Saving God outside of the Text

Saving God outside of the Text

Jason TS LAM

This article is divided into two major parts. In the first part a comparison is conducted between post-structuralism (taking Derrida as an example) and hermeneutics (taking Ricoeur as an example) in dealing with the transformation of meaning in reading a text. It is to show that although both sides exhibit some inner tensions in their handling of the reading process, they can construe coherent renderings. The second part tries to show that, however, if the purpose is to develop a theology from interpreting the biblical text, then Ricoeurian type of hermeneutics may offer some advantages over Derridian deconstruction. It is because hermeneutics scholars, like Ricoeur, understand that there is always an impulse of totalization in human interpreters, while in reality one can only examine concrete and limited events as texts. Thus there exist an outside and an inside of a text and different disciplines of the human sciences may join hands to investigate the temporality and historicity of human beings through analyzing texts. Narrative in this way is a means to connect the seemingly unbridgeable fragments of history for the sake of building up a meaningful and coherent imaginative unity (of a universal history). But then it is obvious that no one single narrative can be truly totalizing and all narratives can always be refigured to generate new meanings in different contexts. The Christian Bible is the example Ricoeur used to illustrate this effect. Different generations of believing communities have demonstrated in the Bible how they (re)figure their own selves or images in the mirror of this imaginative unity being supposed to be inspired by the God who is the holy other outside of this text.