ABSTRACT
This chapter explores three examples of the role of "polyphonic voices": the Book of Job, George Eliot's Adam Bede, and Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel. The Brothers Karamazov. Amos Wilder notably urges that biblical speech performs a variety of linguistic acts. These include dialogue, narration, fictional parable, poetic discourse, exhortation, instruction, testimony, hymnic praise, confession, promise, letter writing and many others. The very context of reflection on time in The Confessions seems to presuppose the very "private subjectivity" that Hans-Georg Gadamer perceives as excluded since Aristotle in G.W.F. Hegel's Logic and temporal dialectic. Human and divine faithfulness in the acceptance of constraint for the performance of promise presupposes a temporal horizon of understanding and action. Tremper Longman III writes in the Westminster Theological Seminary Symposium of 1988 entitled Inerrancy and Hermeneutic that the Book of Job contains "literary artifice", and that the Scriptures are "multi-functional". For many centuries hermeneutics was bound up with the interpretation of sacred texts.
