New Horizons in Hermeneutics [Paperback]

Anthony C. Thiselton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 10, 1997

Dr. Anthony Thiselton's thorough approach to the growing discipline of hermeneutics takes account of a comprehensive range of theoretical models of reading and interpretation. He evaluates both the foundations on which they rest and their practical implications for Old and New Testament reading. Building on his earlier influential work, The Two Horizons, Dr. Thiselton examines theories of texts, semiotics and literature, the legacy of Patristic and Reformation hermeneutics, and the use of socio-critical theory, liberation theology, and Marxist, feminist, and black hermeneutics, and discusses every major hermeneutical theorist. This exhaustive and rigorous critique will prove valuable to anyone undertaking advanced research in hermeneutics, including teachers and students of theology and language or literary theory.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Dr. Anthony Thiselton's thorough approach to the growing discipline of hermeneutics takes account of a comprehensive range of theoretical models of reading and interpretation. He evaluates both the foundations on which they rest and their practical implications for Old and New Testament reading.

Building on his earlier influential work, The Two Horizons, Dr. Thiselton examines theories of texts, semiotics and literature, the legacy of Patristic and Reformation hermeneutics, and the use of socio-critical theory, liberation theology, and Marxist, feminist, and black hermeneutics, and discusses every major hermeneutical theorist.

This exhaustive and rigorous critique will prove valuable to anyone undertaking advanced research in hermeneutics, including teachers and students of theology and language or literary theory.

From the Author

Dr. Anthony C. Thiselton is principal of St. John’s College at Durham University, and a graduate of London and Sheffield Universities. His substantial volume on hermeneutics, The Two Horizons, received international acclaim as a standard resource for this growing subject area

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 703 pages
• Publisher: Zondervan (February 10, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0310217628
• ISBN-13: 978-0310217626
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #716,732 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dr. Anthony C. Thiselton is professor of Christian theology at the University of Nottingham and Canon Theologian of Leicester Cathedral. His substantial volume on hermeneutics, The Two Horizons, received international acclaim as a standard resource for this growing subject area.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Difficult but excellent discussion of how texts have meaning, December 12, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: New Horizons in Hermeneutics (Paperback)

This is not a work for beginners. While biblical hermeneutics are in view, it really concerns how we interpret any text. Thiselton has one major concern: are there standards of meaning that go beyond any particular society and embrace all humanity, or not? Thiselton argues throughout the book that there are, while thoroughly and (I think) fairly presenting the alternative viewpoint(s). His major supports include the later Wittgenstein, the speach-act theory of Austin and Searle, and (to a lesser extent) the eschatological vision of Pannenberg. His major targets are the deconstruction of Derrida and Barthes, the pragmatism of Rorty and (some but not all) liberation theologies, and the reader-response theory of Fish. In a typically understated British way, he cheerleads for the one side and pans the other through the whole book. In both modes, however, Thiselton keeps an impressive critical distance (most of the time) in admitting both to the strengths of those he opposes and the weaknesses of those he supports. While difficult, I know of no better one volume treatment of the subject. A thorough and discerning work for the serious student.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A monumental work, August 8, 2000

By 

Mark McEntire - See all my reviews

This review is from: New Horizons in Hermeneutics (Paperback)

For advanced students in biblical hermeneutics, this book is indespensible. No more comprehensive analysis of the history and present state of this field is available anywhere. Thiselton traces the more significant developments in hermeneutics in great depth from Schleiermacher up to the present day. In the earlier sections, Thiselton has a tendency ramble. His style becomes significantly more concise, particulalry as he moves toward the contemporary era and the impact of general literary studies on biblical hermeneutics. One of the problems with most discussions of hermeneutics is that they stay almost exclusively on the theoretical level, and rarely venture into application of the methods dsicussed. Thiselton's work is somewhat uneven on this count. The application of some methods is presented and critiqued, while in other areas the biblical text never comes into view. Thankfully, Thiselton does move in determined fashion toward his own hermeneutical perspective, outlines his principles clearly, and offers a preliminary application to some Pauline texts. Biblical studies students will be frustrated that developments in hermeneutics are not more consistently related to the history of biblical exegesis. The hermeneutical assumptions and implications of source and form-criticism, for example, are never discussed directly. These criticisms aside, Thiselton has taken on an immense task and, while his execution is not perfect, there is likely no scholar in the world who could surpass his performance in this vook.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Classic that Builds on The Two Horizons, February 27, 2007

By 

Robert Knowles "109Rob" (Cardiff, Wales, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: New Horizons in Hermeneutics (Paperback)

New Horizons in Hermeneutics critically assesses almost the entire range of hermeneutical schools of its day from a stance that had largely, if not entirely, been formulated in Thiselton's thinking from as early as 1976.

