Includes bibliographical references (p. [621]-661) and indexes.

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