Ricoeur’s Biblical Hermeneutics, in R. BIERINGER, R. BURGGRAEVE, E. NATHAN, M. STEEGEN (eds.),...

Paul Ricoeur on Biblical Hermeneutics

Marianne Moyaert

It is the nature of theology to be fundamentally preoccupied with hermeneutical questions, especially since Christianity is after all concerned with the interpretation of a word event that has become scripture.1 Indeed, one can speak of “an entanglement between voice and script in biblical discourse.”2 The Bible is God’s revealed Word. In its capacity as a normative guide and rule for the Chris-tian faith community, the Bible has an enduring authority.

The question of course is what this implies for the interpretation of the Bible. Does the Bible deserve a particular approach or not? Is there a difference between biblical texts and other literary texts? How can the Bible, an ancient and difficult book, still be meaning-ful for a faith community today? How can we know which interpre-tation of the Bible is legitimate? Is it possible to avoid the problem of Hineininterpretierung, interpreting the text to suit our own needs?

An author deeply engaged with these and other questions was the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. More specifically, he has reflected upon the contribution of hermeneutical philosophy to biblical exegesis and to biblical theology.3 Because of the originality

1 F. X. Amherdt, L’herméneutique philosophique de Paul Ricoeur et son impor-tance pour l’exégèse biblique en débat avec le new Yale school (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2004) 216.

2 Ricoeur, “L’enchevêtrement de la voix et de l’écrit dans le discours bib-lique,” Lectures III (Paris: Seuil, 1992) 307-326.

3 “For Ricoeur the disciplines of biblical interpretation and theological reflec-tion operate within the same gravitional space: the complementary and contrast-ing genres of Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Theology, first and foremost, is a hermeneutical exercise at work upon the multiple modes of discourse within the Bible. Closer to exegesis than philosophy, theology is a non speculative inter-pretation of the founding discourses of Jewish and Christian faith without the benefit of any rational foundation upon which to base such an enterprise.”

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of Ricoeur’s approach and because his text hermeneutics has been recognized by the Pontifical Biblical Commission as a possible methodological framework for biblical interpretation, I will address the above mentioned question from a Ricoeurian perspective.4

A central item in Ricoeur’s biblical hermeneutics is the hypoth-esis that nothing can better illustrate the ‘excentric’ character of the Bible “than the effort to apply to it the general categories of hermeneutics.”5 In order to argue the above hypothesis, Ricoeur first develops a general text hermeneutics, which he then applies to the Bible. Biblical hermeneutics is thus understood as a sort of regional hermeneutics in relation to philosophical hermeneutics, con-sidered as a general hermeneutics. It is, according to Ricoeur, “a particular case of a more general enterprise.”6 Biblical hermeneutics has to conform to the rules of general hermeneutics. Only by thinking through the principles of general text hermeneutics towards, and applying them to, biblical texts, can the actual par-ticular character of the Bible be allowed to come to the fore.7 As we shall see, this biblical particularity is primarily related to the central place of God-reference in it.8 When this special confes-sional dimension is recognized, it will then appear that the Bible is not just a particular case of a more general enterprise, it is also a unique case.

M. I. Wallace, “Introduction,” P. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred. Religion, Narra-tive and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995) 23.

4 Pontifical Biblical Commision, Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, April 23, 1993. For an in-depth analysis of this document see J. A. Fitzmyer, The Biblical Commission’s document The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church: Text and Commentary, Subsidia Biblica, 18 (Rome, 1995)

5 P. Ricoeur, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Hermeneutics,” From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics, II (London: Athlone, 1991) 89.

6 P. Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” Figuring the Sacred, p. 46. 7 R. Burggraeve, “Hoe ‘eigen-zinnig’ is het bijbels denken? Bouwstenen voor

een poëtische bijbelhermeneutiek,” De Bijbel en andere heilige boeken. Verhalen om van te leven?, ed. J. De Tavernier (Leuven and Voorburg: Acco, 2004) 49-71. See too, as an example, my other contribution in this volume, “From Escape to Responsibility.”

8 P. Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” p. 45.


PAUL RICOEUR ON BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS 29

i. ricoeur’s general text herMeneutics

Ricoeur’s general hermeneutics revolves around two poles: the text and the interpretation of the text: “The work of the text demands as counterbalance a work of interpretation. Conversely, the dynam-ics of the interpretation consists precisely of revealing and accom-panying the dynamic which is already at work in the text.9In this way text theory and interpretation theory presuppose each other. The question, ‘how do we interpret?’ is preceded by the question, ‘what are we interpreting?’ Hermeneutical reflection thus com-mences with the question, ‘what is a text?’

A. What is a text?

In several articles Ricoeur answers this question by formulating criteria of textuality. These criteria of textuality are applicable to all texts, and thus also to biblical texts. They concern especially (1) the text as discourse, (2) the text as written discourse, (3) the text as literary work, and (4) the world of the text.

