Gadamer and Theology

International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 9 Number 3 July 2007
doi:10.1111/j.1468-2400.2006.00243.x
Gadamer and Theology

PHILIPPE EBERHARD*
Abstract: This article examines the role of theology in Gadamer and what
theology can learn from it. Gadamer owes a great deal to theology for his
account of understanding, but the few times he reveals his own theology he does
not apply to it the insights he gleaned from theology. This article proposes to
open more fully the door back to theology Gadamer left ajar.
Following a middle-voiced reading of understanding as standing under, it
articulates theology in terms of a middle-voiced process in and of which we
partake when we get involved in it.
In this article, I discuss Gadamer and theology. I start with some biographical data
about the man himself, even though in the context of Gadamer one could argue that
knowledge about the author of a text is ultimately superfluous. Then, I move on to
a reflection about the role theological themes play in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. My
argument is that his account of the event of understanding owes a great deal to
theology, but that his explicit theology lags behind his hermeneutics. Finally, I
propose a way to open more widely the door back to theology, which Gadamer left
ajar. I articulate a medial or middle-voiced interpretation of hermeneutics and an
understanding of theology as a whole along the same middle-voiced lines.
Gadamer the philosopher
Before considering Gadamer the man, a methodological question imposes itself on

us: how much do we need to know about Gadamer himself in order to study the
relation between theology and hermeneutics in his work and in general? Life and
work can hardly be separated, but to what extent does the work need the life to make
sense? This question is particularly acute in Gadamer for two reasons. First, he wrote
quite a bit about himself, but he put his major autobiographical work, Philosophical
* Department of Languages and Cultures, William Paterson University, 300 Pompton Road,
Wayne, NJ 07470-2103, USA.
© The author 2007. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA.
284 Philippe Eberhard
Apprenticeships,1 under the motto ‘Of myself I say nothing.’ Contradictory? Not
really, because the emphasis in de nobis ipsis silemus is on ipsis rather than on nobis.
Robert Sullivan notes that the promise to keep silent about oneself is a rebuff
to Descartes’ way of thinking based on a rejection of historical and traditional
prejudices.2 Instead of silence about the self, this motto means that Gadamer does not
limit himself to his own self but locates himself within the traditions and influences
that ‘accrued’ the self. An attitude similar to this qualified silence came to the
fore when Jean Grondin undertook to write a biography of Gadamer. Gadamer
suggested that he deal with more interesting things, but although he kept his distance
from the project he remained forthcoming and answered Grondin’s questions in
private discussions.3 Moreover, I experienced Gadamer’s contextualization or
‘medialization’ of the self first hand. As I was working on my dissertation, I wrote to
Gadamer to ask him about the middle voice. He was kind enough to reply to me. In
the first sentence, he briefly stated that he was aware of the middle voice. In the rest
of the letter, however, he addressed Martin Heidegger.
Second, Gadamer himself asks and answers the methodological question ‘How
much does the interpreter have to know about the author?’ As is characteristic of
Gadamer’s thought, it presents us with a rich ambiguity, in this case the ambiguity
between a method utilized to make sense of a text and ‘the right of the reader’4 that
consists in letting the text make sense. As the title Truth and Method – not ‘Truth or
Method’ – suggests, Gadamer does not reject method altogether. The reader must
know as much as he or she needs and is able to take in.5 Just as in the sciences, one
has to gather as much knowledge as possible, and this requires method. However,
one should not glean more than one can bear. Knowledge has to be adequate. Therein
lies the ambiguity. There is no rule, no absolute gauge to measure the quantity and
quality of that knowledge because acquiring knowledge is not the acquisition of a
commodity, but it is already within the hermeneutic experience. Thus, on the one
hand, there is method because the understanding subject is not just passively
overcome by the truth. He or she is involved and involves himself or herself in it. On
the other, there is at the same time absence of method to the extent that understanding
is an encompassing process where the truth comes to language.
With respect to Gadamer and theology, the ambiguity between the knowledge
we use to make sense of a text and the knowledge that lets the text make sense to
1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. Robert R. Sullivan

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
2 Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, p. vii.
3 Jean Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer: Eine Biographie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999),
p. x.
4 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Dichten und Denken im Spiegel von Hölderlins
“Andenken” ’, in Gesammelte Werke Band 9: Aesthetik un Poetik II. Hermeneutik im
Vollzug (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993), p. 46.
5 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Wer bin Ich und wer bist Du? Kommentar zu Celans
Gedichtfolge “Atemkristall” ’, in Gesammelte Werke Band 9: Aesthetik und Poetik II, p.
450.
© The author 2007
Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007
Gadamer and Theology 285
us means that we cannot precisely determine how much we need to know about
Gadamer. We can only strive for adequacy. In our context, knowledge is adequate not
only if it promotes our understanding of his interpretation of theology but especially
if, to say it with Karl Barth,6 it allows us to understand together with him and to
serve the Sache alongside him. This attitude resembles Matthias Grünewald’s
representation of John the Baptist at the Crucifixion on the Isenheim Altarpiece.
John, holding the Bible in one hand and pointing with the other at Christ on the cross,
stands next to the inscription ‘He must become greater; I must become less’ (Jn
3:30). John’s way of standing under the cross echoes hermeneutic humility and the
hermeneutic principle that one must promote the Sache, not oneself.
Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind about Gadamer himself in the
context of theology is that he was not a theologian but a philosopher, as he himself
emphasized.7 He was nevertheless interested in theology and religions in general.
Officially, he was a Protestant even though in his family Protestantism was low-key.8
His rather authoritarian father, a renowned pharmaceutical chemist, who to his
deathbed worried about Gadamer’s choosing a career in the human sciences and
philosophy,9 did not care about the church. Even so, Gadamer was baptized, and on
Easter Day 1914 he was confirmed. On several occasions he asserted his being a
Protestant10 but, as Jean Grondin notes, he might have done so in order to distance
himself from Heidegger’s Catholicism.11
Gadamer did not believe in a religious sense. He only had a vague religious
disposition12 he traced back to his mother, although he hardly knew her since she died
when he was only four. She, unlike Gadamer’s father and Gadamer himself, had a
deep religiosity marked by Pietism. Gadamer’s religious disposition never became
faith. He confessed, and regretted to some extent, that throughout his life he never
managed to have faith and that his ‘religious history’ bypassed the church like that of
many other Protestants.13 As he used to say, if one is exposed to God in early
childhood, it is much easier to believe, but he did not have this chance.14
6 See Barth’s method in his commentary on Romans, Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief, 5th edn
(Zollikon / Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1947), pp. xii, xx. Also Kevin J. Vanhoozer,
‘Discourse on Matter: Hermeneutics and the “Miracle” of Understanding’, International
Journal of Systematic Theology 7 (2005), p. 15.
7 See, e.g., Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ich glaube nicht an die Systeme der Philosophie: Erwin
Koller im Gespräch mit Hans-Georg Gadamer (Zurich: Schweizer Fernsehen DRS,
2000), video cassette of TV interview.
8 See Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer: Eine Biographie, p. 22.
10 E.g. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Herméneutique et théologie’, Revue des sciences religieuses
51 (1977), p. 388.
13 See Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer: Eine Biographie, pp. 22–3.
14 See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Dialogues de Capri’, in Jacques Derrida and Gianni
Vattimo, eds., La religion: Séminaire de Capri sous la direction de Jacques Derrida et
Gianni Vattimo (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996), p. 229.
© The author 2007
Some have called Gadamer a ‘closet-Lutheran’15 and a ‘nominal Protestant’,16

