David Jasper and Abdur-Rahman Abou Almajd discuss on Short Introduction to Hermeneutics.

David Jasper and Abdur-Rahman Abou Almajd discuss on Short Introduction to Hermeneutics.

Hermeneutics is the theory of text interpretation, and is the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, We have a fresh opportunity to reflect about the book A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics. At this point Professor David Jasper is not going to talk about his views on his work but talks briefly on the history of hermeneutic theory besides hermeneutics themselves.

David Jasper is Professor of Literature and Theology and was Dean for Postgraduates in the Arts at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He was the founder of the Conference on Literature and Religion at Durham University in 1980. Since then, a series of international meetings have been organised every other year by the International Society for the Study of Religion, Literature and Culture, providing a forum for the inter-disciplinary study of literature and theology in contemporary Europe. Professor Jasper himself is one of the most distinguished European scholars of this field.

Q: Well, you managed to present Hermeneutics as a narrative. I wonder what made you focus on functional reading. Could you explain that, please?

DJ: My concern is with theological hermeneutics primarily. The book is primarily intended for students studying theology and hence the sense of ‘functional reading’. But at the same time I wanted to emphasize that all reading is ‘with a purpose’ – as, in a sense, are all religious poetics. The narrative sense is inbuilt into the Biblical literature.

Q: You pursue hermeneutics ‘From Scholasticism to the Age of Enlightenment.’ I wonder why your writings in Medieval hermeneutics are limited to Aquinas, Eckhart and Kempis.

DJ: This is only intended as a brief introduction. I am aware that so much more could be said, but what I was trying to do was establish the continuity of the hermeneutical tradition and so I deliberately highlighted only the most important elements in that ‘narrative’. A longer book should also have included Duns Scotus and many others, but this book is not intended to be inclusive of everything.

Q: You moved rapidly to Erasmus, Luther and Calvin and then on to Kant, Coleridge and Schleiermacher, Could you explain the particular importance of Schleiermacher?

DJ: Again - I am trying to get students to see the progression of the narrative through the major figures. I have left out a great deal. Schleiermacher is clearly a central figure – sometimes called the ‘father of modern hermeneutics’. He stands interestingly between the old and the new worlds – also between the affective tradition of his pietistic background and the highly intellectual world of the modern German university. He holds together so many paradoxes.

Q: He holds together so many paradoxes, Could you explain on that please?

DJ: He recognizes that proper interpretation is not simply about the way we think but also about how we feel. Though rigorously intellectual he is also a Romantic. He also realizes the importance of the past and tradition while at the same time being utterly of his own time. He is both ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ at the same time.

Q: How do you see Wilhelm Dilthey and the tensions between ‘science’ and ‘religion’?

DJ: Dilthey was important as he reflected on the interdisciplinarity of hermeneutics at a time when the hard sciences were establishing themselves firmly. He was concerned to emphasize also the importance of the ‘social sciences’ (anthropology, sociology, etc) as crucial for understanding hermeneutics. As the biographer of Schleiermacher, Dilthey fully brought hermeneutics into modernity.

Q: You said:" He was concerned to emphasize the ‘social sciences’ (anthropology, sociology, etc) as also crucial for understanding hermeneutics" I wonder how he brings hermeneutics into modernity.

DJ: The point is that proper hermeneutical activity is utterly interdisciplinary. To understand a text requires a sense of its place in culture and society (sociology), its role in the understanding of what it isto be human (anthropology), its function within the then new science of psychology, and so on. Hermeneutics is rooted in the past, but always be firmly aware of the demands of the present.

Q: You cover the twentieth century (stressing Barth, Bultmann, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and hinting at Derrida). I want to know how you react to Derrida and his effective on our thinking.

DJ: In a way Derrida marks the ‘end’ of the story of hermeneutics as I have portrayed it. His sense of post-modernism and deconstruction collapses the narratives that are implicit in the story from the beginning. From now on we have to look for new forms of hermeneutics – though not entirely separate from the old.

Q: It's said Jasper's narrative is not neutral. It is decidedly a narrative of biblical interpretation. More, however, it is very much a narrative of European hermeneutics that is set to a particular protestant soundtrack, isn't it?

DJ: Of course this is so. All hermeneutics are from a particular perspective, and mine are no exception. NO hermeneutics are neutral – no reading is innocent. One can only see the world from one’s own perspective, finally – but being aware of that makes it possible to at least understand other perspectives.

Q: Finally, you focus on contemporary critical theory (liberation, responsibility, Bible as literature, postcolonialism, intertextuality.

DJ: Yes – I am looking at the elements that will be within hermeneutics in the contemporary world. It is now over ten years since I wrote this book – and I would do it differently now. For example I have been teaching for some years in China – that is a whole new world that we now have to acknowledge. As Schleiermacher said – hermeneutics never stands still and are never finished.