought and presented them in works that are widely read, not only in philosophy and theology but also in religious studies.

A single book – Truth and Method, by Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), which first appeared in German in 1960 – catapulted hermeneutics into the center of discussion in theology and religious studies in the second half of the twentieth century and has made Gadamer’s name synonymous with hermeneutical theory. While hardly an easy book to read, Truth and Method nevertheless makes accessible to non-philosophers an approach to hermeneutics that owes much to Heidegger. But Gadamer also returns hermeneutics to the traditional concerns of Schleiermacher and Dilthey: human understanding as it functions in the interpretation of authoritative texts. From Heidegger he takes his starting point within the hermeneutical circle; that is, he recognizes that understanding always and only takes place in the context of prior understandings – which is to say within a specific historic tradition of reading and interpreting texts. Gadamer’s controversial way of making this basically Heideggerian point is by attempting to rehabilitate the term ‘prejudice,’ which the Enlightenment had seen as an entirely negative encumbrance to objective knowledge. Gadamer insists that every act of understanding begins in prejudice, in the original sense of pre-judgment: one is not simply neutral or detached from the object of understanding but rather already stands in some relationship to it. Far from constituting a barrier to be removed, such pre-judgments play an essential role in all acts of understanding. Unlike Schleiermacher, Gadamer does not see hermeneutics as a way of overcoming the historical distance between interpreter and text but rather insists on the historical nature of understanding itself, since interpretation always occurs within a concrete historical tradition and makes no sense when removed from this context. It is this common link with the overarching tradition that allows the modern interpreter to understand an ancient text, for the two are in fact already related to one another through a process that Gadamer calls Wirkungsgeschichte, ‘effective history’ – a history of the effects by which everything later in a tradition has been influenced by all that has gone before. The continuum constituted by this history of effective relationships allows Gadamer to conceive the goal of interpretation as a ‘fusion of horizons’ (Horizontverschmelzung), in which the horizon of the interpreter merges into that of the text. Gadamer believes that this phenomenological account of how understanding takes place is

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superior to every ‘method’ by which other theorists seek to arrive at the truth – a conviction alluded to in the title Truth and Method.

In an ongoing debate that has attracted widespread attention, Jürgen Habermas has accused Gadamer of failing to do justice to the limits of understanding. On Gadamer’s account it would appear that understanding can always take place successfully as long as the interpreter acknowledges the context of tradition in which the text is embedded and is willing to enter into it. Habermas maintains that communication is often distorted in ways that the participants in a conversation do not and cannot recognize without the intervention of someone from the outside. An adequate hermeneutics must therefore be able to take into account the possibility and actuality of distorted communication. Otherwise the interpreter will be vulnerable to ideological bias, especially when he or she shares the bias of the text. The question raised by Habermas is whether or not Gadamer’s traditionalist hermeneutics amounts in effect to a conservatism without critical resources for recognizing and combating ideology.

The other important theorist with roots in Heidegger’s philosophy, Paul Ricoeur (1913– 2005), is much more attuned to hermeneutical distortion and conflict than is Gadamer. Indeed, one of his major writings is titled Conflict of Interpretations. As the first major hermeneutical theorist since Schleiermacher to take a particular interest in religion, his work has been especially influential in theology and religious studies. Ricoeur is a philosopher, not a theologian, but he writes out of an explicit commitment to Reformed Christianity and divided his academic career between Paris and the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. His thought thus represents a bridge both between philosophical and religious hermeneutics and also between the Continental and Anglo-American academic worlds. His early work was devoted to an attempt to mediate the traditions of phenomenology and existentialism, which led him to develop a philosophical account of the symbol as the starting point for his hermeneutical theory. A symbol is any sign that contains, in addition to its direct or primary meaning, a secondary or hidden meaning that requires intellectual effort to uncover. In other words, symbol and interpretation become correlative terms. His hermeneutical point of departure is captured in the aphorism that he uses as a title for the conclusion to his 1967 book The Symbolism of Evil: ‘The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought.’ The problematic relationship between symbol and critical thought is epitomized in the hermeneutical circle, which Ricoeur puts this way: ‘We must understand in order to believe, but we must believe in order to understand.’ The way beyond circularity lies in taking the commitment to the truth of the symbol as a wager (borrowing a notion from his French predecessor Pascal). The interpreter must take the risk of assuming that the symbol offers the best way to human understanding, which means making his presuppositions explicit and then trying to demonstrate the power of the implicit symbolic truth through interpretation in the explicit form of articulate thought. In a schema that has appealed to many, Ricoeur conceives the modern hermeneutical situation in terms of three stages. The first is the precritical situation of original or primary naïveté: the world of myth in which symbols are experienced as immediately true. But for the modern interpreter this world has been shattered by criticism, which ushers in the second stage. Now the problem is to find a way to restore the power of the symbols without simply returning to primitive naïveté (something we would be unable to do in any event). Ricoeur calls this third stage a ‘second naïveté,’ for in one sense it is a return to the first stage. But unlike the original naïveté, this stage has been through the fires of criticism and is no longer simply an unreflective or immediate grasp of the symbols. Ricoeur is not always clear about just what second naïveté would consist of or how one might

