Grau, Marion (2014) Refiguring Theological Hermes

Refiguring Theological Hermeneutics
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Refiguring Theological
Hermeneutics
Hermes, Trickster, Fool
Marion Grau
REFIGURING THEOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS
Copyright © Marion Grau, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-32685-0
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-46000-7 ISBN 978-1-137-32455-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137324559
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grau, Marion.
Refiguring theological hermeneutics : Hermes, trickster, fool /
Marion Grau.
pages cm
Includes index.
1. Hermeneutics. 2. Hermes (Greek deity)

3. Hermeneutics—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.
BD241.G665 2014
230.01—dc23 2014027481
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: December 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface: On the Poetics of Christian Theological Hermeneutics vii
1. Unsealing Hermeneutics 1
2. Theological Hermeneutics as Pattern Recognition 35
3. Logos, Mythos, and Mysticism 59
4. Putting Hermes Back into Hermeneutics 79
5. The Trickster as Hermeneut 105
6. Fool’s Errand: Holy Fools and Divine Folly as
Hermeneutical Figures 143
7. Reframing Mythos and Logos: Theology as Mytho-Logy 163
8. Reframing Theological Hermeneutics 187
Index 193
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Preface: On the Poetics
of Christian Theological
Hermeneutics
CIRCUMAMBULATING THE CROSSROADS;

HERMENEUTICAL CIRCLES AND OTHER
UN/AUTHORIZED MOVEMENTS
It is no accident—nor is it insignificant—that the discourse of herme-

neutics takes its name from Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods.
Hermeneutics describes a variety of efforts to understand and interpret
messages across time, space, and difference—of divining the mean-
ings and intentions of others. Ancient Greeks and Romans imagined
Hermes, messenger god and messenger to the gods, as haunting the
crossroads where merchants, travelers, cultures and religions, empires,
missionaries, natives, conquerors and conquered meet, and where a
great deal of “hermeneutics” takes place. Hermeneutical movements
are circumambulatory; they are made across various territories, looping
in hermeneutical circles and sometimes in spirals. Tricksters are found
at these crossroads, and Hermes is one of them. Hermes was a god of
the boundary marker and the threshold, involved in translations and
transitions. Trickster traders shape-shift; deities merge across borders;
and crossroads blend stories, concepts, technologies, and traditions,
trading spiritual and material energies together. The “zones of interac-
tion”1 generated around frontiers are populated by tricksters and coy-
otes passing through, shuttling goods, meaning, and people to and fro,
converting spiritual and economic currencies. Divine messengers enter
the fray, slip through the cracks of confinements, provoke, stimulate,
announce.
viii Preface
William Doty remarks, “What comes as a message through Hermes

always requires thoughtful interpretation (the word hermeneutics
derives from Hermes) and the recipient is left to puzzle out the pre-
cise application of the message.”2 This sensibility, others argue, is “not
particularly new,” but instead “the mode of apprehension we call ‘post-
modern’ was as recognizable to the ancient Greeks as it is to us, and
was presented specifically in the myth of Hermes.”3 That is to say, the
fragmentariness often ascribed to the “postmodern” could be consid-
ered a basic, and ultimately profoundly familiar, human experience of
life and of meaning-making: that of meaning-making lost, misunder-
stood, added to, and fraught with many poetic injustices, meaning lost
and gained in translation—divinity translated and mistranslated—
sometimes amusingly, sometimes tragically, sometimes prosaically.
Simply put, interpreting manifests as fragmentary. The trickster aspect
of interpreting bodies and worlds seems familiar as the fragmentariness
of our sense of reality, comprehension, ambivalence, and prevarication
haunts our every utterance. What Jacques Derrida has named “decon-
struction” describes the “wobble” involved in representation, an “auto-
deconstructing tendency built right into things, [ . . . ] as old as the
hills.”4 Hermes, messenger of the divine, thus circumambulates many
crossroads, “tracing” the untraceable tracks of divinity in the universe.
Messengers and interpreters travel and inhabit spaces of transition,
ambivalence, and a certain circularity. They move along trajectories,
lines, curves, uphill and downhill, through the desert, over mountains.
Stories travel along silken roads, runes are scratched, books are marked,
bush telegraphs drum it out, blogs and tweets pass on the gist of the
latest chatter.
Bodies that interpret are themselves an intersection of meaning and
desire, of holy and unholy, clothed in skins that are permeable mem-
branes. Bodies and minds get lost in the labyrinth of meaning, where
they turn and turn and turn, in different directions, encountering
alternate vistas, exposed to disruptive encounters. Intersections among
meaning, desire, and power are frequented by travelers, messengers,
angels, mediators, and merchants. At the crossroads, interpretation
“brings you round in a circle,”5 connecting hermeneutical pathways—
intercranial, international. At these cross-roads we circumambulate,
bodies, spaces, texts, and presences, frustrated and yet unable to
avoid the hermeneutical intersections that circle, cycle, and spiral our
Preface ix
embodied knowing. Traveling across territories we must often rely on

cairns, scouts, boundary stones, traffic signs, and other way markers.
Our pilgrimages across territories unknown scramble our sense of time,
story, priorities, self, and other.
To some, the term “hermeneutics” might be forbidding. It may
seem decidedly unsexy—and un-sexed—stodgy, stuffy, overly abstract,
and theoretical. For those uninterested in “theory” or other seemingly
“abstract” ventures, pushing for what seems to them “application,”
theological hermeneutics seems to have little practical purpose—or at
least not one that is immediately visible. This book sets out to challenge
such stereotypes, where they may exist, by arguing that whether or not
we choose to acknowledge the interpretive processes that are involved
in our living and communicating, they are active and affecting our lives
and bodies nonetheless. Hermeneutics is always already being applied
in our lives, and our “practical” attempts at transforming thought and
action are deeply involved with the decoding and encoding of bodies
and their messages—chronically mis/understood and mis/applied.
Indeed, I suggest that three figures, the Greek god Hermes, the
trickster, and the Fool illustrate these twists and turns of meaning-mak-
ing, haunting the core of hermeneutics as well as the core of Christian
theology. They are figures of indeterminacy, illustrating how peoples
reflect on meaning-making and interpretation—within and between
languages and cultures.
WHERE THIS BOOK FITS IN—OR STICKS OUT
This book continues an interpretive circumambulation begun in

Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony, further circling the pathways of
encounter, transition, interpretation, and translation of religious expe-
rience and ways of expressing human understandings of the divine.6
Interpretation and translation of the content of sacred narratives across
cultural and religious frameworks emerged as a central preoccupation
in many a missionary encounter, ancient or modern. The complexity
of interpretive decisions that some “messengers of the divine” made,
often with little preparation or skill, was often momentous. Language,
culture, political organization and conflicts, economic structures, and
ecology of life contributed to the often extremely complex layers of
communication involved in mission and translation. The practice of
x Preface
naming sacred relations of the cosmos, divinity, and humanity trou-

bles, incites hopes, and inflames desires. The naming that stretches
toward the infinite is heavily entangled in the finite, that which is both
limited and liminal.
This text focuses on some of the figures that stand at these limi-
nal places of exchange, interpretation, and translation. Biblical texts
feature numerous references to messengers of the Lord, angeloi kyriou,
mysterious beings that carry the divine word to its recipients, be they
kings or meek maidens. Other messengers bring news of battles, enemy
camps, and losses. The Word of God in Hebrew biblical texts can
have the characteristics of a message, sometimes that of a messenger
itself: “As they were sitting at the table, the word of the Lord came
to the prophet [ . . . ]” (1 Kings 13). The German term Hiobsboten—
messengers to Job—describes the bearers of devastating news, relating
profound losses that change lives forever. As mediators of the sacred,
angels carry messages. Gabriel comes to the young Mary and tells one
of the most outrageous tales in the gospels. Other angels stand at the
empty grave, guarding.
As angelic messengers travel the borderlands, their bodies them-
selves can become part of any message they may be relaying—bridging
languages, peoples, and purposes. The figures of Hermes and the trick-
ster connect the seemingly unconnected, traveling the liminal spaces of
the sacred. The trickster has accompanied my theological inquiry for
some years, a cypher for ambiguity, polyvalence, and paradoxicality,
as well as for the inscrutability of the mysterium tremendum et fasci-
nans.7 I have seen this ambiguity as central to the work of engaging
hard questions about existence and the sacred, and to doing theology.
Thus I have explored the aspects of tricksterdom that contribute to an
understanding of the interpretive process of the hermeneutical task and
practice that is so intricately and inescapably part of being an embodied
human being. The wobble of constant ambiguity and negotiation in
intimate relationships as well as in attempts to interpret the layers of
global conflicts as they are presented to us permeates the fabric of our
lives and daily existence. In a world that seems only to increase in com-
plexity and heighten its focus on communication modes, new and old,
the work of thinking through the processes of interpretation, especially
that of religious meaning-making within the signal stream of our lives,
manifests as crucial.
Preface xi
An appreciation of indeterminacy will help to identify how trickster

figures as messengers function in multiple cultural locations. Trickster
figures have many different manifestations, and we will not recog-
nize them if the set of characteristics is too narrowly managed.8 The
strategies employed by the figures of trickster, (holy) fool, and shaman
embody and represent the functions the discipline of theological herme-
neutics aims to describe. These figures appear with a “shifting cluster of
attributes,”9 expressive of the experience that any interpretive act, and
thus any hermeneutics, involves a fundamental indeterminacy. Hermes
is a type of trickster, and hermeneutical actions can be detected across
cultural difference by looking at other trickster figures. This book thus
explores the relevance of a trickster hermeneutics for theology, engaging
in particular the figure of Hermes, trickster, and fool. The investigation
of these figures is followed by a chapter tracing what has been and is
at stake in marking theology as a discourse that involves both of the
classical categories of mythos and logos, and hence remains awkwardly
between multiple genres—irreducibly a mytho-logy.
Circumambulating the territories of our planet, travelers meet—
lives, worlds, and words—and we struggle to find common ground and
conversation. Our ways of making meaning of the world around us are
expressed through conceptual universes. Travelers across religions and
cultures especially experience this confusing, often dangerous, territory
as full of (literal as well as metaphorical) land mines, tripping stones,
and so many things lost in translation. Writing black magic on white
spaces, meaning hides between lines and letters. It is an economy of
representation, but always also a counterfeit; something is always lost in
translation and trade. And yet, those who struggle to express the poet-
ics of the divine continue to circumambulate mysterious territories,
themselves engaged in the work of tricking the divine into words, onto
pages, struggling with the tremendous effects of that responsibility, and
needing ever to be reminded of the futility of such efforts.
DEDICATIONS
This book owes much to its fellow travelers and to the many hosts who
have given shelter and company to its author during circumambulations
literal and metaphorical. John Thatamanil, Rebecca, and Vidar Solevåg
opened their homes repeatedly to this traveler, providing hospitality of
xii Preface
body, spirit, and mind. They shared food, space and connection, sup-
port and feedback during my sabbatical in 2012. Mayra Rivera provided
bi-coastal support and helped move the manuscript toward less clut-
ter and more focus. I thank the faculty and staff of Misjonshøgskolen
in Stavanger, especially Rebecca Solevåg, Kari Storstein Haug, Bård
Maeland, and Kristin Fjelde Tjelle, for the generous loan of an office
and library during my sabbatical. Bud Bynack, Julie Meadows, James
Harding, and Beth Ritter-Conn provided editorial feedback that was
crucial for the fuller development of the ideas within. Without them
the book would be far less readable.
Further afield, colleagues and friends who have supported my person
and my work include: Judith Berling, Julia Watts Belser, Andrea Bieler,
Steed Davidson, Arthur Holder, Willie James Jennings, Munir Jiwa,
Catherine Keller, Rebecca Lyman, Melissa McCarthy, Michelle Meech,
Sarah Pike, Inese Radzins, Jone Salomonsen, Matt Seddon, Christina
Petterson, Cornelia Richter, Irene Tanabe, Kathryn Rickert, Dina Van
Klaveren, Sigríður Guðmarsdóttir, and Annette Weissenrieder. I thank
the Theological Faculty (TF) at the University of Oslo, the School
of Mission and Theology (MHS) in Stavanger, the Fachhochschule
fur Interkulturelle Theologie (FIT) in Hermannsburg, Germany,
the University of Chicago Divinity School and Union Theological
Seminary, New York, for the opportunity to present early versions of
some of the material now contained within these pages. As with the two
previous books, students and colleagues at Church Divinity School of
the Pacific and Graduate Theological Union provided context, engage-
ment, and pressure to move this set of ideas toward publication.
On the feast of a messenger of the Divine Word
Sankthansaften/Feast of John the Baptizer 2014, Stavanger and Oslo
NOTES
1. Peter S. Wells, The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped
Roman Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 126.
2. William G. Doty, “Hermes Guide of Souls,” Journal of Analytic Psychology 23,
no. 4 (October 1978): 359.
3. Bernie Neville, “The Charm of Hermes: Hillman, Lyotard and the Postmodern
Condition,” Journal of Analytical Psychology (July 1992): 339.
4. John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques
Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 74.
Preface xiii
5. David Jasper, A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics (Louisville, KY:

Westminster John Knox, 2004), 31.
6. Marion Grau, Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony: Salvation, Society, and
Subversion (London/New York: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2011), 2.
7. See Otto’s classical rendering of the aspects of experiencing divine mystery
that both attracts and disturbs. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry
into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the
Rational, 6th ed., trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press,
1923), 12ff.
8. This relates, for example, to the attempt to define the characteristics of trick-
sters across cultures. Thus, even the question of the tricksters’ characteristic
fickly mobility is at stake. Many interpreters of tricksters will list boundary
crossing and travel as their main characteristics, and that they are predomi-
nantly male. If it is the case that in many societies men have been more mobile
than women, female tricksters would remain unrecognized. But what if, for
example, one saw the characteristics of movement as not exclusively one of
physical, traveling mobility, but also as mobility across boundaries of ethnic-
ity, differences in status and gender, epistemological status, transgressive in
terms of gendered characteristics, and so forth? Then a host of female trick-
sters come into view, including Pandora, Esther, Rachel, Rahab, Tamar, and
Scheherazade.
9. Smith has suggested taking this approach to reading texts of different reli-
gious provenance. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the
History of Religions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1978), x.
WORKS CITED
Caputo, John D., ed. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques

Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997.
Doty, William G. “Hermes Guide of Souls.” Journal of Analytic Psychology 23, no.
4 (October 1978): 358–64.
Grau, Marion. Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony: Salvation, Society, and
Subversion. London/New York: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2011.
Jasper, David. A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics. Louisville, KY: Westminster
John Knox, 2004.
Neville, Bernie. “The Charm of Hermes: Hillman, Lyotard and the Postmodern
Condition.” Journal of Analytical Psychology (July 1992): 337–53.
Smith, Jonathan Z. Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions. Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1978.
Wells, Peter S. The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman
Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
1. Unsealing Hermeneutics
THE “NOT IMMEDIATELY INTELLIGIBLE”
“Hermeneutics operates whenever something is not immediately intelligible.” 1
With this basic, if broad, definition offered by Hans-Georg Gadamer,

we might consider hermeneutics—that is, interpretation of that which
is given and which we encounter in the world around us—as something
that is pertinent whenever we engage with what seems unintelligible
or what we need to make sense of through a conscious or unconscious
process.2 This process concerns the spoken word and text as much as
nonverbal and other sensual data, bodies of flesh as well as bodies of
water, weather, and landscapes. Theological hermeneutics in particu-
lar concerns itself with the experience of the unintelligible and the
infinitely untranslatable, stretching the bounds of translatability with
each apparently impossible utterance about the Divine. Its economy of
expression falls notoriously short of the ability to grasp the Divine and
is prone to inflicting damage when we claim to understand and thus
control the verbal and ritual expression of the Divine.
In his introductory text on theological hermeneutics, Werner
Jeanrond makes the following observation:
It is thus evident that any consideration of the various forms of belonging as

well as of ultimate belonging requires hermeneutic decisions, that is, strate-
gies of interpreting authentic forms of Christian life and developing criteria of
authenticity for Christian life. No form of human belonging can escape this
hermeneutical predicament.3
2 Refiguring Theological Hermeneutics
Acknowledging the apophatic strands in the engagement with the

Divine, many theologians, past and present, have stated that theology
and other forms of religious discourse are not a precise science. In fact
a closer look reveals that most sciences are far from precise; rather, they
are constantly shifting discourses and practices. As we fumble in the
dark of what we cannot know, we feel strangely compelled to explore
and express what we experience. Exploring the double entendre of un/
sealing would mean unsealing the discourse of theological hermeneu-
tics and exploring the patterns of sealing involved in Hermes’s tricky
art of interpretation.
Throughout the early use of the term in Greek, hermeneia referred
to the interpretation of various kinds of messages, an ambivalent act of
attempting to understand and translate utterances of all kinds, includ-
ing messages from divine agents. This movement to interpretation has
been intimately tied to the theology and the poetry of conceptualizing
the sacred nature of the world and the relationships therein, sometimes
affirming (kataphatic), sometimes denying (apophatic). Aristotle opens
his treatise Peri Hermeneias (On Interpretation) with just that first basic
distinction:
Let us, first of all, define noun and verb, then explain what is meant by denial
[apophasis], affirmation [kataphasis], proposition [apophasis], and sentence
[logos].4
Here, these terms are simple grammatical distinctions. Denial/

apophasis states something by stating that it is not the case. We might
consider a biblical example to illustrate this. In Matthew 12:30, the
phrase “whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not
gather with me scatters” mixes and matches apophasis/denial “not
with” and affirmation “is against me.” The presumable meaning is that
a person who is not explicitly working with Jesus is in fact against him,
which eradicates space for neutrality. Mark 9:40, on the other hand,
states that “whoever is not against us is for us,” shifting denial to “not
against” and affirmation to “is for.” Jesus here seems to be saying the
opposite, opening up a space for neutrality, since even those not explic-
itly with him are not counted as against him. A rather slight grammati-
cal difference describes in fact a very different sense of what relating to
Jesus looks like, at least in these two statements. An easy-to-overlook
variation offers a powerful hermeneutical alternative. The composite
Unsealing Hermeneutics 3
picture of Jesus refracted by just these two phrases from two different
gospels renders Jesus hermeneutically complex, and his attitude toward
those taking a stance toward him seems to fluctuate.
Christians adapted and reinterpreted a variety of existing interpre-
tive patterns and techniques for their own hermeneutics. The apostolic
letters and gospels represent a particular hermeneutic aiming to engage
and transform known oral and written traditions. Much of Christian
theology lives in the dynamic tension between the apophatic and the
kataphatic, saying and unsaying, affirming and denying what we can
and cannot know about God. The sense of God as being beyond under-
standing is a sentiment widespread within Platonic traditions, and it
became a vital aspect of Christian theological expression.5 A future
theological hermeneutics might employ the categories of kataphatic
and apophatic to realize interpretive silences and point to gaps in the
practices of poetic, intercultural, interdisciplinary, and interreligious
interpretation.
Translation as a hermeneutic act of decoding the Other is woven
throughout the history of Jewish-Christian relations. Indeed, the “emer-
gence of Christianity is intimately tied with translation” and expresses
a powerful “translational impulse.”6 Christian attempts to translate the
claims of the faith from and into the idiom of other languages and
cultures aimed to render the message of the gospel compelling across
cultural, geographic, and temporal distances.
Christian theology at its best articulates faith from the deep context
of our lives, in an increasingly global and comparative space. Theology
must make sense of ordinary people’s lives and inform our wrestling
with how we can live together well. While it ought to inspire us to live
more in touch with the values of our faith so they can inform our day
to day practices, how this should exactly happen presents an ongoing
challenge: What factors should inform and determine our reading of
biblical and theological heritage? How should political, economic, eco-
logical, and social and personal context factor in? Living according to
the values of one’s faith continues to be grounds for negotiation, and
such deliberations highlight the importance of conscious engagement
with interpretive processes.
Christian theology is also in deep conversation with the many ethnic,
cultural and religious traditions that have fed and continue to feed into
its river of thought. Theological hermeneutics—interpretation of the
Divine and the sacred elements of the universe—happens within and