1. The realisation of language as discourse

“A text is first of all a link in a communicative chain. One of life’s experiences is brought to language. It becomes discourse.”10 Dis-course distinguishes itself from language understood as a system of signs (langue). Discourse implies the living use of language (parole). Ricoeur distances himself here from the structuralist method (Ferdinand de Saussure), which “places speech and use in parentheses.”11 In line with the French linguist Benveniste, Ricoeur maintains that language realizes itself, or reaches its goal, in

9 F. X. Amherdt, Paul Ricoeur. L’herméneutique biblique, La Nuit surveillée (Paris: Cerf, 2000) 24.

10 P. Ricoeur, “Naming God,” Figuring the Sacred, 217-235, p. 219. 11 Id., “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” Hermeneutics and the

Human Sciences. Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1981, 15,1998) 133.


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discourse. If the basic unit of langue is the sign, then the basic unit of discourse is the sentence.

Discourse is characterized by a dialectic between event and mean-ing. Discourse is primarily “given as an event”12. This means firstly that discourse “is realised temporally and in the present.” In this dis-course distinguishes itself from the system of language which places itself outside of time and is virtual. Secondly, discourse presupposes someone who speaks. “The event consists in the fact that someone speaks, someone expresses himself in taking up speech.”13 Once again discourse distinguishes itself from langue, where the question of, ‘who is speaking?’, is not applicable. Language does not have a subject. Thirdly, discourse has a referential function. It relates to a reality outside of language. Discourse is about something; a world is brought to expression. Here too a clear distinction evidences itself compared to language as a system of signs: “the signs of language refer only to other signs in the interior of the same system so that language no more has a World than it has a time and a subject.”14 articular to discourse finally is that an interlocutor is presupposed. Someone says something to someone. “The event, in this last sense, is the temporal phenomenon of exchange, the establishment of a dialogue which can be started, continued or interrupted.”15

The second pole of the dialectic concerns meaning. “Discourse qua event has a fleeting existence: it appears and disappears. But at the same time – and herein lies the paradox – it can be identified a reidentified as the same. And this sameness is what we call, in a broad sense, its meaning.”16 There is a distinction between the say-ing and the said. If ‘saying’ belongs to the event, then the ‘said’ belongs to the level of meaning. Other than the eventful character of saying, which has something fleeting about it, the said carries

12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 134. 16 P. Ricoeur, “Metaphor and the Problem of Hermeneutics”, Hermeneutics

and the Human Sciences, p. 167.



something permanent and is, on principle, something repetitive. “What is said is already at a distance from the very act or event of saying.”17 Because of this distance, what is said in a conversation, can be repeated and passed on to others who were not present at the conversation.18 In this way, says Ricoeur, discourse is realized as event; it is understood as meaning.

2. The relation between speaking and writing

At the moment when discourse takes on the form of a written text there is once again distanciation. “The first distanciation merely states that the said can be repeated and thus does not coincide with the meaning of the saying.”19 Yet, in writing the said becomes fixed. This is a kind of completion of the first distanciation. Through this fixa-tion the text acquires a semantic autonomy. It is a threefold auton-omy: “with respect to the intention of the author; with respect to the cultural situation and all the sociological conditions of the produc-tion of the text; and finally, with respect to the original addressee.”20

Writing renders the text autonomous with respect to the inten-tion of the author. What it signifies no longer coincides with what the author meant. Thanks to the process of writing, what Gad-amer calls the ‘matter’ of the text can exceed the world of the author.21 This autonomy also holds true for the original socio-logical cultural and economic conditions that produced the text. That is why the text opens itself to an unlimited series of readings, themselves situated in different socio-cultural conditions. Last but not least, “the emancipation with respect to the author has a parallel on the side of those who receive the text.”22 Moreover, the

17 Id., “Philosophy and Religious Language,” p. 37. 18 G-J. van der Heiden, “Distantiatie in de hermeneutiek van Paul Ricoeur,”

Bijdragen. International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 68 (2007) 3 p. 286. 19 Ibid., p. 287. 20 P. Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and Critique of Ideology,” Hermeneutics and

the Human Sciences, p. 91. 21 Id., “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” p. 139. 22 Ibid.


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process of distanciation also frees the audience addressed from the original historical and social conditions. Consequently, the text has a universal range of addressees.

3. Text as a literary work

A text is “open to an indefinite number of readers and therefore of interpretation. The opportunity for multiple readings is the dia-lectical counterpart of the semantic autonomy of the text.”23 A text is poly-interpretable. In this perspective the notion of text as a ‘work’ (oeuvre) is important. A text is never simply written down. It is the result of diligent labour. It is the result of craftsmanship. From this perspective, Ricoeur does not see much difference between mental and physical labour. A text “is submitted to a form of codification which is applied to the composition itself, and which transforms discourse into a story, a poem, an essay, etc. this codification is known as a literary genre; a work in other words, is characteristically subsumed to a literary genre. [Moreover], a work is given a unique configuration which likes it to an individual and which may be called its style.”24

Different literary genres are often understood simply as “clas-sificatory devices that help critics to orient themselves in the immense variety of individual works.”25 For Ricoeur however, genre is more than a classificatory device. It has firstly a generative function. This means that “meanings are ruled and guided by the modes of articulation specific to each mode of discourse.”26 Liter-ary genre contributes to the meaning of a text. The content of meaning is inextricably intertwined with the form of discourse.

This conception of the generative function of literary genres for producing discourse as a work may be of tremendous importance

23 Id., “Speaking and Writing,” Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Sur-plus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: The Texas University Press, 1976) 25-44, 32.