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reach it, but the articulation of the goal itself has found resonance in other modern thinkers, including many who do not follow the specific path recommended by Ricoeur. What is at least clear is that the way to second naïveté is through interpretation, which means not a rejection of critical thought but rather a constructive application of criticism.

Ricoeur’s most systematic attempt to work out his hermeneutical ideas in detail is contained in his 1976 book Interpretation Theory. Rather than seeking, like Schleiermacher, to go behind the text to find its meaning in the mind of the author, Ricoeur insists that the sense is to be found ‘in front of’ the text. Rather than seeking, like Gadamer, to fuse the horizons of text and interpreter, Ricoeur stresses the ‘distanciation’ from the author that first gives the text its autonomy and creates the hermeneutical situation. And rather than seeking, like Dilthey, to separate humanistic understanding from scientific explanation, Ricoeur sets the two in a dialectical relationship that forms the context for interpretation. He also seeks to go beyond Gadamer’s uncritical acceptance of tradition by introducing a critical element into hermeneutics itself, so that interpretation includes both a retrieval of tradition and a critique of ideology. Like Heidegger, Ricoeur emphasizes the existential significance of interpretation; it is our primary means for understanding ourselves and our existence in the world. Texts – especially religious texts – disclose possible worlds, so that the interpretation of texts becomes a primary means of reflecting on the meaning of human existence. Once again it becomes apparent that hermeneutics as an enterprise has a special connection with the study of religion.

The hermeneutics of suspicion

Paul Ricoeur’s attention to the conflict of interpretations has its roots in a historical thesis about the modern hermeneutical situation. He has coined the phrase ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’ to designate a change that has taken place in the modern world, a hiatus in our relationship to texts, especially those authoritative texts that include the scriptures of the world’s religions. Ricoeur identifies this rupture in our hermeneutical history with three figures from the late nineteenth century whom he dubs the ‘masters of suspicion’: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Philosophers since Descartes had generally taken the ego, the thinking self, as a given – as the foundation and point of departure for understanding. With the masters of suspicion this assumption is subjected to scrutiny and found wanting. Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche – each in his own way – suggest that subjectivity may indeed be deceived, not from without, but from within: it is self-deceived. Marx’s term ‘false consciousness’ could be extended to include the others as well: for all three of them, the goal of interpretation cannot simply be to establish the ground of an incorrigible selfconsciousness; rather, the thinking subject must also be called into question, treated with suspicion. According to Marx, for example, class interest distorts both text and interpreter because both are unaware of its influence. The Marxist therefore engages in a critique of ideology in order to uncover the covert interests lurking behind the apparent meaning of the text. A Freudian is suspicious of received texts for quite different reasons, but the hermeneutical effect is comparable. Here the ‘ideological’ factor is not economic and social but unconscious and individual: to understand a text rightly the interpreter must take into account the unconscious motivations that may be at work behind the façade of rational discourse. With Nietzsche the situation is more complex, as we shall see shortly, but the need to take a kind of false consciousness into account links his position to that of Marx and Freud.

