This panel considers 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 puts 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.
This paper interrogates Søren Kierkegaard’s For Self-Examination as anti-hermeneutical method. Standing as a seminal precursor to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of the dissimilarity between truth and method is Kierkegaard’s notion that the earnest (as interpretive summum bonum) is not found in an "objective" and impersonal technique. Rather, a theo-teleological gaze—focused on transformation through union in Christ—demands subjective appropriation through our prejudices over detached exegesis “against” them. Interpretive assurance becomes busyness, where “the people alter the conception of what earnestness is and consider being busy with interpretation to be real earnestness." Here, the mirror of the Word exposes such pseudo-earnestness, insisting on immediate self-confrontation and action. There is no “objective” mediator or method we can defend our prejudices with. Rather, what stands greater is the final upbuilding maxim from Either/Or, that "in relation to God we are always in the wrong,” which serves as the humbling criterion, built upon our eternal sanctification.
In For Self-Examination, Kierkegaard’s account of reading Scripture is strikingly immediate. He trusts in Scripture's ability to reveal itself to the reader through the Spirit's inspiration. He seems to lack any concerns about deferred meaning that put a gap between reader and text. This might seem to align Kierkegaard with evangelical doctrines of inerrancy, though I argue he is closer to trends in New Criticism and Post-Criticism. Further, I argue that such trust in Scripture's immediacy is laudable today in the face of Christian postliberalism and Christian nationalism, which privilege the mediating role of the interpretative community as authoritative for Scriptural interpretation. Thereby, however, the Scripture loses its power to criticize and correct, and capacity for critique is lacking in these movements. Therefore, Kierkegaard’s sense of Scripture’s immediacy is an important rejoinder to postliberal and Christian nationalist hermeneutics.
This paper explores Søren Kierkegaard’s claim in For Self-Examination that Scripture should be approached as a mirror rather than as an object of detached analysis. A mirror is not normally regarded as an object in itself; instead, it recedes as the viewer focuses on the reflected image. Kierkegaard argues that Scripture functions similarly. When readers treat the text merely as an object of scholarship, they risk neutralizing its reflective and transformative function.
Drawing on Diarmaid MacCulloch’s account of Christianity’s historical shift toward individual subjectivity and Erich Auerbach’s analysis of the biblical orientation toward transcendent meaning, the paper situates Kierkegaard’s insight within broader intellectual history. It then brings Kierkegaard into dialogue with Keiji Nishitani’s distinction between asking “What is for me?” and “What am I for?” Together these perspectives illuminate how Scripture, approached as mirror, can provoke a destabilizing transformation of subjective identity.
This paper investigates whether Kierkegaard’s model of self-reflection, as it operates within his Biblical hermeneutics, contains an implicit normative dimension, a standard by which one mode of engaging with Scripture can be judged more adequate than another. Kierkegaard’s approach to reading the Bible is not a neutral or descriptive enterprise; it is bound up with his conviction that Scripture addresses the individual reader personally and demands inward appropriation. The central question is therefore: does Kierkegaard’s Biblical hermeneutics presuppose a normative account of self-reflection, and if so, what are its criteria, its justification, and its limits?