ABSTRACT

The interpreter must step out of his or her own frame of reference and try to place himself or herself "in the position of the author". Some of its origins sprang from the Russian formalism of the Moscow Linguistic Circle of the 1920s, especially from Roman Jakobson’s approach to language as a virtually self-contained linguistic system. On one side of the argument, a consumer-philosophy or consumer-hermeneutic of indeterminate meaning open to the shaping of ethnocentric communities may be regarded as compatible with Christian theism only with great difficulty. Nevertheless other biblical texts reflect a "world behind the text" where double meaning or multiple meaning or even indeterminate meaning plays a role. The postmodern tendencies to undervalue any referential or representational account of language are derived from the Kantian principle that all knowledge of all truth-claims is decisively conditional by prior categories of the mind which shape perception and construe cognition.