24 Id., “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” p. 138. 25 Id., “Philosophy and Religious Language,” p. 37. 26 Ibid., p. 38.



for exegesis. Such modes of discourse as narratives, proverbs and oracles, must be looked at as an encoding process, not as classifica-tory devices.27

Aside from the generative function of literary genres, Ricoeur dis-cerns three other functions that should not be overlooked in the understanding of texts. Firstly, literary genres have a traditional character, through which they form a “common ground of under-standing and interpretation”. Secondly, these also protect the mes-sage of the discourse against distortion, given that genre is inde-pendent from both author and reader. Thirdly, this means that a text’s meaning can continue to unfold, long after the original Sitz im Leben from which the text came into being has disappeared. In this way, the literary genre guarantees the survival of meaning.28 In order to understand the meaning of a text, one has to occupy oneself with the genre in which the meaning is brought to articu-lation. Taking seriously the structure of the text as oeuvre is there-fore a hermeneutical prerequisite.

4. The work of discourse and the projection of the world

Distinctive to each discourse, regardless of whether it is oral or written, is the fact that someone says something to another. Important in this, as already briefly mentioned above, is the refer-ential function of each discourse. There is always a connection to an extra-linguistic reality.

However, there exist two types of discourse: oral and written. “In oral discourse the problem of reference is resolved by the ostensive function of discourse, in other words, reference is deter-mined by the ability to point to a reality common to interlocutors. If we cannot point to the thing about which we speak, at least we can situate it in relation to the unique spatiotemporal network that is shared by the interlocutors.”29 Ricoeur assigns the ostensive

27 Id., The Narrative Form, p. 69-70. 28 Ibid., 71. 29 Id., “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” p. 85.


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function of discourse to both common and scientific speech, since he views the latter actually as an extension of common descriptive and denotative discourse. Truth is understood as empirical truth. This truth is in principle verifiable.

In written discourse the referential function is more complex than in oral discourse. “There is no longer a common situation between the writer and the reader. And at the same time, the concrete condi-tions for the act of pointing something out no longer exists.”30 Thus in written discourse the ostensive referential function is suspended. Although the text does not refer to what is familiar from the sur-rounding context, as would happen in the case of a dialogue, the text speaks about possible worlds that the reader can inhabit. Put differently, in written discourse the possibility arises to refer to a world that is not present in the immediacy of its surroundings. The suspension of denotative reference that belongs to the realm of the known and familiar opens up the realm of the unknown and the unfamiliar. That is also why Ricoeur does not speak about the hid-den meaning of the text – hidden in the spirit of the author or the structure of the text – but about revelation of meaning in front of the text. The text has the means to unfold a world before itself. Ricoeur calls this the poetic power of the text.

Ricoeur objects to the idea that referential discourse stops at the threshold of poetic discourse. Or that poetic discourse only refers to the deepest and most personal emotions of the author. Though poetic discourse does not add to our knowledge of objects, the suspension of descriptive and denotative discourse is the condition of possibility for the “liberation of a more originary referential function, which may be called second-order only because discourse that has a descriptive function has usurped the first rank in daily life, assisted in this respect by science.”31 Poetic discourse does not refer to the world of manipulable objects, it rather “refers to the many ways we belong to the world before we oppose ourselves to things understood as objects that stand before a subject.” Here

30 Id., “Philosophy and Religious Language,” p. 42. 31 Id., “Naming God,” p. 222.



truth is at stake, but not truth understood in terms of adequatio intellectus at rem. It is rather truth as manifestation, “in the sense of letting be what shows itself. What shows itself is each time the proposing of a world, a world wherein I can project my ownmost possibilities.”32 What must be interpreted in a text is precisely the “type of being-in-the-world unfolded in front of the text.”33 In a sense, we could argue that the category of the world in front of the text corresponds to a kind of non-religious concept of revelation. We shall elaborate on this concept of revelation a little later on.

B. The hermeneutical arc

The theory of interpretation elaborated by Ricoeur is closely con-nected to his concept of the text. The interrelatedness between Ricoeur’s theory of the text and his general hermeneutics also becomes apparent from his juxtaposition of what he terms the world of the text and the world of the reader:

By the world of the text I mean the world displayed by the text in front of itself, so to speak, as the horizon of possible experience in which the work displaces its readers. By the world of the reader I mean the actual world in which real action is disclosed in the midst of a web of relationships, to use an expression of Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition.34

In line with this juxtaposition, Ricoeur conceives of his text her-meneutics as follows: “The task of hermeneutics is to accompany the structuring activity which starts in the midst of life, is invested in the text, and, thanks to private reading and public reception returns to life.”35

32 Ibid., p. 223. 33 Id., “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” p. 141. 34 Id., “Toward a Narrative Theology: Its Necessity, Its Resources, Its Dif-

ficulties,” Figuring the Sacred, p. 240. 35 Id., “The Text as a Dynamic Identity,” Identity of the Literary Text, ed.

M.J. Valdes and O. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985) 175-186, p. 186.