Thiselton basically argues that hermeneutical theory needs to be rebuilt programmatically so as to overcome the dichotomies and one-sidednesses inherent in broadly positivist, broadly existentialist, broadly structuralist, broadly post-structuralist, and broadly neo-pragmatic approaches - whether to theory or practice. This rebuilding requires a considerable modification of Gadamer's thought along seven axes.

First, dialogue needs to be broadened at the level of pre-understanding such that as many traditions as possible are allowed to contribute positively to the hermeneutical conversation. Notably, Gadamer's tradition requires correction from that of Pannenberg and T.F. Torrance, from that of the later Wittgenstein, from that of Saussure, from those of Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Bultmann, and from that of Austin, Evans, Searle, Recanati, and others. This is not at all to say that Gadamer was not well read (!), but rather to say that these traditions should have been allowed to contribute more positively to the critical synthesis within the preunderstanding with which hermeneutical problems and questions are approached. Notably, Gadamer lacks the revealed Christological criterion of the tradition of Pannenberg by which traditions can be interpreted against the broader background of the narrative wholes of eschatological anticipations of history-as-a-whole (metacritical explanation) or by which they can be socio-critically evaluated by a Christological ethics (metacritical evaluation).

Second, Heidegger and Gadamer fail to find a philosophy of history that properly accounts for both Dasein's subjectivity (a hermeneutic of selves - not understood transcendentally) and a hermeneutic of traditions without over-emphasising one or other of these two poles in a dichotomous manner that violates the unity of historical reality - a unity that must somehow embrace a process that produces both a posteriori differences and a posteriori continuities whilst also moving towards an eschatological whole. Neo-pragmatic attempts to divorce present reading communities from historical traditions and their operative influence violate the philosophical axiom of the unity of history that resonates with a theology of the unity of creation.

Third, Gadamer and Heidegger thereby fail to properly reinstate subject-object conceptualisation - even in its properly historically embedded form premised upon historical continuity and difference - in relation to the critical testing of the transmitted content of traditions against anticipations of trans-temporal, trans-contextual criteria. That is, theology provides solutions to the problem of the metacriticism of traditions and societies left by Heidegger, Gadamer, and even by Habermas and Apel though they fully realise the issues at stake. Ricoeur rightly attempted to reinstate the explanatory dimension of hermeneutical understanding, but had inherited too much of the thought of Heidegger and Gadamer to achieve this adequately or escape their historical, epistemological, linguistic, and interpretative theoretical dichotomies. Notably, Ricoeur's middle period excursion into dialogue with structuralist approaches left him with too strong an intra-linguistic notion of textual effects to the neglect of 'behind-the-text' factors that embed intra-linguistic effects within an extra-linguistic background of speech-actions. A greater consideration of theories of conversational implicature would have solved this problem, thereby allowing Ricoeur's epistemological 'explanatory' axis to be better grounded in the dialectic between past and present horizons.