but ‘agnostic’ is probably more accurate. He was agnostic in the common sense that
he did not believe in a personal and living God without excluding the possibility of
the existence of God. In a less obvious but more interesting sense, he was agnostic
because for him religion underscored the impossibility of ever reaching complete
understanding. He did not believe in a personal life after death, but then he could
not believe either that the few moments of clarity we go through in our state of
consciousness between the past before we were born and the future after we are gone
amount to all there is to our being. These two variations of agnosticism are
intertwined. The only form of divinity he acknowledged was a Platonic divine in the
neuter.17 For him, this sense of a neuter divine underscored our finitude. We are not
our own authors, we do not set the time of our death, and we never reach self-
transparency.18 Gadamer tended to attribute to Pietism and perhaps to his mother’s
influence his conviction of our inability ever fully to understand ourselves. For
Pietism, this inability was the first step towards faith. For Gadamer, it translated
into the never-ending hermeneutic experience of trying to understand oneself,
yet of ultimately failing to get a complete grasp of oneself.19 His understanding
of Protestantism, which in his view stressed Good Friday and the sinful and finite
human nature, also contributed to his emphasis on finitude and limitedness, and
ultimately to his ‘hermeneutic’ agnosticism.20
Before we turn to Gadamer’s use of theology, a remark about Gadamer and two
leading theologians of the time, Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth, is in order.
Gadamer met frequently with Bultmann, but theologically his thought presents more
affinities with Barth. He took part in at least one seminar with Bultmann,21 and for a
period of fifteen years he went to the weekly ‘Bultmannsche Graeca’, Bultmann’s
Greek reading group. Yet it was classical philology rather than theology that brought
them together. As Grondin writes, ‘he [Gadamer] discovered in Bultmann less the
theologian, than the passionate humanist’.22 Theologically, Gadamer was not in
agreement with Bultmann. Following Heidegger, Bultmann held that there is a
15 Thomas K. Carr, Newman and Gadamer: Toward a Hermeneutics of Religious

Knowledge (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996), p. 9.
16 Jean Grondin, ‘Gadamer und Bultmann’, in J. Pokorny and J. Roskovec, eds.,
Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Exegesis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002),
p. 4. The page number refers to http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/grondinj/pdf/
gadamer_and_bultmann.pdf.
19 Gadamer juxtaposes Unternehmen and Unterliegen. See Hans-Georg Gadamer,
‘Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik’, in Gesammelte Werk Band 10: Hermeneutik im
Rückblick (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995), p. 142.
21 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Sokrates’ Frömmigkeit des Nichtwissens’, in Gesammelte
Werke Band 7: Griechische Philosophie III. Plato im Dialog (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr
(Paul Siebeck), 1991), p. 88.
22 See Grondin, ‘Gadamer und Bultmann’, pp. 6–7.
© The author 2007
fundamental question about the meaning of life, an existential claim that precedes
our reading of any text, including the Bible. There is, therefore, no need to be a
Christian to understand the scriptures. Here, Gadamer’s stance is closer to Barth’s.
For Barth, Bultmann’s position goes against divine revelation. As Thomas Ommen
puts it, ‘Karl Barth and other “right-wing” critics of Bultmann have argued that this
broad view of pre-understanding undermines the distinctiveness of revelation. They
have emphasized that any attempt to speak of a “prior understanding” of an action of
God entails a reduction of revelation to an aspect of human self-awareness.’23
Gadamer shares the same concern. Ommen argues that for Gadamer, ‘the only access
to even the question of God is through faith mediated by the gospel’.24 Faith is an
act of divine grace which happens to someone who has faith in the first place.
Philosophy is not enough. What is required is the gospel.
In addition to the ironic fact that the philosopher Gadamer argues for the
specificity of the question of faith and of theology, whereas the theologian Bultmann
holds that the same pre-understanding underlies the understanding of all texts
including scripture,25 it is interesting to note that Gadamer does not recognize and
plays down Bultmann’s contribution to hermeneutics and the influence Heidegger
had on him. Unlike Paul Ricœur,26 Gadamer puts Bultmann in the Diltheyan
tradition. Grondin notes that Gadamer’s assessment is unfair because Bultmann
acknowledged his debt to Heidegger. Moreover, in ‘The Problem of Hermeneutics’,27
a text that antedates Gadamer’s Truth and Method by ten years, Bultmann criticized
the emphasis Schleiermacher and Dilthey put on understanding the author better than
he or she did himself or herself. Much like Gadamer ten years later, he stressed that
what is there to understand is the meaning of the text.28 A partial explanation of why
Gadamer downplays the Heideggerian influence on Bultmann is that, in his view,
Bultmann did not do justice to Heidegger’s thought after the Kehre, as it left behind
authenticity and delved into language or language loss, Sprachnot.
Similarly to the way Gadamer downplays Bultmann’s contribution to
hermeneutics, he does not allow his own hermeneutics to bear on theology. Ommen
is right to underscore the particularity theology takes on in the few places where
Gadamer’s theology surfaces; he is also right to point out that for Gadamer one can
acquire a connection to a tradition that is not one’s own and into which one was not
born.29 It is precisely here that Gadamer’s theology seems to except itself from his
universal hermeneutics. In my reading, Gadamer’s texts present us with a tension
23 Thomas B. Ommen, ‘Bultmann and Gadamer: The Role of Faith in Theological