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Ricoeur’s text hermeneutics consists of three discrete phases: a naive understanding, objective explanation, appropriation. Between the three phases of the hermeneutical circle a double dialectic is at work, which moves from understanding to explanation and from explanation to understanding. Ricoeur also terms these three phases a hermeneutical arc. One understands a text only after having tra-versed the whole hermeneutical arc.

The first phase of the hermeneutical arc constitutes a prelimi-nary, pre-critical reading of the strange text. The first interpreta-tion is synthetic in the sense that the interpreter attempts to understand the text as a meaningful whole.36 In this the interpreter approaches the text out of her own horizon of understanding. Understanding requires an engagement from the interpreter towards the text. The interpreter is always first an ‘audience’ who already belongs to a certain linguistic community and is formed by a tradition, a cultural context, and a historical background. It is thanks to the horizon of understanding that the strange text can appeal to an interpreter and that ‘something’ of the text can be understood. It is up to the interpreter to first wager a ‘guess’ as to the text’s meaning. This she does from the limitation of her his-torical situatedness and the familiar structure of her own preju-dices.

Given this view of the constructive role of prejudices in the interpretive process, hermeneutics sets itself against the modern tradition that aspires towards objective thought without prejudices. Like Hans-Georg Gadamer in Wahrheit und Methode (1960), Ricoeur defends prejudices. “Prejudice is not the opposite pole of a reason without presupposition; it is a component of understand-ing, linked to the finite historical character of the human being.”37 The idea that we can read a text without presuppositions is a mod-ern illusion, which generally results in blindness. For, the meaning of what is strange can only reveal itself when it is approached from and connected with the familiar horizon of understanding.

36 Id., “Explanation and Understanding”, Interpretation Theory, p. 72. 37 Id., “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” p. 71.



While it is true that the first interpretation of the text’s meaning is made possible through the interpreter’s horizon of understand-ing, this horizon is always finite and limited. Thus, “a specific onesidedness is implied in the act of reading. This onesidedness confirms the guess character of interpretation.”38 Furthermore, it is always possible that the reader will project his own presupposi-tions into the text. That is why there is a second phase, which is one of validation. This is a scientific approach, which supports an attitude of critical distance. This critical distance is necessary in order to avoid that the hermeneutical arc becomes a vicious cycle, i.e. preventing the interpreter from finding only a mirror image of herself in the strange text. The ‘anticipation of meaning’ of the interpreter is tested against the text itself. While a text may be poly-interpretable, it does not mean that anything goes. Some inter-pretations are more fitting than others. As Ricoeur puts it, “if it is true that there is always more that one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal. The text presents a limited field of possible constructions.”39

In this critical phase the text is studied as a scientific (dead) object. The referential function of the text is temporarily placed on hold. The approach is text-immanent. The reader treats the text as though it has no author, public, or world. “Within the process of interpreta-tion explanation of structures may be connected to hermeneutical understanding. The former can correct the historizing, psychologiz-ing, existential prejudices which often characterize the latter.”40

Ricoeur considers the phase of explanation a necessary stage between a naïve and a critical interpretation, between a surface and a depth interpretation.41 Yet hermeneutics does not stop here. After all, the meaning of a text does not limit itself merely to the

38 Id., The Model of the Text, p. 212. 39 Id., “Explanation and Understanding,” p. 79. 40 T.M. van Leeuwen, The Surplus of Meaning: Ontology and Eschatology in

the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1981) 88. 41 P. Ricoeur, “What is a Text?,” Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences,

p. 161.


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‘inside’ of the text.42 “The attempt to bracket reference and to keep sense, i.e., to raise only question about meaning and to drop questions about historical reality fails somewhere, because it runs against my main contention that even fictions are about the world.”43 Text hermeneutics also needs to ask after the ‘outside’ of the text, which is the world in front of the text. This calls for a movement from explanation to comprehension.

Ricoeur terms this last comprehending phase of the hermeneuti-cal arc the phase of appropriation. By this Ricoeur means the pro-cess through which something that was once strange is made one’s own. Appropriation is the anchoring of the arc in the ground of living experience.44 The hermeneutical goal of appropriation is only reached when interpretation actualizes the meaning of the text for the present reader.45 Differently from the critical analytical phase, the text is here understood fully as discourse:

…the characterisation of interpretation as appropriation is meant to underline the ‘present’ character of interpretation. Reading is like the execution of a musical score; it marks the realisation, the enactment, of the semantic possibilities of the text. … The feature of realisation discloses a decisive aspect of reading, namely that it fulfils the dis-course of the text in a dimension similar to that of speech. What is retained here from the notion of speech is not the fact that it is uttered but that it is an event, and instance of discourse. The sentences of a text signify here and now. The ‘actualised’ text finds a surrounding and an audience; it resumes the referential movement – intercepted and suspended – towards a world and towards subjects.46

In the phase of appropriation the meaning of the text returns to being an event. The text once more speaks to an actual public. The movement from decontextualization to recontextualization is

42 P. Ricoeur, Toward a Narrative Theology. Its Necessity, Its Resources, Its Dif-ficulties, p. 240.

43 P. Ricoeur, “Reply to Lewis S. Mudge,” Essays on Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980) 44.

44 Id., “What is a Text,” p. 164. 45 Id., “Appropriation,” Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, p. 185. 46 Id., “What is a Text?” 159.



achieved in this phase. The text is no longer a dead object, but becomes again a living discourse.