between religio-cultural traditions. And, in this connected, blended,
endlessly related world, interpreting across difference continues to
increase in complexity and importance.
Theology involves many modes of thinking and genres of expres-
sion. As its role in society shifts, theologians must seek new, and rein-
vent old, ways of naming the unnameable and unsealing the sealed.
In order to become more flexible to undertake such a task, it is crucial
that some Christian voices formulate hermeneutical approaches that
take into account the complexity of both their own and other cultures
and traditions. There is space for a constructive theological hermeneu-
tics to work from the historical archives while remaining fully open
and engaged with deepening forms of transreligious and transcultural
encounters. Such theological hermeneutics resists simple oppositions
and clear definitions and confronts reductionist reasoning. It chal-
lenges ingrained injustices in the political system or discourse while
articulating a resolute polydox theopoetics,7 both grounded and flex-
ible and seeking to embody such creative, interpretive acts.
The present time and context call for a radical rethinking of theo-
logical hermeneutics. Theology, written in deep conversation with other
religious and cultural narratives, drawing deeply from the wells of time
and place, between parochial and universal, is located, yet radically
alert to the dynamic of the story just as the local weather and climate
patterns are always already shaped and affected by events and places
both far and near.
It is the claim of this book that figures like Hermes, trickster, and
fool reveal, perform, and challenge human interpretive processes.
Narratives that feature these figures have much to teach us about
meaning making. Stories of tricksters and fools make visible the status
quo of a society and its structures of power, knowledge, and belief.
Remembering that hermeneutical acts are notoriously polyvalent, these
figures can help reframe theological hermeneutics as a vibrant reminder
of the need for both humility and resolute courage in reinterpreting the
divine through mythos and logos anew each day. The key aim of this
project is to point interpretive communities facing situations of eco-
nomic and ecological crisis toward a radical rethinking of theological
hermeneutics as a prelude to reconstructing Christian theology for the
contextual eventualities that confront it.
REFRAMING HERMENEUTICS AS PATTERN

RECOGNITION
Understood as pattern recognition, hermeneutics is a common human

activity that involves the reading and interpreting of bodies, ecologi-
cal systems, economic exchanges, societies, and situations. The term
“pattern recognition” employed here for certain kinds of correlation
hopes to capture something between globalizing universalisms and sin-
gular, particularistic “incomparable” uniquenesses, a place where we
may observe, recognize, and link patterns in life and narrative not to
insist unhelpfully on some kind of nonexisting uniformity, but rather
to make enough connection for various lifeworlds to come into a better
view of one another. I propose a form of pattern recognition that has
a number of similarities to the work of any historian, ethnographer, or
anthropologist: the available data are fragmented, perhaps more readily
displaying gaps rather than offering solid evidence, and often engaged
in a narrative ideology that seeks to provide explanatory and potentially
legitimizing force.8
Given the problematic history of comparison as an instrument for
colonial denigration of the ethnic and religious other in particular,
there is a great deal of ethical responsibility inherent in such imagina-
tive construction. The work of comparison is fraught with the danger
of self-referentiality, of self-interest, and the projection of one’s denied
shadow onto another; there is also the danger of sheer ignorance and
the improper linking of texts, patterns, and circumstances across dif-
ferences of culture, time, and place. One way to remain humble in any
undertaking in theological meaning making may be to understand it
as an exercise in pattern recognition, open to constant disruption and
reframing. Thus, such comparisons do not seek “demonstrable proofs,
offering secure shelter, but rather tenuous spaces, both for the builder
of the comparison and for the audience who temporarily passes under
its roof.”9
I suggest that hermeneutic complexity is best approached with a
flexible but resolute epistemology. Holding patterns we think we have
recognized in an open palm, lightly and not in a stranglehold, is crucial
in such situations. Remaining open to the touch of transcendence in
immanence in each moment precludes holding too tightly what cannot
be held anywhere other than in a wide space.10 The purpose of tracing
some patterns of interpretation here is not to assume any kind of grasp

on the situations or occurrences, not to provide answers, but rather
to sketch certain cross-cultural, cross-temporal, and cross-geographic
similarities in difference. Not unlike what we find in chaos theory,
where fractals are repeated at different scales and with different rep-
etition rates, a number of patterns of meaning making can be recog-
nized. As in chaos theory, what we find often hovers between solidly
defined forms of chaos and order, often teetering on the edge of chaos,
as repetition in difference.11 In these unruly patterns, we might dis-
cern certain rhythms, certainly not harmonies, that allow movement in
and around the flow and friction of patterns, rather than simply being
subsumed into them, or fighting a losing battle against polyvalence or
ambivalence.
I would like to propose a definition of hermeneutics as the quest
of forming, articulating, and communicating an understanding of the
world in which humans live and the events and agents experienced
therein. Theological hermeneutics, then, has aspects of the art and skill of
negotiating exchanges, connections, and differences (and presences/absences)
between and among God/s and humans, between cultures, times, places,
ecosystems, and so forth. Thus, I propose that hermeneutics describes
polymorphic acts of interpretation. It is art that is practiced far beyond the
Western cultural context and modern Western academic discourse. Aspects
of this kind of hermeneutics can be explored by looking at its connections
to trickster and fool figures and their interpretive functions. This theologi-
cal hermeneutics highlights the trickster Hermes hidden in herme-neutics,
and observes hermeneutical functions in other trickster figures in order to
expand the repertoire and understanding of interpretive patterns.
Jesus of Nazareth is perhaps one of the more unexpected trickster
figures. He, too, can be seen as always already liminal, that divine mes-
senger and mediator who connects the seemingly unconnected, tells
parables that confound and fascinate, challenge and transform. He
engages in disappearing acts and metamorphoses and acts the holy fool
for us to imitate as we try to confound the death-dealing logic that rules
over our lives. The human-divine body of Christ, a trickster figure who
embodies and thereby holds together in powerful ways the paradoxes
of human flesh and divine substance, is central to the particular cross-
roads of Christian theological hermeneutics. But like other messages
shuttled through crossroads, he can become overshadowed, sidelined,
and sandwiched between the goods, the muskets, the textiles, the tech-
nologies, and monies that titillate attendant economic exchanges.12
One of my driving theological questions has been what salvation is
and what it looks like. From my previous writing projects on the ques-
tions and relevance of redemption, divine economy, and the articulation
of a postcolonial missiology, making a foray into theological hermeneu-
tics felt like a logical progression. The exploration of the connections
between divinity and economy in soteriological discourse as undertaken
in Of Divine Economy is itself a matter of deep hermeneutical implica-
tions: Where do we look for and how do we perceive and interpret God’s
saving action in the world? And what are the implications of using eco-
nomic terminology to describe and express it? When doing research on
how the soteriological concerns of missionary churches and societies
translated their understanding of the divine economy of salvation in
previously unknown territories, languages, and therefore lifeworlds, I
found that questions of communication, interpretation, and transla-
tion moved further into the center of the inquiry. How were the many
layers of intercultural communication refracted with the imperial and
economic concerns that were the context of much of missionary work?
How did the personal and communal aspects of interaction affect the
theological content and the biblical narratives that were transmitted
in a particular place and time? What were the connections between
metropolitan theological discourses and colonial missionary encoun-
ters? How did the interactions between missionaries and locals repeat
or shift the way in which biblical texts and concepts were refracted?
This book represents my attempt to respond to issues and questions
that had remained open from previous inquiries: What can we learn
from the entanglement between Christian faith and economic and
colonial relationality for an intercultural theological hermeneutics that
helps articulate Christian theology in not only post-Christendom, but
also in postsecular societies shaped by those same global economic, eco-
logical, and migratory forces? What concepts, figures, narratives, and
complexes may be useful toward the formulation of such a hermeneu-
tic? How might one address through theological hermemeutics both
the increasing religious illiteracy and the erosion of the ability to access
certain forms of discourse?
In addressing these questions, what follows does not try to formulate
some kind of full, final, or complete version of theological hermeneutics.
I see it more as a kind of manifesto, trying to imagine a recombination

