in one another. It has received renewed attention in some twentieth-cen-
tury Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant theologies. As I understand it, it
is an attempt to protect Trinitarian discourse from any implication of
tri-theism.- John Calvin , Institutes of the Christian Religion , ed. John T. McNeill
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.7.; cf. 1.7.4, 2.5.5, and 3.1.1,
4.14.10. - Martin Luther, The Magnifi cat , in Luther’s Works , Vol. 21, ed. Jaroslav
Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia, 1956), 299. Emphasis added. - Theological-Political Treatise , trans. Jonathan Israel (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 159. On the title page, Spinoza quotes 1 John
4:13, “By this we know that we remain in God, and God remains in us,
because he has given us of his spirit.” - We might see them as analogous to Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas or
Luther, Calvin, and Wesley. - Will Herberg, Catholic-Protestant-Jew: An Essay in American Religious
Sociology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955). - We speak easily today of “paradigm shifts” in various domains, whether or
not we have ever heard of, much less read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of
Scientifi c Revolutions. - We might say it was a group of theologies without churches.
- The circle image comes from the fact that there is a feedback mechanism at
work, that what I discover on the basis of certain presuppositions can lead
me to revise those presuppositions: A » B » A'. - Among the major thinkers in the area of philosophical hermeneutics are
Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Alasdair
MacIntyre, and Richard Rorty. - That is why in Biblical Hermeneutics: Five Views , ed. Stanley E. Porter and
Beth M. Stovell (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), in which I
presented philosophical hermeneutics, I had to decline the editors’ request
to illustrate this hermeneutic by giving an interpretation of a specifi c text.
Philosophical hermeneutics does not guide or generate one interpretation
rather than another. - 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York
and London: Continuum, 1989 and 2004). - Since it insists that human thought is inexorably perspectival, it is appropri-
ate to recognize the hermeneutical theory is itself a perspective. My own
attempt to present Gadamer to the church is found in Whose Community?
Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009). - I give an example of this in Chap. 12 of Whose Community? Which
Interpretation? It concerns a conversation between Lutherans and
30 M. WESTPHAL