CO-SPONSORSHIP: Kierkegaard, Religion, and Culture Unit and Sacred Texts, Theory, and Theological Construction Unit

Kierkegaard and Biblical Hermeneutics

Invites papers that consider how various frameworks of biblical hermeneutics reveal the motivations of human hearts more-so than they reveal about the biblical text itself. In For Self-Examination (1851), Søren Kierkegaard invites his readers to engage with the biblical text with all the interest and passion that a lover would engage with a letter from one's beloved rather than as an object of impersonal disinterested speculation. The biblical text is then construed as a mirror that one must not look at as though observing the mirror itself but must see oneself in the mirror. How we relate to the biblical text is constitutive of our desires and therefore of our lived theologies. Considering the existentially and/or politically consequential nature of our various hermeneutical approaches, this co-sponsored session seeks papers that put Søren Kierkegaard’s approach to biblical hermeneutics as found in For Self-Examination (1851) into conversation with past, present, and emerging trends in biblical hermeneutics.