Hermeneutics’, Thought 59, no. 234 (1984), p. 351.
24 Ommen, ‘Bultmann and Gadamer’, p. 359.
25 See Grondin, ‘Gadamer und Bultmann’, pp. 22–3.
26 See Paul Ricœur, ‘Préface à Bultmann’, in Le conflit des interprétations: Essais
d’herméneutique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), pp. 381–2.
27 Rudolf Bultmann, ‘Das Problem der Hermeneutik’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche
47 (1950), pp. 47–69.
28 See Grondin, ‘Gadamer und Bultmann’, p. 27.
29 See Ommen, ‘Bultmann and Gadamer’, pp. 357–8.
© The author 2007
between the passive believer to whom grace and faith happen and the not so passive
understanding subject who has the possibility to learn new languages not his or her
own. In a nutshell, Gadamer draws a lot on theology to describe the hermeneutic
process, but he fails to apply his insights back to his explicit theology. Let us now
turn to some of those insights and to the ‘special and eminent function’ theological
hermeneutics takes on in Gadamer’s work.
Theology in Gadamer’s work
Gadamer remained at the doorstep of the church and theology. Grondin writes:
Gadamer has always kept a distance, a respectful distance, in regard to theology
and exegesis as such. He was always aware, naturally, of the theological origins
of hermeneutics . . . , but he refrained from saying much about a field in which
he knew his expertise was limited. In contrast to, say, Paul Ricoeur, there are to
my knowledge, absolutely no studies of Gadamer that are Bible readings or
interpretations. References to the Bible are also quite seldom in his work.30
The experience of art, more than religion and theology, was for Gadamer the location
of the event of truth. For instance, the first part of his major work Truth and Method
focuses on the aesthetic experience in an effort to widen the scope of hermeneutics.
Nevertheless, Gadamer drew a great deal on theology for his description of this
event. Theology and religion in general, or better, religions,31 were paramount in
Gadamer’s thought. As Grondin notes, one of Gadamer’s goals was to eliminate the
skepticism against religion within philosophy and to have philosophy acknowledge
the human spiritual disquiet without which it would not be philosophy.32 In the same
vein, Gadamer said in an interview in the year 2000 that humanity’s task is the
dialogue between the world religions and that he hopes that the philosophers of
the twenty-first century will realize its importance.33 Elsewhere he asks whether a
reflection about religions and a dialogue with other religious traditions could not lead
the West to answers other than the religion of world economy, to answers we cannot
even conceive of yet.34
As noted, what Gadamer finds particularly valuable in the teachings of religions
is the emphasis on finitude and limitedness.35 More specifically, however, the
30 Grondin, ‘Gadamer und Bultmann’, p. 3.

31 See Gadamer, ‘Dialogues de Capri’, p. 222.
32 See Jean Grondin, ‘Jenseits der Wirkungsgeschichte: Gadamers sokratische Destruktion
der griechischen Philosophie’, Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 1 (1992), p. 45.
33 See Gadamer, Ich glaube nicht an die Systeme der Philosophie.
34 See Gadamer, ‘Dialogues de Capri’, p. 225.
35 Grace M. Jantzen argues against this emphasis on limitedness, finitude, and ultimately
death in an interesting essay where she puts forward natality; see Grace M. Jantzen, ‘The
Horizon of Natality: Gadamer, Heidegger, and the Limits of Existence’, in Lorraine
© The author 2007
most important theological themes in his account of the event of understanding are
Christology and theological hermeneutics as an example of application. Let us first
examine Christology. Gadamer turns to it in the third part of Truth and Method,
where he articulates the universality of hermeneutics. He examines Christology
because it rethought the unity of word and Sache, speaking and thinking, which had
already started to fall apart in Greek philosophy and ended up in the instrumental
view of language as a system of signs at the disposal of the rational modern subject.36
Christology is the only place where the forgetfulness of language has never been
complete and where the fruitful ambiguity of logos as reason and speech has
survived instead of withering away before the sole ratio. This part of Christian
theology, which does not come from the Greeks, does justice to the being of
language. Gadamer argues that, when Christology penetrates the Greek notion
of logic, something new burgeons. It paves the way to a new anthropology that
mediates human finitude with divine infinity. Thus, Christology is the actual ground
of Gadamer’s hermeneutic experience.37 It allows him to give an account of the
linguisticality of our being, of language as the medium of everything that can be
understood.
Gadamer is not interested in the mystery of the Trinity for theological reasons,
but for its way of articulating how the Word proceeds or emanates from God based
on the analogy with language, with what happens when we speak and think.38 It is not
the content but the structure of the trinitarian speculation Gadamer focuses on,
not theology but the fact that theology uses the analogy of language to explain the
relation between the Father and the Son. Unlike the manifestation of Greek gods in
human form, where the gods remain divine while taking on a human form, the
incarnation of Christ is the becoming human of God. The innovation of the Christian
trinitarian speculation over Greek thought is that the Word steps out of its ideality
Code, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer (University Park, PA:

Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), pp. 285–306.
36 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke Band 1: Hermeneutik I. Wahrheit und
Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 6th edn (Tübingen: J.C.B.
Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1990), pp. 418, 422.
37 See Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke Band 1: Hermeneutik I. Wahrheit und Methode, p. 432.
38 See, e.g., Aquin.: SMT FP Q[27] A[1] Body Para. 2/2: ‘As God is above all things, we
should understand what is said of God, not according to the mode of the lowest creatures,
namely bodies, but from the similitude of the highest creatures, the intellectual
substances; while even the similitudes derived from these fall short in the representation
of divine objects. Procession, therefore, is not to be understood from what it is in bodies,
either according to local movement or by way of a cause proceeding forth to its exterior
effect, as, for instance, like heat from the agent to the thing made hot. Rather it is to be
understood by way of an intelligible emanation, for example, of the intelligible word
which proceeds from the speaker, yet remains in him. In that sense the Catholic Faith
understands procession as existing in God’ (quoted from http://www.intratext.com/IXT/
ENG0023/_INDEX.HTM).
© The author 2007
into history. The Word is pure event.39 In opposition to Greek thought’s disdain for
the external and sensible word, Gadamer stresses the becoming loud, Lautwerden,40
of the Word in Christian theology, the spoken Word in its relation to God from the
act of creation to the Christ event. It is not God among humans that is of primary
interest to Gadamer but the articulation of the Word of God based on language, even
if Augustine and later the schoolmen used the inner word, the verbum cordis, as
opposed to the uttered word. Gadamer underscores that the word reveals without
claiming anything for itself. Its being lies in its revealing and saying the Sache, and
it shares its being with that which it says. Word and Sache are homoousios. They
partake of each other in the same way as God the Father and God the Son partake
of each other. Gadamer, however, points out that because of the fear of
subordinationism, even in theology the focus shifted away, beginning with
Augustine, from the relation between the outer word and reason toward the relation
between the inner word, which is independent from the multiplicity of tongues, and
reason.41 This shift made it necessary to rethink not only God in history or the spoken
word but especially the Word as spoken by God yet with God forever.42
Gadamer, who emphasizes the Lautwerden of the word, asks if this talk about
the inner word is not a way of explaining something incomprehensible by means of
something incomprehensible. What is this inner word that does not sound? Given the
linguisticality of our being and the absence of any pure language of reason, does it
make sense to speak of an inner word? In what sense is the inner word different from
the Platonic inner dialogue of the soul with itself? Gadamer argues that for Aquinas,
despite the revival of Greek philosophy, the inner word retains its event character and
remains turned to its possible externalization, not in particular tongues but as thought
thought through. The inner word signifies the process of maturation and perfection of
thinking due to the finitude of our understanding (we, unlike God, cannot grasp
everything at once).
The analogy of the maturation of thinking to the relation between the Father
and the Son does not lie in the discursiveness of understanding (about which Plato
already knew), but in the Neoplatonic notion of emanation Aquinas introduces. The
inner word does not simply proceed chronologically. It does not undergo a non-stop
transformation – hopping, so to speak, from one item to the next – but it emanates.
Emanation describes the processes of the inner word as well as the process of the
Trinity in a way that goes beyond Plato. The image behind emanation is the opposite
of a bottomless pit: it is a source that does not diminish as it generates. Gadamer
writes:
The primary image, rather, is that of a fountain. In the process of emanation, that
from which something flows, the One, is not deprived or depleted. The same is
42 See Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke Band 1: Hermeneutik I. Wahrheit und Method, p. 421.
© The author 2007
true of the birth of the Son from the Father, who does not use up anything of
himself but takes something to himself.43
Emanation resembles the sound a well-played musical instrument projects into the
surrounding volume; in this process, the instrument does not lose anything of its
being but rather fulfils it. Similarly, in the emanation of the word, there is no change
or transformation, no passage from potentiality to actuality, but an acted out act, a
Vollzug, where the Word is not the result of some operation but simultaneous with the
emanation.
Despite the commonality between the process of the inner word and the Trinity,
Gadamer thinks that the differences between the two are even more important in
order to understand the relation between linguisticality and understanding. He adds
that even theologically it is all right to focus on the differences rather than the
similarities because ultimately the Trinity remains a mystery and any analogy fails
us. Following Aquinas, he notes three differences between the divine and the human
word.44
First, the human word renders the Sache only through the process of thinking,
and in the end it resembles a selective mirror that reflects the Sache and nothing else.
The divine word, by contrast, does not go through this process of formation.
Second, even though the human word perfectly renders the Sache, it cannot
perfectly express our intellect. This imperfection does not lie in the word but in the
dispersed and scattered nature of the human intellect going from one thing to another.
Thus, we humans need many words where God’s Word is one.
Third, unlike God’s Word, which expresses God in pure actuality, human
thoughts and words are mere accidents of our intellect. Our mind cannot grasp the
Sache entirely. Our thinking is never complete. Gadamer adds that the positive side
of this imperfection is a kind of infinity, the infinity of the free mind transcending
itself towards always new projects.
Gadamer sums up his discussion of the trinitarian speculation by stating the
two major elements he retrieves from the Verbum theology for his description of
hermeneutics. The first element, although not central to the trinitarian speculation, is
crucial for hermeneutics: a word is not the product of a reflexive act, that is, it is not
a reflection of the mind, but it says the Sache which comes to language like color
appears where there is light. The second element is the dialectic between the unity
and the plurality of the word which remains event. God’s Word is one, but it is also
many in its proclamation in the church; and the human word is plural, but it is
also one in the sense that within the multiplicity of words an ongoing natural process
of concept formation takes place when we think and speak. In sum, Christology leads
to a different way of thinking about the linguisticality of being: language is not a
43 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. W. Glen-Doepel, rev. Joel C.

Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. edn (NewYork: Continuum, 1989), p. 423.
44 Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke Band 1: Hermeneutik I. Wahrheit und Methode, pp.
428–30.
© The author 2007
medium in the sense of a means through which we express our thoughts, but it is the
medium in which our thinking and understanding take place.
Besides Christology, the other theme I mentioned is theological hermeneutics.
Gadamer generally brings it up together with legal hermeneutics to illustrate that
application, ‘the central problem of hermeneutics’,45 is inherent in understanding. It
appears already on the first page of Truth and Method where Gadamer writes that his
book deals with the problem of hermeneutics, primarily a practical issue that
‘belongs to human experience of the world in general’46 and that is beyond the limits
of method. Gadamer retrieves the subtititas applicandi from Pietism which added
it as a third element to two other ‘subtleties’, namely understanding (subtilitas
intellegendi) and interpreting (subtilitas explicandi). These ‘subtleties’ ‘are
considered less as methods that we have at our disposal than as talents requiring
particular finesse of mind’.47 They underscore that hermeneutics is practical, that we
are always already involved in it, that we know it without learning it, yet that we can
become better at it by practicing it, just like our mother tongue.
Legal and theological hermeneutics are Gadamer’s favorite examples because
application is crucial for both of them. They both apply normative texts to concrete
situations: legal hermeneutics interprets the law to apply it in judgements, and
theological hermeneutics interprets the gospel to apply it to preaching. They
exemplify that understanding is not a matter of mastering a text or whatever there
is to be understood, but of putting oneself at its service48 and opening oneself
critically to its claim in one’s situation.
However, the way Gadamer uses theological hermeneutics is problematic. It
points to a tension between the Christian and the hermeneutic truth. For the most
part, theological and legal hermeneutics are side by side, but in the context of the
productivity or ‘fecundity’49 of the particular case (that is, the notion that the way
we apply something we understand affects in return the way we understand and
the Sache we understand) theological hermeneutics disappears. Here only legal
hermeneutics is pertinent to Gadamer’s description of understanding and application.
Why does Gadamer drop theology in the context of the productivity of the
individual case?50 The answer lies in his conception of the gospel as opposed to
the law. Whereas a judge’s verdict can amend the law, a preacher’s sermon does not
determine more clearly the gospel of salvation. Gadamer writes:
Unlike a verdict, preaching is not a creative supplement to the text it is
interpreting. Hence the gospel acquires no new content in being preached that
could be compared with the power of the judge’s verdict to supplement the law.
It is not the case that the gospel of salvation becomes more clearly determined
45 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 307.

46 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. xxi.
© The author 2007
only through the preacher’s thoughts. As a preacher, he does not speak before
the community with the same dogmatic authority that a judge does. Certainly
preaching too is concerned with interpreting a valid truth, but this truth is
proclamation; and whether it is successful or not is not decided by the ideas of
the preacher, but by the power of the word itself, which can call men to
repentance even though the sermon is a bad one. The proclamation cannot be
detached from its fulfillment. The dogmatic establishment of pure doctrine is a
secondary matter. Scripture is the word of God, and that means it has an absolute
priority over the doctrine of those who interpret it.51
Both the judge and the preacher deal with valid truths, but the Christian truth is
proclamation and its success depends solely on the power of the Word itself and the
work of the Holy Spirit.52
Gadamer’s understanding of the power of the gospel limits the process of
application in theology, particularly in its Protestant form.53 What is more, it appears
to turn theology into an exception to universal hermeneutics since application,
which is inherent in hermeneutics, pertains to theology only to a limited extent. For
Gadamer, scripture falls under another kind of universality: it has the complete
universality of the Word God addresses to everyone. Because of this universality, the
Christian message does not change from one interpreter to the next.54 Curiously,
however, Gadamer also says that the authority of scripture does not stem from the
original speech situation but from the authority of the church or the synagogue.55
Scripture is different from a poem or any eminent text. It is not autonomous; it does
not stand by itself but relies on ecclesial praxis. This remark is important because it
shows that Gadamer’s texts do not completely exclude theology from hermeneutics.
Although scripture is God’s Word, its isolation from hermeneutics is not total since
Gadamer locates its authority within a given community where the religious texts are
practiced and applied.
Nevertheless there is a tension in Gadamer’s texts between the Christian and the
hermeneutic truth, exacerbated in at least five different ways.56 First, Gadamer holds
that scripture is a promise. Whereas poetry is Aussage and is true without being
verifiable, the gospel is Zusage. It does not speak out (aus) but to (zu), that is, it
requires someone who receives it.
51 Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 330–1.

52 See Gadamer, ‘Herméneutique et théologie’, p. 389.
53 See also Ommen, ‘Bultmann and Gadamer’, p. 353.
54 See Gadamer, ‘Herméneutique et théologie’, p. 390.
55 Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Ästhetische und religiöse Erfahrung’, in Gesammelte Werke
Band 8: Ästhetik und Poetik I. Kunst als Aussage (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck),
1993), p. 145.
56 See Philippe Eberhard, The Middle-Voice in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Basic
Interpretation with Some Theological Implications (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), pp.
193–202. Also Pierre Bühler, ‘Gadamer e la teologia’, Filosofia e teologia 18 (2004), pp.
208–9.
© The author 2007
Second, being promise, scripture calls for faith instead of understanding. Unlike
myths, which are open to continuous yet not arbitrary reinterpretations where we can
recognize their truth, scripture is the unchanging Word of God demanding God-given
faith. Myths have their being in their being reinterpreted; scripture has its being in
being believed. Myths interpret us more than we interpret them when we try to
understand them;57 the Christian message does not. Faith is given. It is not part of an
incessant process of understanding and ultimately self-understanding.
Third, Scripture distinguishes itself through its authors who, unlike the ancient
poets, do not situate themselves within the volume of free although not arbitrary
reinterpretation of myths but testify to an event that must be believed. Thus, more
than authors, they are witnesses.
Fourth, the message that is to be believed is addressed to the individual.
Notwithstanding the community of believers, ‘the address of Scripture is, in the
words of Luther, pro me, “for me, for myself” ’.58 It has to become a sign that is given
to me to see. Gadamer tells the story of two churchgoers after a church service. One
of them thinks that the pastor just talked gibberish. ‘Maybe’ says the other, ‘but I
didn’t notice.’ For this one there was a sign to see. He received a message where the
other one heard mumbo-jumbo.59 From this (Protestant) perspective, the believer is
alone before God and passively receives a sign to see. Unlike the hermeneutic event
that encompasses the understanding subject without engulfing him or her, the claim
of the Christian message is such that humans can do nothing without God’s grace.60
Fifth, Gadamer stresses the incomprehensibility of the Christian message
pro me, particularly of the mystery of the Trinity. The gospel’s baffling
provocation that calls us to a faith that is given to us without merit is beyond our
comprehension and our mentality fixated on deserving what we have actively
worked for. Comprehending is different from understanding, and at first the absence
of comprehension does not seem to exclude the Christian message from the
hermeneutic event. For instance, the gospel is translatable and transmissible despite
its incomprehensibility. Gadamer even says that in the case of the paradoxical and
unbelievable Christian message the task of letting something be told to oneself
(a recurrent middle-voiced expression in his texts) is the most intense.61 However,
even though the hermeneutic experience shines through the lines, Gadamer still
turns the Christian message into something special. He writes, ‘that hermeneutics
has a special and eminent function where the tradition of Christian faith is
concerned . . . New Testament hermeneutics has the special task of making
57 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Das Problem der Geschichte in der neueren deutschen
Philosophie’, in Gesammelte Werke Band 2: Hermeneutik II. Ergänzungen. Register
(Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993), p. 36.
58 Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Religious and Poetical Speaking’, in Alan M. Olson, ed., Myth,
Symbol, and Reality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), p. 91.
59 See Gadamer, ‘Ästhetische und religiöse Erfahrung’, p. 154.
© The author 2007
acceptable what seems to be fundamentally incomprehensible: that faith is not the

