Jens Zimmermann

Hermeneutics is the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, a behaviour that is intrinsic to our daily lives. As humans, we decipher the meaning of newspaper articles, books, legal matters, religious texts, political speeches, emails, and even dinner conversations every day. But how is knowledge mediated through these forms? What constitutes the process of interpretation? And how do we draw meaning from the world around us so that we might understand our position in it? In this Very Short Introduction Jens Zimmermann traces the history of hermeneutic theory, setting out its key elements, and demonstrating how they can be applied to a broad range of disciplines: theology; literature; law; and natural and social sciences. Demonstrating the longstanding and wide-ranging necessity of interpretation, Zimmermann reveals its significance in our current social and political landscape. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, best known for his involvement in the anti-Nazi resistance, was one of the 20th century's most important theologians. His ethics have been a source of guidance and inspiration for men and women in the face of evil. Today, Bonhoeffer's theology is being read by Continental thinkers who value his contributions to the recent "religious turn" in philosophy. In this volume, an international group of scholars present Bonhoeffer's thought as a model of Christian thinking that can help shape a distinctly religious philosophy. They examine the philosophical influences on Bonhoeffer and explore the new perspectives his work brings to the perennial challenges of faith and reason, philosophy and theology, and the problem of evil. These essays add Bonhoeffer's voice to important contemporary debates in the philosophy of religion

Contemporary conversations about religion and culture are framed by two reductive definitions of secularity. In one, multiple faiths and nonfaiths coexist free from a dominant belief in God. In the other, we deny the sacred altogether and exclude religion from rational thought and behavior. But is there a third way for those who wish to rediscover the sacred in a skeptical society? What kind of faith, if any, can be proclaimed after the ravages of the Holocaust and the many religion-based terrors since? Richard Kearney explores these questions with a host of philosophers known for their inclusive, forward-thinking work on the intersection of secularism, politics, and religion. An interreligious dialogue that refuses to paper over religious difference, these conversations locate the sacred within secular society and affirm a positive role for religion in human reflection and action. Drawing on his own philosophical formulations, literary analysis, and personal interreligious experiences, Kearney develops through these engagements a basic gesture of hospitality for approaching the question of God. His work facilitates a fresh encounter with our best-known voices in continental philosophy and their views on issues of importance to all spiritually minded individuals and skeptics: how to reconcile God's goodness with human evil, how to believe in both God and natural science, how to talk about God without indulging in fundamentalist rhetoric, and how to balance God's sovereignty with God's love

The German theologian and philosopher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, is important in hermeneutic history for at least two reasons. First, he initiated the transition of hermeneutics from rule‐governed interpretation in particular disciplines‐such as theology, law, and philology‐to a comprehensive analysis of human understanding as such. Second, he is not only the father of general hermeneutics, but also of modern theology. In developing his hermeneutic principles, Schleiermacher steers a middle path between the rationalist Enlightenment interpreters, and the historical‐critical philologists. The third extreme he eschews is dogmatic biblical exegesis that, when it emphasizes the text's divine inspiration, results in disregard for historical particularity. Schleiermacher's hermeneutics tries to integrate the pre‐given ontological structures of language that shape an author's mind with the spiritual element. Every linguistic expression contains both the objective structural and subjective psychological aspects, which require the interpreter's corresponding grammatical (or comparative) and divinatory (or psychological) skills for determining meaning.

The practice and character of biblical hermeneutics, tied as they are to cultural history, are presently undergoing a postmodern phase of reassessing a long hermeneutic development. This chapter aims to show that the history of biblical interpretation is largely determined by the loss of this correspondence in modernity, and by the postmodern attempts to recover this crucial link between mind and being through the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and the hermeneutic philosophies of Hans‐Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, among others. While these philosophers no longer ground the correspondence between consciousness and being in God, they nevertheless insist that language testifies to such a correspondence. For the postmodern, post‐metaphysical interpreter, language becomes “the medium through which consciousness is connected with beings”. Clearly, biblical hermeneutics in the academy is no longer simply dominated by a modernist paradigm.

