Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination: The Crisis of Interpretation at the End of Modernity

This book explores the contemporary crisis of biblical interpretation by examining modern and postmodern forms of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Garrett Green looks at several thinkers who played key roles in creating a radically suspicious reading of the Bible. After Kant, Hamann and Feuerbach comes Nietzsche, who marked the turn from modern to postmodern suspicion. Green argues that similarities between Derrida’s deconstruction and Barth’s theology of signs show that postmodern suspicion ought not to be viewed simply as a threat to theology but as a secular counterpart to its own hermeneutical insights. When theology attends to its proper task of describing the grammar of scriptural imagination, it discovers a source of suspicion more radical than the secular, the hermeneutical expression of God’s gracious judgement. Green concludes that Christians are committed to the hermeneutical imperative, the never-ending struggle for the meaning of scripture in the hopeful insecurity of the faithful imagination.

• Affirms Christian orthodoxy while at the same time engaging in serious conversation with secular thinkers hostile or indifferent to the gospel • Deals lucidly with important but difficult philosophers and theologians • Offers a theological response to the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’

Preface; 1. Theological hermeneutics in the twilight of modernity; Part I. The Modern Roots of Suspicion; 2. The scandal of positivity: the Kantian paradigm in modern theology; 3. Against purism: Hamann’s metacritique of Kant; 4. Feuerbach: forgotten father of the hermeneutics of suspicion; 5. Nietzschean suspicion and the Christian imagination; Part II. Christian Imagination in a Postmodern World: 6. The hermeneutics of difference: suspicion in postmodern guise; 7. The hermeneutic imperative: interpretation and the theological task; 8. The faithful imagination: suspicion and trust in a postmodern world; Appendix: Hamann’s letter to Kraus; Bibliography; Index.