ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the activity of interpretation as a subjective enterprise which nevertheless retains certain objective and communitarian aspects. It argues that norms are intrinsically connected to the sense of obligation which emerges in the encounter with otherness insofar as otherness is significant—that is, bears the imprint—of the divine. The chapter explores how axiological and normative issues are emergent in the movement from epistemology to theology. The pneumatological imagination's semiotic and truthful engagement with otherness is normative with regard to the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of knowledge as both relate to human persons and the natural world. Theological knowledge can therefore be said to emerge semiotically by way of the pneumatological imagination's quest for truth as constrained normatively by the object(s) of engagement. Theological hermeneutics and theological method are thereby inherently triadic as well, both with regard to the activity of interpretation which is semiotically structured, and with regard to the three moments of imagination, engagement, and truthful normativity.
