ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Richard Rorty's critique of language as a mirror of the world to ask whether language is merely a mirror of self, as the self-constructed "texts" of radical reader-response theory might be taken to imply. Paul Ricoeur comments, "Every hermeneutics is thus, explicitly or implicitly, self-understanding by means of understanding others." If Jesus shares a communicative goal that relates to "indirect" communication, the purpose of using parables rather than "direct" discourse may well be to prevent premature understanding without inner change. Clearly the two themes of reader-response hermeneutics and the interpretative dynamics of parables belong together. While exponents of reader-response approaches are correct in insisting that an unduly cognitive or didactic approach such as that adopted by Adolf Julicher and to a lesser extent J. Jeremias changes the original hermeneutical dynamic of parables, there nevertheless remains a place for retrospective readings of parables.
