Playing with Scripture: Reading Contested Biblical Texts with Gadamer and Genre Theory [1 ed.] 1032623225, 9781032623221

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Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Biblical Criticism

PLAYING WITH SCRIPTURE READING CONTESTED BIBLICAL TEXTS WITH GADAMER AND GENRE THEORY Andrew Judd

Playing with Scripture

This book puts a creative new reading of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and literary genre theory to work on the problem of Scripture. Reading texts as Scripture brings two hermeneutical assumptions into tension: that the text will continually say something new and relevant to the present situation, and that the text has stability and authority over readers. Given how contested the Bible’s meaning is, how is it possible to ‘read Scripture’ as authoritative and relevant? Rather than anchor meaning in author, text or reader, Gadamer’s phenomenological model of hermeneutical experience as Spiel (‘play’) offers a dynamic, intersubjective account of how understanding happens, avoiding the dead end of the subjective–objective dichotomy. Modern genre theory addresses some of the criticisms of Gadamer, accounting for the different roles played by readers in different genres using the new term Lesespiel (‘reading game’). This is tested in three case studies of contested texts: the recontextualization of psalms in the book of Acts, the use of Hagar’s story (Genesis 16) in nineteenth-century debates over slavery and the troubling reception history of the rape and murder in Gibeah (Judges 19). In each study, the application of ancient text to contemporary situation is neither arbitrary, nor slavishly bound to tradition, but playful. Andrew Judd is a Lecturer in Old Testament at Ridley College, Melbourne and the Australian College of Theology.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Biblical Criticism

Thinking Sex with the Great Whore Deviant Sexualities and Empire in the Book of Revelation Luis Menéndez-Antuña A Philosophical Theology of the Old Testament A historical, experimental, comparative and analytic perspective Jaco Gericke Human Agency and Divine Will The Book of Genesis Charlotte Katzoff Paul and Diversity A New Perspective on
 !"and Resilience in Galatians Linda Joelsson A Prototype Approach to Hate and Anger in the Hebrew Bible Conceiving Emotions Deena Grant Metaphor, Ritual, and Order in John 12 – 13 Judas and the Prince Todd E. Klutz Luke and the Jewish Other Politics of Identity in the Third Gospel David Andrew Smith Playing with Scripture Reading Contested Biblical Texts with Gadamer and Genre Theory Andrew Judd https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Interdisciplinary-Perspectives-onBiblical-Criticism/book-series/RIPBC

Playing with Scripture Reading Contested Biblical Texts with Gadamer and Genre Theory

Andrew Judd

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Andrew Judd The right of Andrew Judd to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-62322-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-64657-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-64660-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781032646602 Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun

In memory of my grandfather, D. W. B. Robinson, who taught Australians how to read the whole Bible as Scripture.

Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction

viii x 1

PART 1

Gadamer and genre theory

7

1

Gadamer in conversation

9

2

Spiel

43

3

Genre

72

PART 2

Three contested biblical texts

107

4

Reading psalms in the first century

109

5

Reading Hagar in the nineteenth century

129

6

Experiencing that night in Gibeah as twentieth-century horror film

153

Conclusion

199

Appendix: Breakdown of OT citations in Acts by genre Index

203 223

Acknowledgements

This book began as my doctoral thesis in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. I count having Liam Semler as my supervisor as one of the great blessings of my academic life. Thank you for conspiring in this improbable mix of German philosophy, Hebrew verbs and literary criticism, and for the truth that emerges from your ceaseless play of ideas in dialogue. My external examiners, Walter Moberly and Stanley Porter, gave precious feedback and encouragement. Thanks also to John Frow, Nick Riemer, Jim Martin, Andrew Cooper, Thomas Jurkiewicz, Sam McAuliffe and the Gadamer reading group. Midway through my studies I accidentally became an Old Testament lecturer. I am humbled and truly thankful to Ridley College for the study leave that made this book possible and for the constant encouragement, conversation and class-covering of my fellow faculty members: Brian Rosner, Jill Firth, Scott Harrower, Lindsay Wilson, Mike Bird, Rhys Bezzant, Andrew Malone, Tim Foster, Hannah Craven, Bec Muir, Len Firth, Kate Beer, Diane Hockridge, Graham Stanton, Mark Simon, David Williams, Richard Trist and John Dickson – and remembering our dear colleague Anthea McCall. Thanks to Dru Johnson, Katherine Ong and this series’ editors and reviewers for backing this broad interdisciplinary endeavour. Thanks to Mark Brett, Simon Angus, George Athas, Andrew Shead, Malcolm Gill, Andy Abernethy, Con Campbell, Kevin Vanhoozer, Matthew Halsted, Mark Earngey, Chris Porter, Brandon Hurlbert, Andrew Myers, Katya Covrett, Andrew Shead and Adam Ch’ng for being so willing to talk about hermeneutics. My especially deep gratitude to Tim Escott for his friendship, practical wisdom, proofreading and encouragement throughout. The participants at ETS, SBL and IBR in San Diego 2019 gave invaluable feedback as I was forming my thoughts – especially John Thompson, Ian Paul and Steve Walton. Thanks to the editors and reviewers of JETS, ABR and BBR for sharpening (and permission to republish) earlier versions of Chapters 4 and 5. Thanks to Carly Donohoe and Adrien Seignoux for answering my German and French questions. I owe a great debt to the librarians at the Leon Morris, Donald Robinson, Fisher, Dalton McCaughey and Baillieu libraries – especially Ruth Weatherlake and Alison Foster. Thanks to Lachlan Grice, Erica Hamence and Rory Shiner for practical

Acknowledgements ix and moral support. Thanks to Bradford Winters, Jeffrey Overstreet, Alissa Wilkinson and Andrew Lampe for introducing me to the world of horror films. Thanks to Mike Paget and Guy Mason for time off to spend with dead Germans. I am deeply grateful to my parents, Anne Robinson and Stephen Judd, for their enthusiastic and practical support – and for instilling in me an abiding love of Scripture and no fear of questions. (Dad also wins the whisky for most typos found.) Thanks to my wife Stephanie, for encouraging me to start, and finish, this project.

Abbreviations

ANE Ant BDB

BHS DCH HALOT

LXX MT NT OED OT UBS5

Ancient Near Eastern Jewish Antiquities Brown, Francis, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs.A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1951. Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia Dictionary of Classical Hebrew. Edited by David J. A. Clines. 8 vols. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993–2011. The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. Ludwig Koehler, Walter Baumgartner, and Johann Jakob Stamm. Translated by Mervyn E. J. Richardson. 4 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000. Septuagint Masoretic Text New Testament Oxford English Dictionary. Online 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Old Testament The Greek New Testament. United Bible Societies. 5th ed.

Gadamer’s works EPH

GIC

GOC

Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics.Edited by Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson. Translated by Lawrence K. Schmidt and Monica Reuss. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary. Edited and translated by Richard E. Palmer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Gadamer on Celan: ‘Who Am I and Who Are You?’ And Other Essays. Translated by Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Abbreviations GW HT IG

KS PA PH PDE

RB

RPJ

TM WM

Gesammelte Werke. 5th ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986. Hermeneutique et Theologie. RSR 51.4 (1977): 384–97. The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy. Translated by P. Christopher Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Kleine Schriften. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1967. Philosophical Apprenticeships. Translated by Robert R. Sullivan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Edited and translated by David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Plato’s Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Edited by Robert Bernasconi. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Reflections on My Philosophical Journey. Pages 3–63 in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Translated by Richard E. Palmer. The Library of Living Philosophers. Edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn. Peru, IL: Open Court, 1997. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Continuum, 1994. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. 7th revised ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010. First published 1960.

Journals and series ABR AIJCR APQ BAGL BBR BGDSL BibInt BTB CBQ CompS Cont CritInq Di DSD HBT HS

xi

Australian Biblical Review American International Journal of Contemporary Research American Philosophical Quarterly Biblical and Ancient Greek Linguistics Bulletin for Biblical Research Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur Biblical Interpretation Biblical Theology Bulletin Catholic Bible Quarterly Composition Studies Continuum Critical Inquiry Dialog Dead Sea Discoveries Horizons in Biblical Theology Hebrew Studies

xii

Abbreviations

ICC IJPR IJPS IJST Int JAAC JBL JETS JHebS JLS JMH JR JRE JSOT JTAK JTI LCL LLit MW NICOT NLH NovT NTS PCP PhL PhR PhT PL QJS RelSRev RESS RevExp RM RP RSR SAJP SBET SBLSP SI SR SRR SydS TJ TynBul

International Critical Commentary International Journal for Philosophy of Religion International Journal of Philosophical Studies International Journal of Systematic Theology Interpretation Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society Journal of Hebrew Scriptures Journal of Literary Semantics Journal of Modern History Journal of Religion Journal of Religious Ethics Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal of Theta Alpha Kappa Journal of Theological Interpretation Loeb Classical Library Language and Literature Man and World New International Commentary on the Old Testament New Literary History Novum Testamentum New Testament Studies Pacific Coast Philology Philosophy and Literature Philosophy and Rhetoric Philosophy Today Patrologia Latina Quarterly Journal of Speech Religious Studies Review Review of Ecumenical Studies Sibiu Review and Expositor Review of Metaphysics Research in Phenomenology Revue des Sciences Religieuses South African Journal of Philosophy Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology SBL Seminar Papers Studies in Iconography Studies in Religion Seminary Ridge Review Sydney Studies Trinity Journal Tyndale Bulletin

Abbreviations YSH WBC WC WTJ

xiii

Yale Studies in Hermeneutics Word Biblical Commentary Written Communication Westminster Theological Journal

Square brackets in quotations are mine; translators’ glosses appear in round brackets. Italics are original unless noted otherwise. All quotations from the Bible are my translation from BHS or UBS5 unless otherwise noted. As this book addresses the hermeneutical problems of the Christian canon, I will refer to the ‘OT’, whilst acknowledging that these writings belonged first to the Tanak/Hebrew Bible. Significant German terms are glossed initially throughout, and Greek and Hebrew words are translated or transliterated according to the SBL Handbook of Style (2014).

Introduction

On 20 January 2017, hours before he became President of the United States of America, Donald Trump attended the customary inauguration-day church service at St John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC. Pastor Robert Jeffress climbed the historic wood and brass pulpit to preach a sermon from Nehemiah 1:11: When I think of you, President-elect Trump, I am reminded of another great leader God chose thousands of years ago in Israel. The nation had been in bondage for decades, the infrastructure of the country was in shambles, and God raised up a powerful leader to restore the nation. And the man God chose was neither a politician nor a priest. Instead, God chose a builder whose name was Nehemiah. And the first step of rebuilding the nation was the building of a great wall. God instructed Nehemiah to build a wall around Jerusalem to protect its citizens from enemy attack. You see, God is not against building walls!1 This application of Nehemiah to support Trump’s wall has become popular amongst a small but influential group of white American evangelicals. It is echoed in a letter sent to lawmakers in 2019 by Ralph Drollinger of Capitol Ministries, which runs Bible studies for Cabinet, Senate and House members.2 It is, unsurprisingly, a contested hermeneutical move. Global Christian leaders, including Pope Francis, expressed dismay at Trump’s border policy – apparently unconvinced by Nehemiah’s example.3 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Californian Democrat and Roman Catholic, used Genesis 1:26–27 and Matthew 25 to argue the opposite: Americans have an obligation to treat people with dignity and respect, and Jesus condemns anyone who sees someone homeless and fails to shelter them.4 My task in this book is not to adjudicate this particular contest over Scripture.5 I raise the example of Nehemiah and Trump’s wall only to illustrate something of the unique hermeneutical problem that Scripture presents. Three things are worth noting, which I take as typical of how biblical texts are used in the public square. First, each participant assumes that applying the ancient text to the present situation is part of what Scripture is for. Second, these DOI: 10.4324/9781032646602-1

2 Introduction applications carry rhetorical weight: it goes without saying (at least within these contexts) that the Bible is authoritative, even over the highest political office. Third, these interpreters employ vastly different hermeneutical methods, often arriving at competing and contradictory understandings of what the Bible means. In choosing to read the Bible as Scripture, these interpreters assume that the text is, as Walter Moberly puts it, ‘enduringly significant and authoritative’.6 To be understood, Scripture must be applied to the present and obeyed, because, as Nicholas Lash observes, God’s self-witness aims not to describe the human condition but to transform it.7 Reading the Bible as Scripture thus brings two hermeneutical assumptions into tension: its relevance and its authority. To be authoritative, Scripture must be stable; to be relevant, Scripture must be heard and applied in new ways. Anchor Scripture’s meaning too firmly on the scientific reconstruction of the author’s context and grammar and we might reassure ourselves of the text’s authority, but then it becomes harder to explain how the text can also be relevant to new situations. (Nehemiah knew little about the Mexican border.) Embrace the potential for the text to mean different things to different readers and we solve the relevance problem, but will find it harder to account for its authority. (If Jeffress and Pelosi can both be right about what the Bible says on border walls, then why appeal to the Bible in the first place?) This inherent tension between the text’s authority and its relevance is put under further pressure by what Charles Taylor describes as the ‘Great Disembedding’ of the secular age. As personal devotion becomes untethered from collective ritual, and individuated religion gains ascendency, the institutions that might once have been relied upon to anchor Scripture’s meaning no longer wield the same authority.8 (Pope Francis said Trump was wrong, but his is just one more voice on Twitter.) How can Scripture be authoritative given how often, when it comes to applying it, we seem to disagree fundamentally about what it means? Indeed, this raises a more basic question – why do we disagree so often about what the Bible means? There are some obvious answers. Both sides in the Trump border wall contest might put their disagreement down to politics, selfinterest or dishonesty (although to which side they apply these accusations will perhaps depend on their own position). There may sometimes be truth to this, but bad faith surely cannot explain all our disagreements. It gives individuals too little credit for trying to understand, and too much credit for arriving at their interpretation – as if by sheer act of will, uninfluenced by external factors. Simple answers cannot do justice to the complexity of the Bible’s reception history, nor explain the predictable and principled shape our disagreements often take. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics offers a way of approaching the problem of Scripture. His description of the hermeneutical experience suggests how we might tarry within the space opened up by the irresolvable tension between authority and relevance. Drawing on Gadamer’s

Introduction

3

hermeneutics, I argue that to read the Bible is to take part in a Spiel (‘play’, ‘game’) – an intersubjective dynamic that Gadamer uses to move past the dead end of the subjective–objective dichotomy. Applied to biblical interpretation, the outcome of Spiel is not determined by any one player but involves the author, reader, tradition and text in ceaseless dialogue. On my interpretation of Gadamer, Spiel makes us aware of our finite horizons but also gives us reason to think that new and better understanding is always possible. The opening chapter of this book situates Gadamer’s hermeneutics in the context of four discussions: with the German philosophical tradition, the phenomenologists, the Greeks and the Protestant theologians. It also introduces the main critiques of Gadamer: that he is too radical, and that he is too conservative. These critiques need to be addressed because they each have implications for Gadamer’s ability to hold one side or the other of the tension between Scripture’s authority and relevance. The next two chapters address these critiques by clarifying and supplementing underdeveloped aspects of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. While his idea of the ‘fusion of horizons’ has often dominated discussions – and criticisms – of his work, Chapter 2 shows that the less famous concept of Spiel is actually the centre of his phenomenology of understanding. Gadamer’s intuition is that the circular dynamic of Spiel leads to greater understanding, rather than simply new misunderstandings. I draw on economic game theory to confirm and clarify why his optimism might be justified, supplementing his terminology with the ideas of ‘payoffs’ and ‘coordination’. Seeing understanding as Spiel helps allay concerns that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics makes meaning radically subjective. Part of the inherent complexity of reading Scripture is the Bible’s myriad genres. Gadamer occasionally acknowledges the different hermeneutical tasks implied by different kinds of texts – including direct speech, poetry and Scripture – but genre receives no systematic treatment in his description of the hermeneutical experience. Chapter 3 turns to modern genre theory to address this weakness. Recognising that tradition is not monolithic, but mediated through genre in granular and potentially conflicting ways, I suggest how the relevance and authority of Scripture can be maintained despite the allegedly conservative implications of Gadamer’s posture towards tradition. I introduce a new term, Lesespiel (‘reading game’), to give the varying norms of genre a structural place within Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Significant hermeneutical reflections often emerge from engagement with actual texts;9 conversely, theological or philosophical hermeneutics done in the abstract risks theorising confidently about how we think understanding should happen, without accounting for how texts actually work. Therefore, having established in Part 1 a theoretical approach to Scripture by integrating Gadamer’s hermeneutics of Spiel and genre theory, in Part 2, I apply it to the problems posed by three contested biblical texts. Modern Christian appropriations of OT texts owe their hermeneutical structures to the preaching of Jesus and his apostles in the first century and

4 Introduction share deep roots with the tradition of Jewish midrashim. Chapter 4 systematically analyses the use of OT texts in the book of Acts using Gadamer’s model of the hermeneutical experience. The apostolic Lesespiele are constrained by their historical horizon and the questions being asked of the text, as well as the meta-genre of Scripture and the genres of the source texts. Their application is neither arbitrary nor slavishly bound to tradition, but playful. Chapter 5 advances to the nineteenth century and a contest over the Bible between abolitionists and apologists for slavery. Using Gadamer’s hermeneutics and the narrative frame of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I examine the tradition of interpretation around Hagar’s story in Genesis 16. Both sides share similar historical horizons and are asking the same question about slavery, but driving their different readings of her story are different assumptions about the appropriate Lesespiel for the biblical text. Rather than conclude that the Bible is indeterminate on questions of slavery, I attempt to evaluate their differing Lesespiele according to the respective literary and theological payoffs. Finally, Chapter 6 enters an ongoing discussion over the deeply troubling episode in Judges 19, which tells of the rape and murder of a young woman. This horrible story has an ugly history of interpretation. My goal is to resist much of that tradition, while still respecting the otherness of the text. To this end, I use a creative decision about Lesespiel – choosing to experience the text as if it were a horror film. Far from doing violence to the text, this move offers a heuristic method for recovering better coordination with the genre and horizon of the ancient text. These three case studies will demonstrate how Spiel accounts for the problem of Scripture and why we disagree on what it means. To read the Bible as Scripture is to take part in a particular Lesespiel, choosing to tarry in the space opened up by the tension between the text’s authority and relevance. The outcome of this Spiel is neither arbitrary nor determined in advance. We begin with certain Vorurteile (‘prejudices’), including assumptions about genre, and these shape the way we apply the text to the questions raised by our present situation. Yet the recurring nature of Spiel means that we are not captive to what we thought at first. Wrestling with the actuality of the text, and the challenge of other players, traditions and genres, we respond to certain payoffs and revise our initial projections. Sometimes these recurring interactions lead us to closer coordination with the ‘other’ of tradition. In other cases, we choose to resist that tradition and seek new meanings in the text. Spiel is a powerful tool for describing how understanding takes place, and for evaluating different understandings relative to the norms and payoffs of genre. The Bible’s enduring authority and ongoing relevance make it essential that we understand why we so often disagree about what it means. Understanding the dynamics of Spiel helps us see that our disagreements over Scripture may be principled, perhaps even predictable. Disagreements will often arise because we are playing a slightly different Lesespiel, or responding to different payoffs.

Introduction

5

Gadamer holds out hope that sometimes our disagreements will be because we simply have not been talking for long enough yet. It is fitting, therefore, to begin by considering Gadamer in conversation – the questions his work answers, and the criticisms that followed. Notes 1 ‘Donald Trump Inauguration’, TIME, 20 January 2017, https://time.com/4641208/ donald-trump-robert-jeffress-st-john-episcopal-inauguration/. Thanks to Timothy Escott for sharing this article. 2 Ralph Drollinger, ‘The Bible and the Wall’, 26 January 2019, https://capmin.org/ the-bible-and-the-wall/. 3 Philip Pullella, ‘Pope Says He Would Confront Trump Directly on Border Wall’, Reuters, 28 May 2019; ‘A Declaration by American Evangelicals Concerning Donald Trump’, change.org, 2016, https://www.change.org/p/donald-trump-adeclaration-by-american-evangelicals-concerning-donald-trump. 4 Nancy Pelosi, ‘Address to Christian Colleges and Universities Conference’, 30 January 2019, https://www.c-span.org/video/?457379-3/speaker-pelosi-addresses-christiancolleges-universities-conference. 5 Timothy Escott notes that Jeffress’ application of Nehemiah ignores the text’s theological significance and reverses the imperial power dynamic in Persian-era Judea: ‘Faithfulness and Restoration: Towards Reading Ezra–Nehemiah as Christian Scripture’ (PhD diss., University of Durham, 2019), 298. 6 R. W. L. Moberly, ‘Theological Interpretation, Presuppositions, and the Role of the Church: Bultmann and Augustine Revisited’, JTI 6.1 (2012): 22. See also John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 52–57; Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1951), 240. 7 Nicholas Lash, ‘What Might Martyrdom Mean?’, in Theology on the Road to Emmaus (London: SCM, 1986), 91. 8 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007), 143–46. See also Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (London: Pimlico, 1996), 243. 9 For example, Gadamer on Celan, Bakhtin on Dostoevsky, Lewis on Milton: GOC; M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1960). Thanks to Ben Myers for this general observation.

Bibliography ‘A Declaration by American Evangelicals Concerning Donald Trump’. change.org, 2016. https://www.change.org/p/donald-trump-a-declaration-by-american-evangelicalsconcerning-donald-trump. Bakhtin, M. M. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ‘Donald Trump Inauguration’. TIME, 20 January 2017. https://time.com/4641208/ donald-trump-robert-jeffress-st-john-episcopal-inauguration/. Drollinger, Ralph. ‘The Bible and the Wall: A Letter to Members of the Cabinet, Senate, and House Bible Studies’, 26 January 2019. https://capmin.org/the-bible-and-the-wall/.

6 Introduction Escott, Timothy Robert. ‘Faithfulness and Restoration: Towards Reading Ezra– Nehemiah as Christian Scripture’. PhD diss., University of Durham, 2019. Lash, Nicholas. ‘What Might Martyrdom Mean?’ Pages 75–92 in Theology on the Road to Emmaus. London: SCM, 1986. Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. London: Oxford University Press, 1960. Moberly, R. W. L. ‘Theological Interpretation, Presuppositions, and the Role of the Church: Bultmann and Augustine Revisited’. JTI 6.1 (2012): 1–22. Pelosi, Nancy. ‘Address to Christian Colleges and Universities Conference’, 30 January 2019. https://www.c-span.org/video/?457379-3/speaker-pelosi-addresseschristian-colleges-universities-conference. Pullella, Philip. ‘Pope Says He Would Confront Trump Directly on Border Wall’. Reuters, 28 May 2019. Schwartz, Regina M., ed. The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Smith, James K. A. The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012. Smith, James K. A. ‘Fire from Heaven: The Hermeneutics of Heresy’. JTAK 20 (1996): 13–31. Tarnas, Richard. The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View. London: Pimlico, 1996. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Warfield, Benjamin Breckinridge. The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible. London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1951. Webster, John. Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Part 1

Gadamer and genre theory

1

Gadamer in conversation

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) developed his hermeneutics at the intersection of worlds: the Weimar Republic and National Socialism; Communist East Germany and Capitalist USA; romanticism and poststructuralism.1 On retiring in 1968, he was surprised to find himself entering another world entirely: the translation of his second book, Wahrheit und Methode (1960), into English in 1975 and its growing critical reception brought him into a new world of international teaching and public debates with thinkers as diverse as Jürgen Habermas, E. D. Hirsch and Jacques Derrida. That Gadamer could provoke criticism along such opposing philosophical vectors suggests why his work is so important for the problem addressed in this book. His project attempts to negotiate between extremes: confronting the finitude of our existence while remaining optimistic about truth’s ability to reveal itself in language. As Georgia Warnke summarises, Against positivism … Gadamer argues that an objectivity attained through scientific method is no more adequate than the prejudices it presupposes; but he also suggests that our prejudices are as much thresholds as limits, that they form perspectives from which a gradual development of our knowledge becomes possible. To this extent, Gadamer’s account of understanding retains a connection to the Enlightenment.2 This precarious balance explains why Gadamer invites criticism from all sides. From the radical perspective he often looks too conservative; as Chris Lawn puts it, ‘Gadamer is frequently taken to task for emphasising what unites rather than separates us’.3 On the other side, conservative critics are often spooked by Gadamer’s apparent subjectivism. Some of these criticisms have merit and may impact his hermeneutics’ ability to hold the authority and relevance of Scripture in tension. The next two chapters will therefore seek to clarify points where Gadamer’s hermeneutics is indeed underdeveloped. Much of the time, however, Gadamer’s critics have simply misread him. In fairness, Truth and Method is notoriously prone to misunderstanding – ironically so for a book about understanding. Its three parts perhaps betray their origins in separate lectures on aesthetics, DOI: 10.4324/9781032646602-3

10

Gadamer and genre theory

history and language, and the seams of this patchwork occasionally show.4 Its long rhetorical arcs and dense historical excursions are speckled with deceptively simple images: horizons, artworks, dialogue and games. These ‘pieces of phenomenological analysis’5 are more than metaphors – they hint at the structure of understanding itself. But such memorable images risk becoming untethered from their philosophical moorings, taking on a life of their own. I discuss below, for example, how the ‘fusion of horizons’ means almost the opposite of what many of Gadamer’s critics take it to mean. Correctly understood, Gadamer offers a compelling model of the hermeneutical experience of reading Scripture. Gadamer insists that we understand a text only when we understand the horizon of the question that it answers (TM 370). Accordingly, I begin by placing Gadamer’s own work within four key conversations – with the Germans (notably Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Wilhelm Dilthey), with the phenomenologists (especially Martin Heidegger), with the Greeks (specifically Plato’s Socrates and Aristotle) and with the theologians (chiefly Martin Luther and Friedrich Schleiermacher). The second section of this chapter will use these conversations to help situate Gadamer’s description of the hermeneutic experience. This will help clarify some of the misunderstandings of Gadamer’s critics, whom I introduce in the third section. Four conversations The Germans

Gadamer begins Truth and Method by revisiting a nineteenth-century discussion over the status of the Geisteswissenschaften (‘human sciences’). At stake is how truth in the humanities can be given an alibi in epistemology on par with the methods of modern, objective science. The traditional answers to this question can be considered along two axes: method and aesthetics. The method axis answers this question in line with the Enlightenment’s triumphant objectivity. It demands a Cartesian rejection of tradition, in favour of John Stuart Mill’s empiricist insistence that the robust inductive methods of the natural sciences are the only method valid for the humanities (TM 4). Armed with the right method, we can buttress knowledge against the twin enemies of truth: the blind acceptance of dogma, and the overhasty errors of our own reason. The aesthetics axis, by comparison, represents a tradition that traces back to Kant and German romanticism, intersecting with figures such as Herder, Hegel and Schleiermacher.6 Kantian aesthetics offers a different form of knowledge, which cannot be reduced to words (IG 170–171, TM 41–42). The task of interpreting an artwork is never done, and this helps backtrack from the Hegelian absolute of perfect interpretation.7 Gadamer’s dialogical style means he does not reject either axis wholesale. However, he does spend parts 1 and 2 of Truth and Method showing how

Gadamer in conversation

11

both lead eventually to dead ends: either false objectivism or inert subjectivism.8 The price Kant pays for the independent validity of aesthetic judgement is to make beauty entirely reflective, denying art its claim to truth and relegating it to the margins of philosophy (TM 37–40, PDE xxxiv).9 This is what will eventually force the human sciences down the false path of the method axis, attempting to reclaim validity by reinventing themselves on the model of natural sciences (TM 41). In this respect, Gadamer is the hermeneutical successor to Wilhelm Dilthey, whom Gadamer credits for establishing the necessity of an independent methodology suited to the object of the human sciences (TM 6–7). Yet Dilthey ultimately fails to escape his Cartesian baggage, and ends up torn between idealism and empiricism (TM 218–42). It is never quite clear how Dilthey can avoid Hegel and the hope of an absolute Geist (‘Spirit’) that is perfectly revealed through history (TM 227–28). To succeed where Dilthey failed, Gadamer turns to phenomenology. The phenomenologists

Gadamer describes how the First World War left a ‘generation shattered by the collapse of an epoch’ who ‘did not want to retain anything that had formerly been held valid’ (PH 229). Faced with this crisis of tradition, phenomenology offered a break with German Idealism. The most obvious and dominant presence in Gadamer’s thinking is his teacher, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Gadamer met Heidegger in 1923, having recently finished a dissertation under the neo-Kantian Paul Natorp in Marburg.10 It was a complicated relationship, both personally and intellectually; Gadamer described it as one of constant challenge and provocation.11 Early on, Gadamer’s confidence was shaken when Heidegger expressed some doubt over his abilities, leading Gadamer temporarily to abandon philosophy for philology. But, soon after, Heidegger invited Gadamer to write a habilitation on the dialectical ethics of Plato in Philebus. During the 1930s, Gadamer hardly communicated with Heidegger due to the latter’s public advocacy of National Socialism, but they eventually resumed their relationship and stayed in touch until Heidegger died in 1976. Gadamer published little until Wahrheit und Methode in 1960; this was partly a way to ensure safe obscurity in the politically charged academic landscape of Nazi Germany, and partly, it seems, based on fear he could not live up to Heidegger’s expectations. This fear proved reasonable: Heidegger responded to Gadamer’s magnum opus with long and disappointing silence.12 Gadamer’s hermeneutics is phenomenological – meaning that it seeks to describe the experience of understanding, rather than give a scientific method for correctly understanding texts. Gadamer had studied phenomenology under Husserl, but it was an essay of Heidegger’s that led Gadamer to go to Freiburg, and it is a distinctly Heideggerian phenomenology that Gadamer adopts.13 In section 32 of Being and Time, Heidegger describes how Dasein’s experience is not of things that exist (the present-at-hand) as in traditional

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metaphysics, but of what is already understood as something (the ready-tohand). When we see a hammer, we are not a subject apprehending an object then ascribing it with a purpose, but rather we see it as a hammer (PDE 29–30). This immediately breaks down the subject/object dichotomy (PH 156), replacing it with an inescapable circularity in understanding: ‘we read or understand what is there, but nonetheless see what is there with our own eyes (and our own thoughts)’ (PH 121). As he begins his important description of the hermeneutical experience in Part 2 of Truth and Method, Gadamer announces that ‘we will start by following Heidegger’ (TM 264). He begins with Heidegger’s Vorstruktur (‘forestructure’) of understanding and the hermeneutical circle, which are part of Heidegger’s description of the temporality of being. This inspires Gadamer’s description of Vorurteil (‘prejudice’) which I discuss below and is central to the hermeneutical experience in general, and our disagreements over Scripture in particular. Gadamer’s sense of the universality of hermeneutics, and the centrality of linguisticality to being, is also a distinctively Heideggerian heritage.14 Gadamer’s foundational claim that ‘Being that can be understood is language’ (TM 474) develops Heidegger’s ‘language is the house of Being’ to give language an even more central role within philosophy.15 Given Heidegger’s influence, some have seen Gadamer as merely a footnote to Heidegger – at most ‘Urbanizing the Heideggerian Province’, as Jürgen Habermas put it.16 I consider below the criticism that Gadamer has sanitised Heidegger’s radical project. But, for now, I note with Robert Dostal, Ingrid Scheibler and Kristin Gjesdal that Gadamer’s connection with Heidegger is more interesting and – like their personal relationship – ambivalent than this uncharitable assessment implies.17 Many of the critical elements in Gadamer’s hermeneutics discussed below are developed independently of Heidegger. Dostal identifies authority, tradition, the hermeneutical circle, Spiel (‘play’, ‘game’), the fusion of horizons and phronesis (‘practical wisdom’) as distinctively Gadamerian contributions.18 For Heidegger, the future (i.e. death) dominates our understanding; for Gadamer past, present and future are held in reciprocity.19 For Heidegger, the event of truth is sudden and abrupt; for Gadamer, it requires time – as one tarrying with an artwork.20 The most significant difference, however, is Gadamer’s more open posture towards the metaphysical tradition. Gadamer explicitly refuses to follow Heidegger in his rejection of traditional metaphysical language and embracing of a poeticising mode of speech – Gadamer thought this risked ‘mythological thinking’.21 In return, having banished the term Bewusstsein (‘consciousness’) with all its Cartesian metaphysical baggage, Heidegger would never accept Gadamer’s use of wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein (‘historically effected consciousness’; page [17] below) – even though Gadamer always carefully delineated it as more Sein (‘being’) than Bewusstsein.22 This is more than stylistic preference. Heidegger’s reinvention of philosophical language was a deliberate break from the western metaphysical tradition which he blamed for obscuring the nature of being. Gadamer’s

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posture towards this tradition, in contrast, is more positive. Scheibler argues that this provides Gadamer with an intersubjective alternative to Heidegger’s privatistic language and privileging of poetic over everyday language.23 This focus on the everyday language of social existence, she concludes, introduces to Gadamer’s hermeneutics the inescapable ethical dimension of the I–Thou relationship.24 Gadamer’s greater positivity towards the western metaphysical tradition is exemplified by his use of Plato, who, as I explain next, supplies the hermeneutical experience with the critical model of dialogue. The Greeks

Gadamer calls the Platonic dialogues ‘my constant companions’, crediting them as more formative for him than the great thinkers of German Idealism.25 Recovering from the blow of Heidegger’s disappointment with him, Gadamer (according to biographer Jean Grondin) took ‘flight to the Greeks’, studying classical Greek under the philologist Paul Friedländer.26 Gadamer’s early work on Plato provides crucial context for understanding his account of the hermeneutical experience. Gadamer’s first book, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, reveals both his debt to Heidegger and the direction he will diverge from Heidegger. It is explicitly phenomenological, yet also reflects Friedländer’s careful literary approach.27 Nietzsche and Heidegger held Plato responsible for the western metaphysical tradition, but Gadamer is a more sympathetic reader: yes, Plato laid the foundation, but he also left it open to question (PA 184). It was Aristotle, and not Plato, who confined metaphysics to ‘the concept’ (PDE 3). Read through Aristotle, something of the ‘protreptic provisionalness in which Plato’s ethical dialectic is suspended’ is lost (PDE 5–7). But, in fact, ‘Plato was no Platonist and … philosophy is not scholasticism’ (PA 193). Returning to the dialogues as literature we reclaim the ‘inner tension and energy of Plato’s philosophizing as they speak to us, with such incomparable convincingness, in his dialogues’ (PDE 7). The dialectical form reveals the nature of Dasein: Plato’s philosophy is a dialectic not only because in conceiving and comprehending (im Begreifen) it keeps itself on the way to the concept (zum Begriff) but also because, as a philosophy that conceives and comprehends in that way, it knows man as a creature that is thus ‘on the way’ and ‘between’. It is precisely this that is Socratic in this dialectic: that it carries out, itself, what it sees human existence as. This is where philosophy’s name comes from: it is not sophia – the knowledge that gives one disposition over something – but a striving for that. (PDE 3–4) Thus, Gadamer finds in the literary form of Socratic dialectic more than a convenient rhetorical device. The dialogues suggest a view of knowledge not

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as final result – whether Hegel’s absolute Geist, or the metaphysical tradition’s ‘concept’ – but as an always incomplete dialectical questioning: ‘the example of Socrates teaches that the important thing is the knowledge that one does not know’ (TM 365).28 Truth is something that happens – and keeps on happening. At the end of the dialogue, Socrates postpones further analysis until the next day. Gadamer interprets this deferral as pointing to ‘the essential lack of closure that is a necessary correlate of all progressive working toward a shared understanding’ (PDE 187). Philebus is particularly suited to Gadamer’s analysis because, uniquely amongst the dialogues, it presents dialogue and dialectic in a unity: ‘The process of reaching a shared understanding of the matter in question through conversation … is aimed at knowledge’ (PDE 17). In the ideal form of conversation, there is close alignment between three elements: (A) the truth about some subject matter, (B) dialogic conversation and (C) shared understanding. The character of Protarchus commits to this standard of dialogue as laid out by Socrates: With no concealment, then, Protarchus, of the difference between my good and yours, but with fair and open acknowledgement of it, let us be bold and see if perchance on examination they will tell us whether we should say that pleasure is the good, or wisdom, or some other third principle. For surely the object of our present controversy is not to gain the victory for my assertions or yours, but both of us must fight for the most perfect truth.29 Surrounded by the inauthentic speech of the Sophists, Plato shows that knowledge must prove itself in a ‘dialogical coming to an understanding – that is, in an unlimited willingness to justify and supply reasons for everything that is said’ (PDE 52). Gadamer finds in this a model for authentic dialogue: ‘To attain the truth by every possible means’ is the mark of dialectic, which develops comprehensively, in its substantive consequences, what speaks for and against something. The comprehensiveness of the dialectical discussion means that there should be no dogmatic, undiscussed clinging to a logos, but always a testing that is prepared for discussion. (PDE 104) Gadamer identifies two ways of falling short of this ideal. First, some conversation partners seek to ‘understand’ the disagreement in a patronising way, explaining away the other person’s view without any obligation to agree with it (PDE 37–38). They purport to a detached objectivity but actually fall short of the scientific ideal, which thrives on continual contradiction and impasse in order to gain knowledge (PDE 40). Such non-conversations may still arrive at the facts of the subject matter (A), but, without dialogic conversation (B), the understanding (C) is anything but shared.