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The true father of the hermeneutics of suspicion, the one from who the ‘masters’ first learned to identify false consciousness, is the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). Originally a student of Hegel’s philosophy, Feuerbach rejected Hegelian idealism very early in favor of materialism, while nevertheless retaining the dialectical logic of the system. Whereas Hegel had identified thought and being, Feuerbach believed that material nature was the ground of human consciousness and therefore the origin of religion as well. His bestknown work, The Essence of Christianity, attempts to demonstrate how religion arises out of a dialectic of self-alienation, whereby humans project their own essential worldly attributes onto an illusory heavenly subject or subjects, the gods. In his later work, especially his Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Feuerbach abandons even this inverted Hegelianism and argues that religion arises out of a misinterpretation of our experience with nature. In both versions of his critique, however, Feuerbach consistently identifies the imagination as the organ of religion, the source of all illusion. Religious people, he is convinced, ‘misimagine’ the world by reversing cause and effect, subject and predicate, of their experience. This account of religion entails that one cannot simultaneously understand the essence of religion and continue to be religious. The field of religious studies remains divided to this day between those who study religion as members of religious communities and those who, like Feuerbach, believe that understanding religion is incompatible with its practice. Both sides, however, can agree with Feuerbach that imagination is the organ of religious belief and practice while disagreeing on the question of truth. Feuerbach’s hermeneutical legacy is the lingering suspicion that at least some forms of religion falsify reality by their very nature. A more problematic corollary of this legacy is the assumption that religion is false because it employs imagination.

The hermeneutics of suspicion has made important inroads into religion in recent decades – into both the religious traditions themselves, insofar as they participate in the intellectual debates of the modern academy, and into the scholarly study of religion. Liberation theologians, for example, have appropriated Marxist suspicion about religion by trying to use it as a critical tool for purifying traditional belief and practice of its unholy alliance with the forces of oppression and exploitation. Their program entails a revision of classical Marxism, of course, insofar as liberation theology assumes that only ‘bad’ religion is vulnerable to ideological critique. A similar development has taken place among religious feminists, who seek to expose the implicit patriarchy of many or all authoritative religious texts. One finds this approach both within religious traditions themselves – primarily Christianity and Judaism, but increasingly in other traditions as well, including especially Islam – in the form of feminist theology, and also among feminist scholars of religion, who apply a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion to the religious traditions they are investigating. These approaches, of course, have been controversial, not least because in some of their more extreme forms, the practitioners of suspicious hermeneutical theory often succumb to ideology themselves, making implicit historical, philosophical, or theological claims that are immune to criticism. In response, some members of the religious studies community have proposed submitting the hermeneutics of suspicion itself to a suspicious critique. The debate is one more reminder that the ‘hermeneutical circle’ is unavoidable – and not only within the religious traditions but also in the practice of religious studies. For the same reason it is unlikely that any hermeneutical theory will ever achieve the status of an accepted method to be applied universally by scholars of religion without reference to their own convictions.

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Hermeneutics and postmodernism

The most recent and radical development in the hermeneutics of suspicion could be called the postmodern turn. So different is this variety of theory from the nineteenth-century ‘masters of suspicion’ identified by Ricoeur that it needs to be treated as a significant new departure in hermeneutics. Its historical connection with the older tradition is through Nietzsche, who plays a double role in modern interpretation theory. On the one hand, there is what we can call the ‘modernist Nietzsche,’ the one whom Ricoeur classifies together with Marx and Freud because he in effect identifies religion as a form of false consciousness. His variation on this theme locates the root of distortion in a Jewish and then Christian ‘slave revolt of morality,’ in which the weakest elements of society inverted the values of classical Greek nobility. What had been virtues – strength, valor, physical beauty – came to be represented as vices, while their opposites were exalted as virtues – that is, all the sickly values of the weak and diseased elements of society, above all pity. For Nietzsche this ‘transvaluation of values’ is epitomized in the cross of Christianity. This moralistic disease, Nietzsche believes, is not confined to religion but has its modern secular forms as well, such as socialism. The hermeneutical point is that texts, especially religious ones, cannot be taken at face value but must be subjected to radical critique. It is not only the misunderstanding of texts by interpreters that is the problem, one could say, but also the distortions of reality embodied in the texts themselves.

