China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture

13. Scriptural Reasoning and the Hermeneutical Circle

185 CHAPTER THIRTEEN sCriptural reasoning and the herMeneutiCal CirCle From comparative studies among the three Abrahamic traditions to the Chinese classical texts translated by Western missionaries being investigated under the spirit of scriptural reasoning, there has emerged an area of issues and a space for interpretation, which has drawn the attention of scholarship both within and outside China. From the Western perspective, the studies by Peter Ochs from Virginia University and David Ford from Cambridge University are the best-known representatives in this area. In China, whether the naming of missionaries is a “super-sign” of symbol or a Westernized “misreading” has raised many disputes. Essentially, the two aporia related to the “certainty of significance” and “cultural identity” are involved in the disputes. If we hope that “certainty” can really go beyond the limit of “identity,” we must completely get rid of the discourse logic of the “constitutive subject”1 and the “projected others.”2 Otherwise, the potential tension of scriptural reasoning cannot be fully represented.3 In this light, the result of scriptural reasoning (SR) should be revolutionary insight. If we trace back the hermeneutical heritage of ideas, we may say that this is entering into a positive “hermeneutical circle.” 186 China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture The Hermeneutical Circle The so-called hermeneutical circle has existed since ancient times. As Rudolf Bultmann said, “The question about the understanding of history can be specialized as the question about the interpretation of literary documents of the past. In this form it is an old question which has played a role in philology since Aristotle. . . . Aristotle already saw that the interpreter has to analyze the structure of a literary document; he has to understand the details from the whole, and the whole from the details. This is the so-called hermeneutical circle.”4 Researchers thus generalized this idea into two forms: First, “in order to understand a text we are already bringing a whole set of pre-understandings to the text. . . . Without any question [pre-understanding] we are unable to structure our own act of reading or seeing.” Second, “we can never understand a whole without understanding all of its parts; nor can we adequately understand the parts without seeing them functioning in the overall composition to which they contribute.”5 In light of this, Aristotle tried to regulate the expression of Truth through a certain logic. However, even the seemingly rigorous syllogism was questioned sharply by Pyrrho: “Every syllogism is a petitio principii—a begging of the question. For your major cannot be true unless your conclusion is true in advance—which you have no right to assume.”6 Thus, it seems that we can only limit “truth” as the “assertion of truth” or “claim or statement to Truth”7 so that we can go beyond the circle of “pre-understanding” and understanding, the whole and part, and fulfill the “certainty” in a specific context. As the main promoter and advocator of SR, Peter Ochs sketched the potentially revolutionary insights within SR. For instance, he claimed that the goal of SR is not to provide certain answers to a question, and SR never expects to achieve any final conclusion, nor does it seek truefalse judgments. In this way SR can “introduce something otherwise unachievable within the hermeneutical and epistemological frameworks of the modern university.” It can change the differences of “either/or” into the differences of “both/and,” transforming the “non-constructive differences” into a “constructive dialogue beyond differences,” and “contradiction” into “contrariety,” and so on.8 If we start from these “parts” and explore the “whole” of these arguments, it seems that by setting different levels of understanding, Ochs was trying to prove the sufficiency and validity of the “determinate meaning.” Scriptural Reasoning and the Hermeneutical Circle 187 As mentioned in Ochs’ arguments, although at the first level the “plain sense of scripture displays the will of the Absolute but displays it indeterminately,” it is the “indeterminacy” that constitutes “one source of the power of SR.” At the second level, the “interpretive meaning” and “performative significance” come out of the interpretation and action within a historically specific community, and the “determinate/assured meaning” covered in the “interpretive meaning” is valid only for that specific time and place. Therefore they are only “determinate claims about the interpretive/performative meaning.” At the third level, meaning is the other source of power of SR, which means to present “the...