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Second, a Sophistic conversation partner, Gadamer writes, seeks simply to defeat their opponent, regardless of who is right (PDE 44–45, 57). The conversation (B) has as its goal a shared understanding (C), but it is an understanding defined in advance, without a willingness to risk being surprised by the truth (A) that might emerge in that conversation. Truth is concealed rather than unconcealed – you can either try to win the argument or try to understand the truth, but not both. For Gadamer, the dogmatic Hedonist Philebus represents this inauthentic style of dialogue. He will never change his mind: ‘I think and will think’.30 Authentic dialogue can only begin once he retires and Protarchus takes his place (PDE 103–104). A shared understanding of our ignorance is thus the precondition for genuine knowledge (PDE 59). Plato’s dialogues also demonstrate to Gadamer the importance of asking the right question. While Socrates is clearly the teacher, his superior skill and pre-understanding are exercised not in bullying the other into conceding defeat, but in posing the right questions (PDE 104). His questions check that his partners are still with him, and even help his opponents improve their side of the argument.31 I discuss below how Plato’s model of dialogue supplies the final element of Gadamer’s hermeneutical experience (TM 362–79).32 Understanding requires the kind of ethical posture towards the other exemplified by Socrates. The Greeks also provide Gadamer with the concept of phronesis (‘practical reasonableness’). Building on Plato’s distinction between theoretical and technical knowledge, Aristotle distinguishes this moral capacity from mere technical cleverness.33 Ethics is relevant to the human sciences because in our encounter with tradition we are dealing with people, not objects. Phronesis is neither a technical skill nor knowledge applied to a specific case, but the ability to know what is needed in a given situation. Gadamer will use phronesis as a model to clarify the problem of application (TM 312–24; page [23] below). The theologians

While hermeneutical activity is as old as the human being (for Gadamer, we will see below, it is being), hermeneutics as a self-conscious discipline owes much to theology. Its history is often traced back to Philo’s allegorical method, Rabbi Hillel’s rules for interpretation, Augustine’s Trinitarian theology and debates between the Antiochian and Alexandrian schools of Christian exegesis.34 The theological tradition most informing Gadamer’s project, however, is the ‘Protestant art of interpreting Scripture’ (TM 332). Part 2 of Truth and Method begins, accordingly, with an epigraph from Martin Luther (TM 171). Gadamer was not a professional theologian, but he was a Protestant philosopher during a time of great theological development; like Heidegger, he actively participated in conversations involving Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth in Marburg during the 1920s and often draws on post-liberal developments in New Testament hermeneutics and theological

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self-understanding (TM 509, 524–32; PH 198–212; PA 60). Chris Lawn argues that it is Gadamer’s Augustinianism and his reading of the ‘inner word’ that helps Gadamer abandon a designative view of language while still maintaining a degree of realism.35 This interest in theology is not incidental to his project: Gadamer is explicit about his aim of ‘redefining the hermeneutics of the human sciences in terms of legal and theological hermeneutics’ (TM 310–11). Theological hermeneutics provides Gadamer’s model for the re-integration of application into the moment of understanding: ‘it assumes that the word of Scripture addresses us and that only the person who allows himself to be addressed – whether he believes or doubts – understands’ (TM 332). Theological hermeneutics also informs Gadamer’s account of the hermeneutical circle. Gadamer describes how, while the idea of a circular relationship between part and whole is found in classical rhetoric, Luther deployed the image as a hermeneutical principle that the detail of the text should be understood in relation to both the contextus and the scopus, based on his dogmatic insistence on the unity of Scripture (TM 174–77). Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) expanded hermeneutics’ scope from Scripture to all texts and refined a clear method: a way of bringing the language of the text into a dialectical relationship with the psychological state of the author in order to understand the text – perhaps better than the author. The hermeneutical circle was expanded to include reciprocal relationships between the single text, the writer’s other works and a literary genre (TM 291). This hermeneutical circle of whole and part provides the starting point for Gadamer’s hermeneutics (TM xxxv). The Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, Gadamer recognises, shifted priority away from the receiving of dogma to the direct interpretation of Scripture by individuals: ‘neither the doctrinal authority of the pope nor the appeal to tradition can obviate the work of hermeneutics, which can safeguard the reasonable meaning of a text against all imposition’ (TM 277). Schleiermacher’s successor Dilthey eschewed dogmatic principles such as the unity of the canon, with biblical texts to be interpreted using the same scientific methods as other historical documents. However, unlike those on the method axis (page [10] above), Gadamer does not consider such liberation from all dogmatic authority a necessary hermeneutical step towards truth (TM 173). Gadamer recognises that even the most basic hermeneutical foreunderstandings about Scripture – its subject matter, and what it demands from its readers – are unavoidably theological. Given that Gadamer explicitly draws from this theological tradition, it is not surprising to find many themes anticipated in Bultmann’s essays on hermeneutics: the false objectivity of Dilthey, the necessity of presuppositions for understanding, the historicity of understanding, the interpreter’s relation to the subject matter, the significance of the question (especially the question of God) and the way Scripture discloses new meaning in response to the interpreter’s situation and questions.36

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The hermeneutical experience Gadamer’s project is as densely technical as it is ambitious in scope. The hermeneutical hazard of engaging with any one aspect of his argument is that it is very easy to lose connection with the whole. However, having situated Gadamer’s philosophy within these four conversations (with the Germans, phenomenologists, Greeks and Protestant theologians), it becomes easier to explain how nine key elements of his description of the hermeneutical experience work together to answer the question of truth in the Geisteswissenschaften. This will, in turn, provide our model for understanding contemporary contests over the meaning of Scripture. 1 Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein

As a phenomenological project, Gadamer is not trying merely to give a hermeneutic in the sense of a prescriptive method for interpreting certain kinds of texts. Instead, he is trying to explain how it is possible to interpret things in the first place: ‘The task of hermeneutics is to clarify this miracle of understanding, which is not a mysterious communion of souls, but sharing in a common meaning’ (TM 292). Part 2 of Truth and Method describes this hermeneutical experience. Yet knowing how understanding and misunderstanding happen does suggest the kind of posture that tends to lead to better understanding. The closest thing Gadamer has to a ‘method’37 that can be applied to literary or biblical studies is the cultivation of a wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein (‘historically effected consciousness’; TM 300–307). The artful ambiguity of this phrase describes both the consciousness that is always already being shaped by history, as well as the consciousness that is aware of how it is being shaped by history (TM 300; PH 19–20). This consciousness is not a ‘method’ in the Enlightenment sense of a guaranteed procedure for eliminating our dependence on tradition. ‘When a naive faith in scientific method denies the existence of effective history, there can be an actual deformation of knowledge’ (TM 301). Gadamer has no time for the kind of mistaken objectivism into which anyone falls who thinks that in understanding one is able to leave oneself out. … No, people who believe they have freed themselves from their interwovenness into their effective history are simply mistaken.38 Instead, fostering a wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein makes us aware of our hermeneutical situation – our historical finitude and the way tradition is already shaping our Vorurteile and our understanding of the text.39 Everything from genre expectations to basic punctuation conventions are wirkungsgeschichtliches – by the historical situation of the writer, and by our historically situated projections of what we think is important in old books.

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2 A reprieve for prejudice

Every event of interpretation begins with certain Vorurteile (‘prejudices’) already at play. This is a direct implication of the phenomenology informing Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The young Gadamer first encountered Heidegger’s concept of Vorgriff (‘preconception’) in a manuscript given to him by Natorp in the early 1920s that ‘affected me like an electric shock’ (PA 47).40 A phenomenological approach to hermeneutics recognises that we can never understand anything as a detached observer surveying the object behind the glass of objectivity: ‘Thus it is true in every case that a person who understands, understands himself (sich versteht), projecting himself upon his possibilities’ (TM 260). The object of interpretation in enquiry has the same mode of being as Dasein, in all its temporality, finitude and belonging to tradition; ‘neither the knower nor the known is “present-at-hand” in an “ontic” way, but in a “historical” one – i.e. they both have the mode of being of historicity’ (TM 261). Heidegger was right to insist that what he called ‘thrownness’ belongs together with projection. Thus there is no understanding or interpretation in which the totality of this existential structure does not function, even if the intention of the knower is simply to read ‘what is there’ and to discover from his sources ‘how it really was’. (TM 262) ‘Thrownness’ refers to an authentic self’s sense of belonging already to a tradition in history, on the basis of which we project ourselves into the future.41 Gadamer takes this to mean we cannot avoid bringing ourselves and our Vorurteile to the text; all we can choose is whether we are open about our Vorurteile and be prepared to bring them up for scrutiny. We therefore need to rethink the Enlightenment’s ‘prejudice against prejudice itself [das Vorurteil gegen die Vorurteile überhaupt], which denies tradition its power’ (TM 270). 3 Tradition and authority

While the Enlightenment saw tradition as a barrier to objective knowledge, Gadamer rehabilitates the authority of tradition as a precondition for understanding (TM 277–85). Belonging to tradition is an inescapable fact of our hermeneutical situation: traditions transmit texts to us, inform the Vorurteile we use to approach them and indeed are a part of who we are. ‘Our historical consciousness is always filled with a variety of voices in which the echo of the past is heard’ (TM 284). Indeed, because language is essential to being, and language is always part of a tradition, it is impossible to do away with the power of tradition (PH 29). Fortunately, reliance on tradition is not, in principle, a barrier to knowledge; in fact, some of the Vorurteile we accept based on tradition are

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essential for knowledge. ‘To be situated within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible’ (TM 361). To speak of the ‘authority’ of such traditions is not to accept uncritically whatever is given, but to recognise that our finitude means we must often rely on the superior truth claims of others. Tradition underwrites the possibility of reaching an understanding with the other across time and space. The temporal distance between us and a traditionary text is no longer seen only in a negative light as a ‘gulf to be breached’, but instead as ‘filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in the light of which everything handed down presents itself to us’ (TM 297). For all the foreignness of an ancient text, we have much in common. Here too there is a tension. It is in the play between the traditionary text’s strangeness and familiarity to us, between being a historically intended, distanciated object and belonging to a tradition. The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between. (TM 295) The fact that we share a commonality that binds us with tradition means that our relationship with a text is not one of subject and object, but a dialogue between two about some Sache (‘thing’, ‘subject matter’). This assumes that we engage with a text according to the ‘fore-conception of completeness’ (TM 293–4). To understand, we must first assume certain things about the text: that it is a unity, and that the writer of the transmitted text may know more truth about the subject matter than we do (an enabling Vorurteil we hold until we cannot accept what is being said as true, and must resort to psychological or historical explanations for the other’s opinion). I consider below the criticism that this posture of continuity and openness towards tradition makes tradition something monolithic and unassailable. Gadamer, for his part, insists that this is an ‘erroneous’ conclusion (PH 31). Tradition is not static or monolithic, for we participate in its development: ‘Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated’ (TM 290). 4 Spiel and the risking of Vorurteile

Gadamer reverses das Vorurteil gegen die Vorurteile überhaupt (‘the prejudice against prejudices in general’) and rehabilitates the authority of tradition, but he certainly does not see these as static constraints on understanding. On the contrary, Gadamer wants us to become conscious of our Vorurteile so they can be tested and, if necessary, revised. This foregrounding happens through the encounter with a traditionary text:

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Gadamer and genre theory It is impossible to make ourselves aware of a prejudice while it is constantly operating unnoticed, but only when it is, so to speak, provoked. The encounter with a traditionary text can provide this provocation. (TM 299)

By exposing our Vorurteile to the logical structure of the question, ‘our own prejudice [Vorurteil] is properly brought into play [Spiel] by being put at risk [auf dem Spiele steht]’ (TM 299; WM 304). Our Vorurteile are neither held onto blindly nor abdicated to the power of tradition, but as in a Spiel there is suspense as the outcome is left open. Gadamer has already discussed the phenomenon of Spiel in Part 1, which probably derives from his 1936 lectures on aesthetics.42 Here in Part 2, he briefly situates Spiel at the centre of the hermeneutic experience but quickly moves on. He will scarcely mention Spiel again until Part 3, where he concludes his ontological shift towards language by defining the way that truth comes into being as Spiel (TM 490). The seams that join Gadamer’s lectures into a book can easily obscure the link between the Spiel of art and the Spiel of language. Gadamer himself admits as much in his autobiographical reflections on Truth and Method: I did not make clear enough how the two basic projects that were brought together in the concept of play (Spiel, also game) harmonized with each other and how they contrasted with the subjectivism of modern thinking. (RPJ 41) In Chapter 2, I will argue that Spiel is, in fact, his most important phenomenological study, which unifies his hermeneutics and helps avoid the dead end of the subjectivism and objectivism dichotomy. I will also attempt to fill in some of the gaps in Truth and Method using Gadamer’s later writings and economic game theory. But in Part 2 of Truth and Method, rather than integrate Spiel more deeply into the hermeneutic experience, Gadamer moves onto a related phenomenon – dialogue. 5 Dialogue

The wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein that Gadamer is advocating is exemplified not by a method but by what he describes as a ‘readiness for experience’ (TM 362). This emphasis on the dialectical element of experience echoes Hegel, but for Gadamer, this dialectic ends not in absolute or definitive knowledge but in greater awareness of human finitude and openness to new experience (TM 346–62). Drawing from the Greeks, Gadamer defines that experience (Erfahrung) in dialectical terms as an openness to the question (TM 362–69). As in a Socratic dialogue, the truth about a subject matter appears through authentic dialogue, which begins with the knowledge that I do not know (TM 362–69). ‘The speaker (der Redende) is put to

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question (zur Rede gestellt) until the truth of what is under discussion (wovon der Rede ist) finally emerges’ (TM 368). Tradition is experienced hermeneutically as a ‘genuine partner in dialogue’ (TM 358). A dead object such as a book or an artwork cannot speak, but reading can still approximate the reciprocal I–Thou experience of a conversation. This I–Thou relationship with tradition has ethical implications, as tradition cannot be understood in an objectifying or instrumental way, but must be engaged with in genuine dialogue as with a person, respecting their otherness and also recognising that they might know something I do not (TM 358–62). The task of hermeneutics is to restore a written text to something approaching this conversational ideal of speech (TM 368). What makes the text speak with us like a Thou is the logical structure of question and answer (TM 369–79). We guess at the original question that the text is addressing, and within this horizon we understand the text’s answer. We come to the text with our questions, and it answers with its own questions, foregrounding and challenging our Vorurteile. The most dramatic way a text does this is by refusing to make any sense based on our initial Vorurteile – ‘the experience of being pulled up short by the text’ (TM 268). The text’s questions merge with our questions to produce an understanding that is not mine, or the other’s, but ours. The questions of the past are understood in relation to our own questions, and the result is the fusion of horizons. 6 The fusion of horizons

The fusion of horizons is perhaps Gadamer’s most well-known image. One implication of wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein is that understanding is finite; it always takes place within a determinate situation (TM 301–7). Gadamer explicitly borrows and develops the image of a horizon from Husserl and Nietzsche, using it to describe everything that is visible from this finite vantage point in history.43 Our horizon can expand to see things further away, but we are always at the centre of it. This reveals a problem when trying to understand a historical text: failure to account for its different horizon will lead to misunderstanding, but simply transposing ourselves into the horizon of another is both impossible and undesirable. It is impossible because we always take ourselves and our Vorurteile with us anyway (this was the problem with the method axis). It is undesirable because it treats the past as it if has nothing true to say to us that might affect our present horizon (this was the problem with the aesthetic axis): ‘The text that is understood historically is forced to abandon its claim to be saying something true’ (TM 303). Instead, understanding is always a Verschmelzung (‘fusion’, ‘blending’) of past and present horizons:

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Gadamer and genre theory There is no more an isolated horizon of the present in itself than there are historical horizons which have to be acquired. Rather, understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves. (TM 306; WM 311)

‘Supposedly’ (vermeintlich) is an important qualifier. The two horizons are not actually closed off to each other like alien worlds; Gadamer believes there is a deep continuity of tradition and human experience that, in principle, makes the past intelligible to us. By using the metaphor of a fusion, rather than a bridge, Gadamer insists that the present horizon is continually formed and transformed by its encounter with the traditionary text, just as the historical text we encounter is shaped by the concerns of the present. This constant fusion of past and present within a tradition normally happens in the background. It is only under special circumstances that the scholarly task becomes to foreground the differences between us and the text by projecting a distinct historical horizon. This projection is not actually separate from our own horizon; it only serves to highlight momentarily the differences, within a continuous tradition, between past and present. Rather than enter into that projection, the goal is for it to be immediately integrated back as the encounter with tradition challenges our own Vorurteile and transforms our own horizon. This last step Gadamer describes as application. 7 The inescapability of application

A wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein implies that we are always already applying texts as we read them: ‘understanding always involves something like applying the text to be understood to the interpreter’s present situation’ (TM 308). The meaning and significance of a text cannot neatly be separated, but are part of a single event: application is neither a subsequent nor merely an occasional part of the phenomenon of understanding, but codetermines it as a whole from the beginning. … The interpreter dealing with a traditionary text tries to apply it to himself. But this does not mean that the text is given for him as something universal, that he first understands it per se, and then afterward uses it for particular applications. Rather, the interpreter seeks no more than to understand this universal, the text – i.e. to understand what it says, what constitutes the text’s meaning and significance. In order to understand that, he must not try to disregard himself and his particular hermeneutical situation. He must relate the text to this situation if he wants to understand at all. (TM 324) Each moment of application will thus generate new meaning: ‘we understand in a different way, if we understand at all’ (TM 296–97).44 This is,

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Gadamer insists, not the same thing as ‘making free with the text’ but rather application is ‘bound by the meaning of the text’ (TM 332). Thus, understanding requires an ability analogous to phronesis in Aristotelian ethics (page [15] above). Phronesis is, like application, a striving to do what is right in a given situation, and thus cannot be reduced to mere knowledge of a given universal that is applied to the concrete case (TM 312–24). 8 Language

Underwriting the ability for all this to lead to understanding is language: ‘the fusion of horizons that takes place in understanding is actually the achievement of language’ (TM 378). Gadamer spends the third part of Truth and Method using language to try to understand how language can achieve this feat. As Karl Simms observes, this is Heidegger’s phenomenology of language but extended from poetic language to ‘ordinary-language’; the phenomena of our existence, our having a state of mind, our having discourse and our having understanding all happen at once.45 In this, Gadamer, like Heidegger, joins the H–H–H (Hamann, Herder and Humboldt) theory of language; an ‘expressivist’ rather than ‘designative’ model of language.46 Rejecting the Cartesian and Kantian legacies, words are seen as creating worlds, rather than simply mapping pre-given conceptual terrain. Because understanding is always tied up in language and tradition, it reminds us that the conventional model of language as a tool in our hands, which we use to express ourselves, is too simple (PH 29). Language is, Lawn summarises, ‘not an instrument of communication but communication itself’.47 This anti-foundationalist view of language, however, does not lead Gadamer down the path of scepticism. For all our finitude and misunderstandings, our ability to speak means we never lose the ability to connect with the truth of things. I discussed above the Greek idea of truth revealing itself – not as the result of some objectivising method but as part of the being of the thing itself. For Gadamer, the fact that being can come into language like this reveals a deep connection between being and language: ‘Being that can be understood is language’ (TM 474). This rather oracular pronouncement reminds us that whenever we understand something, this process is necessarily linguistic in nature (its being is language). Again, Lawn’s summary is apt: ‘Language does not so much reflect a given world as permit us to enter into an already interpreted world, that is, a world we share by means of the language we hold in common’.48 Gadamer confronts the same realities of language that will send others down the path of scepticism and deconstruction, yet he holds out hope that language can also give us something positive – the miracle of understanding. For Gadamer, language is a ‘medium where I and world meet or, rather, manifest their original belonging together’ (TM 474). This reflects what has been called Gadamer’s ‘perspectival realism’: the world really does disclose itself in language, even if what it discloses is always historically situated and

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incomplete.49 Language is thus what makes the fusion of horizons, and understanding across time and space, possible. 9 Scripture and literature

The central place of Scripture within Gadamer’s hermeneutics has not been widely appreciated. Kevin Vanhoozer, for example, reads Gadamer as saying that Scripture is an exception to hermeneutics: it comes as something of a surprise to learn that the Christian kerygma falls outside the hermeneutical circle … The Word of God stands outside interpretation. At least in the case of the Bible, then, there is a meaning in the text.50 Here, Vanhoozer is referring to Gadamer’s fine distinctions between juridical and theological application (TM 330–32). Unlike judges, Gadamer says, preachers do not have the authority to supplement the text with new content. This contrast with juridical interpretation does not, however, situate Scripture outside hermeneutics. On the contrary, Gadamer summarises his argument on the next page: We can, then, distinguish what is truly common to all forms of hermeneutics: the meaning to be understood is concretized and fully realized only in interpretation, but the interpretive activity considers itself wholly bound by the meaning of the text. Neither jurist nor theologian regards the work of application as making free with the text. (TM 332) Thus, far from exempting Scripture from his model of interpretation, Gadamer takes theological hermeneutics as one of his models for all texts, because application is an inherent part of understanding the Bible. Along the way, however, Gadamer does make incidental observations about the distinctive nature of Scripture, and these are relevant for my readings of contested biblical texts. First, Scripture has greater authority over the preacher than the law has over a judge. The basic hermeneutical structure is the same – neither can make free with the text – but the power dynamic at play is different: ‘Scripture is the word of God, and that means it has an absolute priority over the doctrine of those who interpret it’ (TM 330–31). Here Gadamer confirms our observation above that to read the Bible as Scripture implies both its ongoing relevance and authority. Second, the goal of Scripture is salvation, and so the task of preaching is fulfilled ‘by the power of the word itself, which can call men to repentance even though the sermon is a bad one’ (TM 330). The application of the gospel in the life of the believer does not make the historical investigation of the gospels irrelevant (PH 209). But while the intended meaning of the NT

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authors moves in the direction of this ‘salvation-meaning’, it does not exhaust it: ‘they proclaim something that surpasses their own horizon of understanding – even if they are named John or Paul’ (PH 210). Third, the interpretation of Scripture is properly theological. Gadamer draws on Bultmann’s argument that in reading any text we must be aware of our pre-existing relationship with the subject matter. The subject matter of the Bible is the question of God, and his proclamation of salvation implicates all humans (TM 331). In an address to French theologians in 1977, Gadamer observes that opening our eyes to the divine promise of grace requires those living in modernity to overcome numerous obstacles: forgetfulness of being, despair over finitude, proclivity towards law over grace and preoccupation with technical mastery.51 Gadamer recognises that Bultmann’s hermeneutical presupposition is itself a Protestant theological Vorurteil that may not be shared by Marxist, Jewish or Catholic readers. Yet unlike Schleiermacher and Dilthey, Gadamer insists that the interpretation of Scripture is properly informed by theological dogma, which like any Vorurteil is put at risk (TM 332). Gadamer does not raise the issue of canon here, but we will see throughout Chapters 4–6 how theological Vorurteile about the status and unity of the canon allow biblical texts to be recontextualised beyond the horizons of their authors.52 Finally, the intersubjective dynamic at play in Scripture is distinctive, involving God, the believer and other people. For Gadamer, spoken language is the reference point against which different kinds of writing are differentiated (RB 142–46).53 A written note from me to a friend maintains a strong similarity to spoken language; a literary text speaks in a more universal way to a community generated by language. Poetry is a particular case of literature, one in which the meaning is much more closely tied to the particular embodiment of sounds and words (which is why poetry is so notoriously difficult to translate). Therefore for Gadamer, Scripture is a distinctive problem because, while it resembles a literary text, in other ways it is much more like direct speech (RB 150–53). He does not doubt that the biblical texts include artful narration and poetic qualities. Yet beginning with Luther’s pro me of the gospel leads Gadamer to see Scripture as more than an autonomous text of literature. The ‘special character of the interpretation of Scripture’ is that it is not anonymous but assumes a ‘fundamental relationship’ between the text and the community of saints.54 The text of Scripture has the structure of a promise into which its hearers are drawn; the kerygma is integrated into a historical narrative in which the hearer is meant to find their future.55 This is Gadamer’s way of describing the tension between the authority and relevance of Scripture. Summary

Having examined these nine elements in context, Gadamer’s full description of the hermeneutical experience emerges as follows. Thrown into history with a

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finite horizon, a wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein is shaped by certain Vorurteile and the tradition to which it belongs. This horizon is constantly changing and fusing with other horizons, as dialogue with traditionary texts yields application for the present. Truth reveals itself in this never-ceasing Spiel of language, as Vorurteile are risked and if necessary revised. Within this dynamic, Gadamer’s model makes space for the distinctive problems of legal, literary and (crucially for this book) scriptural texts. Gadamer and his critics After the appearance of Truth and Method in English, new conversation partners soon emerged. Gadamer’s retirement enabled him to spend more time travelling, particularly to the United States, where he engaged in debates with several leading thinkers. While Truth and Method is his magnum opus, it is important to see it as an ongoing and evolving work: he continued writing new prefaces, editing the text and developing his ideas in subsequent publications. It would, of course, have been almost a performative contradiction for Gadamer’s work – a philosophy of truth through ceaseless dialogue – to have sparked anything less than this vigorous, open engagement on multiple fronts. Having placed Gadamer in conversation and surveyed how his key ideas fit together, I will now evaluate some of the criticisms of his hermeneutics. Some will emerge as simple misunderstandings. Others have more substance and will require a more detailed discussion in the following chapters. Gadamer’s conversations with his critics are extensive and involved; they are also well documented, so it is not necessary to revisit the details here.56 I will summarise the major themes of three debates: with the progressives, with the conservatives and with the postmodernists. Gadamer’s ability to hold both sides of the tension between Scripture’s authority and relevance depends on satisfactory answers to these objections. The progressives

One of Gadamer’s most fruitful dialogue partners was the sociologist Jürgen Habermas; following Habermas’ inaugural lectures in Frankfurt (1965), his review of Wahrheit und Methode (1970) and a Festschrift for Gadamer’s 70th birthday, they engaged extensively until Gadamer’s death in 2002.57 While Habermas shares Gadamer’s recognition of the historically situated nature of understanding, he worries that philosophical hermeneutics is too optimistic about the possibility of truth and understanding emerging through dialogue with tradition. Gadamer’s focus on the linguistic ideal of conversation ignores, says Habermas, the material conditions – oppression, economics and social structures – that influence and distort truth claims. By defending the authority of tradition against the Enlightenment, Gadamer’s hermeneutics offers no way to challenge and change the dogmas of an unjust

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society. For Habermas, tradition is thus a potentially conservative or even oppressive force, opposing change by validating the status quo.58 Instead, he looks to critical self-reflection to draw out the power relations underwriting truth claims and bring about emancipation from oppressive structures. If Habermas is right, then we must query Gadamer’s ability to account for both the relevance and the authority of Scripture. How can Scripture be relevant for those living under oppression if it can never challenge the status quo? And does Gadamer’s rehabilitation of the authority of tradition put Scripture’s authority under pressure, demoting it below the dogmas of tradition? In her analysis of the debate, Scheibler observes that the modernist Habermas has a reflex reaction against Gadamer’s use of terms ‘authority’ and ‘tradition’, but these terms really need to be understood as part of Gadamer’s polemic with the Enlightenment pretence of objectivity.59 As explained above, Gadamer’s concepts of authority and tradition are starting points for the hermeneutical circle, but they are not monolithic or immutable in the way Habermas depicts them. Gadamer, following Heidegger, adopts the traditional hermeneutic circle of whole and part to describe this interplay between interpreter and tradition: The circle, then, is not formal in nature. It is neither subjective nor objective, but describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. (TM 293) Within Gadamer’s hermeneutics, then, tradition is the starting point for the circular hermeneutical process. Tradition is not a ‘permanent precondition’, nor are we passively determined by this tradition, but we further determine it ourselves as we participate in its evolution (TM 293–94). As in Plato, truth is disclosed in perpetual dialogue. This is not to claim that dialogue is always possible, or to dismiss Habermas’ worries about pseudo-communication caused by oppressive social systems. Gadamer is aware of the ways in which dialogue can fail, for example when the Sophistic conversation partner’s opinions are not mutually open to revision (PDE 44–45). However, dialogue is at least a possibility under certain conditions, unlike Habermas’ attempt to critique tradition from the outside, which is (on Gadamer’s view) impossible. Whatever Habermas offers as the basis for critical self-reflection – whether psychoanalysis, Marxism or some other theory – must itself be acknowledged as part of tradition. The social scientist or psychoanalyst does not stand outside of history but is as wirkungsgeschichtliches as anyone. Gadamer does not intend then, at least in theory, to make tradition unassailable.60 Whether or not philosophical hermeneutics can resist tradition in practice, however, is another matter. One issue is Gadamer’s equivocation over ‘tradition’ in the singular and ‘traditions’ in the plural – Gadamer speaks of ‘the continuity of custom and tradition’ (TM 297) but also says that ‘we are always situated within traditions’ (TM 282). So for each individual is there just

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one monophonic tradition, or are traditions legion? It seems that there is both unity and distinction to Gadamer’s idea of tradition, but how this works in practice is far from clear. In Chapter 3, I suggest that genre theory might offer some granularity to tradition, explaining the mechanism by which different traditions come into Spiel in a single text. Genre theory also suggests a way of disrupting the tradition surrounding a biblical text, using alternative genre ‘uptakes’. We will see in Chapter 6 how successful this is for understanding and resisting my own tradition’s problematic handling of Judges 19. The conservatives

Conservatives worry that by seeing language as a disclosive event, Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics leaves us without any way to distinguish between right and wrong interpretations. Authorial intent is thus swallowed up by the monologism of the reader.61 They believe Gadamer too quickly abandons Schleiermacher’s objective rigour, risking a dangerous historical subjectivism.62 The jurist Emilio Betti was amongst the first to complain that Gadamer’s bringing together of understanding and application risks collapsing the subjective moment of interpretation with the otherness of the object being interpreted.63 His concerns were echoed by Karl-Otto Apel.64 In North America, E. D. Hirsch devoted an appendix to Validity in Interpretation (1967) to showing how Gadamer’s hermeneutics is not only self-contradictory but even leads to nihilism: Without a genuinely stable norm we cannot even in principle make a valid choice between two differing interpretations, and we are left with the consequence that a text means nothing in particular at all.65 Like Betti, Hirsch insists that the distinction between meaning and significance be preserved.66 This accusation is significant because Gadamer insists that his project does not imply subjectivism or relativism; if the conservatives are right, then Gadamer has failed at his attempt to chart a middle course. In terms of my project in this book, such a failure would put Scripture’s authority at risk: how can a text be authoritative over me, if it means whatever I want it to mean? Much of this criticism, however, rests on obvious misunderstandings of Gadamer’s argument. First, in seeing application as an inseparable part of the event of understanding, Gadamer does not collapse the horizon of the text into the horizon of the reader. Enough people misunderstood this part of Truth and Method that shortly before his death Gadamer clarified that he is not saying we should distort the text to make it say whatever helps us the most: ‘Application is an implicit moment in all understanding; it does not at all conflict with the genuine obligation to have scientific rigor’.67 We still seek to understand what the other is saying. The hermeneutical circle, however, means that interpretation

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and application cannot be kept neatly separated as sequential steps in a methodological process. When we pick up an ancient document and start reading, we have already begun applying it. We already have provisional answers to questions like: what is this thing I am holding? why I am interested in it? what questions might it address for me? To give space for the alterity of the text, we need – counterintuitively, perhaps – to focus on ourselves and our application more, not less, as we constantly foreground our Vorurteile and revise our initial application. Hirsch’s insistence on the strict logical priority of interpretation merely sets us up for the kind of error he wants to avoid; it is precisely when we think we are being ‘objective’ that we are most vulnerable to the captivity of our prejudices. Edward Ho rightly asks, of those who wish to exclude application or contextualisation from meaning: ‘is there such a thing as decontextualized meaning?’68 Gadamer answers that there is no pure initial state of unapplied linguistic meaning, for the nature of language means that the conversation has already started: For no statement simply has an unambiguous meaning based on its linguistic and logical construction as such, but, on the contrary, each is motivated. A question is behind each statement that first gives it its meaning. (PH 88–89) Application is involved even in the most basic task of translating the traditionary object into our own terms. Forget this, and then we will be caught off guard, not realising that we had already begun subtly integrating the traditionary object into our own world – just by bringing to it our own questions and our own vocabulary. Gadamer’s point about the inescapability of application is not to replace interpretation with explication or application, but to show how they have always been connected. On this point, the ensuing dialogue between Hirsch and Gadamer seems to have ended in substantial agreement. In 1984, Hirsch published an essay revising his distinction between meaning and significance and making an important concession to Gadamer: that some degree of application can be part of the meaning of the literary text so long as it is an extension of the original intention-concept.69 Second, Hirsch’s long critique of the fusion of horizons, as David Vessey has shown, leans on an overly literal interpretation of ‘horizon’ as a hard limit, rather than Gadamer’s phenomenological sense of horizon as a threshold that can expand (page [21] above).70 Hirsch claims that horizons cannot fuse unless there is some way to bridge between present and inaccessible past, and so Gadamer’s depiction of alien horizons beyond our reach is self-defeating.71 This would indeed be self-defeating, except that Gadamer depicts the exact opposite: Gadamer’s horizon can expand to blend with another precisely because he believes that the space between them is not a chasm. The horizons of interpreter and historical text are strange, but also

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familiar – we are separated by history but also joined by common tradition, by connection with the subject matter and by shared human experience (see TM 291–300). Third, conservative critics consistently mistake Gadamer’s interest in descriptive general hermeneutics for a wholesale repudiation of normative guidelines or methods for historical enquiry at the level of special hermeneutics.72 Similarly, they often misunderstand Gadamer’s description of the de facto power of tradition as advocating its de jure authority. Hirsch thinks tradition, for Gadamer, is a principle for resolving disagreements between contemporary readers. The reader who follows the path of tradition is right, and the reader who leaves this path is wrong. The determinate meaning of a text at a given point in time is what a present culture would generally take that meaning to be.73 The normative implications of this, according to Hirsch, are subjectivist. Failing to situate Gadamer’s discussion of Vorurteil within his conversation with the Enlightenment and Heidegger’s notion of fore-structures, Hirsch simply reaches for his German dictionary: The word ‘predisposition’ or ‘prejudice’ connotes the idea of a preferred or habitual stance, making the equation imply that an interpreter cannot alter his habitual attitudes even if he wants to.74 Gadamer’s recognition of the impossibility of removing our Vorurteile at the outset then becomes, on Hirsch’s reading, something quite different: Instead of trying to overcome our prejudices – an attempt which cannot succeed and can result only in artificial, alien constructions – we should welcome them as the best means of preserving the vitality of our inheritance and our tradition.75 Hirsch’s concern here about the inevitable subjectivism of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is actually the same concern Habermas raised about Gadamer’s inherent conservatism. It is based on the same misunderstanding of tradition and Vorurteile as monolithic and immutable permanent conditions, rather than mere starting points for the hermeneutical circle. Unfortunately, Hirsch’s misreading remains influential, particularly within North American biblical studies.76 Kevin Vanhoozer echoes this understanding of tradition when he says that Gadamer’s emphasis on the traditionary event of transmission means that ‘What a text is ultimately about more or less coincides with the history of a text’s effects’.77 While Vanhoozer appreciates Gadamer’s description of the hermeneutical process and his reminder of the importance of dialogue with tradition, he worries

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that taken as a normative principle Gadamer’s concept of tradition ends up making the history of a text’s reception by the believing community into an authoritative ‘canon’ to rival the canon of scripture itself: [Gadamer] has furthermore tied phronesis to the authority of interpretative traditions. In the course of the present work, however, we have argued that the canon alone has final authority in theology (sola scriptura), even when it sometimes goes against the tradition of its interpretation.78 This is a valid concern. Yet treating tradition like this as a norm for interpretation is only a possible implication of Gadamer’s description. Vanhoozer sets canon up against tradition, and by ‘tradition’ he means the reception history of the text. But for Gadamer tradition is more than simply the history of effects. Indeed, the text itself is included in what Gadamer means by ‘tradition’, which is why he refers to the biblical text as an Überlieferung (translated as ‘traditionary text’: WM 282; TM 277).79 By placing final authority in the canon rather than the history of ecclesial interpretation, the principle of sola scriptura simply shifts our focus from one part of tradition to another. As Najeeb Awad points out, Luther’s principle of sola scriptura does not exclude Gadamer’s recognition of the authority of tradition – indeed sola scriptura is itself a Vorurteil of the Protestant tradition.80 Gadamer’s idiosyncratic use of ‘authority’ to describe our thrownness within tradition contributes to this misunderstanding. Gadamer certainly does not mean that tradition is elevated to the position of magisterium, or that we should always appeal to tradition.81 His point is to describe the effect of tradition: its unquestionable influence, though not necessarily its absolute authority. Gadamer is merely pointing out that we do not – we cannot – start reading without a tradition already importing certain Vorurteile and concerns. As Warnke puts it, ‘one has to have some way of approaching the object’.82 Gadamer is no relativist. In challenging claims to objectivity and rejecting the subject/object dualism, Gadamer is not embracing subjectivism in the sense feared by his conservative opponents. He insists on maintaining the facticity of language: its connection to the subject matter at hand.83 Brook Pearson, for example, unleashes Gadamer’s hermeneutics on Pauline studies to re-open conversations and question the traditional assumptions of the historical-grammatical method, yet he rightly insists that the Gadamerian interpreter remains in dialogue with the text itself: ‘interpreters are only interpreters of [a] phenomenon if they are interpreting the phenomenon!’.84 Indeed, Gadamer is concerned that understanding leads towards greater knowledge of truth, and his ideas of Bildung, phronesis and wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein attempt to integrate hermeneutics, epistemology and ethics in potentially powerful ways.85 Far from endorsing the monologism of the reading subject, Gadamer’s hermeneutics is, as James Risser argues, profoundly attentive to the voice of the other:

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While Gadamer is reluctant to speak of authorial intent, this is not because he prefers to locate meaning within the reader (as conservative critics assume); locating meaning in either mind would risk subjectivity and return to the problems of the romanticist tradition. As Merold Westphal rightly insists, ‘the birth of the reader is not the absolute death of the author but only the death of the absolute author, the one who could fix meaning unilaterally’.87 There is, for Gadamer, definite value in the hermeneutical step of projecting the horizon of the historical author – to understand the questions the text is answering (TM 370), to distinguish what the text could have meant from anachronisms and to protect from ‘arbitrary interpolations and illegitimate applications’ (PH 209). Yet for Gadamer, the experience of art shows that meaning cannot be restricted to the mens auctoris (PH 209); to be understood, texts must continue to speak into the present in terms that we understand and about things that are relevant to us. However, conservative critics do highlight two important ambiguities in Gadamer’s work. First, if conservatives do not give Gadamer enough credit for honouring the alterity of the other, then this is largely because his phenomenology of Spiel remains underdeveloped and awkwardly integrated within Truth and Method. In Chapter 2, I consider Spiel more closely and look for ways to clarify its significance within philosophical hermeneutics. Second, genre is rarely discussed by Gadamer or his opponents, but it is often an unspoken driver of their disagreement. Hirsch is happy for legal and religious texts to be subject to changing meaning because their meaning can be settled institutionally by court or church, but not all texts should be treated like Constitution or Bible.88 Likewise, Betti thinks Gadamer confuses the role of the legal historian and the judge.89 He does not dispute Gadamer’s description of an infinite hermeneutical task; his argument is over what readers should try to do, and the guidelines they should apply, when reading a certain type of text.90 Gadamer does of course acknowledge that different types of text will presuppose different tasks for their readers. In The Relevance of the Beautiful, he develops these suggestions further, putting literary texts on a scale from closely tied to speech to full poetic autonomy (RB 142–146). Yet Gadamer is not clear enough about how these different types of text, and ways of reading, fit within his universal hermeneutic. In Chapter 3, I address this weakness by connecting philosophical hermeneutics with modern genre theory.