Human Flourishing in a Technological World addresses the question of human identity and flourishing in the light of recent technological advances. The chapters in Part I provide a philosophical-theological evaluation of changing major anthropological assumptions that have guided human self-understanding from antiquity to modernity: How did we move from a religious and mostly embodied anthropology of the person to the idea that we can upload human consciousness to computing platforms? How did we come to imagine that machines can actually be intelligent, or even learn in human fashion? Moreover, what metaphysical changes explain our mostly uncritical embrace of a technological determination of being and thus of how reality "works"? In Part II, the focus turns to the practical implications of our changing understanding of what it means to be human. Covering some of the most pressing current concerns about human flourishing, these chapters deal with the impact of technology on education, healthcare, disability, leisure and the nature of work, communication, aging, death, and the nature of wisdom for human flourishing in light of evolutionary biology. The volume includes the text of a lecutre by virtual reality engineer and computer scientist Jaron Lanier, and a discussion between Lanier and other contributors.

Since the early 1980s, there has been renewed scholarly interest in the concept of Christian Humanism. A number of official Catholic documents have stressed the importance of 'Christian humanism', as a vehicle of Christian social teaching and, indeed, as a Christian philosophy of culture. Fundamentally, humanism aims to explore what it means to be human and what the grounds are for human flourishing. Featuring contributions from internationally renowned Christian authors from a variety of disciplines in the humanities, Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism recovers a Christian humanist ethos for our time. The volume offers a chronological overview and individual examples of past Christian humanisms. The chapters are connected through the theme of Christian paideia as the foundation for liberal arts education.

Luther's biblical hermeneutic flowed from a deeper theological framework that provided a dogmatic orientation or “rule of faith” for guiding biblical exegesis. For Luther, genuine ethics is possible only through communication with the Word and its power, and results in the restoration of God's image in human beings‐a restoration brought about by the creative and lifegiving power of the Word. Luther's hermeneutic constitutes a complex amalgam of traditional and humanistic elements. His christological approach goes back to the church fathers and illustrates Luther's continuity with the tradition. Luther's interpretive practice thus falls between two hermeneutical positions. He does not equate the Bible with God's word. Luther asserts that the governing subject matter of the Bible, God's relation to humanity, means that we ought to reject any separation of historical meaning from the question of its truth for the reader (pro nobis).

The purpose of this study is to integrate the hermeneutics of English Puritanism and German Pietism into the current hermeneutical debate. Opposing a pre-critical world-view to Charles Taylor's concept of a "silent" universe, this study argues that pre-critical hermeneutics derives from its biblical framework a moral strength and confidence which is lacking in modern philosophical hermeneutics. By analyzing the writings of Matthias Flacius , William Perkins, John Owen, Philipp Jacob Spener, August Hermann Francke, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Charles Taylor, this study sketches an increasing slide into subjectivism within the field of hermeneutics. This anthropocentric turn is accompanied by an increasingly secular reinterpretation of pre-critical concepts. Philosophical hermeneutics tries to overcome radical subjectivism, but does so by appealing to secularized versions of pre-critical assumptions whose foundations it no longer acknowledges. This development lies at the root of philosophical hermeneutics' unsuccessful effort to overcome subjectivism and derive an applicatory ethical dimension from a non-theistic hermeneutic. ;This study also aims to expose common misconceptions about pre-critical hermeneutics. One common claim is that pre-critical hermeneutics did not problematize understanding itself, an insight attributed to Schleiermacher and Heideggerian ontological hermeneutics. Yet a close reading of Puritan and Pietist works shows that pre-critical hermeneutics went beyond merely devising technical rules for the removal of lexical and grammatical difficulties. Contrary to the claims of philosophical hermeneutics the Puritans and Pietists did perceive the difficulty of understanding ontologically. Their hermeneutics makes a claim to universal validity on the basis of a created universe and human depravity. Secondly, an assessment of the Puritan faith conceived as trust in a credible testimony dispels the common misconception of faith as irrational. The pre-critical idea of experiential knowledge as relational allows for a balance between propositional and experiential epistemological elements which is lacking in modern hermeneutics. ;Finally, the study shows that pre-critical hermeneuts were as aware of the perspectivism of all human knowledge, and of its conditioning by tradition, as the current hermeneutics of facticity. By re-admitting a neglected and misrepresented group of pre-critical writers this study attempts to renew the dialogue between theological and philosophical hermeneutics.