of tradition and innovation, exploring some of the more interesting
construction sites within that discourse. A greater consideration of how
the reality of embodiment impacts interpretation points to alternate
possibilities for retelling religio-cultural narratives of the sacred that
appear to be hermetically sealed to many of our contemporaries. Each
new generation and context requires a certain degree of reimagination
of a hermeneutics of the sacred, of the sacred in and beyond where we are
and what we know. Each generation must learn to see and touch the
divine in everything; it must consider the divine as embodied and in
its embodiment.
The comparison of different human experiences is as common as
it is problematic, especially at the intersection of culture and religion.
When expected patterns or meanings are not found or recognized, the
seeming absence of a practice, concept, or structure can lead to errone-
ous claims about their absence or meaning. Missionaries and anthro-
pologists, intercultural interpreters who tend to produce readings that
feature “false parallels,”13 can foster “easy illusions” of similarities that
become hardened and resistant to revision past the first impressions
upon which they were founded. The overdetermination by patterns
from one’s home culture and familiar theological concepts can affect
the representation of ideas of others in such a way as to deeply obscure
them.14 Ethnographers and missionaries can plant quasi-equivalents of
Christian concepts in the host culture. At times it becomes impossible
to try to untangle layers of reading that have become entangled. Is the
fact that some readings were, possibly, inadvertently, “planted” grounds
enough to dismiss them as problematic, because they do not fit a sense
of historic originality? Even if the first articulation of a creative adapta-
tion was a strategy of legitimation within a changing cultural scheme,
and thus potentially polemic and apologetic, other versions of these
shifts articulate the constant changes and developments of theological
expressions and their creative, integrative shape. The present study is
interested in the dynamics of interpretation rather than in the estab-
lishment of some fail-safe method, even if there were such a thing.
Storytellers and theologians improvise upon their themes engaging
questions of sacred ethnogenesis: the narratives show concern with what
constitutes the group, what allows life to flourish, and what phases of
transition and learning have been passed through. They recount the
deeds of ancestors and how they inform the present, and the ambiva-
lent acts that occur on the path of a community’s travels to finding,
losing, and keeping its place of life and way of life. We hear about
arrangements made with difficult neighbors, wars being fought, the
management of gender relations, and how divine agency moves people
through space and is involved in negotiating space. Sometimes divinity
features as central to space negotiations; sometimes divinity is marginal
to the narrative. Many biblical narratives articulate the tension between
the tribal focus of the divine-human relationship and care for creation
beyond one region or people.
Like any other form of discourse, theology represents an economy
of power and is expressed through certain forms of power, including
multiple forms of self-fashioning technology. It includes the integration
of previous practices and concepts into a regularly transformed rela-
tionship with the divine. Interpretive moves include the continuation
of a narrative tradition and attempts to name and rename a narrative of
connection to the divine in the incarnate bodies of persons and com-
munities. Transforming meaning making necessitates an awareness of
all forms of baggage carried over: theological, intercultural, personal.
As we consider these forms of meaning making across difference, it
helps to consider theological hermeneutics as diatopical when
the distance to be overcome is not merely temporal, within one broad tradition,
but the gap existing between two human topoi, “places” of human understand-
ing and self-understanding between two—or more—cultures that have not
developed their patterns of intelligibility or their basic assumptions out of a
common historical tradition or through mutual influence. To cross the bound-
aries of one’s own culture without realizing that another culture may have a radi-
cally different approach to reality is today no longer admissible.15
Even as we are unable to eradicate errors in crossing the boundaries

and circumambulating sacred sites and texts, we continue to aim for a
humble, if curious and wise, hermeneutics. The quest is then to gain
greater consciousness about patterns of thinking, reading, interpreting,
seeing, and feeling the Divine in ourselves and others. To put it another
way, diatopical hermeneutics involves all the possibilities and all of the
problems of translation. As a deeply incarnate practice, re-ligare, the
relation making that characterizes religion is expressed through inter-
pretation and hermeneutics as meaning making. All religious reasoning
is in that sense an attempt at translation and therefore a hermeneutical

action—and translation a form of pattern recognition.
A diatopical hermeneutics must be open to narrative formations
emerging from a variety of locations: Friedrich von Hügel’s The Mystical
Element in Religion lays out a taxonomy of different kinds of needs,
knowledge, and styles of leadership that may pertain to a religious
movement or institution: the historical-institutional (associated with
St. Peter), the analytic-speculative (associated with St. Paul), and the
intuitive-emotional (associated with St. John).16 These may be the main
streams of forms of knowledge, charismata, or community and thought
formation found in Western Christianity, and certainly there may be
more that contribute to a fully rounded human experience of any reli-
gious phenomenon. The point is that no one experience of religion or
faith can be limited to one form of charisma or reasoning.
Christians from other than European contexts have offered more
vocally contextualized and multitraditionally resourced approaches to
Christian narrativity that challenges the assumption that Christian
texts and traditions are only contextualized in Western interculturality
and interreligiosity. The “new interreligious horizon”17 in which we find
ourselves compels a more expansive theological hermeneutics.
RIDDLING AND HERMENEUTICS

