10 Meandering Theses on Hermeneia

Towards a Method of Reading Scripture

§1: Hermeneia is neither exegesis nor eisegesis, but a specific act of interpretive meaning making that involves communion with the text and, through the text, with the human authors and readers of the text and, through those human authors and readers, with the diachronic and synchronic world in which they composed and transmitted the text and, through the world, with the divine. Once this contact with the divine through the text is established, the hermeneutēs then proceeds downwards again into their own context, the world as they know it, the people they read the text with, so that the text may become divine speech for the interpreter’s own time and place. On Kripal’s mythemic index, hermeneia involves acts of Realization and Authorization: first, seeing how the divine, through the cosmic and the human intermediaries of which the text is a living sacrament, has written us in our time and place, and then, second, becoming coauthorial with the divine as interpreters of the text who must now make incisive and creative decisions about the meaning of the text in the here and now. Hermeneia always, that is to say, involves both exegesis and eisegesis even as it transcends them both: exegesis, as the hard work of attention to text and contexts (original and successive), and eisegesis, as the hard work of uncovering subtext and using it to connect the text’s meaning to new contexts.