(REVIEW 10) Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

Merold Westphal                                                                                                                             Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2009

Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj

Merold Westphal is the distinguished professor of philosophy at Fordham University. His other publications are postmodern philosophy and Christian thought and over-coming Onto-theology. In this book Westphal relates the current philosophical thinking with the biblical hermeneutics. This book defines church as the faithful community which is being called to interpret the signs of the world.

Why we need interpretation?  Westphal contends that we need interpretation because world is not ‘out there’ or given.’ What ‘we see’ is a construal of an interpretation mediated by a tradition that is still alive in community and in our own thinking. So, ‘just see’ is not an absolute see. It necessitates multiple ‘seeings.’ It was the modern romantic hermeneutics that offered the scientific and objective method of interpretation. Roland Barthes ‘The Death of the Author’ (1969) and Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” offered a paradigm shift in the modern Biblical hermeneutics. According to Barthes, it is not the author who speaks but the language speaks. Barthes gives more importance to the reader and the reading.  

The most important contribution of this book is the hermeneutics of revelation. Westphal opines that ‘to speak of the divine nature of Scripture and of the church as a community built on the foundation of the Scripture is to speak of revelation. To speak of revelation is to speak of divine transcendence. The divine voice is not reducible to the human voices that give us Scripture either by writing it or by interpreting it. The revelatory content of the biblical hermeneutics finds philosophical grounding in the Levinasian notion of the radical other. The other is the radical other. The other is beyond my comprehension and objectification. God is the radical other as we see in the glory and the height of the face of the other-the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. The face of the other is the locus of divine epiphany. So every human community whether it is religious or political needs to be opened to the voice of the other in its immediacy. Westphal emphatically contends that it is the voice of the other that interrupts the authority and the power of the church. At the same time, it is the hermeneutical fecundity for the church today to discern its response-ability.  Whose Community? Which Interpretation? is a useful book for theologians, pastors, and laypeople.