oa The Hermeneutic Imperative: Reading the Bible as Scripture*

*A previous version of this paper was presented at a meeting of the Netherlands School for Advanced Studies in Theology and Religion (Noster), dept. of Systematic Theology, May 1995.

The author argues for a distinction in four hermeneutical types in the struggle over right interpretation of the Bible. These approaches are dubbed respectively critical, fundamentalist, pluralist, and relativist. The first two options are typically modern and foundationalist whereas the latter approaches are postmodern and antifoundationalist. To avoid relativism, we need a normative interpretation but not an authoritarian one. Reading the Bible as scripture is to interpret the world and oneself. Because the meaning of a text is always open-ended, the meaning of scripture is always the fruit of an interpretative act which implies the hermeneutical imperative.