The other Nietzsche is the source of postmodern hermeneutics – the Nietzsche who declares that ‘there are no facts, only interpretations.’ (Whether or not the modern and postmodern Nietzsches can be reconciled is a serious question for Nietzsche scholars but one we need not address here, since both impulses flowing from this brilliant and bizarre mind have powerfully influenced hermeneutics in the century since he wrote.) Those recent thinkers who have come to be called ‘postmodern’ – especially Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) – have developed the ‘other Nietzsche,’ with help from Heidegger, into a powerful if controversial force in the contemporary intellectual world, one that has important consequences for hermeneutics. Derrida’s position depends on a theory of language that emphasizes the instability of signs. Every linguistic sign refers, not to non-linguistic realities lying beyond language, but rather to other signs, which in turn refer to still other signs – and so on, in an endless deferral of meaning. The implication is not that communication is impossible but that it is always incomplete, continually in flux. The attempt to evade this situation, to appeal to some bedrock of certainty and meaning, constitutes the popular but ultimately futile quest for what Derrida calls a ‘transcendental signified,’ that is, a sign that refers to no further signs but only to itself. The hermeneutical implications of this state of affairs have particular importance for religious studies, since religions would appear to have a significant stake in interpretive stability and certainty – just what postmodernist hermeneutics denies is possible. Instead, interpretation appears endless and incapable of achieving closure. Another contemporary French theorist, Jean-François Lyotard, defines postmodernism as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ – a position that might appear to set all traditional religions in opposition to postmodernity.

The most important idea to emerge from Derrida’s philosophy is deconstruction. For all its familiarity in the contemporary academic world, it is notoriously difficult to define – and the difficulty is presumably intentional on Derrida’s part. Deconstruction is clearly the heart of his hermeneutics, yet he denies that it is a method or a technique for interpreting texts. In the hands of some of his devotees, however, it has in fact become a technique, a critical

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device (even a blunt instrument) for uncovering the covert ways in which texts try to stabilize meaning and disguise the flux of signs. Derrida intends deconstruction to be an antidote to what he calls ‘logocentrism,’ the prevalent assumption throughout Western thought that words have a fixed relationship to reality, that they can therefore put us in direct touch with a reality beyond or behind language. He labels the pursuit of such an essential reality the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and endeavors to show that it is based on the seductive but illusory ‘myth of presence.’

The other French postmodernist whose influence on contemporary hermeneutics one can scarcely overlook is Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Mixing writing and lecturing with political activism and sexual experimentation, his life epitomized the Nietzschean postmodernism that he advocated in his writings. Even his academic discipline is difficult to pin down: trained in philosophy, psychology, and psychopathology, he focused much of his attention on the social sciences while calling himself an ‘archaeologist of knowledge’ and devoting much of his writing to historical studies. Although he did not choose the label postmodern, his passionate rejection of the Enlightenment and the modernism it produced has helped to define postmodernism. Like Derrida, Foucault rejects every attempt to establish a single meaning for a text, and opposes every theory that sees language as representing reality. Especially interested in anthropology, he opposes the typically modern assumption that ‘man’ has a ‘human nature’ that somehow persists through change. He prefers to follow Nietzsche by practicing ‘genealogy,’ the method of uncovering the historical layers underlying the present ‘order’ (another Enlightenment notion he criticizes). Genealogical analysis destroys the myth that there are laws or principles of development guiding the course of history, and shows the arbitrary and haphazard ways in which the present situation has emerged out of the conflicts of the past. His intent – virtually the opposite of Gadamer’s at this point

