Hermeneutical Theology

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Hermeneutical theology begins with the recognition that theology cannot escape interpretation. God is spoken of through words, texts, metaphors, narratives, traditions, and acts of interpretation. But my research asks whether hermeneutics reaches deeper than this.

What if language is not merely the human instrument through which an otherwise non-linguistic God is described?

Eberhard Jüngel provides one important starting point. His theology refuses to separate the question of who God is from the event in which God communicates himself. Language and metaphor therefore become more than strategies for theological description. They participate in an account of divine being itself.

This raises a larger systematic possibility: perhaps hermeneutics belongs not simply to theological epistemology—how we know God—but to theological ontology—how we speak about who God is.

My work develops this possibility by placing modern hermeneutical theology into conversation with earlier Christian accounts of divine speech. Preeminent among this is that of my Doktorvater, Christoph Schwöbel, who's work concentrated on developing a conversational model of the Trinity.

One strand of my current research turns to the medieval tradition of the verbum internum—the interior word.

In Augustine and Bonaventure, the analogy of an interior word provides a way of thinking about the eternal generation of the Son. The Word does not merely carry information from God toward creation. Word, expression, and communication already belong within Christian language about the life of God.

Reading these accounts alongside modern hermeneutical theology raises a provocative question: does the linguistic character of revelation originate in human interpretation, or does human language become capable of revelation because something analogous to expression already belongs to God?

Metaphor and narrative become especially important here because neither simply transfers information.

A metaphor creates meaning through the relationship between what is said and what cannot be said directly. Narrative creates meaning through movement, sequence, and history. Both therefore resist the idea that theological language succeeds only when it corresponds straightforwardly to an independently available object.

My research asks what happens when these dynamics are taken seriously within systematic theology itself. The result is a theology interested not merely in interpreting theological language, but in the possibility that interpretation, expression, and communication disclose something about divine life.