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The postmodernists

Ingrid Scheibler observes that Gianni Vattimo’s postmodernist critique of Gadamer echoes that of Habermas and the modernist left.91 By dissolving being into language, emphasising continuity with the metaphysical tradition and highlighting the social domain of collective consciousness, Gadamer represses (says Vattimo) the most promisingly existential elements of Heidegger’s work.92 Gadamer’s aesthetics loses Heidegger’s sense of ‘everopen conflict’ and risks becoming ‘an apology for what already exists’.93 Similarly, John Caputo argues that Gadamer ‘constrains and domesticates’ Heidegger’s more radical side.94 Gadamer offers the ‘most liberal form of traditionalism possible’; a qualified Hegelianism that still stubbornly insists, despite acknowledging the finitude of our understanding, that deep down meaning is stable and tradition is a source of truth.95 Gadamer’s stubborn belief in truth is unlikely to trouble most readers of Scripture; however, the postmodernists’ accusation of uncritical traditionalism echoes Habermas’ critique and raises similar doubts about Scripture’s authority and relevance within oppressive social domains. Yet the postmodernist critique can be addressed in similar ways to the progressive critique. Both rest on a mischaracterisation of the place of tradition within Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Scheibler argues that Vattimo (much like Habermas) misconstrues soziales Einverständnis (‘social understanding’) as a permanent and unquestioned consensus rather than the intersubjective background that makes substantive agreement – and disagreement – possible.96 Caputo is similarly one-sided in his reading of Gadamer on authority: If Gadamer thinks that institutions are solely the product of accumulated prudence and the refinements that have been introduced by human reason over the ages, I think that is metaphysical nostalgia. They have as much to do with power as with prudence.97 It will be clear from the discussion of tradition above that Gadamer emphatically does not think of tradition ‘solely’ as refined wisdom to be uncritically preserved. Gadamer would readily acknowledge that some Vorurteile reflect the distortions of power – we just cannot know which ones in advance. Conclusion Situating Gadamer within four conversations (with the Germans, the phenomenologists, the Greeks and the Protestant theologians) has shown how many of his critics have misread his account of the hermeneutical experience. The Gadamerian hermeneut is neither captive to the authority of tradition (as the progressives and postmodernists allege) nor free to embrace subjectivism (as the conservatives worry). Gadamer thus offers a promising theoretical foundation for biblical hermeneutics, enabling us to hold open the tension between the authority and relevance of Scripture.

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Nevertheless, Gadamer’s critics have revealed certain elements of his account that are unclear or indeed open to challenge. First, Gadamer’s optimism about the possibility of arriving at greater truth and understanding – a possibility implied in concepts like phronesis, Bildung,98 the hermeneutical circle and the fusion of horizons – remains poorly established. To hold to the authority and relevance of Scripture, despite our entrenched traditions and ongoing contests over the Bible’s meaning, requires confidence that the hermeneutical experience can really lead to better, not just different, understandings. In the next chapter, I consider how clarifying Spiel as the centre of Gadamer’s hermeneutics can give reasons for such confidence. Second, Gadamer gives no structural place in his hermeneutics for questions of genre. This makes it hard to account for the particular practice of reading the Bible as Scripture – with its distinctive assumptions about authority and relevance. This leads Gadamer’s conservative critics to worry about what happens to the norms of biblical interpretation if we treat every text like a poem. It also struggles to do justice to the myriad sub-genres of biblical texts, each offering the reader different roles and experiences. Chapter 3 will draw on the resources of modern genre theory to address this, giving genre a structural place in Gadamer’s hermeneutics using my new term Lesespiel. Third, Gadamer may not intend to leave us captive to oppressive traditions, but perhaps his critics are right and he is simply naive about the deceptive power of oppression? The best way to address this is by demonstrating how his hermeneutical tools can enable the kind of critical engagement with tradition that his critics think is obstructed by his conservatism.99 This will be taken up in Part 2 of this book, in which I bring a wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein to the reading of three contested biblical texts: the recontextualization of psalms in the book of Acts, the use of Hagar’s story (Genesis 16) in nineteenth-century debates over slavery, and the problematic tradition of interpreting the outrage in Gibeah (Judges 19). Notes 1 Some descriptions of Gadamer’s hermeneutics in this chapter previously published in Andrew Judd, ‘Gadamer, wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein, and What To Do About Judas (Acts 1:12–22)’, ABR 66 (2018): 43–58. 2 Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 4. 3 Chris Lawn, Wittgenstein and Gadamer: Towards a Post-Analytic Philosophy of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 100. 4 On Gadamer’s lectures see Lawrence K. Schmidt, ‘Biographical Sketch’, in Gadamer’s Century, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 8–9. Admittedly, Grondin disputes this divided view of TM: ‘On the Composition of Truth and Method’, in The Specter of Relativism, ed. Lawrence K. Schmidt (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 23–38. 5 David E. Linge, editor’s introduction, PH, xix.

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6 See especially Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §§1–14, 17. 7 Kristin Gjesdal, Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 71. 8 Nevertheless, Gadamer escapes Romanticism using Kantian tools: see TM 30–60, 101; Kant, Judgment, §17; Jean Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. Kathryn Plant (Chesham: Acumen, 2003), 26; Gjesdal, Legacy, 26. 9 Gadamer perhaps unfairly blames Kant for objectivism’s sins: Gjesdal, Legacy, 1. 10 The following biographical information is from Robert J. Dostal, ‘Gadamer: The Man and His Work’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert J. Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 13–35; Jean Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 11 Robert J. Dostal, ‘Gadamer’s Relation to Heidegger and Phenomenology’, in Cambridge Companion, ed. Dostal, 247–48. 12 Dostal, ‘Heidegger’, 250. 13 Dostal, ‘Heidegger’, 252. 14 Specifically the later Heidegger: Joel Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 51; GIC 39. See also Linge, editor’s introduction, PH xlvi, li; Dostal, ‘Heidegger’, 247, 254. 15 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 193; Ingrid Scheibler, Gadamer: Between Heidegger and Habermas (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), Kindle edition, location 3753. Cf. ‘intelligibility of Being-in-the-world … expresses itself as discourse’: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 203–4, cited in Karl Simms, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Routledge Critical Thinkers (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 36. 16 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Hans-Georg Gadamer: Urbanizing the Heideggerian Province’ (1979), trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Philosophical-Political Profiles (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 189–197, cited in Gjesdal, Legacy, 35. 17 Dostal, ‘Heidegger’; Scheibler, Gadamer; Gjesdal, Legacy, 34–35. 18 Dostal, ‘Heidegger’, 253. Simms describes how Gadamer develops Heidegger’s ontological project into a method for understanding literary texts: Simms, Gadamer, 34. 19 Dostal, ‘Heidegger’, 255. 20 Dostal, ‘Heidegger’, 256. Though Gadamer re-discovered in the 1980s an early Heidegger essay describing theory as ‘tarrying’: Dostal, ‘Heidegger’, 250. 21 ‘Writing and the Living Voice’, EPH 66; ‘Historicism and Romanticism’, EPH 129; Dostal, ‘Gadamer’, 30; Dostal, ‘Heidegger’, 251. 22 PH 50, 38; GIC 46. 23 Scheibler, Gadamer, location 330. 24 Scheibler, Gadamer, location 4606. Richard Palmer argues that the dialectic nature of Gadamer’s hermeneutics moves beyond Heidegger in the direction of Hegel, without falling back on the ultimately subjectivist grounding of Geist: Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 165–66, 215. 25 ‘On the Origins of Philosophical Hermeneutics’, cited in Dostal, ‘Gadamer’, 30. 26 Grondin, Biography, 110–27; Dostal, ‘Gadamer’, 17. 27 PDE, Preface (1931), xxvi; PDE, Preface (1982), xxxii; PDE 33, 164. 28 See also TM 362–69; ‘Plato’s poetic imagination’, PA 184.

36 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52

Gadamer and genre theory Plato, Philebus, 14B (Fowler). Philebus, 12 A; IG 106. Philebus, 14C–19B, 31B–35D; PDE 112, 150. Earlier in TM, Gadamer also describes hermeneutics dialogically as coming to an understanding with another about some subject matter: TM 180. Gadamer relates phronesis to Socrates’ knowledge of the good: IG 33, 165. See Josef Bleicher, Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy and Critique (1980; repr., London: Routledge, 2018), 12; Anthony C. Thiselton, Hermeneutics: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 14; Craig G. Bartholomew, Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics: A Comprehensive Framework for Hearing God in Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), 181. Lawn, Wittgenstein, 120. On designative and expressivist views of language see pages 23–4 above. Gadamer cites Bultmann’s ‘Das Problem der Hermeneutik’ (1950): TM 331. See also Bultmann, ‘Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possible?’, in Existence and Faith, trans. Schubert M. Ogden (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1961), 289–96. Moberly finds Gadamer’s broader conception of pre-understanding more satisfactory: Moberly, ‘Bultmann and Augustine Revisited’, 12. Some consider the ‘Method’ in Truth and Method ironic: E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 245; Warnke, Gadamer, 174. However, while Gadamer doubts that scientific method can produce objective truth claims, he never renounces method itself: see GIC 41. GIC 45. My case studies in Chapters 4–6 will involve reception histories, as a way of situating the present and constructively foregrounding my prejudices. Though John Caputo observes that Bultmann ‘first staked out that terrain’: Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 109. Julian Young, German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Weber to Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2018), 181. Thiselton, Hermeneutics, 277. TM 245–7, 302–7. See also David Vessey, ‘Gadamer and the Fusion of Horizons’, IJPS 17.4 (2009): 533. Cf. the romanticist aesthetics of genius which sought to understand the text better than the original author. Simms, Gadamer, 36–37. Lawn, Wittgenstein, 12. Lawn is borrowing Charles Taylor’s alliterative categorisation. Lawn, Wittgenstein, 32. Lawn, Wittgenstein, 48. Lawn, Wittgenstein, 121, following Wachterhauser. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘Discourse on Matter: Hermeneutics and the “Miracle” of Understanding’, in Hermeneutics at the Crossroads, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, James K. A. Smith, and Bruce Ellis Benson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 16–17. See also Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Doctrine (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 328. RB 149; HT 397. Moberly observes that the ability for texts to be recontextualised beyond author’s frame of reference is implied by the canonical status of the Bible: ‘Biblical Hermeneutics and Ecclesial Responsibility’, in The Future of Biblical Interpretation: Responsible Plurality in Biblical Hermeneutics, ed. Stanley E. Porter

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53 54 55 56

57

58 59 60

61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68

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and Matthew R. Malcolm (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013), 119–20. Pihlaja observes this practice of canonical recontextualisation in his analysis of YouTube debates, though he describes it somewhat narrowly as an ‘Evangelical practice’: Stephen Pihlaja, ‘“What About the Wolves?”: The Use of Scripture in YouTube Arguments’, LLit 25.3 (2016): 231–32. See also Simms’ taxonomy of text types: Gadamer, 109. HT 388–91. Thanks to Adrien Seignoux for help with this translation. RB 147; HT 391. On the ‘Gadamer–Habermas debate’ see Warnke, Gadamer, 109–16; Scheibler, Gadamer, chs. 1–2. Santiago Zabala and Steven Paul Cauchon offer recent versions of these criticisms in Inheriting Gadamer: New Directions in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. Georgia Warnke (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 67–77, 102–120. On the absence of Spiel in this debate see Jeremy Sampson, Being Played: Gadamer and Philosophy’s Hidden Dynamic (Wilmington: Vernon, 2019), 45–65. Jürgen Habermas, ‘A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method’, in Understanding and Social Inquiry, ed. Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 351; Jürgen Habermas, ‘On Hermeneutics’ Claim to Universality’, in The Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (1970; repr., New York: Continuum, 1985), 294–319; HansGeorg Gadamer, ‘Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Critique of Ideology: Metacritical Comments on Truth and Method’, in The Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Mueller-Vollmer, 274–92; Jürgen Habermas, ‘After Historicism, Is Metaphysics Still Possible?’, in Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. Bruce Krajewski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 15–20; Richard J. Bernstein, ‘The Constellation of Hermeneutics, Critical Theory and Deconstruction’, in Cambridge Companion, ed. Dostal, 267–82. Warnke considers Gadamer’s conservatism an unnecessary ‘overlay’: Warnke, Gadamer, 137. Scheibler, Gadamer, locations 247, 850. Gadamer, ‘Metacritical’, 284. Sandra Schneiders acknowledges that tradition is potentially oppressive when approached univocally, but proper dialectic can lead to ‘healthy challenge’ and ‘transformative influence’: ‘The Gospels and the Reader’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Gospels, ed. Stephen C. Barton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 109, 116. Emilio Betti, ‘Hermeneutics as the General Methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften’, in The Hermeneutic Tradition, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 174. Gadamer has also been criticised for a one-sided reading of Schleiermacher and German Idealism: see Betti, ‘Methodology’, 180; Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Resuscitating the Author’, in Hermeneutics at the Crossroads, ed. Vanhoozer, Smith, and Benson, 37. Betti, ‘Methodology’, 183, 186–87. Betti thinks Gadamer is too reliant on Bultmann’s theology of demythologization: 173, 184n. Karl-Otto Apel, ‘Regulative Ideas or Truth-Happening’, in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Hahn, Library of Living Philosophers (Peru, IL: Open Court, 1997), 67. See also the essays in Schmidt, Relativism. Hirsch, Validity, 251. Hirsch, Validity, 253–55; Betti, ‘Methodology’, 164, 174. GIC 47. Edward Ho, ‘Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur’, in Pillars in the History of Biblical Interpretation, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Sean A. Adams (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2016), 114.

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69 E. D. Hirsch, ‘Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted’, CritInq 11.2 (1984): 202–25. Hirsch still, however, understands Gadamer as saying that interpretations must always be essentially different (212). 70 Vessey, ‘Gadamer and the Fusion of Horizons’, 531–42. 71 Hirsch, Validity, 256–58. 72 Though Gadamer might query Apel’s claim to have found universal norms: Apel, ‘Regulative Ideas or Truth-Happening’, 86. Comparing Betti and Gadamer, Palmer argues that their hermeneutics are not antithetical but relate to different parts of the hermeneutical problem. He notes that the purpose of hermeneutics as conceived by Gadamer (unlike many of his critics) is not to provide norms for correct understanding but to understand understanding itself: Palmer, Hermeneutics, 215. In fairness to Gadamer’s critics, his failure to give such norms a structural place within hermeneutics invites this kind of misunderstanding. I argue in Chapter 3 that such norms are best located within genre. 73 Hirsch, Validity, 250. Hirsch reiterates his criticism of Gadamer’s ‘vaguely adumbrated and weakly defended’ notion of tradition in Hirsch, ‘Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted’, 213. 74 Hirsch, Validity, 260. 75 Hirsch, Validity, 260. 76 See W. Edward Glenny, ‘The Divine Meaning of Scripture: Explanations and Limitations’, JETS 38.4 (1995): 481–500; Scott A. Blue, ‘The Hermeneutic of E. D. Hirsch, Jr. and Its Impact on Expository Preaching: Friend or Foe?’, JETS 44.2 (2001): 253–69. Other theologians offer more sophisticated and constructive engagement with Gadamer: Merold Westphal, review of Truth and Method, by Hans-Georg Gadamer, IJPR 8.1 (1977): 67–72; Wolfhart Pannenberg, ‘Hermeneutics and Universal History’, in Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser (New York: State University of New York Press, 1986), 111–46; Anthony C. Thiselton, The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description with Special Reference to Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein (Exeter: Paternoster, 1980), 442–43; Mark G. Brett, Biblical Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Sandra M. Schneiders, The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture, 2nd ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999); Brook W. R. Pearson, Corresponding Sense: Paul, Dialectic, and Gadamer, Biblical Interpretation 58 (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Merold Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church, The Church and Postmodern Culture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009); B. H. McLean, Biblical Interpretation and Philosophical Hermeneutics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Matthew Halsted, Paul and the Meaning of Scripture: A Philosophical-Hermeneutic Approach to Paul’s Use of the Old Testament in Romans (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2022). Studies in Religion dedicated issue 5.1 (1975) to philosophical hermeneutics, with contributions by Dale Stover and Gadamer. 77 Vanhoozer, Drama, 157. See also ‘Discourse’, 14. 78 Vanhoozer, Drama, 329; ‘Personal Communication’, 22 May 2021. 79 Regarding their neologism ‘traditionary text’ see translators’ preface, TM xvi. Cf. WM 299 for ‘überlieferte Texte’. Richard Palmer refers to the hermeneutical experience as ‘an encounter between heritage in the form of a transmitted text and the horizon of the interpreter’: Palmer, Hermeneutics, 207. 80 Najeeb George Awad, ‘Should We Dispense with Sola Scriptura? Scripture, Tradition and Postmodern Theology’, Di 47.1 (2008): 74–5.

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81 Gadamer recommends deferring to tradition’s authority only when lacking better knowledge, or as a pedagogical necessity. See GIC 44. 82 Warnke, Gadamer, 82. 83 Scheibler, Gadamer, location 4623. 84 Pearson, Corresponding Sense, 295. Emphasis original. 85 See, for example, Monica Vilhauer, Gadamer’s Ethics of Play: Hermeneutics and the Other (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010), 113, 148; Warnke, Gadamer, 173–74. 86 James Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-reading Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 208. 87 Westphal, Whose Community?, 81–2. 88 Hirsch, Validity, 112, 123. 89 Betti, ‘Methodology’, 183, 186–87. 90 Betti, ‘Methodology’, 173. 91 Scheibler, Gadamer, ch. 3. 92 Scheibler, Gadamer, locations 2129–2167; Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 131–43; Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 37–40. 93 Vattimo, Modernity, 143. 94 Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 108. 95 Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 111. 96 Scheibler, Gadamer, location 2382. 97 Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 263. 98 Warnke, Gadamer, 173–4 99 Sandra Schneiders’ Catholic–feminist reading of John 4 uses a Gadamerian approach to reject patriarchal elements of the NT while continuing to see dialogue with Scripture as mediating an encounter with the divine: The Revelatory Text, ch. 7. Her critical presuppositions govern how much of the tradition is accepted (and they are never really put at risk) which partly concedes Habermas’ point.

Bibliography Apel, Karl-Otto. ‘Regulative Ideas or Truth-Happening’. Pages 67–94 in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Edited by Lewis Hahn. Library of Living Philosophers. Peru, IL: Open Court, 1997. Arthos, John. The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Awad, Najeeb George. ‘Should We Dispense with Sola Scriptura? Scripture, Tradition and Postmodern Theology’. Di 47.1 (2008): 64–79. Bartholomew, Craig G. Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics: A Comprehensive Framework for Hearing God in Scripture. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015. Betti, Emilio. ‘Hermeneutics as the General Methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften’. Pages 159–197 in The Hermeneutic Tradition. Edited by Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Bleicher, Josef. Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy and Critique. 1980. Repr., London: Routledge, 2018. Blue, Scott A. ‘The Hermeneutic of E. D. Hirsch, Jr. and Its Impact on Expository Preaching: Friend or Foe?’ JETS 44.2 (2001): 253–269.

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Brett, Mark G. Biblical Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Bultmann, Rudolf. ‘Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possible?’ Pages 289–296 in Existence and Faith. Translated by Schubert M. Ogden. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1961. Caputo, John. Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Dostal, Robert J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Dostal, Robert J. Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: Between Phenomenology and Dialectic. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Critique of Ideology: Metacritical Comments on Truth and Method’. Pages 274–292 in The Hermeneutics Reader. Edited by Kurt Mueller-Vollmer. New York: Continuum, 1985. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics. YSH. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Gjesdal, Kristin. Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism. Modern European Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Glenny, W. Edward. ‘The Divine Meaning of Scripture: Explanations and Limitations’. JETS 38.4 (1995): 481–500. Grondin, Jean. Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Grondin, Jean. The Philosophy of Gadamer. Translated by Kathryn Plant. Continental European Philosophy. Chesham: Acumen, 2003. Habermas, Jürgen. ‘A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method’. Pages 335–363 in Understanding and Social Inquiry. Edited by Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977. Habermas, Jürgen. ‘On Hermeneutics’ Claim to Universality’. Pages 294–319 in The Hermeneutics Reader. Edited by Kurt Mueller-Vollmer. New York: Continuum, 1985. First published 1970. Habermas, Jürgen. ‘After Historicism, is Metaphysics Still Possible?’ Pages 15–20 in Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics. Edited by Bruce Krajewski. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Halsted, Matthew. Paul and the Meaning of Scripture: A Philosophical-Hermeneutic Approach to Paul’s Use of the Old Testament in Romans. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2022. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Heidegger, Martin. ‘Letter on Humanism’. Pages 193–242 in Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Hirsch, E. D. ‘Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted’. CritInq 11.2 (1984): 202–225. Hirsch, E. D. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. Ho, Edward. ‘Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur’. Pages 96–118 in Pillars in the History of Biblical Interpretation. Edited by Stanley E. Porter and Sean A. Adams. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2016. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kindle edition.

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Lawn, Chris. Wittgenstein and Gadamer: Towards a Post-Analytic Philosophy of Language. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. Makita, Etsuro. Gadamer-Bibliographie (1922–1994). Frankfurt: Lang, 1995. Malpas, Jeff, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher, eds. Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. McLean, B. H. Biblical Interpretation and Philosophical Hermeneutics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Moberly, R. W. L. ‘Biblical Hermeneutics and Ecclesial Responsibility’. Pages 105–157 in The Future of Biblical Interpretation: Responsible Plurality in Biblical Hermeneutics. Edited by Stanley E. Porter and Matthew R. Malcolm. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013. Palmer, Richard E. Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. ‘Hermeneutics and Universal History’. Pages 111–146 in Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy. Edited by Brice R. Wachterhauser. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Pearson, Brook W. R. Corresponding Sense: Paul, Dialectic, and Gadamer. Biblical Interpretation 58. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pihlaja, Stephen. ‘“What About the Wolves?”: The Use of Scripture in YouTube Arguments’. LLit 25.3 (2016): 226–238. Plato. Philebus. Volume 9 of Plato in Twelve Volumes. Translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925. Plato. Platonis Opera. Edited by John Burnet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903. Porter, Stanley E. and Jason C. Robinson. Hermeneutics: An Introduction to Interpretive Theory. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011. Risser, James. Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-reading Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics. SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Sampson, Jeremy. Being Played: Gadamer and Philosophy’s Hidden Dynamic. Wilmington: Vernon, 2019. Scheibler, Ingrid. Gadamer: Between Heidegger and Habermas. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Kindle edition. Schmidt, Lawrence K., ed. The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995. Schneiders, Sandra M. The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture. 2nd ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999. Schneiders, Sandra M. ‘The Gospels and the Reader’. Pages 97–118 in The Cambridge Companion to the Gospels. Edited by Stephen C. Barton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Silverman, Hugh J., ed. Gadamer and Hermeneutics: Science, Culture, Literature. Continental Philosophy 4. New York: Routledge, 1991. Simms, Karl. Hans-Georg Gadamer. Routledge Critical Thinkers. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. Thiselton, Anthony C. The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description with Special Reference to Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein. Exeter: Paternoster, 1980.

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Thiselton, Anthony C. Hermeneutics: An Introduction. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. Vanhoozer, Kevin J. The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Doctrine. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005. Vanhoozer, Kevin J., James K. A. Smith, and Bruce Ellis Benson, eds. Hermeneutics at the Crossroads. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Vattimo, Gianni. Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy. Translated by David Webb. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Vattimo, Gianni The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. Translated by Jon R. Snyder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Vessey, David. ‘Gadamer and the Fusion of Horizons’. IJPS 17.4 (2009): 531–542. Vilhauer, Monica. Gadamer’s Ethics of Play: Hermeneutics and the Other. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010. Warnke, Georgia. Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason. Cambridge: Polity, 1987. Warnke, Georgia, ed. Inheriting Gadamer: New Directions in Philosophical Hermeneutics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Watkin, Christopher. Jacques Derrida. Great Thinkers. Phillipsburg: P&R, 2017. Weinsheimer, Joel C. Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Westphal, Merold. Review of Truth and Method, by Hans-Georg Gadamer. IJPR 8.1 (1977): 67–72. Westphal, Merold Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church. The Church and Postmodern Culture. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009. Young, Julian. German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Weber to Heidegger. London: Routledge, 2018.

2

Spiel

Richard Palmer likens Truth and Method to a musical fugue: ‘themes are brought in one by one until four, five, and six are going at once and all in harmony’.1 Different readers pick different dominant themes: many say fusion of horizons, some say Bildung (‘cultivation’), others say Wirkungsgeschichte (‘effective history’) and still others say dialogue.2 Such is the misunderstanding surrounding the fusion of horizons that Monica Vilhauer calls for a new focus on Spiel (‘play’, ‘game’).3 In fact, Gadamer’s best readers have long understood the importance of Spiel within Gadamer’s hermeneutics.4 For Bernstein, Spiel facilitates the move beyond the dichotomy of objectivism and subjectivism.5 Warnke likewise identifies Spiel as one way Gadamer makes meaning neither the author’s intention nor the reader’s experience but a shared language which is neither’s exclusive possession.6 To focus on Spiel is not to ignore the fusion of horizons but, to extend Palmer’s musical analogy, to listen carefully for the theme that ties each movement of the piece together. Gadamer’s phenomenology of Spiel That more readers have not immediately grasped the centrality of Spiel reflects in part a weakness in Gadamer’s presentation, which I have already noted (pages [19–21]). This, Gadamer worries, makes it unclear that the otherness of the Other is not overcome in understanding, but rather preserved. What I needed to do was go back to my concept of game once again and place it within an ontological perspective that had been broadened by the universal element of linguisticality. In other words, I needed to unite the game of language more closely with the game art plays, which I had designed as the model for hermeneutics. It was certainly obvious that one could think the universality of linguistic worldexperience under the model of playing a game. (RPJ 41–42) The key to linking the Spiel of art and the Spiel of language, Gadamer suggests, is to see the dialogic structure of question and answer inherent in all DOI: 10.4324/9781032646602-4

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understanding (RPJ 43). The subject matter raises its questions, the text and the interpreter interrogate each other and the work of art is never exhausted but returns in a circular motion with new questions and new answers (RPJ 44). These ideas are, as Warnke observes, suggestive rather than conclusive.7 This chapter seeks to fill out Gadamer’s suggestions, laying the theoretical groundwork for my reading of contested biblical texts in the second part of this book. I begin by situating Gadamer’s Spiel in conversation. I then trace the development of the concept through each movement of Truth and Method and into his later work. Along the way, I note some important questions that Gadamer leaves unanswered. I then supplement his phenomenology of Spiel with the help of a new conversation partner, economic game theory. This offers reasons for confidence that Spiel can lead to better, not just different, understandings. Gadamer’s phenomenology of Spiel emerges as a strong theoretical foundation for reading contested biblical texts, helping us to hold open the tension between the authority and relevance of Scripture. Spiel in conversation To avoid the kinds of misunderstandings I described in the previous chapter, it is helpful to consider three of Gadamer’s explicit sources for Spiel: Kant, Heidegger and Huizinga.8 I then distinguish Spiel from Wittgenstein’s language games, which are superficially similar but tend towards the kind of relativism that Gadamer avoids. Kant

While Gadamer takes issue with key elements of neo-Kantian philosophy, the relationship is more complex than a simple rejection.9 Gadamer begins his discussion of Spiel by expressing his desire to ‘free this concept of the subjective meaning that it has in Kant and Schiller’ (TM 101). However, his work is also positively influenced by Kant’s Critique of Judgment.10 Gadamer develops Kant’s idea of the free play of the subject’s imagination and the understanding which is responsible for pleasure in an object (TM 43).11 For Kant, aesthetic judgements are free because they are not beholden to any interest in an object that reason or the senses might demand.12 Yet Gadamer balances this Kantian heritage with the Greek concept of mimesis (RB 127), so that this state of Spiel becomes not the free play of the subject’s mental faculties communicated by the subjectivity of the genius, but something trans-subjective: When we speak of play [Spiel] in reference to the experience of art, this means neither the orientation nor even the state of mind of the creator or of those enjoying the work of art, nor the freedom of a subjectivity engaged in play [Spiel], but the mode of being of the work of art itself. (TM 101)13

Spiel 45 This distinguishes Gadamer from Schiller and post-Kantian aesthetics because, as Warnke observes, it grants the Spiel itself authority over its participants.14 The fact that Gadamer chooses aesthetics as his initial point of departure highlights the important influence of Kantian aesthetics on his project, as he develops Kant in a new direction to avoid the problems of German Idealism. Heidegger

Heidegger’s analysis of Spiel is rather limited, but Bert Olivier argues that he supplies an ‘authentic precursor’ to Gadamer’s aesthetics of Spiel in his rejection of the Hegelian notion that the struggle between world and earth ends in resolution or synthesis. There is a structural similarity, Olivier observes, between this struggle or contest and the inexhaustible motion of Spiel, which Gadamer sees as the true being of the work of art.15 Detsch also identifies a connection between Gadamer’s Spiel and Heidegger’s explanation of truth as a dynamic relationship of concealment and unconcealment.16 Furthermore, Detsch points to the use of Spiel in Heidegger’s Der Satz vom Grund (1957) to describe the situation of a human suspended between Being and Non-Being, concealment and unconcealment.17 Drew Hyland agrees that Gadamer’s interest in Spiel is deeply influenced by Heidegger’s treatment of Spiel.18 In turn, Heidegger is following Nietzsche in seeing the paradigmatic moment of Spiel as the child’s game: irrational, purposeless (or, rather, autotelic) and groundless (ab-grund).19 Heidegger, Hyland observes, employs this picture of Spiel to understand the Spiel of being with Dasein.20 This leads Heidegger to reverse the Aristotelian formula: a human being is not a being having language, for ‘it is not we who play with words, but the nature of language plays with us’.21 Gadamer makes similar connections between Spiel, language and being when he moves from the Spiel of art to the Spiel of language (page 57–9 below). Huizinga

Gadamer relies extensively on Johan Huizinga’s anthropological work in Homo Ludens,22 which finds a unified play impulse across cultures. As a scientific study, Huizinga’s work has aged poorly; it probably reveals more about the prejudices of early twentieth-century German anthropologists than it does about, for instance, ‘the rude and outlandish ritual of the African, American or Australian aborigines’ he describes.23 However, his theoretical approach to play is significant and informs Gadamer’s phenomenology. Huizinga’s method is not to isolate one aspect within culture but to show how, from language to commerce, the ‘great archetypal activities of human society are all permeated with play from the start’.24 All play has certain things in common:

46

Gadamer and genre theory Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promises the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.25

Huizinga’s definition seems, to Gadamer, to confirm his medial conception of Spiel, and thus ‘the primacy of play [Spieles] over the consciousness of the player [Spielenden]’ (TM 104; WM 110). The rules, Huizinga observes, are ‘freely accepted but absolutely binding’.26 Huizinga anticipates Gadamer in saying that anyone who deviates from the absolute order within the limits of the game in time and space is a spoil-sport.27 ‘It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport’.28 The ‘non-serious’ nature of Huizinga’s play is another way of describing the autotelic, effortless aspect of Spiel that Gadamer also notices. This does not deny play’s real-world stakes: even fights to the death can be play.29 Huizinga sees play as either a contest for something or as a representation of something.30 The latter aspect anticipates Gadamer’s own connection between Spiel and self-presentation, which I consider below. Huizinga notes that many of the words that describe play are borrowed from aesthetics: ‘tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, etc.’.31 Crucial to play is that it is ‘tense’,32 for there is some tension or uncertainty as to the outcome, and this provides a testing not only of prowess but also of the player’s moral quality, for the challenge is to achieve an uncertain goal without cheating. This aspect is what Gadamer calls ‘risk’. This element of challenge or risk is seen in verbal forms in the agonistic word battles of legal disputation, slanging matches and the sacred riddles of wisdom literature.33 It can also be seen in the less obviously agonistic impulse of poetry, which Huizinga thinks is ‘rooted’ in play: The rhythmical or symmetrical arrangement of language, the hitting of the mark by rhyme or assonance, the deliberate disguising of the sense, the artificial and artful construction of phrases – all might be so many utterances of the play spirit.34 The poet plays with words and images in an attempt to enchant, bringing the reader into the sacred game and providing the exhilaration of participation in a contest.35 Huizinga’s definition of poetry may be debatable, but the important thing to note is Huizinga’s intention to draw a strong connection between play, aesthetics and language.

Spiel 47 Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was already using ‘language games’ to describe mathematics in the 1930s.36 They appear in their most famous form as a model of language in Philosophical Investigations, Part 1 of which was completed by 1945 and published posthumously in 1953.37 They are thus part of the later Wittgenstein’s move from a designative view of language to something more relativistic. Language games are the diverse sets of rules by which subjects deploy words within various pre-given forms of life.38 While Huizinga proposes an essence of Spiel, for Wittgenstein the point is that each game is different; they share only ‘family resemblances’.39 Wittgenstein was working within the tradition of analytic philosophy, which may explain why Gadamer only came across his idea of ‘language games’ after the publication of Truth and Method (RPJ 19). The superficial similarities between the two ideas are clear; in the preface to the second edition Gadamer explains that Wittgenstein’s concept ‘seemed quite natural to me’ (TM xxxvi).40 The differences between Gadamer’s Spiel and Wittgenstein’s language games, however, are as significant as the similarities, as Chris Lawn and David Linge observe. Wittgenstein’s static language games are actually more like Gadamer’s Vorurteile or horizons than the ongoing process of Spiel, which for Gadamer is the mechanism by which these structures are put at risk and change.41 Wittgenstein’s language games are isolated from each other and disconnected from history, whereas for Gadamer there is always the possibility of translation and creativity.42 ‘Wittgenstein sees only a logical relationship between rules and application; Gadamer sees the hermeneutical circle in operation’.43 For Gadamer, the outcome of Spiel is continually being worked out; for Wittgenstein applying a rule holds open no possibility of different interpretations or risk of surprise.44 Wittgenstein’s games are, ultimately, anything but playful. Wittgenstein’s language games are, in a sense, a law unto themselves. They do not share in a common tradition that can bridge between them, and it is unclear how they evolve and change. Lawn concludes that it is this refusal to address the historical dimension of language games that brings Wittgenstein close to the linguistic relativism that Gadamer avoids.45 Wittgenstein’s language games are horizons with hard limits; Gadamer speaks of expansion, projection and fusion. For Gadamer, our perspectives are made intelligible by a common history and tradition; Wittgenstein expects no such ‘mutuality and reciprocity’ when we encounter the language games of the past.46 Wittgenstein, Lawn thinks, is right to reject referential theories of meaning, but the network of contingent and self-referential games risks collapsing into ‘complete linguistic autonomy and arbitrariness’.47 Even if Lawn overstates the risk of relativism in Wittgenstein’s language games,48 his analysis does highlight significant structural differences between Gadamer’s Spiel and Wittgenstein’s language games.

