ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the match between types of texts, the goals of readers or interpreters, and appropriate hermeneutical resources. It presents several models of possible relations between interpretations of biblical texts and pastoral situations. Biblical interpretation and pastoral theology both address issues of contingency and particularity as well as questions about theological coherence. Hence the more traditional and effective response in pastoral theology has been neither to eliminate symbols nor to qualify the varying effects of symbols by cerebralizing them. The hermeneutics of understanding, developed by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey and Emilio Betti, entail much more than historical reconstruction. The chapter summarizes a defence of the model used in the hermeneutics of understanding, then, and its traditional role in biblical studies. Carl Gustav Jung argued that engaging with the biblical texts and their symbols entailed asking questions both about the text and also "the meanings of the text in the personal life of the reader".
