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Contents: Introduction: New horizons<br/>Aims and concerns<br/>Hermeneutics in the university, and the Bible and the church<br/>New horizons for readers: reading with transforming effects<br/>New horizons in the development of hermeneutics<br/>The new horizons of fresh argument and transforming the reading-paradigm<br/>I. Transforming texts: Preliminary observations<br/>The capacity of texts to transform readers<br/>The capacity of readers and texts to transform texts: different notions of intertextuality<br/>Situational and horizontal factors in transforming texts<br/>Factors arising from semiotics, theories of hermeneutics, and theories of textuality<br/>II. What is a text? Shifting paradigms of textuality<br/>Are authors part of texts? Introductory issues<br/>Are situations or readers part of texts?<br/>Theological claims about the givenness and actualization of biblical texts<br/>Further theological issues: disembodied texts or communicative address? III. From semiotics to deconstruction and post-modernist theories of textuality<br/>Code in semiotic theory: the nature of semiotic theory<br/>Need semiotics lead to deconstructionism? Different understandings of the implications of semiotic theory<br/>Roland Barthes: From hermeneutics through semiotics to intralinguistic world, and to text as play<br/>Difficulties and questions: the inter-mixture of semiotics and world-view<br/>Jacques Derrida: an endless series of signs under erasure<br/>Postmodernist and deconstructionist approaches in biblical interpretation<br/>Further philosophical evaluations and critiques of deconstructionism, some in dialogue with Wittgenstein<br/>IV. Pre-modern biblical interpretation: the hermeneutics of tradition<br/>Relations between pre-modern, modern and post-modern perspectives: some parallels and contrasts<br/>Tradition as context of understanding; the two Testaments, Gnosticism and the relevance of Irenaeus<br/>Varied issues in allegorical interpretation: its demythologizing function in pre-Christian and philonic interpretation<br/>The beginnings of Christian allegorical interpretation<br/>Allegory or application? The development of pastoral hermeneutical consciousness in Origen and a contrast with Chrysostom. V. The hermeneutics of enquiry: From the Reformation to modern theory<br/>The three polemical contexts which give 'Claritas Scripturae' its currency: epistemology, 'higher' meanings, and efficacy<br/>Questioning in the service of faith: Christ and reflective criteria in Luther<br/>Further reflection on interpretation in Calvin and in English Reformers<br/>The rise and development of modern hermeneutical theory<br/>VI. Schleiermacher's hermeneutics of understanding<br/>Schleiermacher's most distinctive contribution to the subject<br/>The broader context: Romanticism, Pietism, culture, and hermeneutics<br/>Schleiermacher's system of hermeneutics: 'Grammatical' (shared language) and 'psychological' (language-use) axes<br/>Schleiermacher's system of hermeneutics: the hermeneutical circle and a 'better' understanding than the author<br/>Theological ambiguities and hermeneutical achievements. VII. Pauline and other texts in the light of a hermeneutics of understanding<br/>Paul, Pauline texts, and Schleiermacher's hermeneutical circle<br/>The hermeneutical circle and the quest for a 'centre' of Pauline thought<br/>A hermeneutics of 'life-world' reconstruction in Dilthey and Betti: 'Re-living' and 'openness'<br/>Pauline texts and reconstruction: A 'better' understanding than the author?<br/>Understanding the author of an anonymous text: the Epistle to the Hebrews<br/>VIII: The hermeneutics of self-involvement: From existentialist models to speech-act theory<br/>Reader-involvement, address, and states of affairs: The contrasting assumptions of existentialist hermeneutics and 'the logic of self-involvement' in Austin and Evans<br/>The hermeneutics of the earlier Heidegger and Bultmann's approach to Paul<br/>Christological texts in Paul and in the Synoptic Gospels in the light of speech-act theory in Austin, Evans, Searle, and du Plessis<br/>Illocutionary acts in J.R. Searle and F. Recanati: direction of fit between words and the world<br/>The 'world-to-word fit' of a hermeneutic of promise: Types of illocutions; the work of Christ in Paul; promise in the Old Testament. IX. The hermeneutics of metacriticism and the foundations of knowledge<br/>The context of the paradigm-shift to radical metacritical hermeneutics and the nature of