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The phenomenon of Spiel While Grondin calls Spiel a ‘metaphor’,49 within Gadamer’s method his analysis of Spiel carries more phenomenological freight than the general notion of metaphor might imply. In describing the Spiel phenomenon, Gadamer looks to uncover something true about the nature of being.50 Furthermore, Gadamer’s sense of the linguisticality of being means he can look for truth not only in the phenomenon of Spiel itself but also in the language we use for it (TM 103; PH 66). Even the apparently metaphorical senses of spielen – the Spiel of waves, the Spiel of light and Wortspiel (‘play on words’) – reveal something of the true structure of Spiel. Gadamer’s phenomenological analysis reveals six features of Spiel that are relevant for hermeneutics – its motion, the lack of goal or purpose, its priority over individual consciousness, its seriousness, the presence of contest and risk and its coherent identity despite constant variation. These give shape to the experience of reading contested biblical texts, keeping open the tension between the authority and relevance of Scripture. 1 Motion

Gadamer begins his analysis of Spiel by looking at a turn of phrase in ordinary language. The way many languages speak of the ‘play’ of the waves or light points to a common feature: a ‘to-and-fro movement that is not tied to any goal that would bring it to an end’ (TM 103). This, Gadamer insists, is not a mere metaphor, but points to something essential to all Spiele: the very fascination of the game [Spieles] for the playing consciousness [spielende Bewusstsein] roots precisely in its being taken up into a movement that has own its [sic] dynamic. (PH 66; ‘Mensch und Sprache’, KS 1.98) This insight can be traced back to Huizinga, who in his survey of the use of Spiel language identifies movement as essential to Spiel: that we ‘play’ music, for instance, appears to be an exception to his formal description of Spiel until we realise that it refers to the nimble movement of fingers on instruments.51 This ongoing motion is important to the experience of art. The way to understand the truth and relevance of art is by ‘tarrying’: as we sit with a work, there is a process which, like the Spiel of waves, has no end point and is never exhausted or transformed into a concept (as if we could ever finally say that this is what the work means). Rather, the work continually provokes us with new questions which lead to new answers (RPJ 44).52 Yet are these new answers necessarily better answers? Gadamer here does not give us any reason to believe that the circular motion is likely to lead to greater understanding, rather than spiral into new depths of misunderstanding. I discuss below how game theory confirms the intuition that repeated interactions can often, though not inevitably, lead to coordination.

Spiel 49 2 Without goal or purpose

Spiel is a ‘to-and-fro’ (TM 103) movement that is never complete, and so it can be described as ‘without goal or purpose’ (TM 105). What Gadamer is drawing out is the continual self-renewing aspect of Spiel: ‘The movement of playing [Spiel] has no goal that brings it to an end; rather, it renews itself in constant repetition’ (TM 103). The motion of Spiel never finds absolute rest: it can always keep playing. Gadamer uses the example of someone playing with a new word to try out endless new possibilities (PH 55). The purposelessness of Spiel is related to its nature as ‘self-presentation’. When an action is part of a Spiel, it serves no purpose other than to present itself, and thus its mode of being is ‘self-presentation’ (TM 108). As Warnke observes, ‘A game both determines the actions of its players and is nothing other than these actions themselves’.53 This purposelessness is related, somewhat paradoxically, to the seriousness of Spiel. In insisting on the purposelessness of a Spiel, Gadamer does not deny that people play games for all sorts of good reasons, such as recreation (TM 102). However, those subjective purposes in playing are suspended as the seriousness of Spiel takes over (page 50 below).54 3 Beyond individual consciousness

The motion of Spiel has implications for the consciousness of the participants. A cricket game only exists in the actions of players, but cricket is more than the players’ subjective intentions. Indeed, the game as a whole has priority over their actions. Gadamer uses the illustration of two men using a saw in a back-and-forth motion: when they are in rhythm together something comes to ascendency that is more than a merely subjective attitude (PH 53). As Ambrosio puts it: The experience of play, in which the participants are literally ‘overpowered’ and claimed by and for the movement into which they enter, offers us, Gadamer suggests, a more appropriate ontological paradigm for the way truth occurs in understanding than does the metaphysical model of evidential grounding, i.e. foundationalism in all its forms.55 This feature of Spiel is perhaps the most crucial to Gadamer’s project. Spiel is more than the subjective consciousness or the attitude of the players (TM 104). Rather, ‘all playing [Spielen] is a being-played [Gespieltwerden]’ (TM 106). As Warnke explains it, ‘Games and works of art both have an essential priority over the individuals that experience or play them. In playing a game, players enter a new and total environment’.56 This aspect of the phenomenon of Spiel enables Gadamer to move beyond the primacy of consciousness within Idealism, for ‘when one plays a game the game itself is never a mere object; rather, it exists in and for those who play it, even if one is only participating as “spectator”’ (RPJ 27).

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Again, Gadamer looks to language to corroborate this idea. He observes how certain expressions (in German at least) seem to make Spiel itself the subject: something is playing [spielt] at a particular time and place; something is going on [sich abspielt]; something is in play [im Spiele ist] (WM 99; TM 103). These examples, Gadamer says, reveal that the ‘primordial sense of playing [der ursprünglichste Sinn von Spielen] is the medial one’ (TM 103). Thus Spiel is not something a person does, but rather the subject of Spiel is Spiel itself. In this respect, Gadamer argues, the phenomenon of Spiel shares something fundamental with language: Play [Spiel] is more than the consciousness of the player, and so it is more than a subjective act. Language is more than the consciousness of the speaker; so also it is more than a subjective act. (TM xxxvi) None of this is to say that the subjectivity of the player is erased.57 Of course, the individual must choose to spielen (TM 107). Rather, the primacy of Spiel over the subjectivity of the individual releases him or her from the burden of taking initiative – a release that ‘is experienced subjectively as relaxation’ (TM 105). This, somewhat paradoxically, is described by Gadamer as the effortlessness of Spiel, for in Gadamer’s mind the burden of taking initiative is the ‘actual strain of existence’ (TM 105). This develops an observation from Gadamer’s early work on Plato, which takes playing a game as an example of the ‘mode of being’ of resting from producing (PDE 32). It also draws on Aristotle’s discussion of the relationship between work and rest.58 Gadamer observes that in Spiel the players are carried along with the tasks of the game, deliberately forgetting that it is not ‘in earnest’ (PDE 32). This shows the influence of Kantian aesthetics and the idea of the free play of the faculties. Removed from its Aristotelian and Kantian background, Gadamer’s description of Spiel as ‘effortlessness’ may seem forced. For my purposes, however, the important point is that in Gadamer’s phenomenological model, the subjective mental attitudes of the players are secondary to the spirit of each Spiel (TM 106). 4 Seriousness

That Gadamer sees an almost ‘sacred’ seriousness as essential to Spiel (TM 102) seems counterintuitive, for we normally think of games as being whimsical. Yet this is why his distinction between the subjective attitude of the participants and the being of the Spiel itself is important. The player knows that it is ‘only a game [Spiel]’ – but this knowledge must be suspended for the player to lose himself or herself in the Spiel; someone who does not take a Spiel seriously is, echoing Huizinga, a Spielverderber (‘spoilsport’: WM 108; TM 102). Once again, this observation goes back to Gadamer’s work on Plato, where he describes how the player must take the matter at

Spiel 51 hand seriously, making it the subject of a peculiar kind of care and effort even though it would not usually be taken as such ‘in earnest’ (PDE 32). The seriousness of Spiel is a function of the playing field, which is defined more by the rules and regulations of the Spiel itself than any extrinsic physical constraints (TM 107; RB 124).59 Inside its temporal and spatial bounds, the rules and objectives of Spiel take over.60 This voluntary limitation of freedom within these bounds is a fundamental structure within human culture (RB 124). ‘Play is less the opposite of seriousness than the vital ground of spirit as nature, a form of restraint and freedom at one and the same time’ (RB 130). 5 Contest and risk

What keeps Spiel interesting, and draws the subjectivity of the individual within its spell, is the element of risk or contest. This is confirmed by Hyland’s observation that risk-taking is one of the usual satellites of Spiel. Contest is a feature of the Spiel itself, and we do not necessarily require another player to compete with so long as there is an automatic countermove or element of contest (TM 105–6). Putting rubbish into my bin is a chore; seeing how many times I can successfully throw it in the bin from my desk is a Spiel: I do not know if I will be successful or not. In reading, similarly, we bring our Vorurteile into play; they are ‘put at risk’ – auf dem Spiele steht (TM 299; WM 304). There is every possibility that we will be ‘pulled up short by the text’ (TM 268) and so be forced to revise our Vorurteile. Game theory, as explained below, describes this risk in terms of payoffs. 6 Identity and variation

Every game of cricket is unique – and yet ‘cricket’ is always in some important sense the same Spiel. In fact, the changing nature of Spiel is essential: it would not be much fun if the outcome were always the same. But if each interpretation of an artwork is a unique event, can we even talk about an artwork? Hirsch believes that without the romanticist priority of the consciousness of the author, Gadamer’s autonomous literary work collapses into indeterminacy – how can a text’s meaning be self-identical and repeatable if it is also new every time?61 This is why Spiel is so important to Gadamer’s argument: the unity of a Spiel is not challenged by its iterations but exists in and through its variation over time.62 Hirsch knows that Gadamer sees meaning as self-identical without mere repetition, but he cannot understand how these two things can be held together: This seems to say that the meaning of the text is self-identical and repeatable and, in the next breath, that the repetition is not really a repetition and the identity not really an identity. This kind of reasoning stands as eloquent testimony to the difficulty and self-contradictions that

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Gadamer and genre theory confront Gadamer’s theory as soon as one asks the simple question: What constitutes valid interpretation.63

What Hirsch fails to consider here, however, is how Gadamer’s phenomenology of Spiel introduces, through the festival, a model of identity over time. This gives Spiel stability and self-consistency through its diverse iterations. There is no one ‘true’ festival – each year we recognise Christmas as Christmas, but no two Christmases are identical. The festival which comes around each year ‘is neither another festival nor a mere remembrance of the one that was originally celebrated’ (TM 123). It is neither a simple historical unity nor a re-enactment of some ‘original’ event, but rather it ‘exists only by always being something different’ and ‘has its being only in becoming and return’ (TM 123). The festival thus illuminates the temporal aspect of Spiel, which maintains its unity despite constant change. This understanding of the temporality of Spiel is crucial for Gadamer’s understanding of art. Gadamer insists that an enduring monument of art should not be approached as a timeless aesthetic object, abstracted from history and ‘life world’. Rather, the work is totally mediated in each encounter and thus is ‘contemporaneous with every age’ (TM 120–1). Art cannot avoid being transformed with each presentation. Yet however much the art is transformed (or even distorted), it ‘still remains itself’ (TM 122). The outcome of Spiel is thus closer to Hegel’s integration than Schleiermacher’s reconstruction (TM 164–69). However, this is not to say (as Hirsch seem to assume) that there are no criteria by which to judge the validity of a presentation. Each presentation of the work is obliged to ‘contain a relation to the structure itself and submit itself to the criterion of correctness that derives from it’ (TM 122). Spiel has a sacred seriousness (page 50 above), and within its bounds, there are rules that apply to constrain the outcome. As Gaetano Chiurazzi puts it, ‘Play – like experience – is an inextricable weaving of regulation and flexibility, necessity and accidentality, domination and liberty’.64 Even in the case where a presentation is a blatant distortion, it is a distortion of that identity which is ‘intended and judged to be the presentation of the structure’ (TM 122). This emphasis on performance appears to be on a trajectory towards reception theory, but it is not the same idea. While the Spiel of art generates a seemingly inexhaustible sequence of new meanings, this Spiel also has an integrity. This distinguishes his view, Gadamer thinks, from readerorientated views that deny the identity of the work (RPJ 44). In a footnote to the second edition of Truth and Method, Gadamer makes clear that he is not advocating the reception theory of Jauss, which he thinks comes too close to Derridean deconstruction (TM 120). Likewise, Warnke distinguishes Gadamer’s theory from both reader response theories and authorial intent theories, because he locates meaning in something shared, a ‘common view of a subject matter’, rather than any one individual experience.65 The phenomenology of Spiel helps explain the nature of this shared ‘in between’. The

Spiel 53 tradition of performance of a theatrical play is a creative stimulus for the possibilities of re-creation: a re-creation that is not arbitrary or ad-lib, nor a futile re-construction of the original genius, but guided by the meaning found in the work (TM 117–21). As Warnke puts it, ‘both the artist’s intentions and the viewer’s responses are intentions about and responses to the work of art itself’.66 Gadamer sees artistic representation as a total mediation, which implies an unsolvable tension; the representation of a work is ‘both bound and free’ (TM 119). The variations of performance are not to be regarded as ‘free and arbitrary’, but are in fact subject to the ‘supreme criterion of “right” representation’ (TM 118). Gadamer does not say where the boundary lines of ‘right’ representation fall, nor how far one can distort a presentation before it is no longer possible to see in it the same work of art. Presumably, he considers this a matter for phronesis rather than prescription. Indeed, I argue that there can be no universal answer to this question, for the task of the reader and the freedom they are granted in interpretation varies depending on the genre of the text, which I discuss in the next chapter. Each kind of Spiel has its own kind of seriousness. Leaving aside the issue of limits, it is clear in principle that the relationship between the work and its reception over time is neither arbitrary nor overdetermined, but like a festival has a coherent identity in its repetition. This coherence despite constant change is a promising model for how the authority and relevance of Scripture can remain in tension. Unfortunately, Warnke thinks, it is in linking this phenomenology of Spiel to the interpretation of works of art and literature that Gadamer’s remarks ‘confuse rather than illuminate’.67 The argument is indeed complex, and not always fully developed – Gadamer himself admits losing momentum in Part 3.68 In the remainder of this chapter, I will re-trace Gadamer’s steps as he builds the phenomenon of Spiel into a universal hermeneutic: from games, to the performative arts, to the plastic arts, to literature and finally to language itself. Establishing this link between the phenomenon of Spiel and literature is critical preparation for applying Spiel to contested biblical texts. From Spiel to language From theatre

Gadamer moves from the Spiel of games to its ‘true consummation’ and ‘ideality’ as art through the middle stage of the dramatic performance (TM 109–122). I explained above how the purposelessness of Spiel reflects its mode of being a kind of ‘self-presentation’ – it does not stand for something else. In a similar way, art cannot be detached from its self-presentation. A natural extension of this is the re-presentation of a work for spectators in theatrical performances. Introducing an audience effects a ‘transformation into structure’. It becomes an ergon (‘work’), which exists as pure presentation with its own autonomy.

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In the previous chapter, I situated Gadamer’s work within a longstanding conversation over aesthetics and method in German philosophy. The selfpresentation of drama helps answer the question of how art can be true, yet not the same kind of true as science. For Gadamer, the Spiel which is transformed into structure in a drama presents, not a copy of the real world, but the Aufhebung (‘raising up’) of untransformed reality into a ‘superior truth’ (TM 112–13). As di Cesare observes, Truth is at stake in art. And truth can not be dominated, controlled, or possessed, since it emerges only in an encounter: in the encounter with art that, because it speaks to us and invites us to linger, demands to be understood.69 Art presents something ‘more real than reality itself’.70 Here, Gadamer draws on the Greek concept of mimesis, a kind of imitation that involves not just a copying, but a making present of what is known (TM 113–16).71 Unlike designative models of the correspondence between eternal reality and human work, Chiurazzi notes, the self-presentation of the artwork is a transformation of ‘this world, turning it not into another world, but just into our world’.72 For Chiurazzi, this truth rivals the objectivity of the sciences ‘because it eludes the subject’s control and is therefore quite independent of it’.73 In art we encounter the thing itself. Richard Palmer describes how Gadamer develops this idea in his later essays. Truth ‘is what shows itself from itself in a process of phenomenological disclosure’, an idea Gadamer traces back to Plato and his notion of aletheia.74 This is why presentation and truth are linked: ‘Because what presents itself presents itself from itself as it is, this is the truth of the being of the work’.75 The absoluteness of art here is seen in that it possesses its own presentness and is able to overcome foreignness in space and time and still ‘draw one into its path’ … This absoluteness also testifies to the power of art to disclose, and thus to render present a truth of being.76 Gadamer brings the spectators into the structure of Spiel, but this is no subjectivism. Spiel always has priority over its players. Seeing theatrical art as self-presentation means that the art does not exist independently of the event in which it is experienced. There can be, therefore, no one canonical experience of a play. ‘In view of the finitude of our historical existence, it would seem that there is something absurd about the whole idea of a unique, correct interpretation’ (TM 120). It is not just that a perfect performance is unattainable: to insist on a single, correct experience of a musical or theatrical artwork, distilled from its ‘total mediation’ in a particular performance, fails in the ‘real task of interpretation’ and would ‘not do justice to the true binding nature of the work’ (TM 119).

Spiel 55 This transformation into structure has significant implications for the spectator or audience. It is no longer just an activity of the actors or the playwright, but rather, ‘Everybody asks instead what is supposed to be represented, what is “meant”. The players (or playwright) no longer exist, only what they are playing’ (TM 112). If art is an event of self-presentation, then it cannot be the object of a distanced ‘aesthetic consciousness’ because the viewer is a participant in Spiel (TM 116). ‘The spectator is an essential element in the kind of play [des Spiels] we call aesthetic’ (TM 128). By bringing spectators into Spiel, Gadamer denies them the posture of objective observers surveying an aesthetically differentiated work. Spectators cannot pretend to be objective because good art speaks truths that are relevant to us. The audience that devotes their attention to the matter at hand achieves a kind of self-forgetfulness while being wholly caught up in something else (TM 128–29). The proper role of the audience in art is not to focus on the aesthetic skill of the creator but to recognise in the art something we already know, in part, about us and our world (TM 114). For it is the truth of our own world – the religious and moral world in which we live – that is presented before us and in which we recognize ourselves. Just as the ontological mode of aesthetic being is marked by parousia, absolute presence, and just as an artwork is nevertheless self-identical in every moment where it achieves such a presence, so also the absolute moment in which a spectator stands is both one of self-forgetfulness and of mediation with himself. What rends him from himself at the same time gives him back the whole of his being. (TM 128) The Spiel of art makes a ‘claim’ on its audience – a demand that we wrestle with what it is saying about us.77 Aristotelian tragedy thus exemplifies the structure of aesthetic being, for the tragic is defined by its effect on the spectator (TM 129–34). To the plastic arts

The motion of Spiel is clearest in the dramatic arts, where the temporal dimension of the presentation is obvious. Yet Gadamer wants to show how this same self-presentation occurs in the ‘plastic’ arts too. A sculpture or painting ‘demands to be constructed by the viewer’ and ‘only manifests and displays itself when it is constituted in the viewer’ (RB 126). This is a significant step, because aesthetic consciousness normally approaches the work of art as object (TM 143–44). Rather than the mere repetition of an original genius in the mind of the viewer, aesthetic experience is recast as an event of being. By understanding art as an event rather than an object of aesthetic consciousness, Gadamer is (with Hegel) able to move beyond a view of art as ‘copy’; the presentation inherent in Spiel means that there is an immediacy to what is encountered in

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the picture: ‘The picture is an event of being – in it being appears, meaningfully and visibly’ (TM 144). Yet if the presence of a work of art is seen as the coming-to-presentation of being, then occasionality is not just an aspect of music and drama but is in fact a feature of all aesthetic objects (TM 144–59). Architecture, for example, reminds us of what is true of all art: a work has no presence without mediation in time and space. However much the frames and galleries of aesthetic experience attempt to extract art from its temporality, the picture always contains ‘an indissoluble connection with its world’ (TM 144). Occasionality lies in ‘what the work itself claims to mean’ – so a portrait ‘asks to be understood as a portrait’, as a depiction of a historical figure, whereas to ask about the identity of the artist’s model in another kind of painting is to miss the point (TM 145). Of course, interpreters can choose to respect art’s claims and connection to the world, or not, but either way ‘there resides in the picture an undetermined but still fundamentally determinable reference to something, which constitutes its significance’ (TM 146). To literature

Gadamer then moves from art to literature. Even a poem, Gadamer reminds us, needs a world – space and time – to exist (TM 157). The performative aspect of literature is present even in silent reading: Reading with understanding is always a kind of reproduction, performance, and interpretation. Emphasis, rhythmic ordering, and the like are part of wholly silent reading too. Meaning and the understanding of it are so closely connected with the corporeality of language that understanding always involves an inner speaking as well. (TM 160) Gadamer here draws on Augustine’s ‘inner word’ and the doctrine of the incarnation to suggest that what comes forth in speaking is not something secondary to the true, inner meaning, but rather meaning is ‘just what happens when speaking in words is performed’.78 The literary work is preserved and handed down to us by tradition, which thus ‘brings its hidden history into every age’ (TM 161). We see again here just how much faith Gadamer puts in the power of tradition: Nothing is so purely the trace of the mind as writing, but nothing is so dependent on the understanding mind either. In deciphering and interpreting it, a miracle takes place: the transformation of something alien and dead into total contemporaneity and familiarity. … People who can read what has been handed down in writing produce and achieve the sheer presence of the past. (TM 163–4)

Spiel 57 The mistake of historical consciousness is to ignore the normative claim on us that comes with this tradition: the reason certain old texts (like Hamlet) are preserved and read today is not just historical curiosity, but because they still have something to say to us. Gadamer will return to this example of ‘classical’ works in Part 2, where he notes their ‘fundamentally unlimited’ ability to speak directly to new situations, an ability that reveals something of the nature of all historical activity (TM 290). In Appendix 2 of Truth and Method, Gadamer clarifies that this ability, like the occasionality of the portrait, depends on how the text is made. What the text says today ‘must appear as a meaningful element within a work’s total claim to meaning’ and not as something that the historicist finds ‘hidden behind the work’ (TM 497–99). The goal is not to explain away the whole work by reconstructing the author’s historical situation. ‘A play in which everything is completely motivated creaks like a machine’, whereas part of the success of Hamlet, like any ‘fruitful fable or myth’, is that it ‘does not tell the spectator everything’ (TM 498). If we see a political intention in leaving things open, as Carl Schmitt does when he speaks of the taboo of the Queen, then we are failing to recognize the nature of artistic play [Spiel], namely the playing itself out [Sichausspielen durch] by trying out possibilities. The self-playing-out of play [Das Sichausspielen durch des Spiels] does not take place in a closed world of aesthetic appearance, but as a constant integration in time. The productive ambiguity that constitutes the essence of a work of art is only another way of expressing the play’s [des Spiels] essential characteristic of continually becoming a new event. (TM 499) Rather than attempt Schmitt’s complete reconstruction of the author’s situation, Gadamer shifts our focus to the Spiel-event that is given structure by the text itself. The ambiguities in the work are not defects to be resolved by getting behind the text, but part of what makes the work a classic. This example of Gadamer briefly interpreting a literary text is instructive.79 It demonstrates, against Hirsch, that seeing meaning as an event involving application does not collapse into indeterminacy or frustrate Shakespeare’s intention. Shakespeare himself is not excluded from this event, for indeed it is ‘the play [Spiel] he has written’ that ‘conceals his partisanship’ because he had to, Gadamer imagines, if he ‘wanted to reach his public’ regardless of their partisanship (TM 498). To language

Literature provides a bridge between the Spiel of art and the Spiel of language. Literature is not fundamentally different from all writing

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(TM 163). Spiel is a reality for all texts, because like art they must be ‘perceived by the spectator in order to be actualized’ (TM 164). Gadamer therefore concludes near the end of Part 1 that ‘Aesthetics has to be absorbed into hermeneutics’ (TM 164). This means that the dynamic of Spiel that characterises the experience of the work of art must also characterise all hermeneutical encounters. Indeed the continual motion of Spiel that characterises the event of drama turns out to describe the process of understanding in all human sciences (TM 499). In every act of interpretation, tradition is put at risk and tested in the ceaseless movement of new understanding. This last crucial connection between Spiel and language is, however, the one Gadamer later admitted he covered too briefly in Truth and Method. Perhaps di Cesare is right that ‘the milieu of 1960 was not yet ready’ to locate the meaning of literature in its presentation to a reader.80 Whatever the reason, Spiel largely disappears from Gadamer’s argument in Part 2 and is picked up again only briefly in the third last paragraph of Truth and Method, as he compares the presence of truth in language with the presence of beauty in the beautiful: What we mean by truth here can best be defined again in terms of our concept of play [Begriff des Spieles]. The weight of the things we encounter in understanding plays itself out [ausspielt] in a linguistic event, a play of words [ein Spiel mit Worten] playing around [umspielen] and about what is meant. Language games [Sprachliche Spiele] exist where we, as learners – and when do we cease to be that? – rise to the understanding of the world. Here it is worth recalling what we said about the nature of play [des Spiels], namely that the player’s [des Spielenden] actions should not be considered subjective actions, since it is, rather, the game [das Spiel] itself that plays [spielt], for it draws the players [die Spieler] into itself and thus itself becomes the actual subjectum of the playing [der Spielbewegung]. (TM 490; WM 493) The same structure of Spiel that Gadamer identified in the experience of a work of art is now identified in all hermeneutic encounters: those who understand find themselves already participating in an event, having lost their self-possession, being subject to a claim made upon them, and moving in an endless, circular motion of question and answer (TM 490–91). Someone who understands is always already drawn into an event through which meaning asserts itself. So it is well founded for us to use the same concept of play [Begriff des Spiels] for the hermeneutical phenomenon as for the experience of the beautiful. … What we encounter in the experience of the beautiful and in understanding the meaning of tradition really has something of the truth of play [der Wahrheit des Spiels] about

Spiel 59 it. In understanding we are drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were, too late, if we want to know what we are supposed to believe. (TM 490) The paragraph that follows, which concludes Truth and Method, makes clear the relationship between the phenomenon of Spiel and the hermeneutical experience. The event of Spiel means that there is no understanding that is free in advance from all Vorurteile, ‘however much the will of our knowledge must be directed toward escaping their thrall’ (TM 490). The human sciences are no less scientific for the recognition that in such knowledge ‘the knower’s own being comes into play [Spiel]’, but rather this is the very basis of their ‘humane significance’ (TM 491). Rather than a method that purports to objectivity, what we need to guarantee truth is a ‘discipline of questioning and inquiring’ (TM 491). Spiel and the hermeneutical experience

With this conclusion about the Spiel of language in mind, it is possible to read Spiel back into Part 2, which contains Gadamer’s description of the hermeneutical experience in the human sciences. Whereas in Part 1, Gadamer talks about the Spiel of art, in Part 2, he describes understanding primarily in terms of intersubjective conversation, dialogue and the dialectic of question and answer. That he is talking about the same fundamental structure is clear by the opening of Part 3: ‘We say that we “conduct” a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner’ (TM 383).81 Once this implicit link with Spiel is recognised, other connections follow. The hermeneutical circle, which Gadamer redefines as ‘the interplay [das Ineinanderspiel] of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter’ (TM 293; WM 298), is another way of describing the ceaseless motion of Spiel. The logical structure of the question opens us to the truth claims of our dialogue partner, and in this dialogue with tradition ‘our own prejudice is properly brought into play [Spiel] by being put at risk [auf dem Spiele steht]. Only by being given full play [ausspelt] is it able to experience the other’s claim to truth and make it possible for him to have full play [ausspielen] himself’ (TM 299; WM 304). Phronesis (‘practical wisdom’) in application (TM 307–24) is like the skill of the player: more than simply applying certain general rules to the specific situation, it is knowing what is required at that moment. The fusion of horizons that occurs in application (TM 300–7) shares the same relationship to time as the artwork or festival; like Spiel it maintains an essential unity despite existing in a continual renewal. The scientific claim to objectivity, in contrast, ‘keeps oneself out of play [aus dem Spiele]’ (TM 335). Each element of the wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein identified in the previous chapter can thus be understood as an aspect or implication of Spiel – wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein is really another way of saying Spielbewusstsein.

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Later works

In his later works, Gadamer continues to explore the phenomenon of Spiel as a way of understanding language. Language, he writes, is a ‘game of interpretation that we are engaged in every day. In this game nobody is above and before all the others; everybody is at the center, is “it” in this game’ (PH 32). Spiel turns out to be the form of all dialogue (PH 66). In speaking with each other, there is an attempt to engage with each other’s world, and when this is successful the result is a delightful self-forgetfulness and enrichment as the Spiel of giving and taking takes place: It cannot be denied that in actual dialogue of this kind something of the character of accident, favor, and surprise – and in the end, of buoyancy, indeed, of elevation – that belongs to the nature of the game [des Spieles] is present. (PH 57; KS 1.79) In true dialogue, the participants are taken up into the movement of Spiel, with their moves and countermoves determined by the law of the subject matter in a motion that is never finished (PH 66). There is thus a structural relationship between dialogue and Spiel (PH 66), as Robert Sokolowski makes clear: Gadamer uses the analogy with games to illustrate the force of the conversation. The game too has its own logic and substantiality and the players are established as such by the game that they play; the catcher is the catcher and the shortstop a shortstop because of the logic of baseball and the actions permitted by it. The players are not individual agents who are only accidentally related by the activity of the game.82 In his ‘Reflections on My Philosophical Journey’, Gadamer picks up this question again: ‘The question, then, is how the playing of the language-game, which is for each person also the playing of the world-game, goes together with playing the artwork-game’ (RPJ 43). Gadamer’s solution is to show that once a language is acquired, linguisticality is irrevocably incorporated into all hermeneutical activity, and thus both artwork and literature contain a dialectic of question and answer (RPJ 43). The Spiel of question and answer has multiple dimensions: the subject matter raises questions for us, and the interpreter and the text engage in a back-and-forth motion of questioning. Gadamer’s distinctive understanding of language helps him, unlike Wittgenstein, to address how we learn and grow through Spiel. Gadamer describes how speakers ‘must enter into the game of language so that communication can begin, even where various viewpoints stand irreconcilably over against each other’ (RPJ 29). However, our knowledge of the world is forever shaped by our first experience of language, which creates a ‘preschematization

Spiel 61 of possible experience’, and so ‘Growing into a language, then, is a path to knowledge of the world’ (RPJ 29). The players in this Spiel, therefore, are always engaged in the rhetorical task of finding a common language – ‘our’ language – which can bring something into words, and thus into the common consciousness (RPJ 29, 36). Unanswered questions Throughout Truth and Method and into his later works, Gadamer has drawn an unbroken phenomenological line through the Spiel of light, performance, artwork, literature and finally language. Along the way, however, Gadamer leaves two unanswered questions. First, are there limits to responsible Spiel, or is every interpretation as good as the next? ‘Can we still talk of understanding’, Gadamer himself asks, ‘if we are as free with the meaning of the text as the performing artist with his score?’ (TM 64). The strong ethical overtones of ideas like phronesis and Bildung suggest that Gadamer believes in some ideal of responsible reading. Gadamer’s intuition throughout seems to be that different kinds of text imply different hermeneutical limits. He observes that identifying the subject of a portrait matters, whereas in other paintings the identity of the model does not; there is something about Hamlet that invites us to look beyond the immediate political context. Yet Gadamer provides no structural place for these differing norms and limits within his description of the hermeneutical experience. In the next chapter, I turn to genre theory to introduce more granularity to his account of Spiel. Second, is there any reason to think that the ceaseless motion of Spiel will spiral towards better understanding rather than misunderstanding? I discussed above how Gadamer treats Spiel not as a metaphor but as a phenomenon to be explored experientially and linguistically. Other disciplines – Huizinga’s anthropology, for example – rightly inform this phenomenological analysis. In the final part of this chapter, I turn to economics to explain how Spiel can lead to coordination with the other. Game theory During the same period when Gadamer was using Spiel to develop his philosophical hermeneutics, a new model for understanding strategic decisions was being developed within economics.83 Game theory emerged through work in the 1920s by Émile Borel and John von Neumann, followed in 1944 by the publication of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern.84 It furnished economics with a new, mathematical way of describing economic behaviour within noncentrally organised economies using games and the rules that define them.85 Game theory seems incompatible in some ways with Gadamer’s philosophy: rational Cartesian subjects make free strategic choices to maximise their

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profit;86 game trees model an unmediated objective reality;87 its games are not ‘purposeless’ in Gadamer’s sense, but simulate the final outcomes of real economic decisions.88 Yet there is a ‘neglected branch’89 of game theory that does intersect usefully with Gadamer’s phenomenology, giving reason for confidence that reading contested biblical texts can lead to better, not just different, understandings. David Lewis, following Schelling, defines games broadly as ‘problems of interdependent decision’, within which there is a spectrum from games of pure conflict to games of pure coordination.90 Agents in pure coordination games (sometimes referred to as ‘common-payoff’ games or ‘team games’) do not have conflicting interests, but instead share the same payoffs depending on the combined outcome of their independent choices.91 For example, which side of the road to drive on is a classic coordination problem, in which the payoffs for each driver depend on the cooperation (or ‘congruity’) of other drivers.92 If I keep left, and you do too, then the payoff for each of us is positive. This is a ‘pure strategy Nash equilibrium’, meaning that each player’s prescribed strategy is a ‘best response’ to the strategy of the other.93 Having safely passed each other on the road, neither of us will wish we chose differently. Some games are played with imperfect information: we do not see each other’s choice until it is too late. We must decide based on our assessment of the probability of the other driver choosing left or right. Communication, repetition and history are factors that can help give rise to a mutually beneficial outcome, as players choose between two or more equilibria.94 Imagine playing this game in Sweden on the morning of 3 September 1967, when Swedes changed overnight from driving on the left to the right.95 I know, based on an extensive public information campaign, that as of 5 am this morning the new convention is to drive on the right side. If you have also been watching the news, then we are likely to coordinate – and after a few days, a reliable new convention is formed. In such games, convention is often invoked as a background factor that helps players choose consistent strategies.96 But Lewis thinks that regularities in the achievement of coordination equilibria can even explain how a convention arises in the first place. Past regularity helps agents achieve coordination in new analogous problems, and each new action in conformity with this regularity adds to the strength of the experience of general conformity: ‘we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here’.97 Therefore, he defines conventions as ‘regularities in behavior, sustained by an interest in coordination and an expectation that others will do their part’.98 By seeing convention as both the precondition and the result of communication, Lewis essentially derives the hermeneutical circle from the first principles of economics. Lewis argues that the use of a particular language by a population can be explained using this framework: it is something individuals do in conformity with a convention of ‘truth’, with an expectation that everyone else in the population will too, based on their common interest in successful

Spiel 63 communication.99 Like Gadamer, Lewis keeps a close connection between ‘truth’ and language in his model: the meaning of a sentence in a possible language is defined in relation to a set of possible worlds.100 A convention of truthfulness in a population, or language, assigns to a particular utterance on a particular occasion a modal value and a true state of affairs in a possible world.101 Lewis observes that conventions can begin like fires, either deliberately or by chance.102 Prior verbal agreement is one way that an initial coordination equilibrium is arrived at, but salience and precedent can also produce mutual expectations which then solidify into convention.103 A scarecrow placed up to its chest in quicksand may be able to create a coordination equilibrium without any precedent or prior collusion: I may not know precisely the intention of the person who placed it there, but the salience of the action will mean I think twice before stepping out and joining it.104 In the decades since Lewis’ work on convention, a field combining game-theoretical and evolutionary approaches to problems of logic and linguistics has developed substantially. Robin Clark argues that game theory analyses help move from methodological solipsism to linguistic paradigms that see meaning as arising in social networks.105 Lewis’ account of language conventions based on cooperative game theory provides several points of corroboration for Gadamer’s intuitions about Spiel. Just as Gadamer recognises the occasionality inherent in understanding a selfpresenting structure, Lewis assigns meaning to sentences based on the occasion of their utterance.106 Lewis shares the perspectival realism implicit in Gadamer’s view of horizons, describing how communication is possible even though our language conventions are at best a tight cluster that approaches the limiting case of full unity.107 When misunderstandings do arise players can – ‘assuming a little goodwill’ – resolve them by looking for overlap between their slightly different language strategies and working from there to resolve the ambiguity.108 This confirms Gadamer’s historicist understanding of Spiel, as distinct from Wittgenstein’s isolated language games. It also anticipates the overlapping relationships between relatively stable genres which will be discussed in the next chapter. As well as corroborating Gadamer’s view of language, game theory helpfully complements his hermeneutics by pointing to the significance of payoffs and repetition. Payoffs

Payoffs help explain the link between rules, risk, seriousness and the priority of Spiel over the subjectivity of the players. The rules of the Spiel define a set of payoffs that are mutually determined by the actions of the players. The outcome of the Spiel is at risk because it depends on a combination of factors that is beyond the control of any one player. Within the Spiel, the payoffs are what matters. This seriousness is what entices subjects into something

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beyond their own subjectivity, letting Spiel take priority over them. Someone who cares about the payoffs will need to behave in certain ways, taking into account the rules, the actions of other players and their strategic perception of the probable actions of other players. Payoffs offer a way of talking about the relative strengths of an interpretation without falling back on the idea of a single valid interpretation. Infinite interpretations of a text may be possible, but the payoffs associated with each will not be equal. If there is one reading of a poem that appears more productive – which seems to connect more of the images in a satisfactory way, for instance – then this reading may be considered a Paretooptimal strategy profile.109 In their reading of 2 Samuel 11, Menahem Perry and Meir Sternberg observe that readers prefer the hypothesis that ‘organizes the maximum elements in the most cohesive pattern’ and ‘presents things in the most interesting light’.110 Thus the proof of the correctness of our approach to this story is entirely practical: reading with close attention to details and subtleties, presupposing the existence of the text’s semantic substance, ‘pays off’ [
! 
] better than any other kind of reading, because it delivers the story in the richest, clearest, most complex, complete and organized manner.111 Others might, of course, disagree with Perry and Sternberg on this selfevaluation, or even on their choice of criteria. Yet being specific about the payoffs being maximised offers a way of making value judgements about interpretations at a more granular level, without requiring there to be one ‘right’ or ‘valid’ meaning of a text. The ability to recognise different payoffs for different types of texts will become especially important in the next chapter when we consider what different kinds of texts ask of their readers. Coordination with a speaking situation might be a positive payoff for some texts, but not with others. Repetition

Gadamer’s intuition that the iterative nature of Spiel can lead to greater understanding is confirmed by game theory’s account of the development of conventions. Game theory quantifies the force that repetition can exert within our strategic interactions: generally, coordination becomes more likely the more times we play the same game. In Lewis’ model, the initial conditions that generate a coordination equilibrium can be quite weak, or even random: agreement, precedent or salience are all capable of generating the spark that starts the fire.112 The strength of convention depends not on those initial conditions but on repetition. Assuming coordination has payoffs for everyone, repetition can create the very common knowledge conventions that communication requires:

Spiel 65 Once the process gets started, we have a metastable self-perpetuating system of preferences, expectations, and actions capable of persisting indefinitely.113 Game theory thus explains Gadamer’s intuition that the repetitive motion of Spiel can be a force towards shared understanding.114 Conclusion I argued in this chapter that Spiel is the underdeveloped centre of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, bringing together his description of the hermeneutical experience with his accounts of aesthetics and language. It allows us to see understanding as a ceaseless motion, in which Vorurteile are really placed at risk (auf dem Spiele stehen). I then turned to economic game theory to supplement Gadamer’s phenomenology by providing reasons to think that repeated strategic interactions might in practice lead to greater coordination of understanding. Game theory also highlights payoffs as a means of evaluating the outcome of a Spiel. Gadamer seems to have assumed that some understandings are better than others, but he gave no criteria for weighing them. We might now say that a reading is better because it maximises certain payoffs. Yet which payoffs are relevant? When interpreting a royal edict, strict coordination with the speaking situation is encouraged by payoffs like avoiding decapitation.115 But in poetry the better reading might be the one that pays less attention to the originating horizon and offers greater resonance within the situation of the reader. The game-theoretical accounts of language discussed above typically consider understanding at the level of national language or individual utterances. Now we must reckon with the important level in-between these. There are different kinds of Spiel, with different rules and different payoffs. To account for this, and as one final piece of theoretical groundwork, I turn to modern genre theory. Notes 1 Richard E. Palmer, ‘Ritual, Rightness, and Truth in Two Late Works of HansGeorg Gadamer’, in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn, The Library of Living Philosophers (Peru, IL: Open Court, 1997), 547. 2 Thiselton highlights the fusion of horizons: Horizons, 43. Warnke concludes by highlighting Bildung: Gadamer, 173–74. Gjesdal sees a move from reflection to dialogue and Bildung: Legacy, 3. Hans-Helmuth Gander makes Wirkungsgeschichte central: ‘Between Strangeness and Familiarity: Towards Gadamer’s Conception of Effective History’, RP 34 (2004): 125. 3 Vilhauer, Gadamer’s Ethics of Play, xiii. See also Monica Vilhauer, ‘Beyond the “Fusion of Horizons”: Gadamer’s Notion of Understanding as “Play”’, PhT (2009): 359–64; Monica Vilhauer, ‘Gadamer and the Game of Understanding: Dialogue-Play and Opening to the Other’, in The Philosophy of Play, ed. Emily Ryall, Wendy Russell, and Malcolm MacLean (London: Routledge, 2013), 75–86.

