Hermeneutics
Essays

Existentialism is a term in literary, philosophical and psychological history. Jean-Paul Sartre coined the term and through his literature and the stories and writings of his associates, such as Simone de Beauvoir,…

This paper examines the career of William F. Albright and shows it influenced his belief in Christianity and not how his religion affected his scientific inquiry, as his critics have attempted to show. Albright's study of Biblical archeology presented to evidence that the claims of the Bible were true and therefore part of history.

In today's educational environment, breadth as well as depth in education is encouraged. Even scientists are encouraged to take courses in writing, and students of literature must become conversant in the specifics of…

This paper will address issues relating directly to phenomenology as depicted in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. The paper will focus on specified sections of phenomenology, including the understanding of what exactly phenomenology is, including a detailed definition, understanding the concepts involved in ethical constructivism, ethical rationality, human freedom through the inputs of both transcendence and time and integration of totality and infinity into the descriptions of phenomenology.

Allen (1984), Brown (2007), and Kaiser (1994) are like three points on a unidirectional continuum. Allen (1984) is adamant that the Scripture is the Word is the Scripture, and argues that the Scripture is God preaching. Very little room for interpretation or for tacking toward relevance is indicated by Allen's position. Brown (2007) offers a rigorous cognitive framework for approaching the reading of Scripture, and calls on the reader to meet her exacting intellectual standards and respond in a rigorous manner—a position that seems wholly appropriate given that Brown views Scriptural reading as a conversation with God. Brown's communicative theory is considerably more open than Allen's and more flexible than a structuralistic approach, which would preclude attributing substantive importance to individual components of the Scripture. For Brown, and proponents of speech-act theory, the individual components of Scripture may be the hooks on which understanding rests. Kaiser takes a principled view with regard to understanding the Scriptures in the context of the modern world. To those who would object to his "going beyond the Bible," he has at the ready examples of how the Church does exactly that, at its convenience and unabashedly argues that adjustments are made according to "views it believes God to hold true" (Kaiser, 1994). In this regard, Kaiser's criticism points to the Church's willingness to apply a literary criticism approach to Scripture, citing relevance to contemporary society as the pivot point. The very theological paradigms to which Allen (1984) objects are to Kaiser (1994) a natural outcome of a literary criticism approach to Biblical interpretation. The theological paradigms are needed to make assertions about what is Biblical, that is, what God requires in a given situation. Brown posits a more personal and rigorous approach to Scriptural interpretation—demanding that multiple perspectives be considered, to the degree that the essence of a communicative theory of Biblical interpretation contains aspects of literary criticism, structural criticism, and reader-response criticism.

¶ … value of qualitative vs. quantitative research is occasionally debated in the natural and social sciences, both are generally acknowledged to be fundamentally useful constructs, although they are used to answer very…

Philosophers such as Charles Beard and William Appleman stated that history could be understood through economics. Actually, economics is also a hermeneutics that can be used in Biblical interpretation. Right off from the very start, the Garden of Eden was a milieu that worked on the principles of economics. The citizens were supposed to till the garden; in return, they would benefit. The manna in the desert was the first glimmerings of socialism; all received an equal ‘slice'. The manna, too, came with lessons against hoarding. T he Jubilee laws, with land reverting in the 5oth year to the original owner, was a strategy that prevented the few accumulating great mass of possession and power; it also kept the poor from being exploited. There were countless laws like this, including the regulation of paying wages on time and returning the poor man his garb that was his loan at night. The essay is a treatise on biblical economics.

"We are living in a period of profound challenges to traditional Western epistemology and political theory" that are in evidence in every aspect of modern life, and that are especially profound in the field of education (Weiler, 2003). The single most profound aspect of these epistemological, social, and political changes is based in the ironic history of postmodernist movements: An oppressed group may not understand the roots of their disenfranchised position, nor be able to conceptualize ways to address what appears to be a normative condition. Tacit agreement exists among powerful or influential contingents that their worldview is to be dominant. Although certainly not universal, there is an enduring social undercurrent that tolerates oppression when it benefits one class of people over another, particularly when the social majority identifies with or strives to become a member of the powerful group. Indeed, these tensions are evident in the socio-economic divisions that have come to characterize contemporary partisan politics in the USA.

definitional exercise in identity politics, in expanding cultural and semiotic discourse, and reinterpreting the continuing the literary effort of the 20th and 21st century to deconstruct human life and society

Fee and Stuart in "How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth", show the applicability of the Bible and provide readers with the tools of applying the Bible to their contemporary lives. For them there is no "then and there" to the text, rather than "then and there" of the text can equitably be applied to the "here and now" of contemporaneous living. The authors in effect build two bridges; there is the bridge between Church and lay man and the bridge between Church and exegetical scholar. Whilst the exegetical scholar approaches the text from the past trying to see ‘what it meant", the author tell us that the text is far more than that: it is applicable not only for the "then" but also for the "now" and, therefore, people should approach it with the intent of ‘what does it mean" and "what will it mean". In other words, each of us, regardless of scholarly background, should connect the '''then and there' of the original text to the 'here and now' of our own life settings" (p. 10). The operative premise is that the texts of the living Word "mean what they meant" (p. 11).