tutionalizing itself. 10 What faith means here is the acceptance of beliefs
and practices whose rightness cannot be established from some neutral,
objective point of view (the view from nowhere) but only with the help of
some particular presuppositions (the worldviews, paradigms, and language
games mentioned above).
This predicament is often called the hermeneutical circle. Just as I can
only see certain things if I am standing at a certain place, so I can only
“see” (in an extended, metaphorical sense) or prove certain “facts” or
“truths” if I presuppose other “facts” or “truths.” 11
It is time to turn our attention to hermeneutical theory, and this for two
reasons. 12 First, we have been led there by our analysis of Enlightenment
reason as particular rather than, as promised, universal. Second, in terms
of the dialectic of human and divine in biblical interpretation, it will help
us to focus on the human dimension before returning to look more closely
at the role of the Holy Spirit. Philosophical hermeneutics is not a “how
to” set of rules or guidelines for interpreting texts. 13 It is the claim that
much or even all of our cognitive life has the form of interpretation and is
thus like the reading of texts; and it is the description of what goes on when
we interpret something as something, for example, this text as meaning
thus and so. So far as texts are concerned, it is meant to apply to all texts
as human products without regard to whether they are anything more
than that. So without affi rming or denying divine inspiration, it focuses
our attention on the human character of the Bible (texts being produced
by human persons at various times and in various circumstances and with
detectable agendas) and on the human character of our interpretations of
it. Drawing on Gadamer’s Truth and Method , 14 I would like to summarize
the hermeneutical perspective in fi ve key terms. 15
Prejudice. I have been talking about presuppositions and a priori
assumptions. Gadamer gets our attention by calling these prejudices. By
this, he does not mean an irrational bias but rather, in the etymologi-
cal sense, pre-judgment. All interpretation, he claims, is prejudiced; our
thought is never objective or neutral in the sense of being presupposition-
less. For the most part, our prejudices are what we take for granted; they
are the lenses we look through rather than at when we see the world or
the text to be interpreted. There are good prejudices and bad ones; some
that help us to see better and some that lead to misinterpretations. Thus,
if we are studying the stars, a telescope would be a good prejudice and a
microscope would be a bad one, actually blinding us to what is to be seen,
perhaps the extreme form of misinterpretation.
SPIRIT AND PREJUDICE: THE DIALECTIC OF INTERPRETATION 21