product of a believer’s merit but an act of grace.’62
Gadamer’s use of Christology and theological hermeneutics shows that his
account of hermeneutics owes a great deal to theology. However, as the tension
between hermeneutic and Christian truth attests, Gadamer tends to leave his account
of hermeneutics by the wayside the few times he explicitly ventures into theology.
He opens the door to theology a crack and leaves it ajar. How can we open it more?
Theology and Gadamer
What can theology learn from Gadamer’s account of philosophical hermeneutics?

Fred Lawrence argues that Gadamer fulfilled ‘integral hermeneutics’ that Barth and
Heidegger initiated. ‘Integral hermeneutics’ integrates the Augustinian and medieval
hermeneutics of consent, which takes scripture and tradition for granted and
creatively reworks them, and the hermeneutics of suspicion related to names like
Spinoza, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, which is wary and critical of anything taken
for granted. Lawrence writes that ‘Gadamer performs hermeneutics integrally,
combining critique with creative assimilation . . . Gadamer opens up philosophy
to theology, and challenges theology to be philosophical.’63 What does it mean for
theology to rise to the challenge of being philosophical, or better hermeneutic? If
Lawrence is right that Gadamer has shown that ‘the human quest for meaning is
shaped as “faith seeking understanding” ’,64 what can theology learn for itself from
the insights it provided to hermeneutics?
More often than not, theologians praise Gadamer for his rehabilitation of
tradition. As John Caputo writes, the rehabilitation of tradition is the reason ‘why
Gadamerian hermeneutics is so attractive to theologians – it allows them to develop
moderate theories of theological traditions in which theology is neither hide-bound
to archaic dogmatic formulations nor forced to throw the dogmatic baby (a terror of
a child!) out with the historical bath’.65 Robert Webber, for instance, argues that
evangelicals should not be alarmed by postmodernity’s inability to find a unifying
factor because they have an ally in Gadamer and his rehabilitation of tradition,
authority, and prejudice.66
62 Gadamer, ‘Religious and Poetical Speaking’, pp. 96–7.

63 Fred Lawrence, ‘Gadamer, the Hermeneutic Revolution, and Theology’, in Robert J.
Dostal, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), pp. 192–3.
64 Lawrence, ‘Gadamer, the Hermeneutic Revolution, and Theology’, p. 193.
65 John D. Caputo, ‘Gadamer’s Closet Essentialism: A Derridean Critique’, in Diane P.
Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer, eds., Dialogue and Deconstruction: The
Gadamer–Derrida Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), p.
261.
66 See Robert E. Webber, Ancient–Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a
Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999), p. 24.
© The author 2007
However, the rehabilitation of tradition is only one aspect of Gadamer’s

hermeneutics. Theology can learn more from it. Jens Zimmermann, for instance,
takes us a step further. He argues that Gadamer’s hermeneutics is the ‘best possible
starting point for a recovery of theological hermeneutics’.67 ‘Best possible’ does not
mean perfect. Zimmermann criticizes Gadamer for using theological motives out of
context. Gadamer’s adoption of the Logos Christology is ‘decontextualized’68 and in
Gadamer’s account hermeneutics has lost the ground premodern hermeneutics could
stand on. The severance of theological motives from their context becomes a problem
when we ask why we should trust language as Gadamer does. Zimmermann writes,
‘Philosophical hermeneutics, then, confesses faith in language and meaning. Unless
one is satisfied with fideism, with faith in faith, Gadamer’s faith as I have tried to
show, is plausible only in a theological context that can account for this trust in our
meaning-making abilities.’69 Zimmermann also takes issue with the immanence
of hermeneutics. For this reason he cannot follow Gadamer all the way. Theology
requires transcendence, but philosophical hermeneutics is unable to account for the
radical transcendence of God’s otherness and for the theological hermeneutic circle
of self-knowledge and God-knowledge.70
Despite its decontextualized use of theology and its immanence, Gadamer’s
hermeneutics remains extremely valuable for Zimmermann. He argues that the
biggest obstacle to recovering theological hermeneutics toward an incarnational
hermeneutics that lets us understand ourselves in history where God has manifested
God71 is the objectivist–relativist or objectivist–subjectivist divide. Gadamer’s
account of hermeneutics precisely helps us surmount this divide toward an embodied
truth.72 Zimmermann lists four elements we can learn from Gadamer.73 First,
Gadamer reminds us that we are finite beings who understand ourselves within
history and culture. Although Zimmermann agrees with Gadamer, he adds that he
would prefer to hear this rather cold concept based on Heidegger’s thrownness
within the interpretive frame of ‘a careful placement by a good creator God’.74
Second, he follows Gadamer in his rejection of the dichotomy between
subjective opinion and hard fact. He notes that any scientific fact makes sense only
when interpreted within a given perspective of a larger narrated context.
Third, for Gadamer reason is our way of participating in the structure of the
logos of the world and not something that is opposed to the irrationality of
the universe. This rational participation in the world takes place in language. This is
67 Jens Zimmermann, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An Incarnational-Trinitarian

