New Horizons in Hermeneutics

This comprehensive study examines how contemporary hermeneutical theory illuminates biblical interpretation and theological discourse, with significant implications for understanding religious language about God. Thiselton surveys major developments in twentieth-century hermeneutics, from Schleiermacher through Gadamer to postmodern approaches, demonstrating how interpretive theory shapes theological method and religious understanding.

The work engages critically with existentialist, structuralist, and poststructuralist readings of biblical texts, arguing that adequate interpretation requires attention to both historical context and contemporary horizons of meaning. Thiselton particularly emphasizes how speech-act theory and socio-critical hermeneutics offer resources for understanding biblical discourse as transformative action rather than mere information transfer. This approach has profound implications for how theological claims about God function within believing communities.

Central to Thiselton's argument is the critique of both naive realism and radical relativism in biblical interpretation. Against fundamentalist approaches that bypass hermeneutical complexity, he demonstrates how all reading involves interpretive decisions shaped by tradition and context. Simultaneously, he challenges postmodern skepticism about determinate meaning, arguing that texts can communicate across temporal and cultural distances while acknowledging the provisional nature of all interpretation.

The monograph gives particular attention to how different hermeneutical models affect the interpretation of texts concerning God's nature and action. Thiselton shows how existentialist hermeneutics tends to reduce theological language to expressions of human self-understanding, while socio-critical approaches may dissolve divine agency into social processes. His preferred model draws on Gadamer's notion of fusion of horizons and Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval, allowing for both critical distance and transformative engagement with biblical texts.

Thiselton's contribution lies in demonstrating that questions about God cannot be separated from questions about how texts that speak of God are interpreted. The work argues that responsible theological discourse requires hermeneutical sophistication that neither abandons critical inquiry nor reduces religious language to purely human projection. By engaging diverse interpretive traditions, from continental philosophy to analytic philosophy of language, Thiselton provides a framework for reading biblical texts that respects both their historical particularity and their contemporary theological significance. This hermeneutical approach maintains openness to transcendent reference while acknowledging the mediated character of all human discourse about the divine.