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.
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.