Theory of Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), p. 170.
68 Zimmermann, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics, p. 177.
70 See Zimmermann, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics, pp. 30, 186.
71 See Zimmermann, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics, pp. 163–4.
72 See Zimmermann, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics, p. 179.
73 See Zimmermann, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics, pp. 179–83.
© The author 2007
what Gadamer means by his famous phrase that everything we can understand
is in language.
Fourth, we must retain from Gadamer the non-instrumentality of language.
What this means is that language is not just a medium through which but in which we
understand ourselves.
These four points, the finitude and embeddedness of understanding, the rejection
of the subject/fact dichotomy, human rationality as participating in transcendence,
and linguisticality, remind ‘Christian theology that understanding is incarnational:
it cannot be separated from its human dimensions of being in time, of historical
conditionedness and human error’.75 Zimmermann clearly leads us beyond the mere
rehabilitation of tradition. If we listen carefully to the four elements he isolates in
Gadamer’s thought, we notice that there is a common thread among them: in my
reading, they are all middle-voiced, that is, they point to a process that encompasses
the subject without engulfing him or her.
Kevin Vanhoozer agrees with my medial or middle-voiced interpretation of
Gadamer’s hermeneutics. He calls it ‘a fresh, fascinating approach to Truth and
Method’.76 Moreover, he also stresses the theological themes that permeate
Gadamer’s account of understanding. However, his criticism is that the theological
categories Gadamer uses are merely notional analogies. For him, they must be
operational.77 He writes:
It is sheer mystification to say that the process itself – whether it be ‘history’,
‘mind’ or ‘language’ – does something to bring about understanding if the
theological concepts to which one appeals in analogy have only notional force.
Neither ‘history’ nor ‘language’ nor ‘play’ nor ‘conversation’ are subjects, and it
is difficult to see how an impersonal process could have the ability to disclose
truth. The persuasiveness of Gadamer’s account would thus seem to depend on
the extent to which the analogy is not simply notional but operational. The Sache
itself does not literally speak or show itself to us, except when the subject is the
sovereign speaking God (so Barth).78
Vanhoozer agrees with the middle-voiced interpretation of hermeneutics but seeks to
replace the process with a ‘knowing, acting, willing, subject’,79 that is, with God.

76 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, review of The Middle Voice in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Basic
Interpretation with Some Theological Implications by Philippe Eberhard, Theology
Today 61 (2005), p. 596.
77 See Vanhoozer, ‘Discourse on Matter: Hermeneutics and the “Miracle” of
Understanding’, p. 25.
78 Vanhoozer, ‘Discourse on Matter: Hermeneutics and the “Miracle” of Understanding’, p.
30.
30.
© The author 2007
Does Gadamer’s account fail otherwise? Does what Gadamer calls the miracle of
understanding become ‘an obscure myth’80 without God as subject?
Not in my understanding. I do not think that Gadamer’s account of hermeneutics
fails unless we turn God into the subject of the hermeneutic event and consequently
the understanding subjects into passive recipients.81 As mentioned, Gadamer
opens the door to theology but leaves it ajar. Vanhoozer seems either to want to pull
him all the way over the threshold into theology or to deem his account of
hermeneutics a failure. To me, there is an alternative way to learn from hermeneutics
in the context of theology. I prefer to stay with what Vanhoozer calls ‘sheer
mystification’, that is, the medial process and to try to understand theology within the
universality of hermeneutics.
My reading of Gadamer’s account of hermeneutics focuses on the middle
voice. The middle voice is a grammatical notion with philosophical and
theological implications. The linguist Émile Benveniste distinguishes the common
active/passive opposition with its emphasis on the subject and the object from
the opposition between the active and the middle voice.82 The specificity of the
opposition active/middle or external versus internal diathesis, as Benveniste calls it,
is that it stresses not the subject and the object affecting each other but the location
of the subject with respect to the verbal process. In the active or external diathesis,
the subject is outside the verb, at a safe distance from it, and in a dominating position.
In the middle voice or internal diathesis, by contrast, the subject is inside the action
of the verb.
A good example of the middle voice is the get-passive as opposed to the
be-passive. The be-passive expresses something that happens to the patient. The
get-passive, however, implies that the person to whom something happens is to some
extent involved in and responsible for what happens. ‘To be baptized’, for instance,
is different from ‘to get baptized’. Vanhoozer cogently writes, ‘ “to get baptized” (at
least as an adult) is a quintessential middle-voice action in which the subject gets
caught up in a broader process (viz. incorporation into Christ) while nevertheless
remaining active (viz. confessing faith)’.83
Gadamer mentions the middle voice in the context of the notion of play and what
he calls the primordial medial meaning of playing, ‘der ursprünglichste Sinn von
Spielen’.84 Play is middle-voiced in the sense that when we play we get involved in
a process that happens to us even though we are the ones playing. To me, the
middle-voiced notion of play constitutes the frame of Gadamer’s whole exposition of

