Shokhin Vladimir

Philosophical Theology and Biblical Hermeneutics: a Discourse on the Post-structuralist Challenge

Abstract

Given that philosophical theology has two basic missions, i.e. apologetic and hermeneutic, the author avows that it is because of its philosophical nature that it realizes the first task via critical analysis of not only antitheistic but also theistic propositions and the second one by exegesis of the exegesis itself. The paper deals with the exegesis of the contemporary Christian (both Roman Catholic and Orthodox) concern conditioned by the intervention into Biblical studies of a very fashionable trend, i.e. reader-response criticism whose extreme (readers are virtually regarded as the authors of the text) corresponds to Roland Barth’s postmodernist conception of the death of the author. The paper detects not only the logical self-refutation of this theory, but also its profound inconsistency. Indeed, while positioning their liberation of a text from an author as an antitheological revolution, the champions of deconstructivism don’t realize that in the historical perspective they only parody one of the very ancient and infl uential trends of theological Biblical hermeneutics, which the author of the paper designates as “Alexandrism” and whose origins he tries to discover.

Keywords

philosophical theology, apologetics, hermeneutics, exegesis, Biblical studies, reader-response criticism, post-structuralism, the death of the author, Alexandrism, allegorical method

References

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Information about the author

Shokhin Vladimir