PROLONGING THE ITINERARY OF MEANING

Abstract

It is true that Christians regard the Bible as the foundational text for their practice in life, but how can Christians say that their practices are biblically informed without falling into the pitfall of fundamentalism, while still admitting the relevance of the whole Bible in our contemporary world? Moreover, is it possible that biblically informed actions be meaningful not only for Christian communities but also to society in general? With the help of the paradigm of the parable, I would like to show how the appropriation of the biblical text in Christian praxis can be understood as embedding it in their life-narratives. In this way, the biblical text, rather than being taken literally, as in fundamentalist interpretations, is parabolized through an intertextual interpretation which involves an exchange of meaning with the socio-cultural context of the Christian reader. One of the contemporary thinkers who has written extensively on hermeneutics is Paul Ricoeur. He has done significant work on the interpretation of both biblical texts and human action. In this article, I do not aim at giving an overall evaluation of Ricoeur' s various approaches to biblical hermeneutics but try to point out how his work on the parable and the imagination may shed light on a specific problem of Christian praxis that of the appropriation of the Bible in Christian action. 1 To this aim I will bring together two areas of Ricoeur's