Hermeneutic Quotes & Sayings

Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is time to end this standoff, and to reestablish a hermeneutic of trust (itself a sign of the gospel!) in place of the hermeneutic of suspicion which the church has so disastrously borrowed from the postmodern world. — N. T. Wright

I shrank back, my face flaming as if I'd been struck. And in that moment something changed. I didn't trust her anymore. When she cried, I felt numb. After that, she called me heartless, unfeeling. And maybe I was. A — Christina Baker Kline

For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony. — Sri Aurobindo

When you understand the values of God's kingdom, you will best understand His agenda.4 However, it is my conviction that the message of the kingdom, and the values therein, are sorely lacking in understanding today. — Tony Evans

We do not follow a health and wealth savior. We follow a homeless and wounded Savior. — David Platt

Be open to inspiration as you partake in the mundane. — Erica Alex

Countering the juggernaut of formalism is a minority worldview of equal historical standing, even though it does not share equal awareness or popularity. Variously known as hermeneutics, constructivism, interpretationalism, and most recently postmodernism, this tradition has consistently challenged almost everything advanced by the formalists. Iterative development practices, including XP, and object thinking are consistent with the hermeneutic worldview. Unfortunately, most object, XP, and agile practitioners are unaware of this tradition and its potential for providing philosophical support and justification for their approach to software development. — David West

Success doesn't just happen. It is a product of hard work, grit and ingenuity. — Ogwo David Emenike

According to this hermeneutic, if we follow what the NT says about the relationships between men and women and husbands and wives, we will not be doing the will of God, for the redemptive movement in Scripture means we must go beyond Scripture to discover God's perfect will. — Benjamin Reaoch

We are opaque mysteries to ourselves and one another. — Stanley Hauerwas

It is no great hermeneutic feat to recognize that Rome crucified Jesus because of His claim to be king. The charge was posted over His head, after all. What is often overlooked, however, is that it is precisely because of their allegiance to that king - Jesus - that Rome persecuted His followers.
That the God of the Jews should father a son with magical powers was no more offensive to the Romans than the idea that Zeus should father Hercules. But what was intolerable was the fact that Jesus' followers did not stop with recognizing Him as divine; they had the audacity to claim He was their actual sovereign.
In short, while the Jews preserved their religion by shouting, "We have no king but Caesar," the early Christians sealed their fate by unabashedly declaring, "We have no king but Jesus! — Christopher Gorton

How can this strange story of God made flesh, of a crucified Savior, of resurrection and new creation become credible for those whose entire mental training has conditioned them to believe that the real world is the world which can be satisfactorily explained and managed without the hypothesis of God? I know of only one clue to the answering of that question, only one real hermeneutic of the gospel: a congregation which believes it. — Lesslie Newbigin

Grant kissed my neck that I offered up like a willing victim in True Blood. Take me ... Bite me. Lick me. Oh this was madness! Glorious, wonderful madness!
-Julie
From: A New Addiction — Valerie Alexander

In fact, I believe that theological interpretation runs the risk of jeopardizing what it means to be a responsible biblical hermeneut, by attempting to overlook or negate, whether consciously or not, a biblical hermeneutic. — Stanley E. Porter Jr.

The hermeneutic consciousness, which must be awakened and kept awake, recognized that in the age of science philosophy's claim of superiority has something chimerical and unreal about it. But though the will of man is more than ever intensifying its criticism of what has gone before to the point of becoming utopian or eschatological consciousness, the hermeneutic consciousness seeks to confront that will with something of the truth of remembrance: with what is still and ever again real. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

These corners are getting a bit bulky." Mum looks consideringly at the catalog. "Maybe we should fold down if we're not interested in the page. — Sophie Kinsella

(I should mention I attended a Christian elementary school where "my dad's hermeneutic can beat up your dad's hermeneutic" served as legit schoolyard banter.) — Rachel Held Evans

My friends knew that I was reading the Bible. First, the dean of the chapel took me out to lunch and shared his belief that the Old Testament was dispensable and, with it, any prohibition about sexuality and immorality. But I had been reading and studying the three different narratives of the Old Testament, and it seemed to me that you couldn't dispense with it in its entirety without violating a foundational rule about canonicity: no creating canons within canons. In fact, I had just gone over this in my graduate seminar in Queer Theory and it made me wonder if the chapel dean ought not sit in on my class. His position seemed like a hermeneutic of convenience, tailoring the text to fit my experience, and not a hermeneutic of integrity, where the text gets the chance to fulfill its internal mission. — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

[Roland] Barthes turned the thable on the author, saying no only the a book needs a reader to wake it into life, but that in so doing the reader becomes nothing less that the author, who reveals in the book's hermeneutic possibilities, releases them and so becomes its own creator. — Robert Rowland Smith

There has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity because Christianity proceeds from a proclamation. — Paul Ricoeur

It took me years to figure out that upset was upset, and tumultuousness was not the same thing as passion. Love isn't drama. — Deb Caletti

(Personally, I have avoided many fights by going to bed angry and waking up to realize that I'd just been tired.) — Ada Calhoun

To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills. — George Steiner

The radical hermeneutic of suspicion that characterizes all of post-modernity is essentially nihilistic, denying the very possibility of creative or healing love. In the cross and resurrection of Jesus we find the answer: the God who made the world is revealed in terms of a self-giving love that no hermeneutic of suspicion can ever touch, in a Self that found itself by giving itself away, in a Story that was never manipulative but always healing and recreating, and in a Reality that can truly be known, indeed to know which is to discover a new dimension of knowledge, the dimension of loving and being loved. — N. T. Wright

Without a shared hermeneutic, authority is meaningless. — Douglas Wilson

Since God is the end of man, since he has created us to be perfect and happy in him, it is manifest that if the designs of creation have not here below been entirely frustrated, there should be found men who tend to their end in seeking and loving God. And nevertheless, because of human liberty, there should also be found other men who neglect God, their principle and their end, and yield to the seduction of created things. Such indeed is the spectacle which the history of the world unceasingly presents to us. — Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

Although there has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity, the hermeneutic question today seems to us a new one. — Paul Ricoeur

To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. By going out of your mind, you come to your senses. — Alan Watts