– is to call into question the legitimacy of the established order. But the point at which Foucault has had the greatest impact on hermeneutical thinking – including the study of religion – is his theory of the intimate relationship linking knowledge and power. Because knowledge is always embedded in actual social institutions and practices, it is never neutral but always involved in power relationships. So intimate is the relation between knowledge and power that the two virtually merge into a single concept in Foucault’s thought (one of his books bears the title Power/Knowledge). The effect on hermeneutics is virtually to collapse the distinction between theory and practice: theorizing is the uncovering of the hidden sources of truth in specific power interests. The inevitable bias of this kind of theory is against every established order – a bias that Foucault, for whom the student uprising of 1968 was a defining event, by no means tries to deny. Consequently, his hermeneutic approach has been most eagerly adopted by those who see themselves as victims or outsiders to the established institutions of knowledge, and thus of power. Feminists, for example, in various fields, including theology and religious studies, have found Foucault’s ideas useful in their attempt to wrest control of ideas and the institutions in which they are embedded from a patriarchal establishment. If Gadamer’s hermeneutics portrays interpretation as a means for reclaiming tradition, Foucault makes the act of interpretation inherently subversive of every established order.

Ad hoc hermeneutics

The duality or ambivalence within contemporary hermeneutics that we noted at the outset can lead to very different overviews of its history and significance. It is perhaps inevitable

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that in writing about hermeneutics one will emphasize those thinkers who present their task explicitly in terms of hermeneutical theory. But we need to remind ourselves that most of the activity that would today be called hermeneutical – that is, the actual practice of interpreting texts in order to understand and use them in all kinds of social and individual ways – has been (and still is) carried out without the benefit of any theory of hermeneutics. Thus scholars of religion studying the ‘hermeneutics’ of various religious communities seldom encounter the kind of self-conscious reflection on the meaning of interpretation found in Schleiermacher and his successors right up through Gadamer, Ricoeur, and the postmodern philosophers. Religious studies needs to pay at least as much attention to the implicit hermeneutics of religious communities as to the explicit hermeneutical theories, both religious and secular, that dominate so much academic discussion.

Those who have tried to give theoretical voice to such an ad hoc approach to hermeneutics often appeal to the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) for inspiration and support. Like most recent philosophers, Wittgenstein focused his attention particularly on language, which he believed to be the proper subject matter of philosophy. His posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) supplied the original impulse for what came to be known as ordinary language philosophy. Wittgenstein is the champion of language as used nontechnically in everyday situations, where communication typically takes place without benefit of formal theorizing. The negative correlate of this emphasis is the thesis that we – especially if we are academic philosophers and theoreticians – allow ourselves to be ‘bewitched by language,’ and Wittgenstein thought of his own philosophy as a kind of therapy for the linguistic conundrums of modern philosophers. His way of doing philosophy, in keeping with his point of view, is unsystematic and ad hoc – often aphoristic. He is the opponent of every essentialist theory that tries to understand phenomena by reducing them to a shared essence, something they all have in common. Using the example of family resemblances, he demonstrates that our recognition of kinship need not depend on any single shared trait. The notion has had considerable influence in religious studies, making scholars far more cautious about claims concerning the ‘essence of religion.’ We call phenomena religious for a variety of reasons and should be wary of over-schematizing their interrelationships. The implications of Wittgenstein for hermeneutics might be summed up by invoking one of his best-known aphorisms: ‘Look and see!’ Taken as a watchword, this non-theoretical advice is a reminder to keep one’s eyes open, to look at the bewildering variety of religious phenomena without forcing them too quickly into preconceived theoretical molds. It is not that scholars ought to eschew theory altogether but rather that they should use it heuristically rather than systematically, that is, as a source of suggestion and a goad to new discovery, applying it in ad hoc ways as each situation requires.