The riddle of the universe is not so simple.18
Theological discourse has been navigating a messy territory that

involves a variety of forms of expression. We can examine this through
the example of the historical controversies around mythos and logos,
and the various ways truth, deception, history, and folk wisdom have
been transmitted through these genres. The troubling myths of the past
and our own times and places can only be countered by a more compel-
ling myth, argues Ingolf Dalferth.19 A myth can speak deep truths and
offer insight into the sacred nature of the universe. Therefore we are
challenged to tell compelling sacred myths and stories to frame mean-
ing and shift thinking toward living a more just and sustainable life for
a world that faces climate change, mass migration, and resource con-
flicts that will increase in the decades to come. These radical changes
will raise with new urgency ancient questions about divine action in the
cosmos and in human societies. If it is the classical province of myth
to “explain, instruct, justify and warn,”20 grounding present practice in

foundational stories, then theologians, writers, and artists are among
those involved in the hermeneutical work that repeats and shifts such
narratives. Even as we live in a time of transition in the public status of
Christian culture and narrativity—but when was there not such a time?
—this task becomes more, not less, urgent. Some trends in societies
shaped by the Western Christian heritage show a downturn of singular
religious affiliations, the merging and closing of parishes, decline in
institutional belonging and increasingly multireligious communities.
Other data suggest that while denominational and parish affiliation is
on the decline, people’s spiritual hunger continues unabated.21 The task
of the theologian in a time of weakening and transformation of tradi-
tional Christian institutions in Western countries may be that of being
countercyclical, that is, as universities, churches, and seminaries appear
to divest from theological education and articulation, it is a crucial time
to invest heavily in it.
What we may see is a trend toward “privatization” rather than the
widely discussed secularization of religiosity.22 A crisis of authority of
religious institutions and narratives seems to have reached new heights,
perhaps culminating, for some, in the articulation of new, aggressive
atheisms and theories of secularization. Yet, from the angle of the colo-
nized, such disruptions to constitutive narratives and grounding myths
could seem only new to some:
If the collapse of metanarratives alone characterized the postmodern condi-

tion, then some of those populations outside of the North Atlantic that have
been busily deconstructing theirs for centuries, or that have gone through
mega-collapses of their own, have long been “postmodern,” and there is noth-
ing new under the sun. Things fell apart quite early on the southern shores of
the Atlantic, and later in the hinterlands of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.23
Furthermore, the decline of strong religious affiliation is a regional

variant, at best, that we do not find everywhere on the globe. If one
assumed that the current breakdown of certain narratives and discur-
sive regimes is a cyclical phenomenon that shows the rise, peaking,
and breakdown as well as reemergence of certain narratives, in new
and old ways, and we “cannot infer identical reactive strategies to this
collapse,”24 then along with these shifts in narration go shifts in cul-
tural and religious hermeneutics. As Christian communities can no
longer assume a resident or sometimes even residual knowledge of the

Christian tradition, there are both new challenges and new opportuni-
ties for theological education to be faced. Christian narratives are less
familiar and known, and other religious narratives are more present in
society and family. This calls for forms of theological discourse that can
creatively rearticulate Christian theological narrative with an awareness
of, and in conversation with, other religious claims and narratives, thus
moving toward polydox, interreligious, and transcultural discursivity.
Thus, the contestation and layering of messages between cultures con-
stitute nothing new, but rather represent a common phenomenon of
transcultural and intercultural encounters.
The theory and theology of interpretation laid out in the following
find commonality with Raimundo Panikkar’s definition of hermeneu-
tics as
the art and science of interpretation, of bringing forth significance, of convey-

ing meaning, of restoring symbols to life and eventually of letting new symbols
emerge. Hermeneutics is the method of overcoming the distance between a
knowing subject and an object to be known, once the two have been estranged.
Hermes is the messenger of the gods but only outside of Olympus.25
That is, hermeneutical activity engages in bridging distances between

past and present meaning, between shifting senses of understanding,
always traveling, moving to and fro, and never quite at rest. A construc-
tive polydox theological hermeneutic integrates multiple genres and
sensibilities, speaking to heart and mind, to reason and imagination,
in many tongues. It may involve theopoetics, a poesis of mythos, and
other processes of shaping stories anew from old ones. The commit-
ment of constructive theologians to write theology responding to the
social issues facing us may serve as an example.26
Theology, as “Schwellenkunde,” the exploration of a threshold
between human and divine, as well as between humans,27 is a form
of discourse that has involved many modes of thinking and genres
of expression. As a theologian, I am committed to going beyond the
“muddling Christian middle” that “remains adrift in the contradiction”
between the rigidity of some forms of classical theism and those that
“continue to give up on ‘God.’ ” In other words, it is theology’s task to
provide “effective alternatives”28 to these less-than-desirable extremes,
alternatives that are resourced from a deep engagement with tradition

from the challenges of today. Practices of interpretation, context, and
embodiment shape how we make meaning from biblical and histori-
cal Christian texts in their religio-cultural context. They inform us
unconsciously perhaps even more than consciously, which means they
are deeply embedded in common cultural practices.
The scope of the framework we consider in ethical decision mak-
ing is another hermeneutical factor. Take, for example, the question
of ecological ramifications of human action. Upon the purchase of a
cell phone we may merely consider technological facts as they affect
our user experience, or we may take a broader view of the effects of
cell phone production. We may find out that mining resources needed
for cell phone construction, such as Coltan in Africa, affects and feeds
civil wars to produce these raw materials needed in many electronic
appliances. Thus we may become aware that the infrastructure needed
to run and maintain these items increase the damage done to the
cosmos.29Ethical action, especially when set in the context of systemic
injustice, so Christian ethicist Cynthia Moe-Lobeda writes, is ham-
pered by the failure to “see” the full extension of it and necessitates the
development of a “critical vision” that enables action.30 Ethical action,
too, then is affected by the dynamics of hermeneutical action, or the
failure and refusal of it.
The hermeneutical frame of what the world is has clear effects on
legal and political action. Ecuador’s new constitution, for example,
includes the rights of Mother Earth, Pachamama. If a country assumes
that land is primarily a resource to be divided among property owners,
it is reflected in a nation’s or community’s laws. If another community
considers the cosmos a sacred place or being, with its own rights for
existence, protection, and restoration, then a country, such as Ecuador,
may enshrine this in its constitution, a hermeneutical shift that alters
legal dispensations of rights and duties.31Such a shift from land rights
to the rights of the land is a transformation of the underlying interpre-
tation and epistemology, a hermeneutical move, expressing a different
ontology and understanding of being. With Foucault, we might say, a
power/knowledge regime that enshrines the rights of the non-human
as essential will have values and priorities different from those that see
land as property and resource.
CHALLENGES
As Patricia Cox Miller notes, in response to the problem of “how to

