In The Promise of Hermeneutics, authors Roger Lundin, Clarence Walhout, and Anthony C. Thiselton seek to counter certain assumptions about interpretation both within the church and in the larger culture and academic community. The quest for validity and certainty can obscure the nuanced complexity of the interpretive act, and here the authors have sought to establish a balance between application of method and emphasis on indeterminacy. This work proposes that through this balanced approach the role of wisdom and a useful understanding of hermeneutics can lead to interpretations based on valid context and due constraint.
In specific theological terms, interpretation is argued to be an activity that humans engage in within the context of the promises of God, and this book offers sustained literary, philosophical, and theological analyses of contemporary interpretation theorem. In addition to critiquing a number of these theories, and the practices which issue from them, the authors propose models of human understanding that demonstrate the lasting promise of hermeneutics.