But does this not look like a kind of projection by a narcissistic ego that is unable to break free from itself? Is it not again a subject who draws the text towards it and determines and controls its meaning? Has not the meaning of the text been placed under the power of the subject? Rather than all these, it seems that Ricoeur is seeking a medi-ating position between the view that places the author of the text as ruler and master, and the position which sees the reader as having complete control. A text has no meaning until it is read, but the text always has a surplus of meaning. The text refers beyond itself. The ref-erence of the text is at the same time the creative work of the text and the reception of the reader. No one reading can exhaust a text.

That the meaning of a text is a projection of the interpreter is refuted by Ricoeur as follows. Firstly, he refers to the fact that it is the text that projects a world and not the other way around. Reference is the projection of a world, yet it is not the reader who projects himself, but rather the text which reveals a world. That which the interpreter makes his own is the horizon of a world to which the work itself refers. The text brings the interpreter into contact with imaginative variations of ‘being in the world’.47 This insight constitutes for Ricoeur an important critique on the all-powerful ego. It is only by letting go of oneself that the text can present itself. Interpretation here means to follow the trail of the text until its referent, the world of the text, shows itself.48

Secondly, in this phase there is once more the notion of distance, more precisely with respect to the subjective engagement of the reader to the world of the text. The world of the text asks of the interpreter to take distance from the known and the familiar and tread into the world of the unknown. In this context Ricoeur speaks of alienation, insofar as the reader is able to take distance from himself in order that he can then discover himself again, different, renewed and broadened in scope. The interpreter can only appropriate

47 Id., “Appropriation,” p. 189. 48 Ibid., p. 191.


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the world of the text to the extent that he disappropriates himself. Appropriation is thus inextricably linked to disappropriation. In this way hermeneutical appropriation is not the expression of an imperi-alism or colonization, but rather the expression of detachment and letting go. The attitude of the interpreter towards the text is a listen-ing attitude. In the article Naming God, Ricoeur explains this attitude as follows: “Listening excludes founding oneself. … The movement toward listening requires giving up (desaissement ) the human self in its will to mastery, sufficiency, and autonomy.”49 Ricoeur will also speak of ‘the dispossession of a narcissistic self. Understanding means ultimately to understand oneself in front of the text, that is to say, to receive from the text an enriched and enlarged self.

ii. ricoeur’s biblical herMeneutics

According to Ricoeur it is only by first applying general hermeneu-tics to biblical hermeneutics, and thus to treat the latter as a form of regional hermeneutics, that the specificity of biblical texts can be disclosed. This specificity is to be found in the world of the text, which is the final ‘object’ of hermeneutical appropriation. And thus for biblical texts the following axiom also applies: expliquer plus pour comprendre mieux. Thus the initial movement proceeds from philosophical hermeneutics to biblical hermeneutics, involv-ing an application of the various textual categories to biblical texts, understood in the first instance as poetical texts pur sang.

A. Biblical hermeneutics as regional hermeneutics

The dialectic between understanding and explanation underlies the way Ricoeur views biblical hermeneutics. As a result the Bible is taken as a text as all others, amongst all others.”50 Thus the

49 Id., “Naming God,” p. 224. 50 Id., “Herméneutique. Les finalités de l’exégèse biblique,” La bible en phi-

losophie. Approches contemporaines, ed. D. Bourg and A. Lion (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1993) 28.



interpreter of biblical texts must also traverse the hermeneutical arc, who commences with it by “some kind of pre-engagement.”

Ricoeur himself acknowledges that he approaches biblical texts as a believer, as one who listens to the biblical tradition. He commences the hermeneutical process from the assumption that biblical texts are meaningful, even today. Let me quote here Ricoeur at length:

To confess that one is a listener is from the very beginning to break with the project dear tom many, and even perhaps all, philosophers: to begin discourse without any presuppositions. … Yet it is in terms of one certain presupposition that I stand in the position of a lis-tener to Christian preaching: I assume that this speaking is mean-ingful, that it is worthy of consideration, and that examining it may accompany and guide the transfer from the text to life where it will verify itself fully. Can I account for this presupposition? Alas, I stumble already. I do not know how to sort out what is here ‘unravelable’ situation, uncriticized custom, deliberate preference, or profound unchosen choice. I can only confess that my desire to hear more is all these things, and that it defies all these distinctions.But if what I presuppose precedes everything I can choose to think about, how do I avoid the famous circle of believing in order to understand and understanding in order to believe? I do not seek to avoid it. I boldly stay within this circle in the hope that, through the transfer from text to life, what I have risked will be returned a hundredfold as an increase in comprehension, valor and joy.51

Ricoeur is at the same time convinced that his faith bias does not stand in the way of a critical hermeneutical attitude. He first indi-cates that one should not exaggerate the antithesis between convic-tion and critique. In addition to this, he states that faith and cri-tique do not exclude one another: “philosophy is not simply critical, it too belongs too the order of conviction. And religious conviction itself possesses and internal critical dimension.”52 That also explains why Ricoeur does not have a problem in conceiving

51 Id., “Naming God,” p. 215. 52 Id., Critique and Conviction. Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc

De Launay (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) 139.


