Toward a Hermeneutics of Divine Revelation: Bonhoeffer's Quarrel with Barth.

The aim of this paper is to explore the connection between Ricoeur's account of the linguistic imagination and his preference for understanding revelation as a matter of the world of the text rather than of religious experience. To understand revelation as poetic is not to violate the purity and alterity of the phenomena but to remain open to the poetic richness of the world of the text, which creates new meaning and enables new ways of being. To make this argument, I will follow Ricoeur's method of detour-- return. The first detour--return will traverse Ricoeur's account of the productive imagination and consider how the notion of the "world of the text" can enrich our understanding of revelation as the revelation of a new world that we can inhabit. In the second detour--return, I will consider the role of critical distanciation in the preservation of discernment. An important part of this argument will be an examination of Ricoeur's account of the human being as a mixture of finite and infinite. I argue that this implies that human finitude is not utterly opposed to divine infinitude and that, by extension, human understanding is not always and only a contamination or limitation of the divine excess. In the final detour--return, I will follow Ricoeur's recommendation that a phenomenology of religion take the hermeneutical path of examining the texts in which religious phenomena come to expression. I will examine select passages from the Rig Veda to consider the possibilities for understanding revelation as a theo-poeisis -- viz., a divine creativity in which we participate. Ultimately, I hope to show that revelation involves the creation of a new world and the regeneration of human capability such that we can inhabit that world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]