THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SCRIPTURE: PATTERNS OF RECEPTION AND DISCOVERY BEHIND SCRIPTURAL REASONING

While there are fundamental problems concerning the scientific or objective aspirations of a descriptive phenomenology of religion, a second level or hermeneutical phenomenology raises theologically and philosophically interesting questions about the nature of scripture across traditions and contributes to a semiotically informed understanding that takes seriously both external, text‐historical scholarship and internal theological concerns. I wish therefore to raise questions within a hermeneutical phenomenology (or second level phenomenology) and to move from there to a semiotics of scripture; a move necessitated by those very questions. Indeed, one route to Scriptural Reasoning is by way of a phenomenological questioning that requires a non‐teleological, textual engagement of the kind performed in Scriptural Reasoning.