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The Kingdom of Heaven as Endless Hermeneutic: A Phenomenology of the Way

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Abstract

In this essay, I attempt to think along with Kevin Hart, though improvising on his text in my own way, by suggesting that ‘the way’ is one that calls anyone who wishes to follow, that it is, at heart, all about doing battle with oneself, and that this battle is best thought of as an endless hermeneutic, one inaugurated by Jesus yet also with classical precedents.

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Notes

  1. Augustine, Confessions III 5.

  2. Kevin Hart, Kingdoms of God (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), p.1. Hereafter all citations to this text will be appear parenthetically.

  3. Bruce Ellis Benson, ‘“You Are Not Far From the Kingdom”’: Christianity as Self-Disruptive Messianism,’ in Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion with Religion, eds. J. Aaron Simmons and Stephen Minister (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2012) pp. 211–227.

  4. I will put aside all doubts raised by the Jesus Seminar as to exactly what that is and instead assume here that the four gospels present what Jesus did, in fact, say.

  5. I use the phrase ‘Jesus the Deconstructor’ in my book Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida & Marion on Modern Idolatry (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002) p. 49, but there I’m referring to the more usual way of defining the term, as taking apart and challenging something (in this case, the practice of the Pharisees).

  6. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York, NY: Continuum, 1989), xxviii.

  7. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 353.

  8. Metanoia itself comes from the Hebrew term ‘shuv,’ which means ‘to turn.’

  9. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 91.

  10. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, p. 83.

  11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York, NY: Random House, 1967) §204.

  12. Exactly what resisting the evildoer might be is not fully clear. Some commentators maintain that Jesus is simply saying that one should not retaliate. But even that interpretation is already disruptive.

  13. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, trans. J.N. Findlay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 43.

  14. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ(ian), in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Viking, 1954), p. 55.

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  1. Loyola Marymount University, Angeles, CA, USA

    Bruce Ellis Benson

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Correspondence to Bruce Ellis Benson.

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Benson, B.E. The Kingdom of Heaven as Endless Hermeneutic: A Phenomenology of the Way. SOPHIA 56, 59–67 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0584-y

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