Francis Joseph Mootz III (William S. Boyd School of Law, UNLV) has posted Faithful Hermeneutics (Michigan State Law Review, 2009) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This
article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of
American Law Schools on January 9, 2009 as part of a panel on
"Scriptural and Constitutional Hermeneutics." The panel was
co-sponsored by the Law and Religion Section, Section on Jewish Law,
and Section on Islamic Law, and the papers will be published by the
Michigan State Law Review.My article compares legal and
religious hermeneutics by exploring the dual nature of what I term
"faithful hermeneutics." The ambiguity evoked by this phrase is
intentional. On one hand, it suggests an investigation of the
relationship between legal and religious interpretation by comparing
hermeneutical activities undertaken by faithful adherents to these two
different textual traditions. In this first sense, it is to compare how
these practices are the hermeneutics of the faithful. On the other
hand, the phrase suggests an analysis of how interpreters in these two
traditions remain faithful to the nature of their practice. In this
second sense, it is to compare how hermeneutics can be faithfully
accomplished. My thesis is that these two senses of "faithful
hermeneutics" are connected. The fact that it is faithful adherents who
engage in the interpretive practice in large part defines how they can,
and should, remain faithful to the interpretive enterprise.I
anchor my argument in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s critique of historicism, in
which he references the practices of legal and religious hermeneutics.
Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics explains how faith is a
prerequisite of understanding, even as understanding revitalizes and
reshapes the faith one brings to a textual tradition. I then unfold the
critical dimensions of faithful hermeneutics by comparing the work of
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) and Gianni Vattimo
on the Catholic tradition. I argue that these two thinkers display both
the broad range and the non-methodological character of the critical
insights of faithful hermeneutics.I conclude by suggesting
that the parallels between religious and legal hermeneutics is
instructive, but that we remember that it would be a mistake to
conflate these two instances of faithful hermeneutics in our secular
age.