Clusters, roots and hierarchies of metaphors in Scripture and the quest for Christian scholarship

Abstract

This article explores how the confessional thrust of Scriptural and root metaphors relates to the Christian scholar’s quest and how choices for hermeneutical keys to Scripture relate to metaphorical keys chosen as means of access to reality. With respect to Biblical interpretation it is argued that the text of Scripture itself provides the theologian or reader with leads concerning the kind of metaphorical access that functions as its hermeneutical key. I argue that there are clusters or hierarchies of metaphors, central and root metaphors, that regulate the interpretation of Scriptural texts and that a redemptive historical reading of Scripture as a confessional text guides the meaning of such clusters and hierarchies of metaphors. I argue that root metaphors in Scripture set the certitudinal parameters for the metaphors chosen and utilised in the disciplines.

Regarding reality I argue that the recognition of the multidimensionality of reality and the plurivocity of meaning and signification on which we rely in both literal and metaphorical language use and reference assumes the existence of non-linguistic and preconceptual bases that guide the recognition of similarities, differences and analogies in reality. They in turn are pointers to a design plan for reality which one could call a God-given order of creation. Metaphorical meaning appeals to and presupposes such an ordered and categorised world to which language and texts refer and which provides limits and boundaries to the multiplicity of deferrals of meaning that intertextual relationships seem to imply.

In disciplines concerned metaphorical models play a hermeneutical role in the understanding and interpretation of reality. In these metaphorical models, control beliefs steer, guide and condition the access of the discipline to reality. For Christian scholars the ultimate presuppositions embedded in control beliefs need to comport with the thrust of Scripture and its root metaphors. Scholars are at work in God’s creation and their metaphorical approximations of the structures of this creation are guided by the contours of created reality. These approximations in turn are influenced and constrained by what they attribute ultimacy to in the process of attempting to understand this reality. Stable God-given order provides the conditions and parameters for the common differentiation of contexts within which the interpretation of God’s Word in creation is to take place.