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4 Linge, editor’s introduction, PH xxiii, xxxi-xxxii; Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, 40, 92, 57; Thiselton, Horizons, 298–300; Richard Detsch, ‘A NonSubjectivist Concept of Play: Gadamer and Heidegger versus Rilke and Nietzsche’, PhT 29.2–4 (1985): 163; Jeff Mitscherling, ‘Hegelian Elements in Gadamer’s Notions of Application and Play’, MW 25 (1992): 65–6; Philippe Eberhard, ‘Gadamer and Theology’, IJST 9.3 (2007): 298–99; Donatella Di Cesare, Gadamer: A Philosophical Portrait, trans. Niall Keane (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 48; Jeff Malpas, ‘Gadamer, Davidson, and the Ground of Understanding’, in Gadamer’s Century, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 212; Zdenko Š. Širka, ‘Gadamer’s Concept of Aesthetic Experience as a Possibility for the Orthodox Biblical Theology’, RESS 6.3 (2014): 387n60; Lauren Swayne Barthold, ‘If Enhancement Is the Answer, What Is the Question?’, in Inheriting Gadamer, ed. Warnke, 227; Sampson, Being Played. 5 Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 122. 6 Warnke, Gadamer, 48. 7 Warnke, Gadamer, 48, cited in Vilhauer, Gadamer’s Ethics of Play, xiii, xix(n7). 8 Eugen Fink’s phenomenology of Spiel appeared in the same year as WM: Eugen Fink, Play as Symbol of the World: And Other Writings, trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). Gadamer clarifies several points of difference: TM 490; Hans-Georg Gadamer, review of Spiel als Weltsymbol, by Eugen Fink, Philosophische Rundschau 9.1 (1961): 1–8. Frederick Burwick accuses Gadamer of borrowing from Herder’s Kalligone: ‘The Plagiarism of Play: The Unacknowledged Source of Gadamer’s Ontological Argument in Truth and Method’, PCP 25.1–2 (1990): 60–8. The provenance of Gadamer’s concept is sufficiently explained by his explicit sources, so any parallels with this more obscure work are probably not an argument for his borrowing. 9 See Gadamer’s reply to Francis J. Ambrosio, ‘The Figure of Socrates in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics’, in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Hahn, 274. 10 RB 127; Kant, Judgment, §§5, 9 and 16. Thanks to my Kantian friend Dr Andrew Cooper for persuading me of this point. 11 See Paul Guyer, ‘Free Play and True Well-Being: Herder’s Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics’, JAAC 65.4 (2007): 364. 12 Kant, Judgment, §§5 and 9. 13 Similarly RB 128: ‘So much is it common to all that even the artist enjoys no privileged status over those who experience his work. Precisely because he has expressed what he has to say, he keeps back nothing for himself, but communicates himself without reserve. His work speaks for him’. 14 Warnke, Gadamer, 49. 15 Bert Olivier, ‘Gadamer, Heidegger, Play, Art and the Appropriation of Tradition’, SAJP 21.4 (2002): 247. 16 Detsch, ‘Non-Subjectivist’, 169. 17 Detsch, ‘Non-Subjectivist’, 170. 18 Drew A. Hyland, The Question of Play (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 87–8. 19 Hyland, Play, 84. 20 Hyland, Play, 84. 21 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, cited in Hyland, Play, 106. 22 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1955).

Spiel 67 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

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Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 26. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 4. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 13. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 28. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 11. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 30–1, 61. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 13. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 9. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 11. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 68, 84, 110. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 132. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 132–34. Hans Sluga, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein: Life and Work’, in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluga (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17–19. Editors’ introduction, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), vi(e). Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §23 (11e). Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §67 (32e). However, Gadamer’s 1963 assessment of Wittgenstein finds him too negative, preferring a phenomenological approach (PH 176–76). Linge, introduction to PH xxxv; Lawn, Wittgenstein, 19, 40. Linge, introduction to PH xxxviii; Lawn, Wittgenstein, 26. Lawn, Wittgenstein, 28. Lawn, Wittgenstein, 133. Lawn, Wittgenstein, xv–xvi, 85. Lawn, Wittgenstein, 94, 98. Lawn, Wittgenstein, 85. Cf. Robert Vinten, Wittgenstein and the Social Sciences: Action, Ideology and Justice (Anthem Press, 2020), 49–66. Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, 39. Linge rightly calls Spiel and dialogue ‘two fine pieces of phenomenological analysis’: introduction to PH xix. Gadamer himself insists that his analyses of Spiel and of language ‘are intended in a purely phenomenological sense’: TM xxxvi. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 42. This parallels Kant’s lingering over the beautiful: Kant, Judgment, §12. Warnke, Gadamer, 50. Indeed Gadamer thinks focusing on the extrinsic purposes of art (like pleasure or escapism) misunderstands the experience of Spiel and reduces us to exploited consumers of the culture industry: RB 129. Ambrosio, ‘Socrates’, 261–62. Warnke, Gadamer, 48. Hyland rejects Gadamer’s decentring of the intentional subjectivity of each player in favour of the game itself: Play, 88–9. Unlike Hyland, however, Gadamer is not offering a philosophy of sport. He never erases the players’ identities or downplays the value of self-knowledge: Warnke, Gadamer, 40; Rudolf Bernet, ‘Gadamer on the Subject’s Participation in the Game of Truth’, RM 58.4 (2005): 795. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, revised ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), 10.6.6. Cf. ‘limitation’ in Hyland’s philosophy of sport: Play, 64.

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60 Linge notes that the game has its own Spielraum, in which its movement and aims can be cut off from the rest of the world: introduction to PH xxiii. 61 Hirsch, Validity, 249, 252. 62 For a more radical application of Spiel to the parables see John Dominic Crossan, ‘A Metamodel for Polyvalent Narration’, Semeia 9 (1977): 139. 63 Hirsch, Validity, 252. 64 Gaetano Chiurazzi, ‘Truth Is More than Reality: Gadamer’s Transformational Concept of Truth’, RP 41.1 (2011): 63. 65 Warnke, Gadamer, 48. 66 Warnke, Gadamer, 49. 67 Warnke, Gadamer, 52. 68 Grondin, ‘Composition’, 37. 69 Di Cesare, Portrait, 65. 70 Di Cesare, Portrait, 49. 71 In contrast, Crossan opposes mimesis and play: ‘Polyvalent’, 125. 72 Chiurazzi, ‘Truth’, 68, 71. 73 Chiurazzi, ‘Truth’, 63. 74 Palmer, ‘Ritual’, 540. Palmer thinks Gadamer’s Platonism takes him beyond Heidegger’s notion of unconcealment (544). 75 Palmer, ‘Ritual’, 541. 76 Palmer, ‘Ritual’, 546. 77 Here Gadamer makes a link between the experience of total mediation through art and dialectical theology (TM 127). The sacrament or sermon is also a kind of total mediation, and its unyielding contemporaneity with us demands, Kierkegaard would say, that the believer perform the task of bringing together the redeeming act and his own present (TM 127–28). 78 Günter Figal, ‘The Doing of the Thing Itself: Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Ontology of Language’, in Dostal, Companion, 102–25. The priority of speech over writing is critiqued by Deborah Cook, ‘Reflections on Gadamer’s Notion of Sprachlichkeit’, PhL 10.1 (1986): 89. 79 See also Gadamer’s later work on Celan’s poetry: GOC. 80 Di Cesare, Portrait, 64–5. 81 See also PH 66; KS 1.98. Vilhauer fuses this connection in her term ‘dialogueplay’: ‘Dialogue-Play’, 79. 82 Robert Sokolowski, ‘Gadamer’s Theory of Hermeneutics’, in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Hahn, 225–26. 83 John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, sixtieth-anniversary ed. (1944; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1. 84 Martin J. Osborne, An Introduction to Game Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1–2; E. Roy Weintraub, ed., Toward a History of Game Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 5. Wittgenstein was involved in the early development of game theory: Mirowski, ‘What Were They Trying to Do’, in Toward a History of Game Theory, ed. Weintraub, 113, 25. 85 Von Neumann and Morgenstern, Games, 49. Cf. TM 106–7. 86 Von Neumann and Morgenstern, Games, 1–12; Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically (New York: Norton, 1991), 85. 87 Von Neumann and Morgenstern, Games, 32–3. 88 Von Neumann and Morgenstern, Games, 1. 89 David K. Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 3. 90 Lewis, Convention, 13–14. 91 Lewis, Convention, 14; Kevin Leyton-Brown and Yoav Shoham, Essentials of Game Theory (Williston, VT: Morgan & Claypool, 2008), 4. Coordination

Spiel 69

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

103 104 105 106 107

108 109 110 111

112 113 114 115

equilibria sometimes fail to obtain the maximum socially beneficial outcome, as in the infamous ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ in which two prisoners can reduce their sentence only by betraying the other: Joel Watson, Strategy: An Introduction to Game Theory (New York: Norton, 2002), 87. Lewis, Convention, 6; Leyton-Brown and Shoham, Essentials, 4; Watson, Strategy, 80. Watson, Strategy, 83. Watson, Strategy, 80–1; Dixit and Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically, 78–9. ‘Switch to the Right’, TIME 90.11 (1967): 43. See e.g. Dixit and Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically, 78. Lewis, Convention, 42. Lewis, Convention, 208. Lewis, Convention, 177. Lewis, Convention, 171. Lewis, Convention, 173, 177. Lewis, Convention, 88. Schelling similarly used the idea of salience to explain how objects are determined as the focal point of discourse, and this has been taken up by linguists to explain how common knowledge can arise which gives background to language games: Robin Clark, Meaningful Games: Exploring Language with Game Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 196. Lewis, Convention, 52. This source of common knowledge is sometimes described as self-evidence, which can be drawn from community membership, physical copresence or linguistic copresence: Clark, Meaningful Games, 194. Lewis, Convention, 158–9. Clark, Meaningful Games, 31, 279–80, 331–43. This work has concentrated on semantic meaning and rarely considers the problems of hermeneutics. Lewis, Convention, 163. Lewis, Convention, 201. Perspectival realism is Lawn’s designation, following Wachterhauser: Wittgenstein, 121. Overlapping languages give scope for individuality, flexibility in adapting to new situations, and help for children learning language: Lewis, Convention, 201–2. Lewis, Convention, 201–2. That is, the set of decisions that leads to the best outcome for every player: Leyton-Brown and Shoham, Essentials, 9. Menahem Perry and Meir Sternberg, ‘The King through Ironic Eyes: Biblical Narrative and the Literary Reading Process’, Poetics Today 7.2 (1986): 279. *) Perry and Sternberg, ‘' (' &%$
$ #!
" ’, Hasifrut 1.2 (1976): 292. This translation is from Yairah Amit, Reading Biblical Narratives: Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible, trans. Yael Lotan (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 13. The English version of the article (‘The King through Ironic Eyes’) omits this paragraph. Lewis, Convention, 52. Lewis, Convention, 42. However, game theory does not predict that repeated strategic interactions will always lead to greater coordination of understanding. I observe in the following chapters how different payoffs can entrench irresolvable conflicts of meaning. Even then the game can end in chaos: see Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1869), 122.

Bibliography Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by H. Rackham. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934.

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Barthold, Lauren Swayne. ‘If Enhancement Is the Answer, What Is the Question?’ Pages 218–236 in Inheriting Gadamer: New Directions in Philosophical Hermeneutics. Edited by Georgia Warnke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Bernet, Rudolf. ‘Gadamer on the Subject’s Participation in the Game of Truth’. RM 58.4 (2005): 785–814. Bernstein, Richard J. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Burwick, Frederick. ‘The Plagiarism of Play: The Unacknowledged Source of Gadamer’s Ontological Argument in Truth and Method’. PCP 25.1–2 (1990): 60–68. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1869. Chiurazzi, Gaetano. ‘Truth Is More than Reality: Gadamer’s Transformational Concept of Truth’. RP 41.1 (2011): 60–71. Clark, Robin. Meaningful Games: Exploring Language with Game Theory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Cook, Deborah. ‘Reflections on Gadamer’s Notion of Sprachlichkeit’. PhL 10.1 (1986): 84–92. Crossan, John Dominic. ‘A Metamodel for Polyvalent Narration’. Semeia 9 (1977): 105–147. Detsch, Richard. ‘A Non-Subjectivist Concept of Play: Gadamer and Heidegger versus Rilke and Nietzsche’. PhT 29.2–4 (1985): 156–171. Di Cesare, Donatella. Gadamer: A Philosophical Portrait. Translated by Niall Keane. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Dixit, Avinash K. and Barry J. Nalebuff. Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life. New York: Norton, 1991. Dostal, Robert J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Eberhard, Philippe. ‘Gadamer and Theology’. IJST 9.3 (2007): 283–300. Fink, Eugen. Play as Symbol of the World: And Other Writings. Translated by Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner. Studies in Continental Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Review of Spiel als Weltsymbol, by Eugen Fink’. Philosophische Rundschau 9.1 (1961): 1–8. Gander, Hans-Helmuth. ‘Between Strangeness and Familiarity: Towards Gadamer’s Conception of Effective History’. RP 34 (2004): 121–136. Gjesdal, Kristin. Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism. Modern European Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Grondin, Jean. The Philosophy of Gadamer. Translated by Kathryn Plant. Continental European Philosophy. Chesham: Acumen, 2003. Guyer, Paul. ‘Free Play and True Well-Being: Herder’s Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics’. JAAC 65.4 (2007): 353–368. Hahn, Lewis Edwin, ed. The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. The Library of Living Philosophers. Peru, IL: Open Court, 1997. Hirsch, E. D. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1955. Hyland, Drew A. The Question of Play. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kindle edition.

Spiel 71 Lawn, Chris. Wittgenstein and Gadamer: Towards a Post-Analytic Philosophy of Language. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. Lewis, David K. Convention: A Philosophical Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969. Leyton-Brown, Kevin and Yoav Shoham. Essentials of Game Theory: A Concise, Multidisciplinary Introduction. Williston, VT: Morgan & Claypool, 2008. Malpas, Jeff, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher, eds. Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. Mitscherling, Jeff. ‘Hegelian Elements in Gadamer’s Notions of Application and Play’. MW 25 (1992): 61–67. von Neumann, John and Oskar Morgenstern. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Sixtieth-anniversary ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. First published 1944. Olivier, Bert. ‘Gadamer, Heidegger, Play, Art and the Appropriation of Tradition’. SAJP 21.4 (2002): 242–257. Osborne, Martin J. An Introduction to Game Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Perry, Menahem and Meir Sternberg. ‘' *) (' &%$
$ #!
" ’. Hasifrut 1.2 (1976): 263–292. Perry, Menahem and Meir Sternberg. ‘The King through Ironic Eyes: Biblical Narrative and the Literary Reading Process’. Poetics Today 7.2 (1986): 275–322. Sampson, Jeremy. Being Played: Gadamer and Philosophy’s Hidden Dynamic. Wilmington: Vernon, 2019. Širka, Zdenko Š. ‘Gadamer’s Concept of Aesthetic Experience as a Possibility for the Orthodox Biblical Theology’. RESS 6.3 (2014): 378–407. Sluga, Hans, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ‘Switch to the Right’. TIME 90.11 (1967): 43. Thiselton, Anthony C. The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description with Special Reference to Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein. Exeter: Paternoster, 1980. Vilhauer, Monica. ‘Beyond the “Fusion of Horizons”: Gadamer’s Notion of Understanding as “Play”’. PhT (2009): 359–364. Vilhauer, Monica. Gadamer’s Ethics of Play: Hermeneutics and the Other. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010. Vilhauer, Monica. ‘Gadamer and the Game of Understanding: Dialogue-Play and Opening to the Other’. Pages 75–86 in The Philosophy of Play. Edited by Emily Ryall, Wendy Russell, and Malcolm MacLean. London: Routledge, 2013. Vinten, Robert. Wittgenstein and the Social Sciences: Action, Ideology and Justice. Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein. Anthem Press, 2020. Warnke, Georgia. Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason. Cambridge: Polity, 1987. Watson, Joel. Strategy: An Introduction to Game Theory. New York: Norton, 2002. Weintraub, E. Roy. Toward a History of Game Theory. Annual Supplement to History of Political Economy 24. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1963. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. ‘The Rejection of Logical Atomism’. Pages 33–50 in The Wittgenstein Reader. Edited by Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

3

Genre

In describing the universal hermeneutical experience, Gadamer finds what is common to all kinds of linguistic encounters – from dramas to legal interpretation to poetry. He nevertheless assumes that these different kinds of text will require something different of their readers: some texts approximate the immediacy of speech; others are more autonomous (RB 142–46). Beyond this, however, genre receives little systemic treatment in his hermeneutics. I observed above (page 32) that this leaves his conservative critics worrying about what happens to the author’s intention if we treat every text like a poem. To clarify the place of genre within Spiel (‘play’, ‘game’), this chapter draws on the resources of genre theory. Classical genre theory’s stubbornly ahistorical taxonomies might seem hard to reconcile with a wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein (‘historically effected consciousness’). However, the twentieth century saw a shift away from synchronic genre classifications towards more diachronic analyses. This chapter begins by surveying these modern genre theories, integrating their insights into Gadamer’s hermeneutics using the new term I am introducing Lesespiel (‘reading game’). We might describe the distinctive rules and readerly roles that go along with a particular genre (for example, psalm or narrative) as a Lesespiel. At a more general level of analysis, the practice of reading the biblical canon as Scripture might also be described as a Lesespiel. Giving genre a structural place within Spiel answers Gadamer’s progressive critics by introducing more granularity into the concept of tradition, and his conservative critics by making space for the norms of special hermeneutics within the seriousness of Spiel. Analysis of genre theories 1 Synchronic approaches

The patient task of sorting literature into classes has cycled in and out of fashion since Aristotle, whose influence is felt in the enduring though misunderstood2 triad of lyric, epic and drama. The ‘law of genre’ was laid down by Horace, who nevertheless joined his fellow Roman poets in practising precisely the kind of mixing he forbade.3 In German literature the study of Gattungen reached its peak in the nineteenth century with DOI: 10.4324/9781032646602-5

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Vladimir Propp’s structuralist Morphology of the Folktale (1927) – a ‘scientific’ study ‘as exact as the morphology of organic formations’ – dissected folk tales into the 31 possible functions of their characters.4 Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) distinguished the four genres by their radical of presentation (Drama, Epos, Lyric and Fiction), while also cataloguing myriad other ways that literary works can be related because of our common human psychology.5 Structuralists continue to explore the relationship between a genre’s textual features and aesthetic world.6 Taxonomies based on limited archetypes remain common in film studies, despite Rick Altman’s pleas for more ‘semantic/syntactic/pragmatic’ approaches.7 These ‘neoclassical’, ‘theoretical’, ‘essentialist’ or – I prefer – ‘synchronic’8 approaches share a common impulse: using broadly applicable and mostly unchanging taxonomies they seek to make sense of the myriad literary specimens before them. Throughout the twentieth century, however, such approaches were shadowed by two persistent critiques. First, the romanticist critique queried the usefulness of genre classifications. Amongst the most strident was the Italian critic Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) who, embracing the sentiments of Freidrich Schlegel a century earlier, insisted that every ‘true’ work is a unique aesthetic object (so we can leave the classification of books to librarians).9 These reservations about the taxonomical enterprise and its pure genre categories were echoed by Maurice Blanchot in 1959 and in 1980 by Jacques Derrida.10 By 2011, Harold Bloom can claim, with no discernible self-consciousness, that Shakespeare (like the Yahwist) is ‘always too large’ for genre; genre has ‘little relevance for apprehending’ his plays, some of which have ‘no genre’ at all.11 The second critique sees genre as important but objects to rigid taxonomies and (allegedly) deductive methodologies, preferring more inductive approaches.12 Tzvetan Todorov criticises Frye’s theoretical system for its internal incoherence, its borrowing from non-literary disciplines, and its failure to correspond with attested literary phenomena.13 In Frye’s case, Todorov’s theoretical/historical dichotomy results in an unfair characterisation of the method: the connections Frye makes between texts arise from a formidable comparative study of literature.14 Synchronic analysis should not be dismissed out of hand; I will use Frye’s framework in Chapter 5 to help understand an ancient genre whose historical context is mostly inaccessible to us. It is true, however, that synchronic conceptions of genre can easily ossify into immutable taxonomies, obscuring rather than revealing the complex and changing relationships between texts. That is, Carolyn Miller thinks, exactly what happened to Aristotle’s genre paradigm; there is nothing wrong with his four genres – the ancient Greek situations they relate to just no longer exist.15 Genre theory has thus benefited in the second half of the twentieth century from the development of more historical approaches.

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Diachronic approaches

It was rediscovering the importance of history (in Gadamerian terms, a renewed wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein) that brought genre back into play. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell observe, ‘The critic who classifies a rhetorical artifact as generically akin to a class of similar artifacts has identified an undercurrent of history rather than comprehended an act isolated in time’.16 This historical perspective rebuffs the romanticist notion of a genre-less genius. Even the most transgressive work assumes the existence of a tradition with which to break.17 Beaujour is scathing of the ‘terroristic denial of genre’ – despite ‘fancies’ to the contrary, the poet ‘must live by a law he did not make, or else cease writing’.18 Mikhail Bakhtin insists that speech genres, while more flexible and open to creativity than language forms, still ‘have a normative significance for the speaking individuum, and they are not created by him but are given to him’.19 Yuri Tynianov likens the romanticist focus on individual genius to explaining the ‘origin and significance of the Russian revolution by saying that it came about as a result of the personal characteristics of the leaders on the opposing sides’.20 This is Bloom’s mistake with Shakespeare: as Rosalie Colie demonstrates, literary innovation during the Renaissance was typically genre-based: mixing kinds, invoking ancient subcultures and playing with generic norms.21 Great works like King Lear are brilliant precisely because of their ‘inevitable kind-ness’.22 Diachronic approaches came to dominate genre studies in the latter twentieth century. While theorists differ, they all share something of a Gadamerian interest in how genre interactions are embedded in history. Studying genres diachronically avoids the dead end of rigid taxonomy. It releases genre theory from the anxious task of finding firm borders and correct organising principles, for genres are ‘types, rather than fixed categories with borders’.23 The ‘boundaries [between genres] may not be hard-edged, but they can nonetheless exclude’.24 Rather than push genetic or evolutionary metaphors, diachronic approaches often describe genres according to certain prototypes, to which texts can be more or less closely related in a contingent and historical system.25 Borrowed from psychologist Eleanor Rosch, and building on Karl Erdmann and Wittgenstein’s semantic model of family resemblances, prototype theory offers a cognitive model of how humans categorise objects based on greater or lesser similarity with quintessential examples.26 No longer considered normative laws of literature, nor eternal logical classes, genres are seen as overlapping groups that are historically contingent and therefore subject to change.27 From this diachronic perspective, genres appear as systems of relations that are neither immutable nor completely unstable: Bakhtin describes speech genres as ‘relatively stable types’ of utterances;28 Tynianov finds literary form to be a ‘dynamic phenomenon’;29 Catherine Schryer says ‘genres can be described as stabilized-for-now or stabilized-enough sites of social and ideological action’.30

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Diachronic genre theories have emerged within various disciplines, including literary criticism, linguistics, rhetoric and sociology. They offer different but, I argue, complementary accounts of how genre fits within the Spiel of understanding. Five observations are particularly relevant for my study of contested biblical texts – genres are performed by writers and readers, genres can be organised around any internal or external features, texts can have multiple genre relationships, genres respond to recurring situations and genre is a form of social action. 1 Genres are performed by writers and readers

Rhetorical analyses frame genres broadly as regularities of composition, reading practices and social roles performed by writers and readers.31 Texts do not ‘belong to’ genre sets, nor is creativity always choked by their prescriptions; genre provides resources that are used by writers and readers to make meaning.32 Genres function heuristically, as the reader forms a genre hypothesis and ‘tests alternative readings of the text as different genres’.33 The reader of a text is invoked, and even constructed, by the genre.34 Different genres invite readers to play different roles and offer them different kinds of experiences. 2 Genres can be organised around any internal or external features

A limitation of synchronic studies is that the search for trans-historical similarities between genres can easily overlook the differences, as preconceived genre categories predetermine what kind of things can make up a genre. Yet for Anne Freadman ‘perhaps the most important thing about our knowledge of genres is our knowledge of the difference between genres’.35 Diachronic genre theories, in contrast, typically assume no single organising principle by which genres are distinguished, so genres can include a repertoire of internal and external features – anything from meter to recurring themes.36 In his study of the genres used for internal communication in a bank, for example, Graham Smart looked for ‘a distinctive profile of regularities across three dimensions’: texts, composition processes and reading practices.37 3 Texts can have multiple genre relationships

Bakhtin distinguishes between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ speech genres to describe how complex genres like the novel embed other speech types within them.38 However, what Bakhtin observes about the relationship between the novel and other everyday and ideological genres could be true of any genre.39 Derrida helpfully speaks of texts ‘participating’ in, rather than ‘belonging’ to, genres.40 Texts can be analysed in terms of their simultaneous relationships with multiple genres, even if one genre is more prominent.

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4 Genres respond to recurring situations

Michael Halliday’s foundational insight is that the ‘contexts of situation’ in which we use language are recurring, and so language users develop conventional ways of responding to those situation types.41 The combination of situation type and textual features is called ‘register’, which underlies the Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL), or ‘Sydney School’, approach to genre. John Swales’ related approach sees genre as a class of communicative events, which serve the communicative purposes of a discourse community.42 Freadman thinks it especially important to notice when genres are used outside their usual situation.43 The relationship between culture, text and situation is further explored by J. R. Martin.44 For educators, the importance of situation raises pedagogical questions about whether mimicking textual features alone helps, or hinders, disadvantaged students who might be unfamiliar with the social situation.45 5 Genre is a form of social action

Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) explores the social context of genres even further. Rhetoricians’ interest in recurring situations predates that of SFL. In 1945, Kenneth Burke raised the issue of situation in rhetoric; in 1965, Edwin Black suggested how genre and rhetorical situation might be connected; in 1968, Lloyd Bitzer observed that rhetorical situations recur, producing comparable rhetorical forms.46 Drawing on this tradition, Jamieson and Campbell see genre as a ‘constellation of substantive, stylistic and situational characteristics’ that are fused together by an ‘internal dynamic’ and recur in response to comparable rhetorical situations.47 However, while linguistic and rhetorical approaches to genre share this common starting point of situation, they have evolved quite independently. For RGS, the connection between social purposes and linguistic action implies that genres not only reflect but also create and preserve the social interests, power dynamics and ideologies of the discourse community.48 ‘Genres survive’, after all, ‘because they work for someone (however egregiously or oppressively for others)’.49 While SFL educators are interested in giving disadvantaged students access to the power of genres, RGS resists what it sees as the naive prescriptivism or even authoritarianism of this approach, seeking instead to understand and even challenge the way genres construct social situations and relationships.50 If SFL is about ‘exploring genres in their contexts’, then RGS is about ‘exploring genres in their context’.51 In her discipline-defining article, ‘Genre as Social Action’, Carolyn Miller presents genres not merely as communicative tools, but as social actions: ‘typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations’.52 Her approach is ethnomethodological, and her principle for classifying genres draws on Campbell and Jamieson’s conception of genre as a fusion of situational, formal and substantive characteristics.53 The situation that ‘recurs’, of course, is not the same objective or material event, but the inter-subjective

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and social phenomena whereby two different events are construed as the same type of thing. This means that to act we must first determine the situation; like Gadamer, then, Miller sees human action as hermeneutical.54 Genres are as much about defining situations as responding to them: ‘we learn that we may eulogize, apologize, recommend one person to another, instruct customers on behalf of a manufacturer, take on an official role, account for progress in achieving goals’.55 Similarly, Bazerman gives a nod to speech act theory and structuration theory when he speaks of the way genres present ‘habitats’ for us to act within.56 Seen in this situational context, individual genres are not isolated actions but work together to form more complex social interactions. Without losing sight of recurring language patterns, Miller shifts the focus of genre studies from text to context.57 Genres exist in relation to one another in what Bazerman calls ‘genre systems’ (or Devitt’s more narrow ‘genre sets’).58 Genre systems not only help subjects navigate the various activity systems that they find themselves in, but also help to create and maintain those activity systems and subject positions.59 Building on Miller’s work, Freadman situates genre less as a property of an individual text and more as the interaction between texts, a relationship she describes by borrowing the Austinian speech-act term ‘uptake’.60 She retells the story of the last judicial execution in Australia as a series of uptakes by different genres: stories told in court, the jury’s verdict, the criminal statutes, the sentence, the community petitions, the execution and the books and films that tell the story. These insights have spurred empirical genre researchers working within the RGS discipline to critically examine the ways genres operate in different academic, professional and public contexts.61 Based on her examination of insurance company rejection letters, Schryer argues that genres are best thought of as ‘actions or verbs’, which give (or deny) human agents access to the strategies they need to function within the ‘constant social construction of reality’.62 In another study of the competing genre sets in veterinary labs and clinics, she likewise observes how genres work to create and maintain subject positions within certain ideologies.63 Genre is – on this analysis – power. For Frow, ‘Discursive competence is a symbolic capital acquired in the process of socialisation, and the class structure determines relations of possession or dispossession of this capital’.64 Yet within its field a genre’s constellation of regulated strategies will often seem so natural that individuals never question them, even when they work against their best interests.65 Medieval mystic Margery Kempe’s trial for illicit preaching is a striking dramatisation of how access to genres is governed by exclusionary ‘taboos’.66 Even where the power dynamic is not so explicit, the task of RGS is to take apart these ‘structured structures that structure’67 and see whose interests they are serving.68 Richard Coe and Aviva Freedman articulate some of the critical questions that a RGS perspective asks about genre: what is encouraged or constrained, who is empowered or silenced, what beliefs and values are instantiated and what are its

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positive or negative effects?69 These questions helpfully shift the focus from understanding a genre’s textual features in isolation to interrogating how that genre serves to construct situations and regulate relationships. Summary

This analysis has noted five common features of diachronic accounts of genre: genres are performed by writers and readers; they can be organised around any internal or external features; texts can have relationships with multiple genres; genres respond to recurring situations in real life; genres are a form of social action. In highlighting the benefits of these diachronic approaches, I do not recommend abandoning synchronic approaches altogether.70 While RGS has highlighted the social relations that genres serve, the literary forms through which different societies enact those relations are still worth comparing. Indeed, Martin Buss notices that generic features, whilst historically contingent, tend to show up in similarly motivated situations across different human cultures.71 My next task is to give this modern genre theory a structural place in Spiel, before applying it to contested biblical texts. Before that, however, I cross over into a parallel universe to observe the development of biblical studies’ homegrown genre theory over a similar time frame. Genre and biblical studies Genre theory in biblical studies has developed largely parallel to literary genre theory, with only occasional communication of ideas in either direction.72 This isolation from wider discussion has made for a biblical genre theory that is occasionally brilliant, but mostly under-developed and unevenly applied. This is not at all because Bible scholars are uninterested in genre. The very shape of the Christian canon – a collection of books, in multiple languages, with each book itself a pastiche of text types – foregrounds questions of genre. As Hans Robert Jauss observes, The abundance of literary forms and genres ascertainable in the Old and New Testaments is astonishing, and leads directly to the discovery of Romance parallels. The Bible contains worldly lyrics (songs of work, ridicule, drinking, burial, and war) as well as spiritual ones (the hymn or the lament). It developed the most varied forms of narrative prose: etiological, historical, and also heroic sagas (the legendary garland for Samson); legends of martyrs and novellas (the Kings novellas, but also the Book of Ruth). It contains the model for various forms of historiography (tribal legend, genealogy, royal chronicle), historical prose (documents, letters, contracts, war reports), and biography (the self-disclosures of the prophets). All

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imaginable forms of wisdom literature (proverb, riddle, parable, fable, debate, allegory) and religious instruction (sermon, exhortation, epistle) are also found in it.73 Naturally, then, genre’s importance is widely recognised in both ancient and contemporary biblical hermeneutics. Jerome’s return to the original Hebrew texts encouraged the church to explore the literary art of the OT in its linguistic and cultural context, rather than the unflattering mirror of Greek genres.74 Other early church fathers wrestled over the proper genres for reading the Bible, and their relation to Greco-Roman literary forms.75 The thirteenth-century shift from allegorical interpretation to greater focus on the human auctores brought Scripture’s various literary forms to the centre of exegesis.76 The importance of genre to exegesis is often recognised in modern doctrinal statements,77 and hermeneutical textbooks.78 Most theologians recognise the importance of genre given the dual nature of Scripture as divinely inspired human literature.79 Conservative theologians have turned to genre to help stabilise the Bible’s meaning around the author’s intent.80 However, recognition of the importance of genre is no guarantee of a coherent and sophisticated genre theory. The rise and fall of form criticism

It is Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), and the Formkritik he inspired, that best embodies biblical studies’ ambivalent relationship with literary genre theory.81 In his seminal work on the folk tales of Genesis, the poetry of Psalms and the oracles of the Prophets, Gunkel sought to reconstruct the Bible’s pithy, pure and pre-textual oral forms in their original Sitz im Leben (life-situation).82 The recurring institutional context – for example, the occasion of worship in which the underlying oral psalm type originated – combines with the formal features, and the ‘treasury of thoughts and moods’, to define a genre.83 The folklore research of the brothers Grimm, and Religionsgeschichtliche Schule presuppositions about the progression from cultic to non-cultic piety, emboldened Gunkel to begin reconstructing the different historical stages behind individual units of narrative or poetic text.84 His students drove these insights further, inferring more about the original institutional setting of poetry and law in light of other ANE texts (Sigmund Mowinckel and Albrecht Alt) and the generic qualities of larger units (Martin Noth and Gerhard von Rad).85 Twentieth-century form criticism has further extended this project, analysing all kinds of OT and NT literature and drawing on other literary methodologies.86 Gunkel’s idiosyncratic focus on the connection between genre and social situation was in some respects ahead of its time, and indeed earned him Jauss’ admiration.87 It anticipates Carolyn Miller’s conception of genre as ‘typified rhetorical actions based on recurrent situations’,88 and modern genre pedagogy’s attempt to understand genres within the ‘scene’ that they

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are used.89 Yet in other important respects, as Longman notes, Gunkel’s genre theory was obsolete even in his day.90 The rigidity of Gunkel’s taxonomy and its overconfident reconstruction of institutional contexts introduced an unfortunate tension into biblical form criticism.91 Martin Buss describes the result as a ‘questionable hybrid’ of Aristotelian essentialism, combined with dogged historical particularism: there is one correct genre designation for every text, though these immutable categories are not universal to humanity.92 Beyond form criticism

