Refiguring Theological Hermeneutics : Hermes, Trickster, Fool

Grau reconsiders the relationship between "logos" and "mythos" as a precondition to opening theological hermeneutics to discourse from other cultures and genres, other modes of telling and retelling. (Publisher) Hermeneutics can be said to be operative when something is not immediately intelligible. The divine, experiences of God and the sacred, are of course a notorious hermeneutical problem. How to render, translate, interpret the unintelligible, the infinitely untranslatable without indeed admitting to its impossibility? This book argues that interpretive agency has aspects that are represented by the figures of Hermes, trickster, and fool. These figures reveal, perform, and challenge the status quo of a society and its structures of power, knowledge and belief. As hermeneutical acts are notoriously multivalent, engagement with these figures can help reframe hermeneutical work as a vibrant reminder of the play between humility and courage in reinterpreting the divine through mythos and logos anew each day. These figures can help to reconstruct theology as mytho-logy in teaching us greater respect for the dynamics of mythological narrativity and its logical exfoliation Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Unsealing Hermeneutics....Pages 1-34 Theological Hermeneutics as Pattern Recognition....Pages 35-58 Logos, Mythos, and Mysticism....Pages 59-78 Putting Hermes Back into Hermeneutics....Pages 79-103 The Trickster as Hermeneut....Pages 105-142 Fool’s Errand: Holy Fools and Divine Folly as Hermeneutical Figures....Pages 143-162 Reframing Mythos and Logos: Theology as Mytho-Logy....Pages 163-185 Reframing Theological Hermeneutics....Pages 187-192 Back Matter....Pages 193-201