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Gnostic hermeneutics

Lundin suggests that "At the core of Hirsch's appeal is a promise dear to American culture - that we can return to the innocent origins and begin history anew. . . . Hirsch wants a 'ruthlessly critical process of validation' to establish the facts of original intent and thus to clear the historical ground stretching between an author and us." As Lundin rightly notes, this is the same aspiration found in Schleiermacher's mind-meld hermeneutics. It is also thoroughly gnostic, in that it ignores and resents the fact that texts, and their readers, exist in time. Time and change are tragic obstalces to meaning. It is gnostic in that it seeks to bridge the historical "distance," rather than (as would seem preferable) seeing that historical distance as one of the conditions of meaning.

If the last comment sounds odd, think of how the meaning of the OT is illuminated by the events of the New. What clarifies the OT is precisely time, a new time, the time of the kingdom.

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