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of biblical hermeneutics according to the paradigm of philosophi-cal text hermeneutics. In fact, quite the contrary, as will become evident a little later. “Our first naïveté is surely the condition of being in some sense called, but it is unable to distinguish the authentic message from the reality-apprehensions of our culture or from the dogmatic and ecclesiastical framework in which we hear it.”53 The point is after all to turn this too naive and prejudiced reading towards what Ricoeur terms l’exégèse savante, which places the question regarding the ‘authority of the Bible as a normative guide for faithful life between brackets.54 This exégèse savante is the second phase of the hermeneutical arc, which we have previously termed ‘critical analytical’, the phase of explanation.

Ricoeur sees in this critical phase an important role especially for literary criticism.55 He means a synchronic approach to the text that concerns itself with the immanence of the text. This method does not ask after the author or the word outside the text, but considers the text only from its internal dynamics. This critical phase intends to avoid meanings from being projected into the text. That is why one looks here for an “interpretation that would not be an interpretation of the text or an interpretation about the text, but an interpretation

53 L. S. Mudge, Paul Ricoeur on Biblical Interpretation, p. 23. 54 P. Ricoeur, “Herméneutique. Les finalités de l’exégèse biblique,” p. 28. 55 Another method that should be mentioned here is the historical-critical meth-

odology, which Ricoeur maintains also offers a necessary and fruitful contribution to the explanation of texts. Differently from structuralism, it does not offer a syn-chronic, but instead a diachronic approach to the text that concerns itself with the genealogy of a text. Attention is given to the concrete historical context which gave rise to and contributed to the text’s development. “La méthodehistorico-critique se distingue globalement de la méthode sémiotique par son caractère génétique, en somme c’est l’histoire du texte. La sémiotique s’en tient aux articulations structurelles du dernière texte, sans souci de sa chronologie interne. On peit donc s’opposer les deux méthodes comme une généalogie et une anatomie.” This genealogical process can proceed in two directions. First is the so-called Quellenforschung: This means “partir du dernier texte en direction de couches réputées plus anciennes.” The focus here is on l’arrière du texte. Second is the so-called Redactionsgeschichte, which goes in exactly the opposite direction: “c’est le mouvement de recomposition”. See: P. Ricoeur, “Herméneutique. Les finalités de l’exégèse biblique,” p. 29.



in the text and through the text.”56 It is not the question of the text’s reference that is central here, but rather its sense.

This critical method will first “consider discourse as such and describe its main traits.” Here one might recall the dialectic between event and meaning (speech and its content). This is the most origi-nal distanciation, which paves the way for hermeneutics. There is a distance between the saying and the said. A similar distance exists between speaker and discourse, between discourse and the initial situation, and discourse and its initial audience. “Whatever the sta-tus of the recounted events in the Bible as historical occurrences, these events now enjoy a textual existence at some remove from their antecedent origins. Their meaning is now a product of their inscrip-tion within a network of texts that alternately support and displace one another in an intertextual whole. Whatever their original Sitz-im-Leben, it is now the mediation of these events through the Sitz-im-Wort of various literary genres that constitutes their present-day significance.”57 Literary criticism will mainly preoccupy itself with the different literary genres that the Bible is rich with. Consider for example narratives, prophecies, legislative texts, proverbs and wis-dom sayings, hymns, prayers, parables, and liturgical formulas.

The critical phase makes it possible to make the transition from a superficial and too general first interpretation of the strange text to an in-depth reading that has withstood the confrontation with objectivity. Moreover, it “frees the Bible from culture-bound sub-jectivizing interpretations as well as from fundamentalist, objectiv-izing interpretations.”58 But Ricoeur also warns against the danger of ideologizing certain critical methods.59 Because of the text’s plurivocity no single critical method can claim to be the only valid one, and any method that does so lapses into ideology.

56 P. Ricoeur, “On the Exegesis of Genesis 1:1-2:4a,” Figuring the Sacred, p. 140.

57 M.I. Wallace, “Introduction,” p. 24. 58 L.S. Mudge, Paul Ricoeur on Biblical Interpretation, 23. 59 P. Ricoeur, Esquisse de conclusion, in X. Leon-Dufour, Exégèse et herméneu-

tique, Parijs, p. 288.


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Perhaps what is even more problematic is when the interpreter continues to remain in the critical analysis of the textual sense. Then one forgets that the Bible is first and foremost a discourse, which general text theory understands as a “link in a communica-tive chain.”60 Decisive in this communicative chain is not just the dialectic between speech and writing, but also between writing and reading. The act of reading is one way of recontextualizing and reactualizing the text. “Cut away from speaking-becoming-writing and from writing-becoming speaking, the text is no more than an artefact of critical method.”61 It is then a museum piece without current relevance. The text no longer speaks, it has nothing left to say, and no longer means anything. What needs to happen above all is the restoration of the referential function of the text.

