This book explores the rapidly growing interdisciplinary area of hermeneutics and its significance for biblical studies, combining wide, fundamental, rigorous, and creative theoretical concerns with practical questions about how we read biblical texts.

From essays that focus on the horizon of the text through to essays that consider the horizon of the twenty-first century church, this collection invites reflection on the illumination that hermeneutical awareness brings to biblical interpretation. This Festschrift in honor of Anthony C. Thiselton aims to consider, exemplify, and build upon his insights in philosophical hermeneutics and biblical studies, particularly in relation to Paul and his writings.

Anthony Thiselton here brings together his encyclopedic knowledge of hermeneutics and his nearly four decades of teaching on the subject to provide a splendid interdisciplinary textbook. After a thorough historical overview of hermeneutics, Thiselton moves into modern times with extensive analysis of scholarship from the mid-twentieth century, including liberation and feminist theologies, reader-response and reception theory, and postmodernism. No other text on hermeneutics covers the range of writers and subjects discussed in Thiselton’s Hermeneutics.

Hermeneutics is an interdisciplinary study of how we interpret texts, especially biblical texts, in the light of theories of understanding in philosophy, meaning in literary theory, and of theology. This volume brings together the seminal thought of a leading contemporary pioneer in this field. Thiselton's The Two Horizons was a classic on how horizons of biblical texts engage creatively with the horizons of the modern world. The author's later New Horizons in Hermeneutics explored still more deeply the transforming capacities of biblical texts, while his massive commentary on 1 Corinthians interpreted an epistle. This volume collects many of Anthony Thiselton's more notable writings from some seven books and 70 articles, to which he adds his own re-appraisals of earlier work. It uniquely expounds the thought of a major contemporary British theologian through his own words, and includes his own critical assessments.

Throughout the book Thiselton shows how perspectives that arise from hermeneutics shed fresh light on theological method, reshape horizons of understanding, and reveal the relevance of doctrine for formation and for life. --

Dr. Anthony Thiselton s thorough approach to the growing discipline of hermeneutics takes account of a comprehensive range of theoretical models of reading and interpretation. He evaluates both the foundations on which they rest and their practical implications for Old and New Testament reading. Building on his earlier influential work, The Two Horizons, Dr. Thiselton examines theories of texts, semiotics and literature, the legacy of Patristic and Reformation hermeneutics, and the use of socio-critical theory, liberation theology, and Marxist, feminist, and black hermeneutics, and discusses every major hermeneutical theorist. This exhaustive and rigorous critique will prove valuable to anyone undertaking advanced research in hermeneutics, including teachers and students of theology and language or literary theory."