34.
81 See Vanhoozer, ‘Discourse on Matter: Hermeneutics and the “Miracle” of
Understanding’, p. 36.
82 See Émile Benveniste, ‘Active and Middle Voice in the Verb’, in Problems in General
Linguistics (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 145–51.
24 n. 59.
84 Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke Band 1: Hermeneutik I. Wahrheit und Methode, p. 109.
© The author 2007
the event of understanding: Truth and Method begins with the experience of art
and the notion of play as the way of being of the work of art and ends with a mention
of play in the context of the metaphysics of beauty. The middle-voiced playing at the
beginning and at the end of Gadamer’s magnum opus warrants a middle-voiced
reading of understanding as standing under. The hermeneutic event encompasses the
understanding subject without engulfing him or her. It happens to the subject who
does not become passive but remains within the process and is also its subject. The
force of the middle voice is that it provides a different way of thinking or, better, a
different awareness of the way we have always been thinking. Instead of focusing on
the subject and the object, the active and the passive and looking for an exclusive
subject, the middle voice situates the subject within a process of which he or she is
also but not exclusively subject. A good dialogue, for example, where the Sache says
itself in and through the dialogue partners who serve the Sache is a perfect example
of such a medial process that happens to and with the understanding subjects.
Teaching a class is another example: in a good class, no one is in control; the class
runs itself yet not without the participation of the teacher and the students. In short,
the significance of the middle voice is that it lets us think verbally instead of
subjectively or objectively.
What does the middle-voiced interpretation of hermeneutics mean for theology
as a whole, in the general sense of discourse about God? I am asking this broad
question because when mediality is applied to specific issues like faith, grace,
freedom, the other, scriptural inspiration, ecclesiology and the like, it somehow
glosses over the question whether in the end God is the subject of theology as a
hermeneutic process. Is it possible to follow Gadamer’s hermeneutics as a universal
middle-voiced process that happens in language without making theology an
exception to it and without importing God into it as the ultimate Speaker? In short,
can we think theology verbally or medially? I think we can.
In my understanding, thinking verbally or medially brings the linguisticality of
understanding to bear on theology as well. God, Christ, faith, just like the world and
anything there is to understand, have to be told to us. Gadamer uses Christology to
articulate the linguisticality and universality of hermeneutics and to show that there
is no pristine or objective access to the world. He says that being that can be
understood is language.85 Language is where the understanding subject meets the
world. The Sache that comes to language is not the result of subjective reflexivity or
objective data collecting, but it is the doing of the Sache itself in and of which we
partake when we try to understand. Here we are at the core of the influence theology
had on Gadamer’s account of hermeneutics. That which represents itself in language,
that which comes to language distinguishes itself from language without being
different from it, just like the Son’s proceeding or emanating from the Father.
Gadamer, however, did not return to theology the insights he gained from it. Can we
not take the step Gadamer did not?
© The author 2007
Theology, particularly Christian theology where God speaks to humans as

humans speak to God, is like a language. It is a way of speaking about God and
letting God speak that leads to a different self-understanding before God when it
speaks to me. In this context, ‘to me’ does not mean ‘me’ as an individual passive
believer on the receiving end but ‘me’ as a speaker of a language I did not invent, a
language that carries me and that I care to learn and to speak better and therefore
affect as it affects me. For Gadamer, language is speculative. The speculative nature
of language does not imply that language is a mirror in which reality reflects itself.
It rather bespeaks the middle-voiced process of mirroring where the unsaid provides
the volume, the ‘within’, of that which comes to language when one says what one
means.86 To say what one means points to the whole of being, as opposed to, for
instance, the truncated being that surfaces in a statement during an interrogation,
where the process of mirroring wanes because the truth is reduced to an actively
sought object.
The middle-voiced hermeneutics and the speculativity of language lead to a
different kind of objectivity called Sachlichkeit that does not manipulate an object
but tries to understand a Sache by standing under it. Of course, one might ask if to
think and speak about God is like thinking and speaking about any Sache, or if it is
different because God is the all-encompassing Sache. From a medial standpoint,
it is the same and yet it is different. On the one hand, when we talk and think about
God, we are involved in a Sache that comes to language in the process of our
understanding, like any Sache. On the other, what makes theology different is the
volume of the unsaid God opens up. Often, we assume that by means of our language
we control what we talk about except when the Sache is God. However, when we
think verbally or medially, it dawns on us that this assumption is misconstrued. We
do not control any Sache. In the middle voice, understanding means to stand under
and ultimately leads to a different self-understanding. The medial question is not
‘Who or what is it I try to understand’, but ‘Where are we?’ The emphasis on locality
and the speculativity of language that conjures up the whole of being in the volume
of the unsaid where we hear the Sache coming to language when we say what we
mean, intimates that talking and thinking about God or shoes for that matter is the
same, yet different. Shoes can be fascinating. Petr Hlavacek, an associate Professor
of Shoe Technology who recreated Oetzi the Iceman’s shoes, is a case in point.87 Any
Sache we talk and think about, even shoes, has the potential to involve us in a
hermeneutic experience. However, the question ‘Where are we?’ echoes quite
differently in the volume of the unsaid of God compared to the unsaid of shoes, even
where it is about being in the shoes of a man who lived 5,300 years ago.
87 See, e.g., www.radio.cz/en/article/9832.
© The author 2007

Gadamer and Theology

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International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 9 Number 3 July 2007

Gadamer and Theology

Gadamer the philosopher

Before considering Gadamer the man, a methodological question imposes itself on

1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. Robert R. Sullivan

Some have called Gadamer a ‘closet-Lutheran’15 and a ‘nominal Protestant’,16

15 Thomas K. Carr, Newman and Gadamer: Toward a Hermeneutics of Religious

23 Thomas B. Ommen, ‘Bultmann and Gadamer: The Role of Faith in Theological

Theology in Gadamer’s work

30 Grondin, ‘Gadamer und Bultmann’, p. 3.

Code, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer (University Park, PA:

43 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. W. Glen-Doepel, rev. Joel C.

45 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 307.

51 Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 330–1.

acceptable what seems to be fundamentally incomprehensible: that faith is not the

Theology and Gadamer

What can theology learn from Gadamer’s account of philosophical hermeneutics?

62 Gadamer, ‘Religious and Poetical Speaking’, pp. 96–7.

However, the rehabilitation of tradition is only one aspect of Gadamer’s

67 Jens Zimmermann, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An Incarnational-Trinitarian

75 Zimmermann, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics, p. 185.

80 Vanhoozer, ‘Discourse on Matter: Hermeneutics and the “Miracle” of Understanding’, p.

Theology, particularly Christian theology where God speaks to humans as

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