Abstract
In this essay, I reflect on the hermeneutical predicament of all references to revelation. Any adequate treatment of revelation must attend to the necessary linguistic/symbolic mediation of religious experience in general and of transcendence in particular. Hence, in a first move, I reflect on different hermeneutical options and on the overall significance of hermeneutics for theological thinking. In a second move, I discuss the challenge of a hermeneutics of love capable to treat not only of difference but also of radical difference. In a third and final move, I offer some conclusions for Christian praxis and theology faced with the challenges of both globalisation and religious pluralism.
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Notes
- 1.
I gratefully acknowledge the editors’ permission to make use here of some parts of Jeanrond 2014.
- 2.
In a properly Kantian way, I should state: “space, time and language are the categories of our being”, although, curiously enough, Kant did not explore the category of language in his philosophy.
- 3.
In this section I am developing some earlier reflections published in Jeanrond 1998a.
- 4.
Cf., also Charles Taylor’s defence of “the idea that stories give us an understanding of life, people, and what happens to them which is peculiar (i.e., distinct from what other forms, like works of science and philosophy, can give us), and also unsubstitutable (i.e., what they show us can’t be translated without remainder into other media).” (Taylor 2016, p. 291)
- 5.
“Conversation in its primary form is an exploration of possibilities in the search for truth. In following the track of any question, we must allow for difference and otherness… Otherness and difference can become, however, genuine possibility: the as other, the as different becomes the as possible.” (Tracy 1987, pp. 20–21. Original italics)
- 6.
“Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of neighbor does not understand it at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way.” Saint Augustine 1958, 30. See also Jeanrond 1994, pp. 22–26.
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Jeanrond, W.G. (2020). Revelation and the Hermeneutics of Love. In: Marion, JL., Jacobs-Vandegeer, C. (eds) The Enigma of Divine Revelation. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8_7
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