Fourth, Gadamer fails to overcome the artificial linguistic dualism attendent upon Heidegger's construal of the language problematic from within the coordinates of the epistemological embeddedness and centrality of Dasein for whom propositions and assertions represented a disparaged derivative mode of thinking. Further, these dualisms led to an artificial ontological prioritisation of language over history that Gadamer fails to properly eradicate, and which Ricoeur fails to fully overcome. By contrast, the later Wittgenstein overcomes the linguistic dualism by embedding all language within human (and we might with Thiselton add divine) speech-actions of various kinds - including assertions and propositions of various types. By implication, dualisms or dichotomies are removed when the language problematic is construed from within a theory of action that, in turn, presupposes a broader philosophy of history in which the unity (but not uniformity) of history is the precondition for all language and understanding. The structuralist tradition wrongly tried to return to a kind of idealist notion of language grounded in basic 'formal' oppositions, thus divorcing language from a properly historical perspective. Post-structuralism rightly deconstructed the 'formal' axioms of Western philosophical writings by showing them to be literary devices, but also failed to construe the language problematic within an adequate philosophy of history. This led to a kind of dichotomy between a still-idealised precondition for linguistic flux and shifting 'histories' construed linguistically. The result was a kind of 'docetic' approach to language and textualities that artificially divorced language from historical continuities and traditional criteria. This then allowed texts to have potentially endlessly indeterminate meanings constrained only by present readers.

Fifth, in relation to Western culture and culture criticism more broadly, then Habermas and Apel were right to seek a basis for trans-contextual and trans-temporal criteria against which the interpretations, interests, and practices of traditions could be evaluated, though their lack of a theological dimension rendered their success limited. Thus, these thinkers rightly tried to flesh out the metacritical side of Gadamer's thought by moving beyond an explanatory dimension towards an evaluative dimension. By contrast, Rorty and Fish violated both a theological basis for metacriticism and a philosophical criterion against which historical texts could reshape reader-horizons on the ultimate basis of the unity of historical reality. Liberation and feminist hermeneutical strands which presuppose meta-socio-critical theoretical frameworks may be affirmed in this attempt. Those that presuppose - even in disguised form - socio-pragmatic theoretical frameworks are largely rejected on the metacritical grounds that they adopt the power-abusers own strategies of self-assertion - whether at the level of 'interest groups' or individually. The socio-pragmatic 'solution' is thus a formula for disastrous social conflict and fragmentation with no criteria for exposing abuses of power other than personal narratives. The basis upon which it does this is a self-assertive suppression of dialogue with the philosophy of history - a dialogue that would have shown that texts can indeed impact readers from beyond their own horizons. Links with readers' prior concepts can be maintained whilst simultaneously extending the grammar of those concepts and superimposing them in new ways. To say otherwise is like saying one cannot add to a Lego set. Tradition may come to speech in the language of the readers, but reader horizons can still be transformed beyond a phenomenology of self-discovery and self-imperialisation.

Sixth, in relation to a hermeneutic of selves, then Gadamer's near-reduction of selves to the products of a hyposticisation of the inter-subjective and suspiciously near-intra-linguistic tradition-background requires correction by the emphasis on individual subjectivity as found in Kierkegaard, Schleiermacher, Heidegger, and Bultmann. Whilst subjectivity is de-centred by virtue of its situatedness within a larger socio-historical and ultimately theological historical process, it is not neglected altogether. Thus, there remains a place even for a stress on personal narrative as in socio-pragmatism - so long as this does not then become a basis for ethics.

Seventh, Gadamer's hermeneutical circle requires modification in that distancing and fusion need to be recast in more properly historical terms over and against an overly intra-linguistic perspective (by appeal to the later Wittgenstein, Austin, Evans, Searle, and Recanati), in more properly epistemological-metacritical evaluative terms over and against mere assessments of difference between horizons (traditions can distort truth), and in less linguistically dualistic terms in the sense that in the later Wittgenstein's partly parallel notions of noticing and showing propositions can function so as to highlight Gadamer's own emphases on broader rationality and on effective history. The Saussurian tradition can also help lend specificity to Gadamer's notion of distancing. the particularity of the textual horizon, of reading goals, and of reading interests means that no single interpretative model or model of textuality can be imperialised. Fusion - especially in biblical hermeneutics - is not only a matter of actualisation, but also of divine speech-acts operating via the biblical texts so as to shape readers according to promise. This involves appropriations and applications in the extra-linguistic world in which divine promises will be fulfilled. This in turn contributes to the hermeneutical circle at the level of the processes of tradition such that tradition can neither be imperialised in a static form that over-emphasises the past (cf. premodern hermeneutics) or the present (cf. postmodern hermeneutics) nor naively rejected (cf. modern hermeneutics).

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