Form criticism continues to exert some influence across biblical studies – especially, following Gerald Wilson, in the study of Psalms. New versions of form criticism have expanded the focus from the particular historical situation of production to consider the more general situations in which texts might be used.93 They largely continue Gunkel’s tradition of studied disinterest in literary genre theory.94 However, most have shed Gunkel’s confident reconstruction of the original setting and oral forms, expanding their focus to questions of structure, Sitz in der Literatur and social situation of the final form of texts (or even reader responses).95 Yet constant metamorphosis has not entirely succeeded in averting form criticism’s decline from critical favour in the final quarter of the twentieth century.96 The approaches that replace it have less interest in genre, leaving biblical genre theory largely where form criticism left it. Of course, much work continues on biblical genres – greater access to comparative ANE literature has yielded more sophisticated understanding of Hebrew narrative, poetry, treaties, woe oracles and lawsuits.97 Explicit or self-reflective genre theory, however, has been less common. The 1970s and 1980s saw a burst of interest in genre theory, much of it centred on the elusive genre of apocalypse, drawing mainly on Fowler and Hirsch, as imported by Gerhart and Doty.98 Genres were conceived synchronically as descriptions of similarities between whole works which help or hinder the interpreter in properly understanding the author’s intentions, with the emphasis on formal and structural rather than thematic content; questions of historical and social setting were explicitly excluded.99 Growing interest in Bakhtin has begun to inflect discussions of genre. Roland Boer likens Bakhtin’s genre theory and form criticism to long-lost siblings, bearing striking similarities despite very different upbringings.100 Michael Vines revisits Collins’ formalistic definition of the apocalyptic, providing a more ideological description of the apocalyptic chronotope.101 David Valeta applies Bakhtin’s ‘heteroglossia’ to Daniel 1–6, which he calls ‘prenovelistic Menippean satires’,102 and elements of the Bakhtinian novel or carnivalesque forms have been identified in the books of Kings, Esther and Ruth.103 Jennifer Pfenniger reads Song of Songs as a Bakhtinian complex

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genre.104 Carol Newsom reveals the diverse ideologies brought into dialogue by Job’s distinct genres and chronotopes.105 Beyond Bakhtin, there are other examples of explicit genre theorising. Mary Gerhart looks forward to biblical hermeneutics paying closer attention to the intersection of genre and gender, and the possibilities these open up for testing the text with new readings.106 Carol Newsom calls on biblical studies to abandon taxonomic approaches to genre in favour of prototype models borrowed by cognitive linguistics.107 Using Fowler’s understanding of the development of genres, Margaret Odell identifies Ezekiel’s structure as an appropriation of the Babylonian building inscription genre.108 With the help of Klaus Hempfer, Tremper Longman retires Gunkel’s rigid method and employs a communicative-semiotic approach to understand books like Ecclesiastes in the context of Near Eastern cognate genres.109 In her study of the genres of woe, indictment and hope oracles, JoAnna M. Hoyt criticises form criticism’s interest in ‘subjective’ criteria like themes, which produce contradictory genre classifications; she turns instead to discourse analysis criteria like verbal types to propose a more ‘objective’ definition of these genres.110 Simon Chi-chung Cheung relaxes the hard borders of the ‘wisdom psalm’ genre with the help of Swales and Miller.111 Applying Vanhoozer’s explicit genre theory, Andrew Abernethy attempts to articulate the worldviews offered by narrative, legal and poetic genres.112 A welcome contribution to biblical genre theory is Will Kynes’ provocatively titled An Obituary for ‘Wisdom Literature’. Drawing on Fowler and Frow, it shows how the strict taxonomy of so-called ‘Wisdom Literature’ has obscured intertextual relationships with the broader canon.113 Readers should instead be free to identify multiple, subjective and overlapping genre groupings, just as stargazers are free to form constellations between stars – a metaphor borrowed from RGS, but divorced from its interest in the internal dynamic of social situation, power, rhetorical forms and stylistic elements within genres. This effectively dissolves genre into intertextuality, making any subjective link between texts a potential genre. In contrast, Miller recognises that for genre to be a theoretically or critically serviceable term ‘it cannot refer to just any category or kind of discourse’; alongside shared formal characteristics and audience, the social action must be truly recurrent, and its motive or exigence must be public.114 In NT studies, whether the canonical gospels are ancient biographies has been debated since the 1970s.115 In his 1992 work, Richard Burridge explicitly draws on modern genre theory to advance the discussion; his 2018 edition references Frow’s work, but the essential genre theory is still that of Fowler.116 Andrew Pitts and Zach Dawson criticise Burridge for his lack of attention to developments in genre theory since 1970, recommending instead a SFL approach which pays more attention to the social situation that created the gospels.117 The under-developed genre theory in debates over the gospel genres has also been addressed using Bakhtin, cognitive linguistics and other synchronic approaches.118 Brian Larsen applies Frye’s archetypes

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of romance, comedy, tragedy and irony to the characters and theological vision of the gospel of John.119 Beyond the Gospels, Jeannine Brown has long sought to integrate the insights of secular genre theory into her hermeneutical approach.120 Sean Adams analyses the social dynamics involved in the use of Greco-Roman genres by Jewish authors.121 Stanley Porter has applied the insights of SFL to analyse the social function of the epistle genre.122 Questions about the apocalyptic genre are routinely raised in relation to Revelation.123 Yet despite these promising advances, genre theory remains largely underappreciated and under-developed within NT studies. This survey of explicit biblical genre theory highlights something of a paradox. There is widespread agreement that genres are important, and much scholarly labour devoted to learning about them. Yet, inexplicably, the genre theory underwriting all these endeavours has scarcely improved on Gunkel’s equivocal relationship with the genre theory of his day. Bringing genre into Spiel I observed in Chapter 1 that, while Gadamer acknowledges the different experiences involved in reading different types of texts, genre itself has no systemic place in his hermeneutics.124 Jauss, however, offers one way of linking genre with Spiel: every work belongs to a genre – whereby I mean neither more nor less than that for each work a preconstituted horizon of expectations must be ready at hand (this can also be understood as a relationship of ‘rules of the game’ (Zusammenhang von Spielregeln)) to orient the reader’s (public’s) understanding and to enable a qualifying reception.125 While Jauss is not addressing Gadamer’s work, describing social norms of expectation and reception as ‘rules of a game’ suggests where genre might be relevant to Gadamer’s Spiel. This link is further confirmed from the genre theory side, where games are often used as a metaphor for genre. Anne Freadman describes the relationship between texts, genres and social contexts as a tennis game: genres are to texts as shots are to tennis balls. A shot is played and then returned, just as one genre anticipates its ‘uptake’ by another genre within a system. To play effectively, a participant needs to know what uptakes a certain genre can prompt within the rules of the Spiel.126 A judge’s question prompts the jury’s verdict, then a sentence, which is then met by an appeal. Though relatively free, the shots a player can return (their potential uptakes) are not arbitrary but enabled and conditioned by the Spiel we are playing.127 The reader is both freed and constrained by the rhetorical situation: ‘Returns, and readings, work within certain clearly marked conventions, and with the material at hand. They are both enabled, and

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constrained, by the formal-material determinants of the signs they read and the signs they will write’.128 Using modern genre theory to give genre a structural role in Spiel supplements Gadamer’s description of the hermeneutic experience at four critical points. 1 Genre mediates tradition and enables the fusion of horizons

The fusion of horizons is possible, says Gadamer, because the distance between readers and historical texts is not empty but filled by tradition (TM 297). Genre is one of the most important ways that tradition is mediated to us.129 RGS alerts us to the ways in which individuals are socialised through genres, which are inherently ideological and power-based structures – we are, Schryer says, ‘genred all the time’.130 Genres mediate between the private individual motives and broader social exigencies.131 Genres imply not only formal literary conventions but also, in Rosalie Colie’s terms, a ‘frame’ or ‘fix’ on the world;132 genre ‘is a way of creating order in the ever-fluid symbolic world’.133 Taking up this idea, Frow describes genre as ‘a form of symbolic action: the generic organisation of language, images, gestures, and sound makes things happen by actively shaping the way we understand the world’.134 Thus, ‘far from being merely “stylistic” devices, genres create effects of reality and truth, authority and plausibility, which are central to the different ways the world is understood in the writing of history or of philosophy or of science, or in painting, or in everyday talk’.135 Genre is a powerful way of transmitting tradition because genres define what goes without saying – ‘the ideological second nature, which constitutes the real’.136 Drawing on Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope, Schryer notes that genres instantiate particular understandings of time, place and values; while invisible and implicit, such ‘commonsense’ understandings effectively constrain what human actions are possible.137 Robert Alter demonstrates this when he observes a link between the laconic characterisation of Hebrew narrative and its theological understanding of human nature as a ‘bundle of paradoxes’: ‘every person is created by an all-seeing God but abandoned to his own unfathomable freedom, made in God’s likeness as a matter of cosmogonic principle but almost never as a matter of accomplished ethical fact’.138 I will return to this when discussing Hagar’s story in Chapter 5. This ability to mediate tradition means genres can facilitate the fusion of horizons by projecting a foreign horizon. As Ricoeur observes, a genre is sufficiently distanciated from both of us that it can be held in common: the relatively stable nature of literary genres means a literary text ‘escapes the vicissitudes of a simple utterance condemned to vanish with the speech-act of the actual speaker’.139 Likewise, Jauss considers genre as a crucial link between intention and reception of a work. Where the social function of a text is lost in a distant past, the historical norms of the audience can ‘still be

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reconstructed through the horizon of expectations of a genre system that preconstituted the intention of the works as well as the understanding of the audience’.140 Genre is an especially powerful tool for such reconstruction because genre affects the interpretation of meaning at every level, from themes to syntax and even punctuation.141 The book of Esther, for example, constantly pulls us up short, thwarting our Vorurteile – including that a biblical narrative should at least mention God. One way to try to make sense of it is to try reading it as a ‘diaspora tale’,142 or perhaps a darkly satirical holocaust novel. These modern genres reflect horizons of oppression and resistance that are not dissimilar to the situation facing diaspora Jews in the Persian era. Reading the text as one of these modern genres thus projects out a horizon for the ancient text in terms we can understand. I will explore this potential further in Chapter 6 with a reading of Judges 19 as horror film. In reading Scripture, we are dealing with an old text, whose abandoned genres reflect social actions and motivations that are long forgotten. RGS gives us some cause for optimism in reconstructing these generic horizons. First, on Miller’s formulation, genres sit somewhere between the universal human condition and the idiosyncrasies of private motivation. This means that the situations instantiated in one culture’s genre may have substantial overlap with the situations of another culture. Second, genres are themselves part of the way we are socialised, and themselves help to construe the social situations to which they relate. The old form critics were overconfident, but they were on to something: it might sometimes be possible to infer things about the ancient communities from the genres that have survived. 2 Genre is a strategic move

Seeing genre as a strategic move provides a significant point of connection between game theory and RGS. As Coe, Lingard and Teslenko explain: The members of particular human communities and cultures are able to act together because they are able to shape discourse in socially expected and institutionally sanctioned ways. Whether fulfilled or subverted, such expectations constitute the fabric of social situations, embody the ‘rules of the game’ … Ordinarily this allows individuals who understand the genre to predict, anticipate, respond to, and negotiate the ‘moves’ of other participants. Genres embody situational expectations and ranges of potential strategic responses. Thus a full description of genre requires attention to how the form is rhetorical, to how it embodies the type of recurring situation that evokes it, and how it provides a strategic response to that situation.143 While not working within a game theory paradigm, Fowler highlights the strategic moves made by writers in signalling genre: ‘The generic markers that cluster at the beginning of a work have a strategic role in guiding the

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reader. They help to establish, as soon as possible, an appropriate mental “set” that allows the works’ generic codes to be read’.144 Burke describes the role that form plays in raising these expectations as ‘an arousing and fulfilment of desires’.145 Likewise Bakhtin observes that ‘we guess its genre from the very first words’, and this enables us to make predictions – for example, about the work’s length – without which speech communication would be ‘almost impossible’.146 This way in which genres organise other codes is particularly important in literary texts, which lack the immediate contextual reference of personal speech.147 In Frow’s analysis, different genres not only contribute to the formal organisation of the medium, but also introduce rhetorical structures – the situation between senders and receivers – as well as thematic content which is invested with certain meaning and significance.148 The result is a projected world organised into certain schema;149 in phenomenological terms, the genre determines what is experienced as ready-to-hand. Bakhtin points out that language users within a given sphere of human activity cluster around speech genres because otherwise it would be impossible to bridge the inflexible national language (langue) and the contingent needs of each concrete utterance (parole).150 Speech genres provide a necessary heuristic tool, helping us predict, for example, the expected length of the utterance from the very first words.151 If genre is a strategic move, then whose move is it? We have already noted with Fowler that texts contain ‘signals’ that invoke certain genre relationships. Frow similarly concludes that the framing of a text – for example by the typographic patterns on the page, or promptings of a text’s situation in the world – discourages readers from assigning whatever genre they want to a text.152 The Spiel of writing, thus, is one of signalling particular ‘strategic intentions’ to an unknown audience.153 Whether such generic signals are conscious or not, they are unavoidable, particularly at the opening of a work, for ‘[a]ny literary order at all constitutes in effect a frame, by distinguishing the work from the world beyond, which is not ordered in that way’.154 For writers, then, signalling genre might be an efficient move: by using the resources of a suitable genre strategically, speakers can increase the probability of coordination with a projected audience efficiently – without introducing the encoding costs of establishing all expectations within the text. 3 Genres describe the structure and rules of a Lesespiel

Genre is not only a writer’s move to make. Modern genre theory recognises that genre is as much a function of reading, as readers impute to texts ‘thekind-of-thing-this-is’.155 This raises the possibility that a reader might employ a different economy of relationships and therefore produce different – or indeed resistant – meanings.156 Bringing this insight together with Gadamer’s phenomenology of Spiel and game theory, I am going to describe the different kinds of things readers do with texts as Lesespiele (‘reading games’).157

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Lesespiele will be used on two levels: describing the different hermeneutical roles that different genres of biblical texts (for example, psalm or narrative) invite readers to perform, as well as the general task of reading the Bible as Scripture which applies across the canon. Seeing genre as a Lesespiel suggests a new way of addressing the criticism that Gadamer gives tradition too much authority. Gadamer (I think rightly) insists against Habermas and his former student Jauss that there is no rational standpoint outside of tradition from which to critique tradition.158 Yet genre theory introduces a granularity to that tradition. Each Lesespiel structures tradition in a different way, bringing different assumptions and different power dynamics into ascendancy.159 I can never critique the ideology caught up in a text from outside tradition (in Gadamer’s broadest sense), but as a reader I certainly can choose to play a different Lesespiel, and in doing so invoke some other tradition (in the narrower sense). I cannot critique the tradition of biblical studies from somewhere outside – but I can choose to read a biblical text as something: as a tool of power, as a class struggle, as a mythopoetic storehouse or as a subversive celebration of the feminine. This genre move need not be intentional: participants can bring ‘uptake memories’ or ‘uptake residues’ with them between activity systems.160 Normally such memories provide stability, but if the memory is from a different genre system it could be destabilising and bring about new unexpected meaning. Gadamer’s conservative critics might worry about the subjectivism that Lesespiele seem to imply. Yet the reader’s decisions about genre are constrained by the inter-subjective seriousness of Spiel and the fact that genres are not subjective possessions. ‘Genre’, Frow observes, ‘is neither a property of (and located “in”) texts, nor a projection of (and located “in”) readers; it exists as a part of the relationship between texts and readers’.161 Gadamer’s generalisation of the hermeneutic experience tends to soft-pedal the slightly different hermeneutical roles that different genres require of their readers. Fowler recognises that the generic repertoire of different kinds of literature can include particular expectations of the reader’s ‘hermeneutic activity’. Drawing on Frank Kermode, he gives the example of a detective novel that sets the reader the conventional task of seeing through layers of misdirection to identify the killer.162 Likewise, ‘Children who cannot apply proverbs to their own experience will not appreciate them’.163 Of course, Frow points out, ‘this is not to say that these guidelines must be respected’.164 Neither authors nor readers have total control over the shared structures of genre; they must ‘negotiate the generic status of particular texts’ without having ‘the power to make their ascriptions an inherent property of those texts’.165 Gadamer assumes these distinctions in Part 2 when he compares theological and legal interpretation, but such differences do not have a structural place in his hermeneutics. Introducing genre into Gadamer’s hermeneutics helps us see why different rules for responsible reading apply to different texts. It may also help explain how phronesis is acquired – not all at once, but one Lesespiel at a time, just as children learn games.166

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By breaking down Spiel into more granular Lesespiele, genre theory can calm the fears of Gadamer’s more conservative critics – some Lesespiele do indeed require the reader to pay careful attention to the speaking situation in which the text originated in order to work out what the text could have meant.167 I will show in the next chapter that this is reflected in the varying methods of exegesis employed by speakers in Acts. But can genre thus help Gadamer evade the charge of subjectivism by offering a criterion for weighing the validity of each new understanding? 4 Genre as a criterion for validity?

Bazerman observes that recognising a text’s genre ‘helps to limit the domain and focus the character of the multiplicities offered by, or to be read out of, the text – that is, genre recognition usually limits interpretive flexibility’.168 Some critics attempt to use these limits to establish a principle for the validity of interpretations. For Hirsch, genre is the bridge between descriptive and normative hermeneutics: ‘valid interpretation is always governed by a valid inference about genre’.169 The genre-bound nature of understanding is, Hirsch says, ‘a version of the hermeneutic circle’ – a reader’s initial, unrevised generic conception shapes the interpretation, but this generic idea can be ‘defeated and baffled by the experience of subsequent details’ leading to a revision of that generic conception.170 In Hirsch’s model, genre provides a shared space for strategic interactions between speaker and hearer: if I want to be understood, I should adapt to my hearer’s ‘system of expectations and associations’.171 These shared, reusable expectations are what Hirsch calls the ‘intrinsic genre’ of the utterance: ‘that sense of the whole by means of which an interpreter can correctly understand any part in its determinacy’.172 Intrinsic genre introduces shareable properties that solve the problem of the inaccessibility of the author’s mind, most significantly through the unifying and controlling idea of the purpose of the utterance.173 Such intrinsic genres are contrasted with extrinsic genres – methods and approaches that are alien to the text – which Hirsch objects to as ‘monolithic’, ‘dangerous’, and a damaging attempt at ‘fitting the lock to the key rather than vice versa’.174 Grant Osbourne uses this idea of a ‘final generic classification’ to anchor biblical studies in authorial intent.175 These attempts to establish the validity and determinacy of meaning are frustrated by the dubious concept of ‘intrinsic genre’.176 A final determinate ‘intrinsic genre’ is hard to reconcile with modern genre theory’s recognition that genres are only relatively stable. Even for the original author, Paul de Man observes, the horizon of expectation of a period is never available in a fully conscious, propositional way.177 Readers will still need to project onto the text their own understanding of the genre – a genre that was never fixed in the first place – in terms that they can understand. In other words, genre cannot help us escape our horizon; it is itself subject to the fusion of horizons.

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Intrinsic genres are, like the author’s subjective intentions, never given to us in an unmediated way.178 Hirsch says that interpretation is valid when it is based on a valid inference about genre – but what then makes an inference about genre valid? A Freudian reading of Hamlet, for Hirsch, is illegitimate because such an extrinsic genre takes application beyond anything Shakespeare could have imagined.179 But Hirsch concedes that it is reasonable to assume that Shakespeare intended his play to embrace the fullest range of implications about human psychology, in which case the Freudian reading could be valid.180 What if, as Liam Semler suggests, Hamlet is a play about ‘aboutness’, and indeed the brilliance of the play is the way it invites these ‘invalid’ interpretations?181 Furthermore, even if it were possible to establish how Shakespeare intended his text to be used, it is not clear what prevents it from being gainfully re-purposed against his will by Freudian critics. Why cannot a reading of a text, as Frow puts it, ‘productively ignore’ a text’s strategic intentions?182 The problem of the validity of interpretation is solved, but only by raising the problem of the validity of genre designations.183 While the appeal to genre theory to help establish the validity of certain interpretations is doubtful, Lesespiele do provide limits on the reader’s interpretive activity (even if those limits are voluntary or ethical rather than hermeneutical). We can draw on game theory here to describe in more neutral terms a degree of coordination as a potential goal of the hermeneutical task. What Hirsch and Fowler anoint as a criterion for validity is best understood more modestly as a certain type of coordination between speaker and hearer. Many kinds of Lesespiele involve substantial payoffs for the coordination of meaning between speaker and hearer – most of our everyday communications fall into this category. Some Lesespiele, however, do not seek this kind of coordination between speaker and hearer, and indeed see this kind of coordination as a barrier to some other project. There is always the possibility of a deliberate re-genreing of a text, whereby the rules of some other game are brought into Spiel. In contrast, reflecting on her doctoral study of papal encyclicals, Jamieson suggests that genre can therefore be used by critics as a ‘potentially productive critical ploy’, using an alternative genre classification to ‘better’ explain the work.184 Reading the encyclicals in light of the genre of Roman Imperial Decree makes sense of the syntactical complexity and highlights the social implications of the Pope’s choice to address the whole church in this form. When a text is analysed from a consciously Freudian perspective, it does not matter whether the author is playing along; the Spiel belongs to a community of which she or he is not a part. Whether we decide to do genre analysis for the purpose of historical inquiry into the world of the author, or (as Mary Gerhart prefers) experiment with genre and so open up ‘alternative versions and visions of the text’, we will have to decide on other grounds.185 In Chapter 6, I will attempt a strategic ‘disruptake’ of a text in order to resist a problematic tradition of interpretation.

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Conclusion This analysis of modern genre theories has helped assemble a working grammar of genre, in which genres are described as a fusion of formal and situational features. Synchronic analyses offer detailed descriptions of formal features, which can help reveal shared features across different genres. I will deploy Frye’s analysis of modes in Chapter 5. The turn towards a diachronic perspective, however, is the most significant development in modern genre studies, freeing genre from the dead ends of taxonomy and romanticism. Genres are performed by readers and writers. Genres can be organised around any internal or external features. Texts can have relationships with multiple genres. Genres respond to recurring situations. Genre is a form of social action. I have given genre theory a structural place in Gadamer’s hermeneutics using my new term Lesespiel (‘reading game’). Lesespiele can describe the different hermeneutical tasks invited by different lower-level genres within the Bible (for example, psalm or narrative), as well as higher-level principles and practices reflecting beliefs about the canon as a whole. To read the Bible as Scripture is to take on a particular kind of Lesespiel. Integrating a diachronic perspective on genre into Spiel is useful for the problem I am addressing in this book because it confirms and clarifies Gadamer’s hermeneutics at some key points of criticism. For those who think Gadamer is too radical, and worry that his hermeneutical philosophy gives too much freedom to readers, genre theory offers some much-needed clarity about the different roles that different types of text call on readers to play. Genre is a strategic move that writers can use to guide the course of Spiel. Genre is not a universal criterion for validity, but a particular Lesespiel can provide norms for reading. We can describe when coordination with a speaker’s situation is desirable and what conditions make it more likely. For those who think Gadamer is too conservative, and worry that his hermeneutic enthrones tradition beyond critique, genre theory gives tradition a more granular shape. Tradition is not monolithic but is mediated through multiple overlapping and conflicting genres. The previous three chapters have built upon Gadamer’s hermeneutics, confirming and clarifying his approach using game theory and genre theory, in order to arrive at this proposal: to read the Bible as Scripture is to adopt a Lesespiel that is played out within the tension between the authority and relevance of the text. Yet as Jamieson and Campbell insist, ‘The value of formal and generic analysis, indeed the value of all criticism, must be tested heuristically, in application’.186 So far I have assembled this proposal in theoretical terms, without applying it to actual biblical texts. In the next part, then, I will take this theoretical hermeneutics and apply it to three case studies in biblical hermeneutics: apostolic interpretation of the psalms in Acts, the application of Hagar’s story in Genesis 16 in nineteenth-century debates over slavery, and the horrific tradition of interpretation of Judges 19.

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Does bringing application into the moment of understanding drown out the voice of the other and leave us listening to ourselves (or our own tradition)? Casting understanding as Spiel helps explain how Scripture can be the authoritative voice of the other, and yet still able to speak in new and relevant ways into the present. Notes 1 Notable surveys include David Duff, ed., Modern Genre Theory, Longman Critical Readers (Essex: Pearson, 2000), 3; John Frow, Genre, 2nd ed., New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2015), 55–78; Brian Paltridge, Genre, Frames, and Writing in Research Settings (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1997); G. N. G. Orsini, Frederick Garber, and T. V. F. Brogan, ‘Genre’, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 456–59; Hayden White, ‘Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres’, NLH 34.3 (2003): 597–615. 2 Gérard Genette, ‘The Architext’, in Modern Genre Theory, ed. Duff, 210–18. The Greeks were less rigid than their imitators realised: Paul Hernadi, Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 153. 3 Joseph Farrell, ‘Classical Genre in Theory and Practice’, NLH 34.3 (2003): 394. 4 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), xxv, 19–21, 64, 79. A later essay (1928) explores how these forms evolve into new varieties under environmental pressures: Vladimir Propp, ‘Fairy Tale Transformations’, in Modern Genre Theory, ed. Duff, 50–67. 5 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum, 1968). 6 Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff, Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy (West Lafayette: Parlor, 2010), 26. 7 Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 18, 215. 8 I borrow this term from linguistics to differentiate the approaches neutrally, without implying the older theorists were necessarily shoehorning defenceless texts into predetermined theories. While diachronic approaches explore genres within their historical development, synchronic approaches bring out the logical or psychological relationships that form systems of meaning for speakers. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 99–100; Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, 2nd ed., New Accents 1 (London: Routledge, 2003), 8–9. 9 Benedetto Croce, ‘Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic’, in Modern Genre Theory, ed. Duff, 25, 27–8; René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 46; Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 27. 10 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, CritInq 7.1 (1980): 55–81; Michel Beaujour, ‘Genus Universum’, Glyph 7 (1980): 16. See also Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Genre’, Glyph 7 (1980): 1–14. Derrida does not dispense with genres, but complicates the notion of texts belonging to one genre: Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 26. 11 Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 42, 46–7. On Bloom and the Yahwist see Mary Gerhart, Genre Choices, Gender Questions (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 93.

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12 Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, ‘Form and Genre in Rhetorical Criticism’, in Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action (Falls Church, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1978), 22; Carolyn R. Miller, ‘Genre as Social Action’, QJS 70 (1984): 153. 13 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 8–23; Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 22–4. 14 On his method see Frye, Anatomy, 247–48. 15 Miller, ‘Genre as Social Action’, 152–3, 164. 16 Jamieson and Campbell, ‘Form’, 26. 17 Todorov, The Fantastic, 8; Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 78–79; Frow, Genre, 30; White, ‘Anomalies of Genre’, 605. 18 Beaujour, ‘Genus Universum’, 16, 30. 19 M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 80–1. However, the Bakhtin circle was more concerned about the doggedly anti-historical disposition of the dominant Russian formalists than the romanticist critique: Tatiana Teslenko, ‘Ideology and Genre: Heteroglossia of Soviet Genre Theories’, in The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change, ed. Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko (Cresskill: Hampton, 2002), 329. 20 Yuri Tynianov, ‘The Literary Fact’, in Modern Genre Theory, ed. Duff, 35. 21 Rosalie Littell Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara Lewalski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 22 Colie, The Resources of Kind, 127. 23 Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 249. 24 Fowler, Kinds, 74. 25 Frow, Genre, 59–60. 26 Paltridge, Genre, Frames, and Writing, 53; Frow, Genre, 59–60; Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 43. 27 Jauss, Reception, 80; Fowler, Kinds, v, 221; Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation’, PhT 17.2 (1973): 135; Frow, Genre, 76–8; René Wellek, Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 251. 28 Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 83. 29 Yuri Tynianov, The Problem of Verse Language, trans. Michael Sosa and Brent Harvey (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1981), 33. 30 Catherine F. Schryer, ‘Records as Genre’, WC 10.2 (2016): 204; Catherine F. Schryer, ‘Genre and Power: A Chronotopic Analysis’, in Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, ed. Coe, Lingard, and Teslenko, 77. 31 Anthony Paré and Graham Smart, ‘Observing Genres in Action: Towards a Research Methodology’, in Genre and the New Rhetoric, ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway (London: Taylor & Francis, 1994), 122. 32 Fowler, Kinds, 22; Frow, Genre, 2; Ricoeur, ‘Distanciation’, 135; Lloyd F. Bitzer, ‘Aristotle’s Enthymeme Revisited’, QJS 45.4 (1959): 408. Regarding biblical genre as a principle of production and reading see Mary Gerhart, ‘Generic Competence in Biblical Hermeneutics’, Semeia 43 (1988): 34. 33 Gerhart, ‘Generic Competence in Biblical Hermeneutics’, 36. See also ‘Generic Studies: Their Renewed Importance in Religious and Literary Interpretation’, JAAR 45.3 (1977): 316. Gerhart here follows Paul Ricoeur’s idea of generic competence as a means of production, for both readers and authors. 34 Richard Coe, ‘“An Arousing and Fulfilment of Desires”: The Rhetoric of Genre in the Process Era – and Beyond’, in Genre and the New Rhetoric, ed. Freedman and Medway, 155.

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35 Anne Freadman, ‘Uptake’, in Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, ed. Coe, Lingard, and Teslenko, 45. 36 Fowler, Kinds, 58; René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (Mitcham: Peregrine, 1963), 231. Fowler distinguishes kinds (genres) by their ‘complex of substantive and formal features that always include a distinctive (though not usually unique) external structure’: Fowler, Kinds, 74. 37 Cited in Schryer, ‘Genre and Power’, 78. 38 Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 85; M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 33. On novels as ‘macrogenres’ or ‘mixed texts’: J. R. Martin and David Rose, Genre Relations: Mapping Culture (London: Equinox, 2008), 88, 242. 39 Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 33. 40 Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, 65. Frow says texts relate to ‘a field or economy of genres’: Genre, 2. 41 M. A. K. Halliday, Language as Social Semiotic (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), 144–45; John Frow, ‘Discourse Genres’, JLS 9.2 (2009): 73; Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 36. 42 John Swales, Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 58. 43 Freadman, ‘Uptake’, 46. 44 See Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 39. 45 See Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 162–66. 46 Jamieson and Campbell, ‘Form’, 14; Lloyd F. Bitzer, ‘The Rhetorical Situation’, PhR 1.1 (1968): 13. 47 Jamieson and Campbell, ‘Form’, 17–26. See also Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko, ‘Genre as Action, Strategy, and Differance: An Introduction’, in Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, ed. Coe, Lingard, and Teslenko, 3; Frow, Genre, 14. The ‘constellation’ metaphor appears in the same year in Halliday’s Language as Social Semiotic, and in the decade prior in Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes: Thomas O. BeeBee, The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 282. 48 Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 44; Coe, ‘Arousing’, 157. 49 Coe, Lingard, and Teslenko, ‘Genre as Action’, 3. Similarly, Richard Coe, ‘“Rhetoric 2001” in 2001’, CompS 29.2 (2001): 29–30. 50 Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway, ‘Locating Genre Studies: Antecedents and Prospects’, in Genre and the New Rhetoric, 8; Aviva Freedman, ‘“Do As I Say”: The Relationship between Teaching and Learning New Genres’, in Genre and the New Rhetoric, ed. Freedman and Medway, 162. However Schryer, drawing on Bakhtin, also notes sites of contradiction in even highly monologic genres: Schryer, ‘Records as Genre’, 213. 51 Schryer, ‘Genre and Power’, 78. 52 Miller, ‘Genre as Social Action’, 159. 53 Miller, ‘Genre as Social Action’, 152, 155. Campbell and Jamieson in turn borrow the ideas of motive and situation from Kenneth Burke. 54 Miller, ‘Genre as Social Action’, 156. 55 Miller, ‘Genre as Social Action’, 165. 56 Charles Bazerman, ‘The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom’, in Genre and Writing, ed. Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/ Cook, 1997), 22. 57 Schryer, ‘Records as Genre’, 77. 58 Charles Bazerman, ‘Systems of Genres and Enactment of Social Intentions’, in Genre and the New Rhetoric, ed. Freedman and Medway, 82.

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59 Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 95; Anis Bawarshi, Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003), 45. 60 Anne Freadman, ‘Anyone For Tennis?’, in Genre and the New Rhetoric, ed. Freedman and Medway, 37–56; Freadman, ‘Uptake’. 61 See Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, chs. 7, 8, and 9; Coe, Lingard, and Teslenko, Rhetoric; Freedman and Medway, eds., Genre and the New Rhetoric; Mary Jo Reiff and Anis S. Bawarshi, eds., Genre and the Performance of Publics (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2016); Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 62 Schryer, ‘Genre and Power’, 95. 63 Schryer, ‘Records as Genre’; Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 142. 64 Frow, ‘Discourse Genres’, 78. See also BeeBee, The Ideology of Genre, 16–19. 65 Schryer, ‘Genre and Power’, 76. 66 Nadeane Trowse, ‘The Exclusionary Potential of Genre: Margery Kemp’s Transgressive Search for a Deniable Pulpit’, in Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, ed. Coe, Lingard, and Teslenko, 341–53. 67 Schryer, ‘Genre and Power’, 95. 68 Freedman and Medway, ‘Locating’, 10. 69 Richard M. Coe and Aviva Freedman, “Genre Theory: Australian and North American Approaches,” in Theorizing Composition: A Critical Sourcebook of Theory and Scholarship in Contemporary Composition Studies, ed. Mary Lynch Kennedy (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998), 139. Cf. Coe, ‘Arousing’, 157. 70 Unfortunately, the standard scholarly genre-set encourages uptakes of critique and replacement, justifying a new approach by what older theories failed at or overlooked: e.g. Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 27, 30, 41, 198; Freadman, ‘Anyone For Tennis?’, 39; Zachary K. Dawson, ‘The Problem of Gospel Genres: Unmasking a Flawed Consensus and Providing a Fresh Way Forward with Systemic Functional Linguistics Genre Theory’, BAGL 8 (2019): 46. In contrast, the Brazilian tradition demonstrates that different approaches can be successfully synthesised: see Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 77. 71 Martin J. Buss, The Changing Shape of Form Criticism: A Relational Approach, ed. Nickie M. Stipe (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2010), 267. 72 On form criticism and secular literary theory see Buss, Shape, 161–210. 73 Jauss, Reception, 102. 74 Michael Graves, ‘The Literary Quality of Scripture as Seen by the Early Church’, TynBul 61.2 (2010): 179. 75 Andrew T. Abernethy, ‘Genre and Theological Vision’, in Interpreting the Old Testament Theologically: Essays in Honor of Willem A. VanGemeren, ed. Andrew T. Abernethy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018), 47; Buss, Shape, 116–20. 76 A. J. Minnis, ‘Discussions of “Authorial Role” and “Literary Form” in LateMedieval Scriptural Exegesis’, BGDSL 99 (1977): 52. 77 Article XIII and exposition of The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics, 1982; Pius XII, ‘Divino Afflante Spiritu: Encyclical on Promoting Biblical Studies’, encyclical letter, Vatican Website, 1943, http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/ encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_30091943_divino-afflante-spiritu.html. 78 Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014); Vern S. Poythress, Reading the Word of God in the Presence of God: A Handbook for Biblical Interpretation (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), 206–10; Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006), 181–83; Jeannine K. Brown, Scripture as Communication, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), 135–62.

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79 Grant R. Osborne, ‘Genre Criticism: Sensus Literalis’, TJ 4.2 (1983): 4; Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘The Semantics of Biblical Literature: Truth and Scripture’s Diverse Literary Forms’, in Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon, ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids: Academie, 1986), 85; Craig S. Keener, Spirit Hermeneutics: Reading Scripture in Light of Pentecost (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 190–92; Abernethy, ‘Genre and Theological Vision’, 46. 80 Vanhoozer, ‘The Semantics of Biblical Literature’, 84; Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Leicester: Apollos, 1998), 335–50. See also Tremper Longman III, ‘Form Criticism, Recent Developments in Genre Theory, and the Evangelical’, WTJ 47 (1985): 46–67. 81 Confusingly, the German Form (‘form’) sometimes means the internal structure of a text, and sometimes overlaps with register or Gattung (‘genre’). Form critics are concerned with both, and their relation to social setting. See Marvin A. Sweeney, ‘Form Criticism’, in To Each Its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Application, ed. Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R. Haynes (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999), 59; Constantine R. Campbell, Advances in the Study of Greek: New Insights for Reading the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015), 140. 82 Hermann Gunkel, Genesis, trans. Mark E. Biddle, 3rd German ed. (1910; repr., Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997); Hermann Gunkel, The Psalms: A Form-Critical Introduction, trans. Thomas M. Horner (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967), 10–24, 30–39; Hermann Gunkel and Joachim Begrich, Introduction to Psalms: The Genres of the Religious Lyric of Israel, trans. James D. Nogalski (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998), 7. 83 Gunkel and Begrich, Introduction to Psalms, 16; Buss, Shape, 15; Erhard Blum, ‘Formgeschichte – A Misleading Category?’, in The Changing Face of Form Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Marvin A. Sweeney and Ehud Ben Zvi (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 35. 84 Gunkel and Begrich, Introduction to Psalms, 13. Gunkel also assumed that older genres are pure, whereas mixtures arise later (p. 20). 85 See Sweeney, ‘Form Criticism’, 62–65; Sweeney and Ben Zvi, editors’ introduction, Changing Face of Form Criticism, 2. 86 On OT genres: Claus Westermann, Basic Forms of Prophetic Speech, trans. Hugh Clayton White (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991); George W. Coats, ed., Saga, Legend, Tale, Novella, Fable: Narrative Forms in Old Testament Literature, JSOTSup 5 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985); Sweeney and Ben Zvi, Changing Face of Form Criticism, 2–3. On gospels: Rudolf Bultmann, ‘The Study of the Synoptic Gospels’, in Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research, trans. Frederick C. Grant (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 1. 87 Jauss, Reception, 100. 88 Miller, ‘Genre as Social Action’, 159. 89 Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 186. 90 Tremper Longman III, ‘Israelite Genres in Their Ancient Near Eastern Context’, in Changing Face of Form Criticism, ed. Sweeney and Ben Zvi, 181. 91 Issues with Gunkel’s ‘monolithic conception’ of genre were identified in Rolf Knierim, ‘Old Testament Form Criticism Reconsidered’, Int 27.4 (1973): 467. 92 Buss, Shape, xiv. See also Longman, ‘Form Criticism’, 64; Stuart Weeks, ‘The Limits of Form Criticism in the Study of Literature, with Reflections on Psalm 34’, in Biblical Interpretation and Method: Essays in Honour of John Barton, ed. Katharine Dell and Paul Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 15–25.

