Reasonable Doubt

The Bible itself generates in the reader legitimate doubts. Those doubts do not concern wrong readings but rather the correct ones because every correct reading is always partial and unilateral. No reading ever catches and reflects the whole biblical horizon. That would be idolatrous and dangerous. A healthy interpretation of the Bible acknowledges both the structural unavailability of the text and the inevitable unilateralism of every reading. Therefore a biblical hermeneutics of paradox does not aim and stop at the answer but rather aims at the extension and enrichment of the question. Biblical hermeneutics is not and cannot be a synthetic and resolving instance of meaning. It is not a hermeneutic of clarity but of complexity. Indeed of dynamic complexity that is of paradox. The meaning sought thus always remains elusive both in the text from which one starts (Bible) account taken of its structural ambivalence and in the interpretation to which the reader arrives because that legitimate and necessary interpretation derived with effort and enthusiasm nevertheless remains partial and transitory capable of touching the meaning only tangentially and provisionally. For this reason the reasonable doubt is the best way to stand and marvel in front of the text.