The Fall of Interpretation

"James K.A. Smith surveys contemporary hermeneutical discussion, identifying three traditions and how they understand interpretation: a present immediacy model, an eschatological immediacy model and a violent mediation model. Questioning the foundational assumption that these models share, Smith draws on and reworks Augustine's biblical understanding of the goodness of creation to propose a creational-pneumatic model of hermeneutics. The result is an understanding of the status of interpretation as a 'creational task', a task which is constitutive of finitude and thus not a 'labor' to be escaped or overcome. --From publisher's description.