ABSTRACT
This chapter traces how a series of issues emerged from a developing context of ideas in teaching and research in hermeneutics in four universities of the United Kingdom. It offers some tentative comments about prospects for the discipline. The chapter presents a balanced critique of the New Hermeneutic of Fuchs and Ebeling in the volume New Testament Interpretation. It addresses issues in theology including "pre-understanding", the relation between hermeneutics and theories of language. The chapter explores the usefulness of Martin Heidegger's notion of "situatedness", and "horizon", which provisionally bounded possibilities of understanding. It deals with Walter Wink's illustration about the effects of the intervention of a long tradition that separated the two horizons historically, with effects that call for a creative hermeneutic of what Ricoeur would call suspicion and retrieval. A more creative and authentic prospect for hermeneutics is to engage once again more seriously with the problem of manipulation.
