Contemporary Hermeneutical Challenge to the Religion
Hermeneutics is the branch of philosophy that deals with theory of interpretation. It arose as a formal discipline in the modern period although the interpretation of texts has long been a problem. Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey are credited with the rise of modern hermeneutics. Since its rise, this branch of thought has developed and has had many different phases. Its earliest strategy was to attempt to understand the context of the written text to get at an objective meaning. Since those early moments in the development of the discipline, the idea of objectivity has come under further. Now, in contemporary hermeneutics there are many who doubt that there is anyway to get to an objective meaning in any text. Like every other area of philosophy, the ideas of knowledge and epistemological foundations for that knowledge have been deconstructed. In response to this deconstruction, scholars of religion are left to answer the question how to interpret their traditions after the metaphysical foundations have been pulled apart. The question is not whether religion can be grafted on metaphysics and whether this enterprise is worthwhile. The question is whether and how ontological presuppositions affect the approach and the interpretation of religion. This means that religion is not merely understood by way of logical coherence but also by way of ontology. A hermeneutic philosophy, however, will not approach this in an essentialist way because it has always understood its object in its context and in a particular perspective. This hermeneutic movement is inherent to the questionings of philosophy. The present paper will attempt to bring out the crisis in religious ontology and axiology with reference to the methodological challenge posed by Contemporary hermeneutics.