After completing the brief series on existentialism and hermeneutics (pt 1, pt 2, pt 3), I noticed a few related discussion around the way worth mentioning:
1. Rod Decker interacted with the reader-response approach which Richard Hays seemed to suggest in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (1989).
2. Ken Schenck shares an introduction to a paper he is writing in which he will attempt to build a bridge “across the ugly ditch between historical-contextual interpretations of individual biblical books and a holistic Christian perspective on Scripture as a whole.”
3. Ben Byerly interacts briefly with Schenck, most interestingly suggesting that coherence in a reader-centered approach must mean “internal coherence.” (I have a few thoughts on ‘coherence’, perhaps for another time).
I would love to see more discussion related to the problem (from my perspective) of multiple meanings (cf. previous post).
I hope you do take up the topic of “coherence.” I was fumbling around; maybe “perceived coherence” would be . I’ll take a look at your earlier posts.
Great. Briefly, my interest in ‘coherence’ is that it can be an exegetical key used in both a grammatical-historical method and a reader-response method (i.e., internal coherence of a text or internal coherence of a reader’s interpretation).
I’ll look forward to hearing more.
[…] “coherent,” unless you want to say that it is trying to making some kind of attempt at internal coherence (perceived coherence?). Not that anyone will necessarily agree on the results of the […]
yeah i’m looking forward to your thoughts on coherence as well. gurus miss that stuff like that plague
Too bad I am so late in discovering this discussion….
I have a question that seems to find a flaw in the nature of any discussion at all. What we have to “say” about anything at all is easily seen to be similar to finger painting…the images that result are interpretive not meaningless but not a shared meaning. So when we arrive at a personal “meaning”, again we are painting a-fresh and again a new meaning the soon slips into the unrecoverable past…not any absolute loss or any absolute gain…now what?
Regards,
Bill W.
Thanks, Bill. I would basically affirm your point although I am perhaps slightly more optimistic about our ability to determine meaning.