An example of ad hoc hermeneutical practice within a religious community is found in the work of Karl Barth (1886–1968), a theologian in the Reformed tradition, and one of the major figures in twentieth-century Christian theology. Barth’s chief opponents, including Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich, were heavily influenced by Heidegger’s existentialism. Bultmann in particular appeals to the notion of pre-understanding in his theological hermeneutics, a practice that caused Barth to accuse him of importing an alien philosophical criterion into theology instead of taking his hermeneutical bearings from the symbolic world of scripture itself. Their debate is far too complex to deal with here except to note that Barth’s insistence on doing theology out of a theological perspective rather than basing it on prior acceptance of a philosophical theory represents a hermeneutical approach that one can find in many religious traditions and which ought to be given its due in religious studies. A classic

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statement of this approach is the Protestant Reformers’ principle that ‘scripture interprets itself,’ meaning that the way to understand obscure or difficult passages of scripture is not by importing a hermeneutical theory from philosophy but rather by attending to the intratextual relations of the scriptural canon itself. Religious studies should resist the temptation to supply a supertheory, focusing instead on the implicit hermeneutical ideas and practices of the religious traditions themselves. After all, the notion of the hermeneutical circle – according to which one always interprets out of prior immersion in a tradition of reading texts and not as a ‘neutral’ outsider – has been a mainstay of the major hermeneutical theorists of the modern (and postmodern) age. Applied to religious studies, the hermeneutical circle implies that an ad hoc application of theory, hermeneutical and otherwise, is the wisest course to follow in studying the diverse phenomena of the world’s religious traditions and practices, because it respects the unique features of those traditions while seeking to interpret them both sympathetically and critically.

Bibliography

Auerbach, E. (1953) Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Caputo, J. D. (1987) Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

Ebeling, G. (1959) ‘Hermeneutik.’ In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft. 3rd edn. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 3: 242–62.

Ferraris, M. (1996), History of Hermeneutics. Translated by Luca Somigli. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International.

Feuerbach, L. (1957 [1841]) The Essence of Christianity, New York: Harper. —— (1967)ÂLectures on the Essence of Religion, New York: Harper.

Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books.

Fowl, Stephen E., ed., (1997) The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Frei, H. (1974) The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.

Gadamer, H.-G. (1991) Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn., translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad.

Green, G. (2000) Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination: The Crisis of Interpretation at the End of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Grenz, S. J. (1996) A Primer on Postmodernism. Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing.

Jeanrond, W. G. (1991) Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance. London: Macmillan. Kant, I. (1960 [1794]) Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, translated by Theodore M. Greene and

Hoyt H. Hudson, New York: Harper.

Ramm, B. L. (1976) Protestant Biblical Interpretation: A Textbook of Hermeneutics. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House.

Ricoeur, P. (1974) The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

—— (1976)ÂInterpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press.

Schleiermacher, F. (1977) Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, edited by H. Kimmerle, translated by J. Duke and J. Forstman. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press.

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—— (1988 [1799])ÂOn Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, translated by R. Crouter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (2001) Philosophical Investigations: The German Text with a Revised English Translation, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.

Suggested reading

Caputo, J. (1987) Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Hermeneutics reconceived in the light of postmodern philosophy.

Ebeling, G. (1959) ‘Hermeneutik,’ in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft, 3rd edn., Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 3: 242–62.

A definitional essay by the leading proponent of the ‘New Hermeneutic.’

Ferraris, M. (1996) History of Hermeneutics, translated by Luca Somigli, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International.

A comprehensive overview of philosophical hermeneutics.

Fowl, S., ed. (1997) The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

An anthology of primary texts in theological hermeneutics.

Green, G. (2000) Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination: The Crisis of Interpretation at the End of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hermeneutical issues in modern European religious and secular thought.

Grenz, S. (1996) A Primer on Postmodernism, Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: Eerdmans. An introduction to postmodern philosophy for beginning students.

Jeanrond, W. (1991) Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance, London: Macmillan. A comprehensive history of theological hermeneutics.

Ramm, B. (1976) Protestant Biblical Interpretation: A Textbook of Hermeneutics, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. A conservative Protestant account of biblical hermeneutics.

Ricoeur, P. (1995) Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, Minneapolis: Fortress. The best collection of Ricoeur’s essays on religious themes.

—— (1991) From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

A second collection of Ricoeur’s essays on hermeneutics, supplementing The Conflict of Interpretations [1974].

Zimmermann, J. (2004) Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An Incarnational-Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.

A compelling argument against the secularization of hermeneutics.