We have already learned from general text theory that writing does not abolish reference, it transforms it. Descriptive referential-ity is suspended and this suspension opens the field of a non-descriptive poetic reference to the world. “Only writing can, by addressing itself to anyone who knows how to read, refer to a world that is not there between interlocutors, a world that is the world of the text and yet is not the text.”62 This is what Ricoeur, following Gadamer, calls the ‘thing’ or the ‘issue’ of the text. It is also the final object of hermeneutical appropriation. The issue of the text is “neither behind the text as the presumed author nor in the text as its structure, but unfolded in front it.”63

This applies equally to biblical texts. Here is where general text theory offers a warning to a certain way of viewing revelation. All too often revelation, and the revelatory character of the Bible, is associated with inspiration, understood as an “insufflation of meaning to an author that projects itself into the text.”64 It is not

60 Id., “Naming God,” 219. 61 Ibid., p. 220. 62 Ibid., p. 220-221. 63 Ibid., p. 221. 64 Id., “Philosophy and Religious Language,” Figuring the Sacred, pp. 35-47,

p. 44.



inspiration in the sense of some psychologized version of the doc-trine of the Holy Spirit that makes Scripture revelatory. Ricoeur rightly observes that such a concept of revelation can moreover be dangerous: it renders sacred everything that is said in the Bible. Since the Bible addresses a great diversity of issues, one can then use the Bible to justify just about everything.65Such a fascination for revelation as insufflation is at core anti-hermeneutical because it denies the semantic autonomy of the text. The text is distanci-ated from the original author. The divine revelatory character of the Bible cannot thus be explained by positing God as the Author behind the different authors of the Bible. For Ricoeur, too, neither should one account in this way for the Bible’s continuing signifi-cance for believers today. “If the word ‘revelation’ means some-thing, its meaning is to be sought on the side of the issue the texts tell about as an aspect of the biblical world.”66 Revelation is not seen in the first instance as a specifically religious term. The Bible is poetic. Poetic discourse reveals, discloses, and calls forth what until then has remained hidden. It offers the reader a glimpse of a trans-empirical, deeper, reality.

According to Ricoeur, this non-religious concept of revelation is “capable of furnishing a first approximation of what revelation in the biblical sense may signify.”67 Biblical texts are poetic texts and thus revelation is a trait of the biblical world these texts refer to. Revelation is thus understood here as the manifestation of an original way of being.

B. The particular nature of biblical discourse: Naming God

The focus on the revelatory power of biblical discourse, and on the hermeneutical category of the world of the text, is an important

65 E. Lévy, “Le statut du texte biblique à la lumière de l’herméneutique de Ricoeur,” Perspectives romandes. Revue de théologie et de philosophie 138 (2006) 355-368. Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language.”

66 P. Ricoeur, “Naming God,” p. 221. 67 Ibid., p. 222.


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turning point in the relation between philosophy and biblical her-meneutics. In turning to the world projected in front of the bibli-cal text, we encounter the specificity of biblical discourse. And “one of the traits that makes for the specificity of the biblical dis-course … is the central place of God-reference in it.”68 Biblical discourse is unique to the extent that God is the referent who is named. That is also why biblical discourse is not merely poetic, it is also religious.

The naming of God in biblical discourse is not simple but mul-tiple. In this context Ricoeur will speak of the polyphonic character of biblical discourse. There is a plurality of literary genres: narratives, prophecies, wisdom literature, proverbs, legislative texts, parables, hymns, and so on. These literary genres are the means by which theological meaning is produced. Each form of discourse encom-passes a particular confession of faith which names God in an orig-inal way: “sometimes as Hero of the chronicle of salvation, some-times as the Hero of Anger or compassion, as the One to whom one addresses oneself in an I-Thou relation, as the One encountered only in a cosmic order that is unaware of my existence.”69 Because of the strong link between literary genre and the confessional mes-sage, the naming of God is diversified. But God is the point of intersection of all these different discourses. Attention to the diver-sity of discourses in the Bible has the advantage of showing the complexity of Biblical faith. “The Bible emerges as an asymmetrical intertext of oppositional genres – genres that alternately comple-ment and conflict with one another –rather than a stable book uni-fied by a particular discourse or singular perspective.”70 An in-depth study of the different biblical literary forms teaches that revelation is not a monolithic concept. One looks in vain for the one biblical revelation. Ricoeur also warns here against a theology that attempts

68 Id., “Philosophy and Religious Language,” p. 45. 69 Id., “Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Hermeneutics,” From Text to

Action. Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991) 89-101, p. 94.

70 M. I. Wallace, “Introduction,” p. 17.



to surpass this biblical polyphony with pure propositional theologi-cal speaking about God.

… if the forms of religious discourse are so pregnant with meaning, the notion of revelation may no longer be formulated in a uniform and monotonous fashion which we presuppose when we speak of the biblical revelation. If we put in parentheses the properly theo-logical work of synthesis and systematization that presupposes the neutralization of the primitive forms of discourse and the transfer-ence of every religious content onto the plane of the assertion or proposition, we then arrive at a polysémie and polyphonic concept of revelation.71

What derives from this in a second instance is that the God of the Bible cannot be equated with the God of the philosophers. The biblical God is not a philosophical concept somehow analogous to Being. “The word ‘God says more than the word ‘being’ because it presupposes the entire context of narratives, prophecies, laws, wisdom writing, psalms, and so on. The referent ‘God’ is thus intended by the convergence of all these partial discourses. It expresses the circu-lation of meaning among all the forms of discourse wherein God is named.”72 Biblical speech about God is unique and irreducible.

