Justification of Faith

Abstract

‘The abdication of Belief’, wrote Emily Dickinson, ‘Makes the Behaviour small’. Hermeneutics, whether from the point of view of belief or not, asks a question so large as to appear unanswerable: How is interpretation possible? Perhaps there can never be an answer that will satisfy the long search for validity in interpretation, running (according to a possible narrative account) from the first-century re-reading of the Hebrew Scriptures, under the Christian imperative, to the hermeneutics of Gadamer and Ricoeur. But faith has a way of giving rise to hope, and the faith which produces linguistic meaning brings along with it a hope that such meanings are justified. How real a hope is it? The Dickinson poem continues: ‘Better an ignis fatuus/ Than no illume at all’.³ This chapter sets out to reveal faith (emerging from the intra-linguistic process) as a hermeneutic principle at the level of the text, and to relate it to the orientation of hermeneutics in hope, taken up in subsequent chapters. Inquiring into the justification of meaning requires that the role of faith (as it is found already at work in language) is taken into account in the process of interpretation, not as an external constraint which protects rather than opens a reading,⁴ but as the possibility of reading itself. To abdicate belief is to attenuate language, to deprive it of the very hopefulness which drives the speaking subject on towards communication.

... being justified by faith... (Romans 5:1)

The discipline of interpretation is founded ... on a logic of validation.¹

Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?²