Gadamer's hermeneutics<br/>Gadamer's claim for 'the universality of the hermeneutical problem' and the development of critiques of language and of knowledge<br/>Pannenberg's metacritical unifying of a hermeneutics of universal history with the scientific status of theology<br/>X. The hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval: Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutical theory<br/>Human fallibility, hermeneutical suspicion, and Freudian psychoanalysis: Idols, dreams, and symbols<br/>Paul Ricoeur on metaphor and narrative: Possibility, time, and transformation<br/>Metacriticism, fiction, history, and truth: Some assessments largely in the light of speech-act theory<br/>Some consequences for Ricoeur's approach to biblical hermeneutics. XI. The hermeneutics of socio-critical theory: Its relation to socio-pragmatic hermeneutics and to liberation theologies<br/>The nature of socio-critical hermeneutics: Habermas on hermeneutics, knowledge, interest, and an emancipatory critique<br/>Habermas's theory of communicative action in the double context of social theory in Marx, Weber and Parsons, and speech-act theory: Habermas and biblical interpretation<br/>Richard Rorty's socio-pragmatic contextualism vs. Karl-Otto Apel's cognitive anthropology as transcendental metacritique<br/>XII. The hermeneutis of liberation theologies and feminist theologies: socio-critical and socio-pragmatic strands<br/>The major concerns, development, and dual character of Latin American Liberation hermeneutics<br/>Parallels and contrasts with black hermeneutics: the varied approaches of Cone, Boesak, Goba, Mosala, and other writers<br/>Further examples of Marxist or 'materialist' readings: Belo and Clevenot<br/>The nature and development of feminist biblical hermeneutics<br/>The use of socio-critical and socio-pragmatic methods and epistemologies in feminist hermeneutics: Ruether, Fiorenza, Tolbert, and other writers<br/>Further complexities in feminist hermeneutics: Parallels between demythologizing and depatriarchializing. XIII. The hermeneutics of reading in the context of literary theory<br/>Problematic and productive aspects of the literary approach and the legacy of the new criticism<br/>A closer examination of narrative theory<br/>Formalist and structuralist approaches to biblical narrative texts<br/>From post-structuralism to Semiotic theories of reading: Intertextuality and the paradigm-shift to 'reading'<br/>The paradigm of 'reading' in biblical studies and intertextuality in biblical interpretation<br/>XIV. The hermeneutics of reading in reader-response theories of literary meaning<br/>Wolfgang Iser's theory of reader-interaction and its utilization in biblical studies<br/>Umberto Eco's Semiotic and text-related reader-response theories and their implications for biblical texts<br/>Differences among more radical reader-response theories: The psychoanalytical approach of Holland and the socio-political approach of Bleich<br/>Further observations on the reader-orientated Semiotics of Culler and on the social pragmatism of Fish<br/>What Fish's counterarguments overlook about language: Fish and Wittgenstein<br/>The major difficulties and limited value of Fish's later theory of biblical studies and for theology. XV. The hermeneutics of pastoral theology: (1) Ten ways of reading texts in relation to varied reading-situations<br/>Life-worlds, intentional directedness, and enquiring reading in reconstructionist models<br/>Disruptions of passive reading in existentialist models<br/>Drawing readers into biblical narrative-worlds: Four theories of narrative in relation to reading-situations<br/>Biblical symbols: Productive and spiritual reading, with questions partly from Freud and Jung for pastoral theology<br/>Models five through to eight on variable reader-effects: Semiotic productivity, reader-response, socio-pragmatic contextualization, and deconstruction<br/>XVI. The hermeneutics of pastoral theology: (2) Further reading-situations, pluralism, and 'believing' reading<br/>Some implications of speech-act models for enquiring and believing reading (ninth model); and the socio-critical quest to transcend instrumental uses of texts (tenth model)<br/>'The present situation' in hermeneutical approaches pastoral theology and to social science: criteria of relevance in Alfred Schutz and the critique of the cross<br/>The transformation of criteria of relevance and power in the new horizons of the cross and resurrection: Towards a new understanding of hermeneutical pluralism |