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93 Buss, Shape, 191–96. 94 Commenting on literary approaches to prophetic texts, Michael Floyd suspects that the lack of interest in genre within biblical studies more broadly is a reaction to form criticism’s ‘dubious project of reconstructing the original words of the prophets’: ‘Basic Trends in the Form-Critical Study of Prophetic Texts’, in Changing Face of Form Criticism, ed. Sweeney and Ben Zvi, 301. 95 Roy F. Melugin, ‘Recent Form Criticism Revisited in an Age of Reader Response’, in Changing Face of Form Criticism, ed. Sweeney and Ben Zvi, 58–59; Anthony F. Campbell, ‘Form Criticism’s Future’, in Changing Face of Form Criticism, ed. Sweeney and Ben Zvi, 26–31; Blum, ‘Formgeschichte’, 44–5; Floyd, ‘Basic Trends’, 302–3. As Melugin and Floyd both observe, this development is visible in the commentaries published in the Forms of the Old Testament Literature series (1981–2016). See also David L. Petersen, ‘Hebrew Bible Form Criticism’, RelSRev 18.1 (1992): 31–3. 96 James Muilenburg’s watershed SBL presidential address acknowledged that literary types are often used flexibly or imitated, and called for greater focus on the actuality of particular texts, an approach he called ‘rhetorical criticism’: ‘Form Criticism and Beyond’, JBL 88.1 (1969): 1–18. See also Campbell, ‘Form Criticism’s Future’, 15; Knierim, ‘Old Testament Form Criticism Reconsidered’. 97 Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Adele Berlin, Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1983); Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Amit, Reading Biblical Narratives. 98 John J. Collins, ed, Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, Semeia 14 (1979); John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016); Adela Yarbro Collins, ed., Early Christian Apocalypticism: Genre and Social Setting, Semeia 36 (1986); William Doty, ‘The Concept of Genre in Literary Analysis’, in The Genre of the Gospels, SBLSP (Atlanta: SBL Press, 1972), 413–48; Gerhart, ‘Generic Studies’; Gerhart, ‘Generic Competence’; Gerhart, Genre Choices, Gender Questions, 86–7. John Collins’ seminal Apocalyptic Imagination was first published in 1984 but draws, like his earlier book, on Fowler’s 1971 article rather than Kinds of Literature (1982). 99 Doty, ‘The Concept of Genre’, 439–42; John J. Collins, ‘Apocalypse: Towards the Morphology of a Genre’, in Society of Biblical Literature 1977 Seminar Papers, ed. Paul J. Achtemeier (Missoula, MT: SBL Press, 1977), 359. 100 Roland Boer, ed., Bakhtin and Genre Theory in Biblical Studies (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2007), 3. 101 Michael E. Vines, ‘The Apocalyptic Chronotope’, in Bakhtin and Genre Theory, ed. Boer, 109–17. 102 David M. Valeta, ‘Polyglossia and Parody: Language in Daniel 1—6’, in Bakhtin and Genre Theory, ed. Boer, 91–108; David M. Valeta, Lions and Ovens and Visions: A Satirical Reading of Daniel 1–6 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2008). His application of Bakhtin here probably overemphasises formal features, cf. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 26. 103 Helen Paynter, Reduced Laughter: Seriocomic Features and Their Functions in the Book of Kings (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 52–61; Nehama Aschkenasy, ‘Reading Ruth through a Bakhtinian Lens’, JBL 126.3 (2007): 437–53; Kenneth Craig, Reading Esther: A Case for the Literary Carnivalesque (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995). 104 Jennifer Pfenniger, ‘Bakhtin Reads the Song of Songs’, JSOT 34.3 (2010): 331–49.

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105 Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 106 Gerhart, Genre Choices, Gender Questions, 69–96. 107 Carol A. Newsom, “Spying out the Land: A Report from Genology,” in Bakhtin and Genre Theory, ed. Boer, 19–30; first published 2005. See also Carol A. Newsom, “Pairing Research Questions and Theories of Genre: A Case Study of the Hodayot,” Dead Sea Discoveries 17.3 (2010): 270–88. Cognitive linguistics has been employed by several scholars working on OT genres: Hindy Najman, “The Idea of Biblical Genre: From Discourse to Constellation,” in Prayer and Poetry in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature: Essays in Honor of Eileen Schuller on the Occasion of Her 65th Birthday, ed. Jeremy Penner, Ken M. Penner, and Cecilia Wassén, Studies in the Texts of the Desert of Judah 98 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 307–22; B. G. Wright III, “Joining the Club: A Suggestion about Genre in Early Jewish Texts,” DSD 17 (2010): 336–60; R. Williamson, “Pesher: A Cognitive Model of the Genre,” DSD 17 (2010): 336–60; Beth M. Stovell, “‘I Will Make Her Like a Desert’: Intertextual Allusion and Feminine and Agricultural Metaphors in the Book of the Twelve,” in The Book of the Twelve and the New Form Criticism, ed. Mark J. Boda, Michael H. Floyd, and Colin M. Toffelmire, Ancient Near East Monographs volume 10 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015), 37–61; Colin M. Toffelmire, “Cohesion and Genre Blending in Prophetic Literature, Using Amos 5 as a Case Study,” JHS 21 (2021): 1–22. 108 Margaret S. Odell, ‘Genre and Persona in Ezekiel 24:15–21’, in The Book of Ezekiel: Theological and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Margaret S. Odell and John T. Strong (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2000), 211. 109 Longman, ‘Israelite Genres’, 182. See also Tremper Longman III, Fictional Akkadian Autobiography: A Generic and Comparative Study (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1991); F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City-Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible (Roma: Biblical Institute Press, 1993), 15–22. 110 JoAnna M. Hoyt, ‘Discourse Analysis of Prophetic Oracles: Woe, Indictment, and Hope’, HS 60.1 (2019): 153–74. Using register analysis: Jacqueline Vayntrub, Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on Its Own Terms, The Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2019), 88. 111 Simon Chi-chung Cheung, Wisdom Intoned: A Reappraisal of the Genre ‘Wisdom Psalms’ (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 16–19. For other analyses using RGS see Andrew Knapp, “David and Hattushili III: The Impact of Genre and a Response to J. Randall Short,” VT 63 (2013): 261–75; Andrew Knapp, Royal Apologetic in the Ancient Near East, Society of Biblical Literature. Writings From the Ancient World Supplement Series (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2015); Molly Zahn, Genres of Rewriting in Second Temple Judaism: Scribal Composition and Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Using SFL see Colin M. Toffelmire, “Sitz Im What? Context and the Prophetic Book of Obadiah,” in New Form Criticism, ed. Boda, Floyd, and Toffelmire, 221–44. 112 Abernethy, ‘Genre and Theological Vision’, 56; Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text?, 335–50; The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Doctrine (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 212–6. 113 Will Kynes, An Obituary for ‘Wisdom Literature’: The Birth, Death, and Intertextual Reintegration of a Biblical Corpus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). See my review in JETS 63.4 (2020): 857–59. 114 Miller, ‘Genre as Social Action’, 163–4. 115 J. Arthur Baird, ‘Genre Analysis as a Method of Historical Criticism’, in SBL Book of Seminar Papers (Atlanta: SBL Press, 1972), 385–411.

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116 Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with GraecoRoman Biography, 25th anniversary ed. (Waco, TX: Baylor, 2018), 1.4–6. 117 Dawson, ‘The Problem of Gospel Genres’; Andrew W. Pitts, History, Biography, and the Genre of Luke-Acts: An Exploration of Literary Divergence in Greek Narrative Discourse (Leiden: Brill, 2019). See also Elizabeth E. Shively, “A Critique of Richard Burridge’s Genre Theory: From One-Dimensional to a MultiDimensional Approach to Gospel Genre,” in Modern and Ancient Literary Criticism, ed. Calhoun, Moessner, and Nicklas, 101, 107. 118 Michael E. Vines, The Problem of Markan Genre: The Gospel of Mark and the Jewish Novel (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2002); Christopher C. Fuller, ‘Matthew’s Genealogy as Eschatological Satire: Bakhtin Meets Form Criticism’, in Bakhtin and Genre Theory, ed. Boer, 119–32; Jonathan Pennington, Reading the Gospels Wisely: A Narrative and Theological Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 19–22; Elizabeth E. Shively, “Recognizing Penguins: Audience Expectation, Cognitive Genre Theory, and the Ending of Mark’s Gospel,” CBQ 80.2 (2018): 273–92; Helen K. Bond, The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020). 119 Brian Larsen, Archetypes and the Fourth Gospel: Literature and Theology in Conversation (London: T&T Clark, 2018). 120 Jeannine K. Brown, “Genre Criticism and the Bible,” in Words and the Word: Explorations in Biblical Interpretation and Literary Theory, ed. Jamie A. Grant and David G. Firth (Nottingham: Apollos, 2008), 111–50. See also James L. Bailey, “Genre Analysis,” in Hearing the New Testament: Strategies for Interpretation, ed. Joel B. Green, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 141–65. 121 Sean A. Adams, Greek Genres and Jewish Authors: Negotiating Literary Culture in the Greco-Roman Era (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2020). 122 Porter, Stanley E., and Sean A. Adams, eds. Paul and the Ancient Letter Form. Pauline Studies 6. Leiden: Brill, 2010. 123 See Vern S. Poythress, ‘Genre and Hermeneutics in Rev 20:1-6’, JETS 36.1 (1993): 41–54; David Edward Aune, The New Testament in Its Literary Environment (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987), 226–52. 124 An odd omission, given Gadamer’s careful attention to genre in his studies of Latin poetry and the Gospels: Grondin, Biography, 123–4. 125 Jauss, Reception, 79. Similarly, Osborne describes genre in more Wittgensteinian terms as determining the ‘rules of the language game’: Hermeneutical Spiral, 183, 510; ‘Genre Criticism’, 11. See also Hirsch, Validity, 70–71; Bawarshi, Genre and the Invention of the Writer, 23. 126 Freadman, ‘Anyone For Tennis?’; Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 83. 127 Social context and power dynamics also constrain players: see Schryer, ‘Genre and Power’, 84. 128 Freadman, ‘Anyone For Tennis?’, 38. Emphasis original. 129 A similar link is made in Gerhart, ‘Generic Studies’, 313. 130 Schryer, ‘Genre and Power’, 95. On developmental linguistics and language acquisition within situation types: Miller, ‘Genre as Social Action’, 157. Genres also reproduce and reconstruct rhetorical communities: Carolyn R. Miller, ‘Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre’, in Genre and the New Rhetoric, ed. Freedman and Medway, 64. 131 Miller, ‘Genre as Social Action’, 162–63; Miller, ‘Community’, 62. 132 Colie, The Resources of Kind, 8; Frow, Genre, 20. 133 Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge, 319. 134 Frow, Genre, 2. 135 Frow, Genre, 2. 136 Frow, ‘Discourse Genres’, 79.

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137 Schryer, ‘Genre and Power’, 75–76, 85. On the time-and-value planes of epic and novel see Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 13–14. 138 Alter, Narrative, 115. 139 Ricoeur, ‘Distanciation’, 137. 140 Jauss, Reception, 108. See also Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’, trans. Elizabeth Benzinger, NLH 2.1 (1970): 19. The same hope is held out by Muilenburg, ‘Form Criticism and Beyond’, 7. Devitt has considered how the study of ‘occluded genres’ might be possible, by studying the genres around the texts we cannot access: Amy J. Devitt, ‘Uncovering Occluded Publics: Untangling Public, Personal, and Technical Spheres in Jury Deliberations’, in Genre and the Performance of Publics, ed. Reiff and Bawarshi, 139–56. The reconstruction of the ancient situation based on abandoned genres presents the same problem in reverse. 141 Fowler, Kinds, 257. Even whether we interpret a line break as significant will depend partly on our projection of genre – is this a poem or a novel? Likewise, the functions of Greek and Hebrew verb forms change depending on genre: Campbell, Advances, 141; Paul Joüon, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, trans. and rev. Takamitsu Muraoka (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 2006), §118c. There is no clear, unidirectional progression from decoding orthographic data, to glossing semantic meaning, to establishing cultural context: the guesses we make as to genre shape even how we read the lines on the page. Understanding must be a circular process, like Spiel. 142 Ellen F. Davis, Opening Israel’s Scriptures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 380. 143 Coe, Lingard, and Teslenko, ‘Genre as Action’, 6. 144 Fowler, Kinds, 88. 145 Quoted in Coe, ‘Arousing’, 153. 146 Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 90. 147 Fowler, Kinds, 22. 148 Frow, Genre, 82–83. See also Frow, ‘Discourse Genres’, 77–8. 149 Frow, Genre, 91. 150 ‘Problem of Speech Genres,’ in Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 92. This insight has informed an entire sub-discipline of genre studies within linguistics, education and sociology: see, for example, Suzanne Eggins and J. R. Martin, ‘Genres and Registers of Discourse’, in Discourse as Structure and Process, ed. Teun A. van Dijk (London: SAGE, 1997), 230–56; Martin and Rose, Genre Relations. 151 Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 90. 152 Frow, Genre, 118. 153 Frow, Genre, 125. 154 Fowler, Kinds, 105. 155 Frow, Genre, 111. Frow is adapting Hirsch’s notion that genre is a guess at ‘thekind-of-thing-this-is’. 156 Frow, Genre, 111. 157 Genres are sometimes described using Wittgenstein’s metaphors of ‘family resemblances’ between ‘language games’: Fowler, Kinds, 41; Jauss, Reception, 82. However, both metaphors are fraught. Wittgenstein’s view of genre is limited and overly rigid: Freadman, ‘Anyone For Tennis?’, 38–9. Out of context, ‘family resemblance’ implies genetic evolution of a class: David Fishelov, Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 2, 54–65; Maurice Mandelbaum, ‘Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts’, APQ 2.3 (1965): 221. For similar reservations about genetic analogies see Frow, Genre, 59; Fowler, Kinds, 43–4; Tynianov, ‘The Literary Fact’, 31–2.

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158 Paul de Man observes in his introduction to Jauss that Gadamer’s commitment to tradition (which, he explains, in Germany means Goethe) was a subject of Jauss’ reproach of his teacher at Heidelberg: ‘Introduction’, in Jauss, Reception, xi. On the debate with Habermas see Warnke, Gadamer, 135–37. 159 In her analysis of the genre of insurance rejection letters, Schryer demonstrates how genres operate as ‘flexible constellations of improvisational yet regulated strategies that agents enact within fields’ and these ‘provide us with the flexible guidelines, or access to strategies that we need to function together in the constant social construction of reality … They create gnoseological systems – systems where commonsense visions of time/space and the possibility of human action exist’: Schryer, ‘Genre and Power’, 95. 160 Bawarshi and Reiff, Genre, 99; Dylan B. Dryer, ‘Disambiguating Uptake: Toward a Tactical Research Agenda on Citizens’ Writing’, in Genre and the Performance of Publics, ed. Reiff and Bawarshi, 66. Dryer also raises the possibility of ‘disruptakes’ that deliberately subvert automatic uptakes. Similarly Tosh Tachino, ‘Multiple Intertextual Threads and (Un)Likely Uptakes: An Analysis of a Canadian Public Inquiry’, in Genre and the Performance of Publics, ed. Reiff and Bawarshi, 178–98. 161 Frow, Genre, 112. 162 Fowler, Kinds, 72. 163 Fowler, Kinds, 73. 164 Frow, Genre, 118. 165 Frow, Genre, 119. 166 ‘For some time, perhaps, stories are the games you have to sit still for’: Fowler, Kinds, 44. Hirsch points out that it is impossible to know all the possible language games (which make up langue as a whole) that are potentially being played (in a particular instance of parole): Hirsch, Validity, 71. This supports Lewis’ cluster model of possible languages (pages 61–5 above). 167 Gadamer would, of course, resist describing this as ‘authorial intent’. In practice, however, it makes little difference. Osborne, for example, talks about getting to the ‘probable intent’ of the author, which is very close to what Gadamer means by the text’s horizon of expectations: Osborne, ‘Genre Criticism’, 24. 168 Bazerman, ‘Systems’, 76. 169 Hirsch, Validity, 113. Duff describes how Jonathan Culler’s drawing together of Wordsworth’s contract theory and Noam Chomsky’s idea of transformational generative grammar finds its logical conclusion in Hirsch’s normative theory of interpretation: Duff, Modern Genre Theory, 15. 170 Hirsch, Validity, 76. 171 Hirsch, Validity, 80. 172 Hirsch, Validity, 86 173 Hirsch, Validity, 99. 174 Hirsch, Validity, 88–89n11. 175 Osborne, ‘Genre Criticism’, 14. See also Osborne, Hermeneutical Spiral, 510. 176 The following critique of Hirsch is my own, but is hardly unique. Frow describes Hirsch’s attempt as ‘wishful thinking’: Frow, Genre, 111. BeeBee argues Hirsch inadvertently concedes Gadamer’s point by invoking traditional notions of genre: BeeBee, Ideology of Genre, 252. 177 Paul de Man, ‘Introduction’ in Jauss, Reception, xii. 178 Identifying which author’s intention matters, especially for complex biblical texts, is an additional complication for Hirsch’s view. Hirsch distinguishes between divine and human authorial intention but leaves theologians to work out the details: Hirsch, Validity, 126. Our access to divine intention is surely

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179 180 181 182 183

184 185 186

Gadamer and genre theory through the text and canon itself, rather than some direct link with the author’s consciousness. Even the OT prophets themselves were not always privy to how the salvation they announced would be fulfilled (1 Peter 1:10–12). Hirsch, Validity, 123. Hirsch, Validity, 125. Liam Semler, ‘A Proximate Prince: The Gooey Business of “Hamlet” Criticism’, SydS 32 (2006): 98. Frow, Genre, 4. Fowler similarly uses genre as a criterion of validity, though he avoids the term ‘intrinsic genre’: Fowler, Kinds, 113. While agreeing with Gadamer that we cannot ever escape our finitude or standpoint in approximating the original genre, his assessment of what counts as a valid reading still rides heavily on assumptions about what a ‘responsible critic’ would or would not do with a text: Fowler, Kinds, 268–70. He may think William Empson’s reading of Paradise Lost is dreadful, but calling it ‘invalid’ does not account for the way many readers continue to productively ignore the presumed authorial intention of a text, including generic cues. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, ‘Generic Constraints and the Rhetorical Situation’, PhR 6.3 (1973): 169. Gerhart, ‘Generic Competence’, 41. Jamieson and Campbell, ‘Form’, 28.

Bibliography Abernethy, Andrew T. ‘Genre and Theological Vision’. Pages 43–56 in Interpreting the Old Testament Theologically: Essays in Honor of Willem A. VanGemeren. Edited by Andrew T. Abernethy. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018. Adams, Sean A. Greek Genres and Jewish Authors: Negotiating Literary Culture in the Greco-Roman Era. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2020. Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Poetry. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute, 1999. Amit, Yairah. Reading Biblical Narratives: Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible. Translated by Yael Lotan. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001. Aschkenasy, Nehama. ‘Reading Ruth through a Bakhtinian Lens: The Carnivalesque in a Biblical Tale’. JBL 126.3 (2007): 437–453. Aune, David Edward. The New Testament in Its Literary Environment. Library of Early Christianity 8. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987. Bailey, James L. ‘Genre Analysis’. Pages 141–165 in Hearing the New Testament: Strategies for Interpretation. Edited by Joel B. Green. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010. Baird, J. Arthur. ‘Genre Analysis as a Method of Historical Criticism’. Pages 385–411 in SBL Book of Seminar Papers. SBLSP. Atlanta: SBL Press, 1972. Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press Slavic Series 1. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bawarshi, Anis. Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003.

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Bawarshi, Anis S. and Mary Jo Reiff. Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy. West Lafayette: Parlor, 2010. Bazerman, Charles. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Bazerman, Charles. ‘The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom’. Pages 19–26 in Genre and Writing: Issues, Arguments, Alternatives. Edited by Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997. Beaujour, Michel. ‘Genus Universum’. Glyph 7 (1980): 15–31. BeeBee, Thomas O. The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Berlin, Adele. Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative. Sheffield: Almond Press, 1983. Bitzer, Lloyd F. ‘Aristotle’s Enthymeme Revisited’. QJS 45.4 (1959): 399–408. Bitzer, Lloyd F. ‘The Rhetorical Situation’. PhR 1.1 (1968): 1–14. Bloom, Harold. The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Boda, Mark J., Michael H. Floyd, and Colin M. Toffelmire, eds. The Book of the Twelve and the New Form Criticism. Ancient Near East Monographs 10. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015. Boer, Roland, ed. Bakhtin and Genre Theory in Biblical Studies. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2007. Bond, Helen K. The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020. Brown, Jeannine K. ‘Genre Criticism and the Bible’. Pages 111–150 in Words and the Word: Explorations in Biblical Interpretation and Literary Theory. Edited by Jamie A. Grant and David G. Firth. Nottingham: Apollos, 2008. Bultmann, Rudolf. ‘The Study of the Synoptic Gospels’. Pages 1–76 in Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research. Translated by Frederick C. Grant. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962. Burridge, Richard A. What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography. 25th anniversary ed. Waco, TX: Baylor, 2018. Buss, Martin J. Biblical Form Criticism In Its Context. JSOTSup 274. Sheffield: Sheffield, 1999. Buss, Martin J.. The Changing Shape of Form Criticism: A Relational Approach. Edited by Nickie M. Stipe. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2010. Calhoun, Robert Matthew, David P. Moessner, and Tobias Nicklas, eds. Modern and Ancient Literary Criticism of the Gospels: Continuing the Debate on Gospel Genre(s). Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 451. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020. Campbell, Constantine R. Advances in the Study of Greek: New Insights for Reading the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015. Cheung, Simon Chi-chung. Wisdom Intoned: A Reappraisal of the Genre ‘Wisdom Psalms’. Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 613. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015. Coats, George W., ed. Saga, Legend, Tale, Novella, Fable: Narrative Forms in Old Testament Literature. JSOTSup 35. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985. Coe, Richard. ‘“Rhetoric 2001” in 2001’. CompS 29.2 (2001): 11–35. Coe, Richard and Aviva Freedman. ‘Genre Theory: Australian and North American Approaches’. Pages 136–147 in Theorizing Composition: A Critical Sourcebook of

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Theory and Scholarship in Contemporary Composition Studies. Edited by Mary Lynch Kennedy. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998. Coe, Richard, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko, eds. The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change. Cresskill: Hampton, 2002. Colie, Rosalie Littell. The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance. Edited by Barbara Lewalski. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Collins, Adela Yarbro, ed. Early Christian Apocalypticism: Genre and Social Setting. Semeia 36 (1986). Collins, John J., ed. Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre. Semeia 14 (1979). Collins, John J. ‘Apocalypse: Towards the Morphology of a Genre’. Pages 359–370 in Society of Biblical Literature 1977 Seminar Papers. Edited by Paul J. Achtemeier. SBLSP. Missoula, MT: SBL Press, 1977. Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016. Craig, Kenneth M. Reading Esther: A Case for the Literary Carnivalesque. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995. Davis, Ellen F. Opening Israel’s Scriptures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Dawson, Zachary K. ‘The Problem of Gospel Genres: Unmasking a Flawed Consensus and Providing a Fresh Way Forward with Systemic Functional Linguistics Genre Theory’. BAGL 8 (2019): 33–77. Derrida, Jacques. ‘The Law of Genre’. CritInq 7.1 (1980): 55–81. Devitt, Amy J. Writing Genres. Rhetorical Philosophy and Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Dobbs-Allsopp, F. W. Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City-Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible. Roma: Biblical Institute Press, 1993. Doty, William. ‘The Concept of Genre in Literary Analysis’. Pages 413–448 in The Genre of the Gospels. SBLSP. Atlanta: SBL Press, 1972. Duff, David, ed. Modern Genre Theory. Longman Critical Readers. Essex: Pearson, 2000. Eggins, Suzanne and J. R. Martin. ‘Genres and Registers of Discourse’. Pages 230–256 in Discourse as Structure and Process: Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. Edited by Teun A. van Dijk. London: SAGE, 1997. Farrell, Joseph. ‘Classical Genre in Theory and Practice’. NLH 34.3 (2003): 383–408. Fee, Gordon D. and Douglas Stuart. How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. 4th ed. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014. Finlay, Tim. ‘Genres, Intertextuality, Bible Software, and Speech Acts’. Pages 153–172 in Second Wave Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Marianne Grohmann and Hyun Chul Paul Kim. Altanta: SBL Press, 2019. Fishelov, David. Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Fletcher, Michelle. Reading Revelation as Pastiche: Imitating the Past. Library of New Testament Studies 571. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. Freedman, Aviva and Peter Medway, eds. Genre and the New Rhetoric. London: Taylor & Francis, 1994. Frow, John. ‘Discourse Genres’. JLS 9.2 (2009): 73–81. Frow, John. Genre. 2nd ed. New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 2015.

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Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. New York: Atheneum, 1968. Gerhart, Mary. ‘Generic Studies: Their Renewed Importance in Religious and Literary Interpretation’. JAAR 45.3 (1977): 309–325. Gerhart, Mary. ‘Generic Competence in Biblical Hermeneutics’. Semeia 43 (1988): 29–44. Gerhart, Mary. Genre Choices, Gender Questions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Graves, Michael. ‘The Literary Quality of Scripture as Seen by the Early Church’. TynBul 61.2 (2010): 161–182. Gunkel, Hermann. Genesis. Translated by Mark E. Biddle from the 3rd German ed. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997. First published in 1910. Gunkel, Hermann. The Psalms: A Form-Critical Introduction. Translated by Thomas M. Horner. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967. Gunkel, Hermann and Joachim Begrich. Introduction to Psalms: The Genres of the Religious Lyric of Israel. Translated by James D. Nogalski. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998. Halliday, M. A. K. Language as Social Semiotic. London: Edward Arnold, 1978. Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics. 2nd ed. New Accents 1. London: Routledge, 2003. Hernadi, Paul. Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972. Hoyt, JoAnna M. ‘Discourse Analysis of Prophetic Oracles: Woe, Indictment, and Hope’. HS 60.1 (2019): 153–174. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. ‘Generic Constraints and the Rhetorical Situation’. PhR 6.3 (1973): 162–170. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. ‘Form and Genre in Rhetorical Criticism: An Introduction’. Pages 9–33 in Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action. Falls Church, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1978. Jauss, Hans Robert. ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’. Translated by Elizabeth Benzinger. NLH 2.1 (1970): 7–37. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Jensen, Michael P. Theological Anthropology and the Great Literary Genres: Understanding the Human Story. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. Judd, Andrew. ‘Review of An Obituary for ‘Wisdom Literature’: The Birth, Death, and Intertextual Reintegration of a Biblical Corpus, by Will Kynes’. JETS 63.4 (2020): 857–859. Joüon, Paul. A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew. Translated and revised by Takamitsu Muraoka. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 2006. Keener, Craig S. Spirit Hermeneutics: Reading Scripture in Light of Pentecost. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016. Knapp, Andrew. ‘David and Hattushili III: The Impact of Genre and a Response to J. Randall Short’. Vetus Testamentum 63 (2013): 261–275. Knapp, Andrew. Royal Apologetic in the Ancient Near East. Society of Biblical Literature. Writings From the Ancient World Supplement Series. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2015. Knierim, Rolf. ‘Old Testament Form Criticism Reconsidered’. Int 27.4 (1973): 435–468.

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Kynes, Will. ‘Genre as Reception: A Multidimensional Network Approach’. Journal of the Bible and Its Reception (2023). 10.1515/jbr-2020-0017 Kynes, Will. An Obituary for ‘Wisdom Literature’: The Birth, Death, and Intertextual Reintegration of a Biblical Corpus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy. ‘Genre’. Glyph 7 (1980): 1–14. Larsen, Brian. Archetypes and the Fourth Gospel: Literature and Theology in Conversation. London: T&T Clark, 2018. Longman, Tremper, III. ‘Form Criticism, Recent Developments in Genre Theory, and the Evangelical’. WTJ 47 (1985): 46–67. Longman, Tremper, III. Fictional Akkadian Autobiography: A Generic and Comparative Study. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1991. Mandelbaum, Maurice. ‘Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts’. American Philosophical Quarterly 2.3 (1965): 219–228. Martin, J. R. and David Rose. Working with Discourse. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. Martin, J. R. and David Rose. Genre Relations: Mapping Culture. London: Equinox, 2008. Miller, Carolyn R. ‘Genre as Social Action’. QJS 70 (1984): 151–167. Minnis, A. J. ‘Discussions of “Authorial Role” and “Literary Form” in LateMedieval Scriptural Exegesis’. BGDSL 99 (1977): 37–65. Muilenburg, James. ‘Form Criticism and Beyond’. JBL 88.1 (1969): 1–18. Najman, Hindy. ‘The Idea of Biblical Genre: From Discourse to Constellation’. Pages 307–322 in Prayer and Poetry in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature: Essays in Honor of Eileen Schuller on the Occasion of Her 65th Birthday. Edited by Jeremy Penner, Ken M. Penner, and Cecilia Wassen. Studies in the Texts of the Desert of Judah 98. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Newsom, Carol A. The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Newsom, Carol A. ‘Pairing Research Questions and Theories of Genre: A Case Study of the Hodayot’. DSD 17.3 (2010): 270–288. Odell, Margaret S. ‘Genre and Persona in Ezekiel 24:15-21’. in The Book of Ezekiel: Theological and Anthropological Perspectives. Edited by Margaret S. Odell and John T. Strong. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2000. Orsini, G. N. G., Frederick Garber, and T. V. F. Brogan. ‘Genre’. Pages 456–459 in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Edited by Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Osborne, Grant R. ‘Genre Criticism: Sensus Literalis’. TJ 4.2 (1983): 1–27. Osborne, Grant R. The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation. 2nd ed. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006. Paltridge, Brian. Genre, Frames, and Writing in Research Settings. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1997. Paynter, Helen. Reduced Laughter: Seriocomic Features and Their Functions in the Book of Kings. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pennington, Jonathan. Reading the Gospels Wisely: A Narrative and Theological Introduction. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012. Petersen, David L. ‘Hebrew Bible Form Criticism’. RelSRev 18.1 (1992): 29–33. Pfenniger, Jennifer. ‘Bakhtin Reads the Song of Songs’. JSOT 34.3 (2010): 331–349. Pitts, Andrew W. History, Biography, and the Genre of Luke-Acts: An Exploration of Literary Divergence in Greek Narrative Discourse. Leiden: Brill, 2019.

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Pitts, Andrew W. ‘The Fowler Fallacy: Biography, History, and the Genre of LukeActs’. JBL 139.2 (2020): 341–359. Pius XII. ‘Divino Afflante Spiritu: Encyclical on Promoting Biblical Studies’. Encyclical letter. Vatican Website, 1943. http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/ encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_30091943_divino-afflante-spiritu.html. Polak, Ben. Game Theory. Open Yale Courses. New Haven: Yale, 2007. Poythress, Vern S. ‘Genre and Hermeneutics in Rev 20:1-6’. JETS 36.1 (1993): 41–54. Poythress, Vern S. Reading the Word of God in the Presence of God: A Handbook for Biblical Interpretation. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. 2nd ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975. Reiff, Mary Jo and Anis S. Bawarshi, eds. Genre and the Performance of Publics. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2016. Ricoeur, Paul. ‘The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation’. PhT 17.2 (1973): 129–141. de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959. Schryer, Catherine F. ‘Records as Genre’. WC 10.2 (2016): 200–234. Semler, Liam. ‘A Proximate Prince: The Gooey Business of “Hamlet” Criticism’. SydS 32 (2006): 97–122. Shively, Elizabeth E. ‘Recognizing Penguins: Audience Expectation, Cognitive Genre Theory, and the Ending of Mark’s Gospel’. CBQ 80.2 (2018): 273–292. Swales, John. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Sweeney, Marvin A. ‘Form Criticism’. Pages 58–89 in To Each Its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Application. Edited by Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R. Haynes. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999. Sweeney, Marvin A. and Ehud Ben Zvi, eds. The Changing Face of Form Criticism for the Twenty-First Century. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Toffelmire, Colin M. ‘Cohesion and Genre Blending in Prophetic Literature, Using Amos 5 as a Case Study’. JHS 21 (2021): 1–22. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Tucker, Gene M. Form Criticism of the Old Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971. Tynianov, Yuri. The Problem of Verse Language. Translated by Michael Sosa and Brent Harvey. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1981. Valeta, David M. Lions and Ovens and Visions: A Satirical Reading of Daniel 1–6. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2008. Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader and the Morality of Literary Knowledge. Leicester: Apollos, 1998. Vanhoozer, Kevin J. ‘The Semantics of Biblical Literature: Truth and Scripture’s Diverse Literary Forms’. Pages 49–104 in Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon. Edited by D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge. Grand Rapids: Academie, 1986. Vayntrub, Jacqueline. Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on Its Own Terms. The Ancient World. London: Routledge, 2019.

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Vines, Michael E. The Problem of Markan Genre: The Gospel of Mark and the Jewish Novel. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2002. Weeks, Stuart. ‘The Limits of Form Criticism in the Study of Literature, with Reflections on Psalm 34.’ Pages 15–25 in Biblical Interpretation and Method: Essays in Honour of John Barton. Edited by Katharine Dell and Paul Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Wellek, René. Concepts of Criticism. Edited by Stephen G. Nichols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. Wellek, René. Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. Wellek, René and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. Mitcham: Peregrine, 1963. Westermann, Claus. Basic Forms of Prophetic Speech. Translated by Hugh Clayton White. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991. White, Hayden. ‘Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres’. NLH 34.3 (2003): 597–615. Williamson, R. ‘Pesher: A Cognitive Model of the Genre’. DSD 17 (2010): 336–360. Wright, Benjamin G., III.‘Joining the Club: A Suggestion about Genre in Early Jewish Texts’. DSD 17 (2010): 336–360. Zahn, Molly. Genres of Rewriting in Second Temple Judaism: Scribal Composition and Transmission. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Part 2

Three contested biblical texts

4

Reading psalms in the first century

At 11:00 pm on 16 June 1974, President Ephraim Katzir of Israel proposed a toast for President Richard Nixon and the American people at a state dinner in Jerusalem –  

(‘to life and to peace’). Standing in the Knesset, Katzir retold his nation’s history, linking that modern parliament with the first constructed after the return from Babylonian exile: The modern Knesset, too, has come into being during a period of return to Zion, the second return, realizing the two-thousand-year-old dream of the Jewish people. A generation ago, a battered people emerged from the valley of the shadow of death into the light of liberty. Here, where Jewish peoplehood was born, where our lawmakers proclaimed the biblical ethic, where the prophets spoke their immortal message, here did we, the surviving sons of that people, rekindle the torch of national independence, thereby ending twenty centuries of exile.1 The description of the Second World War as a ‘valley of the shadow of death’ invokes King David’s words of confidence in Psalm 23:4 that YHWH will shepherd the king of Israel through danger and lead him eventually to enjoy abundance in the presence of his enemies. The ancient text is re-applied in light of assumed consistencies of space and statehood; discontinuous periods and nations – twentieth-century Israel and ancient Judea – are connected by a pattern in God’s dealings with humanity of exile and return. The exiled nation was threatened with extinction and survived. At 8:30 pm on 11 September 2001, George W. Bush addressed his nation live on TV. After condemning the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC, and thanking world leaders for their support, he turned to the same biblical text: America and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the world, and we stand together to win the war against terrorism. Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety DOI: 10.4324/9781032646602-7

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and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23: ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me’.2 Again, ancient and modern circumstances and nations are connected by the threat of violent enemies; YHWH’s assurance of covenantal protection for the Davidic king is now claimed by a Gentile ruler. At 5:20 pm on 25 April 2010, Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama, addressed a memorial service for the victims of a mining accident in West Virginia, turning to this same text: There’s a psalm that comes to mind today, a psalm that comes to mind, a psalm we often turn to in times of heartache: ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.’ God bless our miners. God bless their families. God bless West Virginia. And God bless the United States of America.3 This time the assurance of God’s protection from death at the hand of enemies becomes a source of comfort following a terrible accident. The miners were not rescued from death, but President Obama looks to God for comfort and hope through death. Three different Presidents read Psalm 23 in relation to three different valleys: genocide, terror attack and mining accident. The KJV translation in particular has a notable history of such recontextualization: John Bunyan’s pilgrim hears it spoken to him in the pit of his disconsolation;4 the Book of Common Prayer and derivative burial rites ensure innumerable mourners have heard these words in their time of grief; in ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ Coolio walks through the valley of street violence.5 This way of performing a psalm in radically new contexts has its origins in the very structure of the Christian canon – Old and New Testaments. The application of the OT to Christian theology is, as Gadamer notes, a ‘venerable hermeneutical problem’ (TM 331): is the correct interpretation of the OT Jewish or Christian? Or do both traditions have something in common that makes them equally legitimate? Gadamer moves through this issue quite quickly on the way to his general philosophical hermeneutics, but his comments about the importance of theological presupposition and application for theological – and, ultimately, all – hermeneutics are suggestive. The book of Acts depicts a defining moment in the evolution of nascent Christianity from Jewish sect to differentiated religion. It is also full of memorable speeches performed in moments of crisis to audiences familiar with the OT. Just as the US and Israeli presidents turn to Psalm 23, so in these moments the apostles often make use of psalms. This will serve to test

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some of the predictions of our playful hermeneutics. Like the presidents, the apostles apply the texts in ways that reflect the Wirkungsgeschichte (‘effective history’) of their situation. As interpreters, they do not determine the outcome but risk themselves in the Spiel (‘play’, ‘game’). The rules and payoffs of that Lesespiele (‘reading game’) depend on the primary genre of Scripture and the secondary genre of the specific OT text being understood. Application is therefore not arbitrary, nor slavishly bound to tradition, but playful. I begin with the paradigmatic case of Acts 1:12–26, before more briefly analysing every substantial quotation of the OT in the book of Acts as noted in the standard UBS5 text. What to do about Judas in Acts 1? 6 Acts 1 depicts Peter as a creative hermeneut, reworking and applying OT texts in light of recent history. The apostles have returned to Jerusalem with a pressing practical issue: 12 tribes await restoration, but only eleven apostles remain.7 The odd number in that upstairs room is an uncomfortable reminder of the grisly and public demise of Judas Iscariot, the apostate apostle who betrayed Jesus to the authorities. Addressing these practical and hermeneutical questions Peter, himself once briefly apostate, strengthens the disciples as Jesus promised he would (Luke 22:31–32). He addresses the 120 believers, interpreting Judas’ fate in light of Scripture,8 and applying his exegesis to contemporary circumstances to point a way forward: Brothers and sisters, the Scripture had to be fulfilled that the Holy Spirit foretold through the mouth of David about Judas, who became a guide for those arresting Jesus; 17 for he was counted one of us, and received a share in this ministry. … 20

For it is written in the book of Psalms: ‘Let his dwelling place be desolate, and let there be no one to dwell in it’ ‘and may another take his position.’

