Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Fall 1-1-2016 The Return of Participatory Scriptural Hermeneutics in Evangelicalism: An Augustinian Philosophy of Communication Joshua David Hill Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Hill, J. (2016). The Return of Participatory Scriptural Hermeneutics in Evangelicalism: An Augustinian Philosophy of Communication (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/38 This Worldwide Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE RETURN OF PARTICIPATORY SCRIPTURAL HERMENEUTICS IN EVANGELICALISM: AN AUGUSTINIAN PHILOSOPHY OF COMMUNICATION A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Joshua D. Hill December 2016 Copyright by Joshua D. Hill 2016 THE RETURN OF PARTICIPATORY SCRIPTURAL HERMENEUTICS IN EVANGELICALISM: AN AUGUSTINIAN PHILOSOPHY OF COMMUNICATION By Joshua D. Hill Approved October 28, 2016 ________________________________ ________________________________ Dr. Janie Harden Fritz Dr. Ronald C. Arnett Professor of Communication Professor of Communication (Committee Chair) (Committee Member) ________________________________ Dr. Richard Thames Associate Professor of Communication (Committee Member) ________________________________ ________________________________ James C. Swindal Dr. Ronald C. Arnett Dean, McAnulty College of Liberal Arts Chair, Dept. of Communication & Professor of Philosophy Rhetorical Studies Professor of Communication iii ABSTRACT THE RETURN OF PARTICIPATORY SCRIPTURAL HERMENEUTICS IN EVANGELICALISM: AN AUGUSTINIAN PHILOSOPHY OF COMMUNICATION By Joshua D. Hill December 2016 Dissertation supervised by Dr. Janie Harden Fritz Using a philosophy of communication approach adapted from St. Augustine’s rhetorical theory, I propose the recovery of Augustinian scriptural hermeneutics to meet the hermeneutical crisis in current Evangelicalism. Evangelical identity is centered on scripturally mediated belief and mission that ties together its ecumenical coalition, but its hermeneutic principles were co-opted by modernism and have now become further embattled by the turn away from modernism to philosophical hermeneutic approaches. Augustine’s hermeneutical principles of charity, hermeneutical humility through responsiveness to the Word, and the social/communal action of lived hermeneutics are explained in terms of Augustine’s pre-modern cosmology of “participation” and are clarified by comparison with the hermeneutic theories of Gadamer, Ricoeur, and their iv Evangelical respondents. Fulfilling its philosophy of communication emphasis, this project concludes with a conceptual sketch of Evangelical interpretation as practiced through Augustinian participatory hermeneutics. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the consistent support, clearly communicated mission, and intellectual freedom of the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies, a tradition built up and maintained rhetorically over several years by Ronald Arnett, Janie Harden Fritz, Richard Thames, Pat Arneson, and Calvin Troup. The organizational philosophy of communication on display has not only been helpful to me in my academic work but has also served me as a sign of hope for my possible future in academia. I give special thanks to my committee chair, Dr. Fritz, who modeled both academic breadth and charity in her review of my dissertation (and its early false starts). I also thank Dr. Troup for giving me an excellent set of coordinates by which to explore Augustine otherwise than convention, and I thank Dr. Thames for driving home the importance of the historical moment by means of his battery of required history readings. And I thank Dr. Arnett for his courage in preaching and practicing intellectual generosity. As part of the long intellectual tradition in the temporal measure of the city of God, I am thankful for Augustine’s labors, his love, and his life of service. Closer to home, I confess that I would not have been able to complete any part of my program here without the labors, love, and life of my wife, Stacy, who has endured much for the sake of a work whose value she can take only by faith. Finally, as befits my project, I confess that whatever good this work communicates to any reader is a result of its participation in the Truth, in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) and apart from whom we “can do nothing” (John 15:5). I acknowledge God as the ground of being and communication. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ vi Chapter 1 ..............................................................................................................................1 Chapter 2 ............................................................................................................................54 Chapter 3 ..........................................................................................................................132 Chapter 4 ..........................................................................................................................214 Chapter 5 ..........................................................................................................................322 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................396 vii Chapter 1 Introduction: Hermeneutics in the Historical Moment of Evangelicalism This project takes an Augustinian philosophy of communication interpretive approach to the current problem of biblical hermeneutics that has taxed the confidence in both the interpretive praxis and communicative identity of the Evangelical coalitional community. Bypassing the long-traveled Christian rhetorical focus on homiletics, this project applies philosophy of communication to hermeneutics as the other main rhetorical concern of Evangelical “people of the book.” After setting out the complexities and history of the crisis in Evangelical biblical hermeneutics, this project explains and proposes the recovery of Augustinian participation (an early Christian view of the cosmos), interpretation, and social dynamics to provide linguistic-conceptual resources by which to meet that crisis. These Augustinian philosophical resources are developed in the context of Evangelical conversations about philosophical hermeneutics and Augustine for current biblical hermeneutics and ecclesiology. After developing these conceptual tools from an Augustinian philosophy of communication, the project concludes with a rhetorical turn, proposing a socially embodied praxis of scripture reading as one solution to the Evangelical hermeneutical problem. Telling the historical narrative of how Evangelical hermeneutics has interacted with the broader hermeneutic tradition—under the prevailing Evangelical identity markers of unity through mission and shared biblical reading practices1—this chapter sets the parameters of the larger project, defines the hermeneutical problem within its rhetorical context, clarifies the interpretive approach, and defends the appropriation of Augustine’s hermeneutic and social theory in the move towards a new Evangelical hermeneutical praxis. 1 The Problem of Evangelical Hermeneutics As Robert Bellah et al. have noted, the Christian church in the United States has been radically compromised in its ability to communicate to itself, its members, and the culture at large its mission/telos and rule of life, an indictment that holds for the significant Christian subculture of Evangelicals.2 From their origins in biblical communal narratives, Bellah says that American churches have largely shifted to being gathering places (“lifestyle enclaves”) for people operating according to “expressive” and “instrumental” concepts of individual meaning.3 According to Evangelical historian Mark Noll, Evangelicals in particular have “lost all sense of history” and have “ignored their own tradition’s resources” in their 20th century cultural transformation into a fideistic and pragmatic political powerhouse, and historian Molly Worthen argues that the root of this Evangelical “anti-intellectualism” stems from their community’s “deep disagreement over what the Bible means,” as seen in their contradictory hermeneutic that joins fideistic presuppositionalism and Enlightenment textual rationalism.4 The shift from an earlier Evangelical community for which the scriptures permeated community and mission (constituting the background) to a 20th century movement organized largely around the defense of a bible very much in the foreground was the result of a combination of factors—sociological, theological, and historical—but the most telling blow was to the practice of an evangelical biblical hermeneutics that, though undertheorized and imperfect, had enabled many earlier Evangelicals to be both historically responsive and scripturally focused, both socially constructive and