1. Modern Perspectives (A. Philosophical Hermeneutics) (Interpretation of the Bible in the Church) (Studies on Bible & Early Christianity)

Conscious of the cultural distance between the world of the first century and that of the 20th, Bultmann was particularly anxious to make the reality of which the Bible treats speak to his contemporaries. He insisted upon the "pre-understanding" necessary for all understanding and elaborated the theory of the existential interpretation of the New Testament writings. Relying upon the thinking of Heidegger, Bultmann insisted that it is not possible to have an exegesis of a biblical text without presuppositions which guide comprehension.

"Pre-understanding" (Vorverst�ndnis) is founded upon the life-relationship (Lebensverh�ltnis) of the interpreter to the reality of which the text speaks.

To avoid subjectivism, however, one must allow pre-understanding to be deepened and enriched�even to be modified and corrected�by the reality of the text.

Bultmann asked what might be the most appropriate frame of thought for defining the sort of questions that would render the texts of Scripture understandable to people of today. He claimed to have found the answer in the existential analysis of Heidegger, maintaining that Heideggerian existential principles have a universal application and offer structures and concepts most appropriate for the understanding of human existence as revealed in the New Testament message.

Gadamer likewise stresses the historical distance between the text and its interpreter. He takes up and develops the theory of the hermeneutical circle.

Anticipations and preconceptions affecting our understanding stem from the tradition which carries us. This tradition consists in a mass of historical and cultural data which constitute our life context and our horizon of understanding. The interpreter is obliged to enter into dialogue with the reality at stake in the text. Understanding is reached in the fusion of the differing horizons of text and reader (Horizontverschmelzung). This is possible only to the extent that there is a "belonging" (Zugeh�rigkeit), that is, a fundamental affinity between the interpreter and his or her object. Hermeneutics is a dialectical process: The understanding of a text always entails an enhanced understanding of oneself.

With regard to the hermeneutical thought of Ricoeur, the principal thing to note is the highlighting of the function of distantiation. This is the necessary prelude to any correct appropriation of a text. A first distancing occurs between the text and its author, for, once produced, the text takes on a certain autonomy in relation to its author; it begins its own career of meaning. Another distancing exists between the text and its successive readers; these have to respect the world of the text in its otherness.

Thus the methods of literary and historical analysis are necessary for interpretation. Yet the meaning of a text can be fully grasped only as it is actualized in the lives of readers who appropriate it. Beginning with their situation, they are summoned to uncover new meanings, along the fundamental line of meaning indicated by the text. Biblical knowledge should not stop short at language, it must seek to arrive at the reality of which the language speaks.

The religious language of the Bible is a symbolic language which "gives rise to thought" (donne a penser), a language the full richness of which one never ceases to discover, a language which points to a transcendent reality and which, at the same time, awakens human beings to the deepest dimensions of personal existence.