Variation On A Theme: Historyís "Nth" Great Hermeneutical Crisis -- By: Robert W. Yarbrough

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 39:3 (Sep 1996)
Article: Variation On A Theme: Historyís "Nth" Great Hermeneutical Crisis
Author: Robert W. Yarbrough


Variation On A Theme:
Historyís Nth Great Hermeneutical Crisis

Robert W. Yarbrough**

Hermeneutics is the theory and practice of interpretation, especially of written texts. As an academic discipline with profound practical outworkings it both reflects and influences our culture, and thus our lives, both within and without the Church. It is also a discipline of considerable complexity and sometimes unprofitable effect. This makes it tempting either to disparage or ignore it. But a better response would be to consider (1) the crisis in which hermeneutics finds itself, (2) the configuration of the battle lines characterizing this crisis for those who wish to engage it critically rather than simply curse or surrender to its confusion, and (3) a practical rationale for such critical engagement in light of our respective individual stations in life. I will take up each of these three subjects in turn.

I. Hermeneutical Crisis

While human nature has remained surprisingly uniform across millennia and cultures, each successive period does evince telltale distinctives. In this century one of these distinctives in the west is the rhetoric of crisis. There are sound bases for the rhetoric. With the rise of modernism in its Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment forms, and then that same modernism’s quasicollapse in recent generations, thinkers with Christian concerns felt the very existence of Christian theism to be threatened, in part because they saw the future of western civilization with its historic Christian underpinnings imperiled.

In theology, crisis rhetoric began in the wake of the First World War’s catastrophic devastation, which shattered the cultural euphoria shared by the great western powers of the nineteenth century. Historians of theology will recall that dialectical, or neo-orthodox, theology was also known as crisis theology in its formative years. 1 And no sooner was the remembered apocalypse of World War I fading from a hideous nightmare to just a vivid memory in Europe than a no less savage sequel slowly grew to its full terrifying stature. Try as we may, we can never fully plumb the depths of sacrilege and human misery unleashed along the time line beginning with

* Robert Yarbrough is associate professor of New Testament studies at Covenant Theological Seminary, 12330 Conway Road, St. Louis, MO 63141.

Hitler’s Machtergreifung of 1933, extending through the reciprocal atrocities inflicted by Hitler’s and Stalin’s troops locked in no-quarter conflict, climaxing in the revelations of Auschwitz and Dachau, and concluding with a whimper in the Pyrrhic victory si...

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