The referent ‘God’ is not only the point of intersection of all different biblical literary forms. ‘God’ also functions as the ‘point de fuite’ (vanishing point) of biblical discourse in all its variety. “Nam-ing God is the index of their [=literary forms] incompleteness. It is their common goal, which escapes each of them.”73 Paradigmatic here is Exod. 3:13-15, where God’s name is revealed to Moses.

Then Moses said to God, “if I come to the people and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you’, and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’, what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”

71 P. Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermenutic of the Idea of Revelation,” Harvard theological Review 70 (1977) 1-37, 16.

72 Id., “Naming God,” 227-228. 73 Ibid.,, p. 228


48 M. MOYAERT

What this passage teaches is that God’s name is actually unnameable. This confirms God’s continuing transcendence. His name is inexhaustible. He is mysterious and ineffable. He cannot be contained by any single discourse. Interestingly enough, the text continues as follows: “God also said to Moses; ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “Yahweh, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you: this is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.” Thus, though this passage of Exodus resists all naming God, at the same time, it authorizes the various ways of naming God: “Far, therefore, from the declaration “I am who I am” authorizing a positive ontology capable of capping off the narrative and other namings, instead it protects the secret of the ‘in-itself’ of God, and this secret, in turn, sends us back to the narrative namings through the names of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and by degrees to the other namings.”74

In this sense God’s name is at the same time both what holds biblical discourse in all its variety together, and its vanishing point. Theologically, this means that the God who is named in the Bible bursts open each closed discourse. From this perspective Ricoeur has serious questions concerning the suitability of a systematic the-ology, which seeks to understand God in propositions. The bibli-cal God escapes and breaches each attempt at systematization. More strongly, because of its dynamic of escape, the divine name plays a subverting role, which carries all language to its limits and avoids the risks of idolatry.”75

in conclusion: a faithful response?

Ricoeur sees biblical hermeneutics both as a particular case of philosophical hermeneutics and as a unique case. In this way

74 Ibid. 75 A. Thomasset, sj., Paul Ricoeur. Une poétique de la morale. Aux fondements

d’une éthique herméneutique et narrative dans une perspective chrétienne (Leuven: Leuven University Press - Peeters, 1996) 262.



Ricoeur wholeheartedly agrees with Gerhard Ebeling, when the latter says that “it is only in listening to this book to the very end, as one book among many, that we can encounter it as the word of God.”76 The specificity of biblical discourse does not abolish its poetic nature; rather, it “adds to the common traits of the poem the circulating of an overarching referent – God – that coordinates the texts at the same time that it escapes them.”77

It is in applying the principles of general philosophical hermeneu-tics to the Bible that we encounter its undeniably confessional dimension. Confession is intrinsic to the textual dynamic of biblical discourse and challenges the reader to respond: “The reader is called to identify himself time and again, in imagination and sympathy, with the self confronted with God who blesses, punishes, comforts, without ever allowing himself to be fixated in an assured, fixed and final posture.”78 The biblical world suspends the everyday world and invites the reader into an actualizing participation. This participa-tion implies a revolution, a conversion. The world proposed in these Biblical texts invites the reader to a radically different existence, grounded in the event of the cross. The Bible is the Word of God in offering the possibility to human beings to be transformed.79 The Word of God, which can only be heard through listening to the biblical world challenges the reader to a radically different form of existence. Confronted with the unique confessional dimension of biblical discourse, the reader is presented a choice: will she allow herself to be liberated by the world proposed by the Bible? Will he allow himself to be formed and taught by biblical discourse? Will she accept the biblical world as a guideline for her life? Will he bear testimony to this divine word by allowing it to redescribe and refigure his life? Will she place herself in the hermeneutical chain of communication so typical for Christian faith?

76 P. Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” p. 45. 77 Id., Naming God, p. 233. 78 Id., “Herméneutique. Les finalités de l’exégèse biblique,” p. 50. 79 Lévy, “Le statut du texte biblique à la lumière de l’herméneutique de

Ricoeur,” 366.


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At this point the hermeneutical process culminates in its final stage, namely that of existential appropriation. Here is where the biblical world and the world of the reader meet. This is the critical moment, when the reader allows his perspective of reality to be refigured and transformed by the biblical world. The Bible reaches its final destination, while affirming its enduring significance for people today. What Christian tradition calls faith is, according to Ricoeur, precisely this: allowing oneself and one’s identity to be refigured by the biblical world time and again. The community of the faithful consists of people who recognize themselves “to be founded and, if we can put it this way, as comprised, in every sense of the word, in and by this particular body of texts.”80 A biblically inspired faith, which recognizes the lasting authority of the Bible, will always be post-critical for it is necessary “for a confessional reading to pass through the sieve of critical reading, of objectifying distanciation. That is the price to be paid so that faith would not become a violation of intellectual honesty.”81 Critique and convic-tion are mutually inclusive. This, too, is one of the lessons Ricoeur’s biblical hermeneutics has taught us.

80 P. Ricoeur & A. Lacoque, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneuti-cal Studies (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998) xviii.

81 P. Ricoeur, “Herméneutique: Les finalités de l’exégèse biblique,” p. 51.


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