21

Therefore it is necessary for one of the men accompanying us the whole time the Lord Jesus came and went among us – 22 beginning from the baptism of John until the day he was taken up from us – for one of these to become a witness of the resurrection with us. (Acts 1:16–17, 20–22)

Yet, far from settling the matter, this hermeneutical solution raises more questions – at least for modern readers. In quoting from Scripture, Peter has apparently also re-written it:

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Let their dwelling place be desolated and Let his dwelling place be desolate and let in their tents let there be no one to there be no one to dwell in it dwell (Psalm 68:26 LXX = 69:25 MT) (Acts 1:20) and let another take his position. (Psalm and may another take his position 108:8b LXX = 109:8b MT) (Acts 1:20)

Is this just opportunistic proof-texting? Perhaps an unrepeatable moment of apostolic revelation? Or is this a principled, repeatable, way for Christians to understand the OT in the wake of the resurrection? Considerable scholarly effort has been expended trying to identify the hermeneutical principles behind Peter’s exegesis. Maybe Luke is drawn to Psalm 108:8 LXX by the word association of
π !" π#$%(‘position’) and to Psalm 68:26 LXX by its pre-existing association with Jesus’ death.9 Perhaps Peter is aware of a tradition of Jesus’ own use of another part of Psalm 68 to describe his enemies (John 15:25)10 – although this use of Psalm 68 is unusual because it is applied to Judas, not Jesus.11 Or is it rabbinic midrash? Perhaps he is employing the rule   
 (qal vahomer, ‘light-and-heavy’) to jump from the psalm’s run-of-the-mill villains to the weightier wickedness of Judas?12 Or is he connecting Scripture using catchwords, creating new meanings by changing consonants?13 Or is he using the rule of contradiction, to link two contrasting verses?14 As interesting as it is to spot the midrashic parallels at play in this speech, they aggregate into an incohesive picture of apostolic exegesis. Reading ahead through Acts, it is striking how the different speakers exegete the OT in such different ways. When Stephen retells the story of Israel to a hostile crowd in Acts 7, his hermeneutical strategy – Michael Whitenton observes – is determined by his Greco-Roman rhetorical method, drawing on existing Jewish traditions to persuade his audience of his argument.15 At other times, however, the hermeneutics of the Lukan speeches resemble gezerah shava (analogy), pesher (‘this-is-that’) or other midrashic techniques.16 Is there any principled hermeneutic here, or are these nascent Christian hermeneuts just making it up as they go along – opportunistically engaging any technique they can find so long as it proves their point? Our hermeneutics of Spiel brings several features of Peter’s hermeneutics into focus which can help us ground a general hermeneutics of the Scripture genre, while still allowing for the diversity of ways the secondary genres – psalm, history and law – are applied. The Scripture genre and re-contextualisation

The primary genre – Scripture – allows broad scope for re-contextualisation in light of the Wirkungsgeschichte of performance, particularly defining new experiences of salvation in history. I discussed in Chapter 1 how Gadamer

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expects that Scripture, by its very nature, will speak beyond the horizon of its original audience into new contexts. Aaron White observes that Luke’s adaptations of Amos form an inclusio structure that serves to highlight and interpret recent events using the normative authority of Scripture.17 Similarly, Chris Blumhofer argues that Luke’s adaption of Joel 3:1–5 in the following chapter of Acts is shaped by his theological vision of Israel’s eschatological restoration through the early church.18 The new Christians adopted these assumptions about Scripture from the Tanak and LXX tradition itself. David’s shepherd motif is recontextualised by the prophetic tradition in light of the disaster of exile, contrasting disastrous human leaders with YHWH’s own leadership (Isa 40:11; Ezek 34:15). This continued after the time of the prophets in the translation tradition; David Baer argues that the Greek translators of Isaiah used translation decisions as part of an ‘exegetical-homiletical’ act, implicating their contemporary audience in the message of the text.19 The primary genre of Scripture, therefore, allows Peter to participate in this long-standing tradition of recontextualising texts within a history of salvation that is continuous with the present. The question

I also described in Chapter 1 how, for Gadamer, the interpreter’s engagement with tradition in Spiel has the logical structure of a dialogue. This means that the questions being asked of Scripture are determinative. The event of Judas’ demise imposes itself on Peter’s wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein through the hermeneutically charged structure of a question: where precisely does the fatal betrayal of the Messiah by a member of his own inner circle fit within the scriptural expectation of a divinely appointed – and protected – Davidic king? Judas’ absence is not only a practical issue, but also a potent hermeneutical provocation. The presupposed, inescapable question of Judas explains why Peter changes the plural of the LXX’s20 &'()$%(‘their’) to a singular &'(" *%(‘his’).21 Darrell Bock suggests these changes may reflect an alternative traditional source for Luke’s version.22 However given that the MT and the LXX agree on the plural    (‘their camp’) and that no such alternative Greek version survives, the simplest explanation for the singular suffix is that Peter made a creative alteration for this occasion. To modern readers, this seems like startlingly irresponsible exegesis – you cannot unilaterally change a prophecy to match its claimed fulfilment! Yet the hermeneutical act is not arbitrary or unilateral, for it is answerable to a question that history has already raised. The question which dominates Peter’s horizon is what to do about the recent death of Judas. This given constitutes part of the Wirkungsgeschichte that Peter can neither change nor ignore. Peter is not asking the psalm whether Judas is the enemy of the Messiah: Judas already answered that himself through his actions. Nor is he

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asking whether Jesus is the Christ – the resurrection cleared that up, for the apostles at least. The question is: what can be done about the position left vacant by the friend-betrayer of the Messiah? This is why, as Witherington observes, the use of the canonical psalms in the New Testament is inherently selective: it is constrained by the presupposition that Christ was raised, and so not all psalms about David will fit the accepted narrative about Christ.23 There is nothing especially Gadamerian in the observation that the interpretation of Scripture is a creative process of application in light of historical experience. Yet Gadamer goes further than this, highlighting the dialogical relationship between text and event. The questioning goes both ways: ‘The speaker (der Redende) is put to the question (zur Rede gestellt) until the truth of what is under discussion (wovon der Rede ist) finally emerges’ (TM 368). Not only are recent events interpreted in light of the norms of Scripture, but indeed Scripture takes on new meaning in light of the questions posed to it by history. Recent events give new meaning to the psalms; conversely, reading the psalms through the lens of the Christ event provides a ‘lexicon or source of the language the writers of the NT use to tell the gospel story’, and so shapes how those events are understood.24 The secondary genre of psalm

Frye observes that in lyric the thematic aspect takes priority, whereas in drama more attention goes to the internal narrative.25 Psalms typically share the lyric’s focus on performance over narrative.26 Jamie Grant observes that the canonical arrangement of the psalms lends itself to recontextualization because, like much wisdom literature in the Bible, the psalter is placed outside the narrative frame of the histories.27 In the canonical book of Psalms, there are 14 superscriptions that identify the psalm with a point in the David story (for example, Psalm 51’s association with 2 Samuel 12, where Nathan rebukes David for his actions towards Bathsheba), but even then the actual content of the psalm tends to focus more on the relevant theme than any particularities of the situation that gave rise to the text. The other psalms come to us with little historical context. Psalm 102, for instance, is simply announced as ‘a prayer of one afflicted’. Historical notes are far outnumbered by performance directions: to the choirmaster (55 psalms), according to a particular tune (21 psalms) or with stringed instruments (7 psalms). To the frustration of generations of form critics, psalms do not give up their origins easily.28 Whatever hints we think we might recover of their original Sitz im Leben, the compilers of the canonical book of Psalms on the whole invite us to approach their content in a much more immediate way. This loose tethering to narrative history reflects the psalmic radical of presentation: texts sung corporately as part of a community’s living spirituality. As Witherington observes, there is no evidence that the laws, narratives or prophecies of the OT were sung in synagogues or the early Christian churches, whereas believers daily took the words of psalms on their lips:

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The Psalms, in short, speak not only ‘for us’ but if we read them and embrace them they speak ‘as us.’ … for they become our words in the sincere recital of them. Indeed, total immersion in the Psalms happened because they were sung, they were heard, they were responsively read, they were taught, they were memorized, they were preached to a degree unlike any other form of the OT.29 As liturgical resources, psalms are often sung on certain occasions, invoking old historical events even as they interpret new ones. Psalm 63, for example, links the experience of spiritual thirst with David’s experience in the wilderness of Judah. The non-canonical Psalms of Solomon, on the other hand, take inspiration from the literary form of the biblical psalms in their response to Pompey’s conquest of Jerusalem.30 In Acts, the essential vagueness of the psalm genre’s chronotope invites Peter to contextualise the psalms’ meaning in light of the time and place of their performance, rather than the context of their composition. The historical context retreats to the background, so the focus can turn to the present. The psalter anticipates, and even welcomes, an emphasis on the horizon of future performances. Unlike a narrative work which describes its own coordinates in space and time, the immediacy of the sung text invites interaction with the place of its recital. Wherever these psalms are performed the local geography imposes itself upon the wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein. Indeed the narrator seems to want us to be conscious of it: an intrusive historical aside breaks the narrative flow to foreground some local geographical knowledge – shared by ‘all the residents of Jerusalem’ – which forms the horizon of Peter’s act of exegesis: Now this man acquired a field with the wages of wickedness and, falling headlong, his middle burst and out came all his guts. And this became known to everyone living in Jerusalem, so that that field is called in their language Hakeldama – ‘field of blood.’ (Acts 1:18–19) Dennis MacDonald infers that this field was a ‘real place somewhere near Jerusalem’ from Luke’s use of the Aramaic name, which is independent from the Matthean tradition.31 This Wirkungsgeschichte is thus grounded, symbolically and spatially, in the geographical coordinates of a named field. Kim Paffenroth observes that the background provided in verses 18–19 appears as an ‘awkward aside’ if seen as part of Peter’s speech, but is necessary for Luke’s readers.32 It is so much a part of the Wirkungsgeschichte of Peter’s exegesis that it must be included for the benefit of readers who are separated by time and space from the original horizon of meaning. The underexplored idea that geography is part of a text’s Wirkungsgeschichte is picked up by Régis Burnet, who traces the history of interpretation of the Hakeldama from Augustinian monastic writings to contemporary heavy metal

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lyrics, retelling the development of the geographical object as a symbol of treason, blasphemy and corpse-devouring hell.33 The psalmist’s accusations of betrayal against the anointed mean something different when you read them standing in a notorious field of blood. The genre of psalm – with its performative nature, and emphasis on thematic rather than historical aspects – lends itself to this kind of immediate application to recent events and local geography. The poetic genre

I have noted above that the psalm genre emphasises thematic rather than historical matters, and so lends itself to re-contextualisation. The same can be said of the poetic language of the psalms. The evocative language is preloaded with potential for going beyond the original referent. On Gadamer’s scale of textual autonomy, poetry sits towards the self-presenting end, far from the situation of regular speech (RB 142–46). It is, Lawn observes, ‘language at its most playful’.34 It is the nature of poetry, Gunkel says, to prefer an ‘indeterminate means of expression’.35 As Witherington points out, the very nature of poetry, especially wisdom poetry, as metaphor is to invite analogy: When the poetry is often as generic and universal as the Psalms, speaking to the general human conditions (the fears, the hopes, the dreams, the foibles, the prayers of humans hoping for divine help), then the door is left wide open for later meaningful appropriation in ways that go beyond, but not against, the original meaning of the poetry.36 Peter’s use of psalms to respond to the emotionally fraught Judas situation is especially fitting because responding to emotionally fraught historical situations is part of what psalms are for: in other words, doing this kind of hermeneutical act is something inherent, not alien, to the genre. The genre of the source material partly informs how open it is to this kind of new event of reinterpretation. Reflecting on his two recent intertextual studies into the use of Isaiah and Psalms in the New Testament, Witherington makes the important observation that when addressing the emotional struggles of a new situation the New Testament authors are far more likely to reuse material from psalms than from prophetic or narrative texts.37 Poetry is an inherently ‘risky thing – it can mean more than you realize when first you create it’, and this lends itself to such ‘homiletical’ as opposed to ‘exegetical’ use.38 Indeed, genre also informs how much of a text can be used in this way. Quoting from a psalm, he observes, requires a more selective and even critical hermeneutical approach than quoting from the prophetic material in Isaiah, because by its genre a psalm gives voice not only to the oracles of God but also to the struggles of humanity.39 Additionally, the poetic genre seems to grant Peter poetic licence in how he responds to his source material. I have described how in this passage Peter

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is portrayed interpreting Judas in light of the psalms, but he is also reinterpreting – we might say even re-writing – a poetic text in light of Judas. The poetic nature of this creative hermeneutical act suggests that Peter’s reading strategy is guided not only by the content of the traditionary source material, but also by the genre of the psalms he is re-reading. Different genres invite both writers and readers to participate in different kinds of Lesespiele, with different structures and rules. Viewed as an act of poetic creation, rather than exposition, some of the other changes start to make more sense. In his analysis of Peter’s translational Hebrew poetics, Matthew Whitlock argues that Peter’s exegesis can be seen as a kind of ‘poetry of place’: an expressive and creative movement between the emptying of Judas’ physical place and the re-filling of the place of service he abandoned.40 Participation in a poetry of place might explain why Peter, in his reinterpretation of Psalm 68, replaces the LXX’s participle +,-μ.μ/$-%with its adjectival form 0,-μ" 1. Dennis MacDonald suggests that this change might be explained by dependence on Papias’ Exposition.41 Certainly, and regardless of whether Luke is dependent on Papias, it may be that Luke is reflecting some alternate Greek version. Yet is his choice of this version more than accidental or arbitrary? Craig Keener’s suggestion that Luke changes the verb form to ‘smooth the style’ seems unsatisfactory, especially given that in this poetic context, Luke delights in preserving, for instance, the LXX’s 0π&231%– a hapax legomenon in the NT.42 There is some explanatory power therefore in Whitlock’s suggestion that the change from a participle describing the process of desertion to an adjective describing a deserted place serves to emphasise the poetic theme of place.43 This motif of place brings two ideas into relationship: the place Judas bought, and the place amongst the apostles that he abandoned. The genre of the source material constitutes such an important influence on the event of interpretation that the source psalm brings some of its own linguistic Spiel with it into the new act of literary creation. Peter shortens the second verset of the LXX, so that 4%0π&231%(‘the homestead’) is no longer extended by the parallelism of (" 51% !-$6μ& $%(‘tents’) as in the LXX (and MT) but is met by a more laconic
$%&'(7%(‘in it’). This is not a lazy or forgetful omission. As Whitlock astutely observes, by removing the parallel (" 51% !-$6μ& $%the exact meaning of 4%0π&231%is left more open: it could be referring either to the physical field or more figuratively to Judas’ leadership role.44 Perhaps more significantly, the alteration moves the verb from the end of the line (as in the LXX and MT) towards the front, meaning that verset 2 no longer balances verset 1 with a closed symmetrical structure.45 This leaves two grammatical ‘ticks’ awaiting their corresponding ‘tock’. The omission of the first verset of Psalm 108:8 completes the tri-verset with a final ‘tock’: Psalm 108:8b, which breaks from the established pattern of verb-fronted versets.46 This final verset is thus alone in being fronted by the object of the verb, 89$%
π !" π9$%&'(" *, creating a sense of contrast.47

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The genre of the traditionary material informs the literary techniques used as part of the hermeneutical event. Had the Lukan Peter been interpreting a section of Hebrew narrative or prophetic tradition then the hermeneutical strategies available to him would have been different. But Peter is interpreting poetry, by re-creating poetry, and so some poetic licence is entirely appropriate. In addition, the elevated language of Hebrew poetry lends itself to the escalation of a typological structure, which is related to the Davidic genre. The Davidic genre

Multiple generic relationships come into play when reading a psalm. Form criticism’s classical genre theory made it reluctant to describe psalms based on their content,48 but modern genre theory opens up the genre of ‘Davidic psalm’ as one legitimate and important dimension of the overlapping relationship between texts. Psalm 69 and 109 MT have the superscript 
   (‘of David’), implying some association with that historical figure.49 Various strands of nascent messianic theology are weaved together, in the Christian tradition, around David as the prototypical Christ figure. Thus, within this tradition, the genre of ‘Davidic psalm’ is implicitly messianic; it is natural for Peter to apply such a psalm to the Messiah, and by extension the friendbetrayer of the Messiah. While the thematic and performative nature of the psalm genre widens the scope for legitimate recontextualization, the Davidic genre provides a principle of control, anchoring that recontextualization in the structure of a typological connection between David and Jesus. The answer to the Judas question is governed by this typological structure. When did the Holy Spirit through David foretell Judas’ betrayal? David, a type of Christ, speaks of the enemy of the Messiah in Psalm 69:25.50 Judas, Peter reminds everyone, served as a guide for those who arrested Jesus. Judas thus enters the picture relative to this christological typology. If Jesus is the Messiah, then Jesus’ friend-betrayer is the friend-betrayer of the Messiah. Peter then combines this text with the poetic justice of Psalm 108:8 to conclude that a fitting fate for the friend-betrayer is to be replaced. I describe this hermeneutical structure as extended christological typology. Typology is classically understood as related to allegory, but whereas allegory understands two ideas in light of each other, typology is anchored at both ends by an event, object or person, and this serves as a more definite limit on the meaning.51 The typology in this case is christological because it seeks to understand the events and personality of Jesus in light of King David and his heirs. There is a strong prophetic theme inherent in this typology because of the important place that a revived Davidic kingship has in the Latter Prophets. The typology is extended in this case because it seeks to understand the person of Judas and the event of his betrayal in light of the enemies of the Davidic king.

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Summary

A traditionary object, Gadamer says, is a self-presenting object. Like a Spiel, which exists in the playing, so a text exists in the reading. And because reading is an event, it is always wirkungsgeschichtliches. Acts 1 provides us with a hermeneutical time capsule, recording a moment of application at a critical point in salvation history. Five aspects of this hermeneutical situation reveal themselves as decisive: the relevance and authority assumed by the genre of Scripture, the hermeneutical question raised by recent events and geography, the secondary genre of psalm with its thematic chronotope and elevated language, the poetic licence afforded by the poetry genre and the messianic connotations of a Davidic psalm. Within this complex historical horizon, Peter interprets Psalm 68 and Psalm 108 in a new event of understanding. It is a creative act, but it is not an unprincipled or subjective appropriation. Peter is an active participant, but he does not control the elements in Spiel. He does not choose the history or geography of his Wirkungsgeschichte – things mean what they mean to him because he stands near a field of blood, on the other side of the betrayal of the Messiah. Nor does he write the rules of the Spiel: they are provided by the genres which tradition has given to him and his listeners. Testing the hypothesis 52 The other psalms in Acts

We have seen that Peter’s reading strategy is guided not only by the content of the traditionary source material, but also by the genre of the psalms he is re-reading. Peter is portrayed interpreting Judas in light of the psalms, but he is also re-interpreting – we might say even re-writing – the psalms in light of Judas. This Lesespiel is invited by the generic relations of the source texts themselves: as poetic works, as psalms, as Davidic songs and as Scripture. If my hypothesis about this is correct, then elements of Peter’s treatment of these two psalms in Acts 1 should be echoed later in the book, as other voices are depicted applying psalms to their situation. In total there are eleven citations of psalms in Acts. Examining these eleven passages confirms that Peter’s hermeneutical strategy in chapter 1 is consistently employed throughout the book of Acts. A breakdown of each OT citation by genre and hermeneutical method is provided in the Appendix to this book, including a summary (Table 1) of the use of psalms in Acts. Typological and christological readings are applied to Psalm 2 (twice), Psalm 15 (twice), Psalm 68 (twice), Psalm 108 (twice), Psalm 109, and Psalm 117. The only exception to this pattern is Psalm 89:20, two words of which are apparently being quoted in Acts 13:22 alongside 1 Samuel 13:14 as part of a straightforward promise-fulfilment hermeneutic. Ten times out of eleven, therefore, when a psalm is quoted, it is applied to Jesus through a typological lens.53

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A striking feature of the use of psalms in Acts is the relative freedom the apostles feel to change the text to suit circumstances.54 Psalms 68:26 and 117:22 are the most significant examples. There is nothing to suggest that this is underhanded or sloppy quotation; the rhetorical strategies of the speeches assume that everyone is familiar with the psalm’s original context and content. Furthermore, the changes are not random, but always serve to heighten the immediacy of a psalm’s relevance to the event of interpretation. These changes are best seen, not as the result of some unknown Greek version, but rather as deliberate hermeneutical moves that are encouraged by the performative nature of the psalm genre, and controlled by the underlying typological hermeneutic which presupposes the basic facts of the Christ event. The granular nature of Lesespiele creates space for different norms within Gadamer’s general hermeneutics, thus explaining how certain genres of biblical text can be relevant to new situations in surprising new ways, without compromising the authority of Scripture. My hypothesis is that there is a correlation between the hermeneutical strategies employed by the apostles to read the OT, and the genre of the source material. To demonstrate this correlation, it will be helpful now to look at the other substantial OT quotations noted in the apparatus of UBS5 – prophetic, narrative and legal texts. This will reveal how the new meanings generated in the Spiel of understanding are consistently constrained, in part, by the genre of the source text. In the Appendix to this book, I include my full breakdown of the OT citations in Acts by genre, noting the hermeneutical lens being used (typological, promise-fulfilment, salvation-historical, and so on) as well as the speaker and any differences from the LXX source text. Prophetic texts

There are nine main examples in Acts of prophetic genre texts being applied by Christians (see Appendix, Table 2). Four of these references are to the Minor Prophets: Joel features in Peter’s Pentecost sermon (Acts 2), Amos in both Stephen’s and James’ speeches (Acts 7 and 15), and Habakkuk in Paul’s Antioch speech (Acts 13). Not surprisingly, five quotations are from Isaiah: once in Stephen’s speech (Acts 7), once in Philip’s conversation with the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8), twice in Paul’s speeches in Antioch (Acts 13) and once in his final speech in Rome (Acts 28). While there is a general christological presupposition implicit throughout the apostolic teaching, prophetic texts tend to be applied differently to psalms. Often the events of the present are being interpreted or justified using ‘this-is-that’ or promise-fulfilment structures – most obviously in Acts 2:16–21 where Peter interprets the Pentecost tongues by saying ‘this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel’. In other cases, the ethical application of the source text is based on a theological or anthropological argument: the words of Isaiah about God’s transcendence and intolerance of false worship

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can indict the temple officials in Stephen’s day in Acts 7:48–50 because God is still transcendent, and humans are still prone to false worship. There are a couple of examples of directly christological use of the source material (Acts 8:32–35 with Isaiah 53:7–8, and Acts 13:34 with Isaiah 55:3) and some of these could be regarded as examples of a typological structure. Even so, the range of hermeneutical structures used with prophetic genre texts is broader than with psalms. The quotations from prophetic texts typically follow the LXX, with the minimal changes to the sense usually just serving to make aspects of the original more explicit. There are two notable exceptions that are closer to the creative quotations of psalms. In Acts 7:42–43, Stephen pointedly changes ‘Damascus’ to ‘Babylon’, effectively drawing an analogy between the situation under the Assyrian crisis and the later Babylonian exile (and, implicitly, beyond). In Acts 13:34, Paul turns the description of the holy things of David being sure into an assurance that God will give them. Narrative texts

The use of biblical narrative texts such as Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy is quite distinct from the use of psalms (see Appendix, Table 3). The hermeneutical structure is less likely to be typological and will typically be part of a salvation-historical, exemplary or promise-fulfilment argument. Peter’s use of the psalms requires his audience to relocate the quotations to a new context, sometimes changing the psalm to better fit the new context; Stephen’s argument relies on his audience identifying the original context of those quotations in order to weave together his own digest of Israel’s history. There are numerous divergences from the LXX, but these seem to be paraphrases, composites or verbal allusions rather than substantial changes to the sense of the original. It is striking that, of the 11 direct quotations considered, 9 are direct speech from pivotal moments in the stories. This creates an overlap between these narrative texts and the prophetic genre considered above, as the quotations are often the direct speech of God’s promises and so embedded within the primary genre of narrative is the secondary genre of prophecy. Five of the quotations are God’s promises to his people, and another is Moses’ prophecy about the future. However, unlike the quotations where prophecy is the primary genre, here the promises are embedded within narrative texts and so their original context is typically foregrounded. For example, the historical context of these promises is supplied through Stephen’s own summaries, with moments of verbal similarity to the canonical storytellers anchoring and authorising the narrative. The overall hermeneutic therefore is much more anchored in salvation history. The immediate fulfilment of the promise in the present is not as directly on view. In the rehearsal of the details of Abraham’s story, the point is to establish a diachronic relationship between God’s promises to Abraham

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and the Christ event through salvation history, rather than through the more direct structure of ‘this-is-that’ or typology. The rhetorical strategy behind the application of narrative texts is also quite different: in much of Stephen’s speech the reason for quoting prophecy is not to establish its fulfilment, but to make an ethical point based on a shared sinful anthropology. Law

There is only one citation from a legal text in Acts (see Appendix, Table 4). The hermeneutic here is a direct application of the prohibition to the circumstances of the present time: the leaders of the people are taken to include the current High Priest, and the addressee of the command (Israel) is taken to include Paul himself. The word of Moses here has both immediacy and authority over the situation, which is fitting for a legal text. Summary

Throughout Acts, the apostles are shown interpreting various genres of text: psalm, prophecy, narrative and law. While psalms typically receive christological readings using typological structures, the hermeneutical structures for other genres are more diverse. Prophetic texts generally attract ‘this-is-that’ or promise-fulfilment structures. Narrative texts are mostly comprised of direct speech and brief allusions, and while the language can be subject to paraphrase and composite quotation, the horizon remains firmly on the historical events in salvation history. The structure is usually promisefulfilment, salvation-historical or exemplary. The lone legal text is applied directly as part of an ethical argument. These different structures seem to provoke different kinds and degrees of variation to the text of the LXX. The differing secondary genres of Scripture thus seem to give readers a different hermeneutical task of application. Conclusion To be authoritative, Scripture must be stable; to be relevant, Scripture must speak and be heard in new ways. In Chapter 1, I explained how Gadamer describes this distinctive hermeneutical problem of Scripture in terms of application: ‘the meaning to be understood is concretized and fully realized only in interpretation, but the interpretive activity considers itself wholly bound by the meaning of the text’ (TM 332). A hermeneutics of Spiel helps us hold both sides in tension. Our theological presuppositions are essential to read Scripture, but they do not alone determine the outcome of our reading: This does not mean that such theological hermeneutics is dogmatically predisposed, so that it reads out of the text what it has put into it. Rather, it really risks itself. But it assumes that the word of Scripture

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addresses us and that only the person who allows himself to be addressed – whether he believes or doubts – understands. Hence the primary thing is application. (TM 332) We have seen this element of risk played out in the apostolic exegesis of the OT depicted in Acts. Scripture can continue to offer new meanings without dissolving into subjectivity because in Spiel no one participant alone determines the rules or dominates the field. The questions posed by the Wirkungsgeschichte, the genre and genres of Scripture, and the payoffs of the hermeneutical situation, all contribute to the outcome of the Spiel. The result is a performance that is simultaneously creative and constrained; dynamic and stable; novel and authoritative. The players are constrained by the seriousness of the Spiel. The outcome of Spiel is therefore not solipsistic or indeterminate in the way that conservatives fear. But nor is understanding a slave to tradition in the way progressives fear. At the end of his comparative hermeneutical analysis of one of the speeches in Acts, Whitenton concludes that ‘the view of scripture demonstrated from Acts 7:2–16 would suggest that the words of scripture alone are not what are important, only the words as understood through tradition count’.55 Yet a hermeneutics of Spiel would qualify this statement in a significant way – the new questions posed by the resurrection event prompt the disciples to depart from the traditional understanding of the OT texts and propose radically new, christological readings of Scripture. Genre theory has proven to be a powerful supplement to Gadamer’s general insights. The hermeneutical problem of Scripture is genre-d through and through. We have seen that the rules of the apostolic Lesespiele are governed by genre. For example, a psalm will often be radically recontextualised in light of the horizon of the Christ event, sometimes freely changing the words to better match the circumstances. This fits what a psalm is: a song, words sung in time and space, particularly in moments of great communal joy and lament. The chronotope of the psalm genre emphasises values common to humanity rather than specific times and spaces; untroubled by the vicissitudes of the original situation, the interpreter has little trouble fusing such expansive textual horizons with their own. Narrative, prophetic and legal texts invite slightly different Lesespiele. Returning to the use of psalms by the Israeli and US presidents, we can now say that their Lesespiel reflects both a primary genre of Scripture, and the secondary genre of psalm. To ask the text to speak anew into contemporary circumstances is part of what it means to read the Bible as Scripture. More specifically, to take a psalm out of context is, paradoxically, to respect its integrity. The psalm genre invites us to apply its thematic content to moments of national and personal grief. It might be a different matter if the presidents had chosen a narrative or legal text out of context to apply in this way; this would put them out of step

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with the model of apostolic exegesis. In his response to President Katzir’s toast, for example, Nixon praised the contribution of Jewish immigrants to America whose ‘names are legion’. He probably did not intend to compare Jewish Americans to the demons of Gerasenes (Mark 5:9) – an unfortunate connection for a Jewish audience in Israel, especially as the unclean spirits were sent into pigs which then rushed into the sea. When dealing with a narrative text, context matters. If Katzir realised the implications of Nixon’s allusion, then he was too polite to mention it publicly. It was probably an unintentional gaffe, and in the scheme of international politics little rides on it. However, our next case study from Genesis 16 brings us to the nineteenth century, and a situation where the hermeneutical stakes are much higher. Notes 1 ‘Toasts of the President and President Ephraim Katzir of Israel at a State Dinner in Jerusalem. June 16, 1974’, in Richard Nixon: January 1 to August 9, 1974, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1975), 518–25. Of course, politicians sometimes use stock biblical phrases without intentionally citing the source text. However, Katzir cites the biblical context at length and explicitly cites the psalmist as authoritative when he quotes Psalm 34:14: ‘make peace and pursue it’. 2 George W. Bush, ‘Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation’, 11 September 2001, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/ 2001/09/20010911-16.html. 3 Barack Obama, ‘Remarks at a Memorial Service for the Victims of the Upper Big Branch Mine Accident in Beckley, West Virginia’, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, DC: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration, 2010), 1.539. 4 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (London: Ponder, 1678), 80. 5 Mark Roncace, ‘Psalm 23 as Cultural Icon’, Bible Odyssey, https://www. bibleodyssey.org/en/passages/related-articles/psalm-23-as-cultural-icon. 6 An earlier version of this section published as Andrew Judd, ‘Gadamer, wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein, and What To Do About Judas (Acts 1:12–22)’, ABR 66 (2018): 43–58. 7 David G. Peterson, The Acts of the Apostles (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 118–9. 8 Acts 1:16. 9 Rom 11:9–10, 15:3; Steve Moyise, The Old Testament in the New (New York: Continuum, 2001), 52. 10 Rudolf Pesch, Die Apostelgeschichte (Apg 1–12) (Zurich: Benziger, 1986), 89. 11 Ben Witherington III, Psalms Old and New: Exegesis, Intertextuality and Hermeneutics (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017), 157. 12 Richard N. Longenecker, Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 97. 13 Arie W. Zwiep, Judas and the Choice of Matthias: A Study on Context and Concern of Acts 1:15–26 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 26. Following Frédéric Manns. This is more persuasive than Darrel Bock’s suggestion that the link is a gezerah shewa prompted by the common pronoun &'(" *: Darrel L. Bock, Acts, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 86. 14 Tzvi Novick, ‘Succeeding Judas: Exegesis in Acts 1:15–26’, JBL 129.4 (2010): 797.

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15 Michael R. Whitenton, ‘Rewriting Abraham and Joseph’, NovT 54 (2012): 166. 16 See further Moyise, The Old Testament in the New, 28–130; Agnethe Siquans, ‘Hermeneutics and Methods of Interpretation in the Isaiah Pesharim and in the Commentary on Isaiah by Theodoret of Cyrus’, in The Dead Sea Scrolls in Context, ed. Armin Lange et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 765–75; Longenecker, Exegesis. Cf. Hans W. Frei, ‘The “Literal Reading” of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?’, in The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, ed. Frank McConnell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 36–77. 17 Aaron W. White, ‘Revisiting the “Creative” Use of Amos in Acts and What It Tells Us about Luke’, BTB 46.2 (2016): 204. 18 C. M. Blumhofer, ‘Luke’s Alteration of Joel 3.1–5 in Acts 2.17–21.’, NTS 62 (2016): 499–516. 19 David A. Baer, When We All Go Home: Translation and Theology in LXX Isaiah 56–66, JSOTSup 318 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001), 53–4, 83–4. 20 ‘LXX’ is used here and throughout somewhat anachronistically to mean the Greek translations assumed to reflect the Old Testament texts available to firstcentury Greek-speaking Jews. 21 Pesch, Apostelgeschichte, 89. 22 Bock, Acts, 86. 23 Witherington, Psalms, 164. 24 Witherington gives the example, borrowed from Raymond Brown’s The Death of the Messiah, of how Psalm 22 led Christian writers to concentrate on certain elements of the passion narrative: Witherington, Psalms, 165. 25 Frye, Anatomy, 52. 26 With obvious exceptions, including Psalm 78. 27 Jamie A. Grant, ‘Singing the Cover Versions: Psalms, Reinterpretation and Biblical Theology in Acts 1–4’, SBET 25.1 (2001): 34. 28 This is not necessarily to deny the canonical approach to Psalms of Childs and Wilson; the fact that postexilic editors can rework so much traditionary material into a broadly coherent narrative arc over the five books rather demonstrates the thematic versatility inherent to the genre. 29 Witherington, Psalms, 325. 30 See Brad Embry, ‘The Psalms of Solomon’, in Early Jewish Literature, ed. Brad Embry, Ronald Herms, and Archie T. Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 563. 31 Dennis R. MacDonald, ‘Luke’s Use of Papias for Narrating the Death of Judas’, in Reading Acts Today: Essays in Honour of Loveday C. A. Alexander, ed. Steve Walton et al., Library of New Testament Studies 427 (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 45. 32 Cf. Kim Paffenroth, ‘The Stories of the Fate of Judas and Differing Attitudes towards Sources’, Proceedings: Eastern Great Lakes and Midwest Biblical Societies 12 (1992): 72. 33 Régis Burnet, ‘Pour une Wirkungsgeschichte des Lieux: L’exemple d’Haceldama’, NTS 59.1 (2013): 129–41. 34 Lawn, Wittgenstein, 130. 35 Gunkel and Begrich, Introduction to Psalms, 1. 36 Witherington, Psalms, 324. 37 Witherington, Psalms, xiii, 330–31. 38 Witherington, Psalms, 326–27. 39 Witherington, Psalms, 330. 40 Matthew G. Whitlock, ‘Acts 1:15–26 and the Craft of New Testament Poetry’, CBQ 77 (2015): 89. 41 MacDonald, ‘Luke’s Use of Papias’, 54.

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42 Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 1:766. 43 Whitlock, ‘Craft’, 97. Whitlock goes on to show how the contrasting senses of place implicit in 1:20 are made explicit by the repetition of (:π" $%in the prayer of 1:25. 44 Whitlock, ‘Craft’, 99. 45 Whitlock, ‘Craft’, 95. 46 Whitlock, ‘Craft’, 96. 47 Whitlock, ‘Craft’, 102. The only change to the quotation from Psalm 108:8b is subtle: the LXX’s rarer optative 3;