conceptualize transfiguration enacted on the human level,” that is,
“how to translate godliness into the matter of human life, ancient
Christianity” assumed “that the material world—particularly in the
form of the human body—was a locus of spiritual presence.” To follow
this assumption requires a theological hermeneutics that interprets the
many ways in which divinity and the sacred can be embodied or repre-
sented as being embodied, thereby disrupting the “conventional binary
of transcendence and materiality,”32 as well as the binary opposition of
mythos and logos and the gendered oppositions that have accompanied
it in the West.
Theology that is respectful, critical, and passionate in the engage-
ment with the texts of tradition, whether in Bible or theology, must
find a productive way to read and interpret the mythological as well
as the historical strands in the tradition. That is to say, forms of rep-
resentation described as mythical/mythos and logical/logos are part of
the conversation. A resolutely constructed contemporary theology can
stand grounded and rooted deeply through respectful engagement with
both modes of expression.
One of the crucial functions of religious communities in postsecu-
lar societies is to be public interpretive communities in religiously and
culturally diverse immigration societies.33 Where socially explosive dif-
ferences of class, ethnicity, religion, and social structures endanger the
possibilities of peaceful and relatively equitable cooperation in societ-
ies that tend toward democratic and just social structures, interpretive
communities committed to the furtherance of peace, justice, and inter-
cultural participation in these societies are called upon to be crucial
mediators and articulators of religio-cultural contents. They need to
build relationships across challenging differences.
The particular challenges for theological hermeneutics at the time
of writing include a deep shift in the social location of theology and
religious discourse. In postsecular societies, while religious commit-
ments are increasingly expressed as distinct from national and ethnic
identities, they can be crucial for mulling over ethical issues in pub-
lic discourse, bringing in considerations that go beyond economic,
political, and in-group reasoning. With shifting grounds of secular and
postsecular contexts, changing religious membership and commitment,

the displacement and diffusion of the task of theology have become
matters of urgent concern. Set within the challenges of climate change,
increased mobility of populations, postdemocratic power scenarios,
constant computing, the continued dominance of market forces, and
the decline of educational institutions, theological hermeneutics must
contribute to the rearticulation of Christian narrativity in a challenging
environment.
REFRAMINGRENAMING?
I considered proposing alternate names for the discipline of hermeneu-

tics, such as an attempt at queering it by calling it hermaphroneutics—
more to make a point, than to suggest a viable alternative. Another
possibility could have been a neologism. Iridescence, for example, refers
to Iris, a female messenger of the gods in Greek mythology, far less
known and remembered than Hermes. One could blend the two and
imagine hermiridescence or some such monstrosity, for indeed, the
purpose would be to de-monstr-ate, to point toward something that
might expand the frame. Or, one could simply aim to reoccupy the
term and discourse of (theological) hermeneutics differently and push
out its boundaries beyond that which has been considered its domain.
And that is, mostly, what I have attempted to do here.
INTERPRETING BODIES: THEOLOGICAL

HERMENEUTICS AND EMBODIMENT
Embodiment and its location and place play a crucial role in our con-
necting and our interpreting. Gaps in embodiment, space, and time
generate gaps in meaning and communication. The possibility in some
cultural settings of instantaneous internet communication across space
and time zones adds powerful modifications that shift the ways in which
our bodies process and sense closeness and connection. Closeness is
less spatially understood, yet it appears to create new forms of distance
between people physically close at hand and new forms of instanta-
neous connection between those separated by great distances. When
we make phone calls, write e-mails or Skype, we can connect in ways
that give us a different sense of connection. Yet, while we can keep in

touch with loved ones and friends across great distances, evidence of
social isolation connected to the overuse of social media is starting to
emerge. Some online discourses are in danger of proliferating misin-
formation and information overload34 while increasing the pressure to
constant connectivity, and responding evermore immediately to online
communication. Many humans are more “connected” than ever, but
not necessarily less lonely:
Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise.
We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are
less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants—that is, in quality
social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey,
the mean size of networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people
in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said
they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said
they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk
to, and 20 percent had only one confidant.35
This shift in connectivity and relationality appears to be changing

the way persons who live in a context of constant computing encounter
bodies, places, and stories.36 The danger of shallow connectedness, the
deluge of information, and the many modes of techno-based diversions
contribute to the challenge of articulating a hermeneutics that focuses
on making transformative, embodied connections.
Our world faces serious disruptions economic, ecological, and as a
result refugee and migration crises. This reality issues new challenges
for the narratives that we tell about who we are, where the origins of
life, joy, suffering, and death lie, and how we might find a life worth
living and something to hope for beyond. Climate change will create
significant challenges to our perceived reality and ways of life in our
various geological environs. The human geopsyche,37 in many places
deeply affected by our technophilia, has shifted our perceptions and
relationship to the world around us.
We are deeply shaped by our surroundings, the ecological and eco-
nomical relations that transform our conceptual and physical embodi-
ment. The context to which any contemporary theological hermeneutics
must respond includes the realities of global economy, climate change,
and needed local transformation toward a sustainable, peaceful, and
relatively equitable life. At the same time, the loss of authority of many
religious narratives indicates a need for the rearticulation of narratives
that give meaning beyond immediate gains and needs, and a need to
adjust relations to God and the world in new ways as new technologies
impact our knowing and relating. How do we seal and unseal weighty
messages under these circumstances?
Cultures are enriched, destabilized, and transformed through a vari-
ety of intercultural dynamics that have different effects and are experi-
enced in different ways, as traders, go-betweens, hermeneuts, travelers,
and tricksters bring to consciousness questions about the generative
forces of life, body, and community.
The hermeneutic impulse, the urge to interpret, thus goes far beyond
the confines of the thought patterns and figures generally treated in
books that teach the history of hermeneutics, where it appears to be an
activity particularly, and perhaps exclusively, mastered and enjoyed by
a variety of males from various regions of Europe. However, this is far
from the case. The modern European discourse of hermeneutics can-
not be conceived without the interreligious and intercultural encoun-
ters that formed it. These contributions to European modern thought
could not have been made without the persons, ecosystems, and puz-
zles encountered by colonial travelers who challenged the interpreta-
tion of geographical, biological, and anthropological Otherness. The
information from colonial encounters flows into reconceptions of the
European self.38 What we know as European Enlightenment thought
was in fact vitally informed by texts, philosophies, religious thought,
and culture of which European intellectuals became aware through
colonial encounters. This raises the question of what in fact constitutes
a distinctly “Western” hermeneutical tradition, and how to explore the
porous boundaries and crossroads among interpretive traditions.
The greater enmeshment of culturally and religiously different
human societies spurred by the vagaries of global capitalism with its
tendencies to spread interaction, trade, and consumption worldwide
has necessitated a new effort in rendering theology, and particularly
theological hermeneutics, for this increasingly complex setting. This
necessitates a theological hermeneutics that is based on an enlarged
sense of spatial, oral, textual, and historical heritage.
We will explore modes of sealing, unsealing, interpretation, transla-
tion, and transformation by focusing on a number of figures that mark
the dynamics of the ambivalence of interpreting acts: Hermes, the

Trickster, and the (Holy) Fool. These figures help locate a discussion
of the ambivalence of mythos and logos, discourses that are suspended
in the space between truth and lie, reliability and deception, male and
female, known self and foreign other.
Practices of signification mark places of human engagement and dif-
ference. Technologies of writing, of representation, of storytelling are
lifesavers and death dealers—always not quite there, not quite right.
Trying to point toward the Other, yet they all remain a simulacrum,
marking the shifting and unstable territory of meaning. Inter-texting,
inter-scribing, and inter-touching on the mark of the absent presence
of the unknown, they represent the unclear, the unknowable known
imagined, half-experienced, and fully felt. They remain processes of
knowing, recognizing, knowing bodies, inside and out, leveraging bod-
ies, interpreting bodies in space.
DISENCHANTED WITH DISENCHANTMENT:

BETWEEN SACRED TEXT AND DEMYTHOLOGIZED
NARRATIVE
Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to
dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.39
While it is all too easy and certainly common to generalize profusely

about “the Enlightenment,” often omitting synchronous streams of
thought in the West that were resisting what are generally considered its
concerns, there is a point to be taken from Adorno and Horkheimer’s
observation. If indeed part of the result of the Enlightenment was a
certain disenchantment of the world, then this was also a hermeneuti-
cal shift. Whether it was a shift in dominant cultures of reading sacred
scripture from a “hermeneutics of faith” to a “hermeneutics of doubt,”
as David Jasper in his introductory text would have it, or, as I would
rather suggest, a shift from faith in some things to faith in others,
some major reading and interpreting patterns certainly appear to have
shifted.40 I say “appear,” because I am suspicious of an all-too-confident
pronouncement of grand narratives of major changes. Those, too, natu-
rally, have much to do with interpretation.
James Kugel has shown that modern biblical scholarship has sought
to render biblical texts more accessible to modern people, clearing aside
traditional interpretations to reveal the “real Bible.” Instead, what was
revealed undermined the very notion of a holy scripture, and thus
undermined the sense of a “common, divine origin of the whole.”41
The Bible was seen as just another human creation, and scholars high-
lighted what they saw as the Bible’s flaws. This is in contrast to ancient
authors who saw in confounding passages well-hidden but impor-
tant divine teachings that were there to guide the faithful to a higher,
deeper knowledge of God. Since “error is not generally held to be a
characteristic of the divine,” discontinuities became evidence against
divine authorship that had become assumed about the entire collection
of biblical texts.42Learning from the Bible became learning about it,
generating a different posture and attitude in relationship to the text,
and “a great gap between the Bible of ancient interpreters and that of
modern scholars.”43 A profound shift in hermeneutics occurred during
this time:
Modern biblical scholarship began in the belief that the Bible’s meaning
was simply inherent in its words, indeed, that by throwing away the Four
Assumptions of ancient readers and all the interpretations they had generated,
the “real Bible” would emerge. This, as we have seen, did not happen. But now
that the genie is out of the bottle and modern scholarship has discovered every-
thing it has discovered about the text’s original meaning, what is to become of
the Bible?44
This development left both liberals and conservatives in “profound

discomfort with the actual interpretations that the ancients came up
with,” such as midrash, allegory, and typology, though these are pre-
cisely what characterize the numerous interpretations of Old Testament
texts by those interpreters that shaped the Apostolic Writings of the
New Testament.45 Kugel, a Jewish interpreter, puts his finger on some
of the key differences between Jewish and Christian hermeneutics of the
Bible. This hermeneutical angle might propose to us in the Christian
canonical reading tradition, and especially its Protestant allegiance to
sola scriptura, a different way of engaging the dilemmas of reading.46
When the focus on sola scriptura becomes a way to deny the contex-
tual forces then and now that have shaped texts and, just as impor-
tantly, have shaped interpretation of those texts, we enter a potentially
dangerous territory where one’s own interpretation becomes the one

that is true, in denial of context, time, and agenda.
Jewish reading included two Torahs, the written (Pentateuch) and
the oral traditions of its interpretation and application. The oral tra-
ditions were “held equal to the authority of the written text and this
idea has remained a central tenet of Judaism to this day.” In prac-
tice, Kugel argues, “the Oral Torah always wins.”47 That is to say,
the “written text alone is not all-powerful,” and it rarely stands on its
own. Kugel argues that this puts modern biblical scholarship inevi-
tably in conflict with traditional belief and practice, but that they do
not necessarily have to “always remain completely irreconcilable.”48
In fact, some of the hermeneutical flexibility in Jewish interpreta-
tion of sacred text and tradition has started to make its way (back)
into some Christian hermeneutics. The point is that “the words of
that Torah were evidently not sacrosanct,” and their “apparent mean-
ing was frequently modified and supplemented by ancient interpret-
ers [and] sometimes overthrown.”49 Other Jewish commentators on
modern Western thought have argued something that seems related,50
though they may not go where Kugel goes: that “in Judaism, it is not
the words of Scripture themselves that are ultimately supreme, but
the service of God [ . . . ] that they enjoin.”51 The proposed polydox
theological hermeneutics finds much commonality with the herme-
neutical flexibility of Jewish interpretation.
INTERPRETING SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE
A “famous Hermetic maxim” from the Emerald Tablet suggests that “as
above, so below.”52 And indeed, philosophical and theological language
is heavily dependent upon analogical language and reasoning, as well
as metaphors, that is, various technologies of “carry-over.” In the case
of some versions of Greek cosmology and philosophy, the relationship
between idea and forma is thought to represent the structure of the
universe. Thus Plato claimed that “all knowledge takes place through
some kind of similitude.”53
In the formulation “as above, so below,” such analogical reasoning
appears in a basic text of hermeticism (a form of late Platonism), the
Emerald Tablet, ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus.54 This recognition
of echoing, of similarities between macro- and microcosms, or divinity
and cosmos, underlies many hermeneutical maneuvers in a variety of

cultural settings. Given the human brain’s predilection to analogical
reasoning, or inference of relation by similarity, and the temptation to
conflate similarity with deeper relations and even causation, forms of
mystical reasoning and apophatic thought can represent a strategy of
resistance to such overwhelming dynamics of thought.
If human beings have a strong tendency to “insist on forming expla-
nations no matter what,” as Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T.
Barber claim, and if the analytical part of our brain is “programmed to
produce explanations for everything,” it makes sense to investigate the
kinds of reasoning and storytelling techniques and dynamics involved
in this process.55 Analogical reasoning, so the Barbers argue, is not only
a key element in the construction of myths, it is in fact “our brain’s best
talent.”56 This manifests as a tendency to assume that if
two entities bear a resemblance, they must be related. [ . . . ] All we need is to

perceive a pattern or resemblance and, like a bridleless horse, we’re off and
running. [ . . . ] If any entities or phenomena bear a resemblance, in any aspect,
people assume they must be related—where points of resemblance include
form, behavior, cause, significance, or whatever.57
The tendency to look for similarities and differences is related to the

recognition of patterns. Instruments for interpreting similarity and
difference have much to do with pattern recognition, with establish-
ing relations and connections between more and less obviously related
things. The search for patterns, however, also reveals differentiation.
Thus it is perhaps instructive that Farella suggests that “the Navajo
begins with the idea that differentiation is the essential prerequisite to
the existence and growth of all systems.”58 Ironically, and perhaps quite
to the point, “Diyinii [Holy People] cannot agree on whether or not to
allow disagreement.”59 And there you have it, an initial disagreement on
disagreement. This basic incongruence is contained as a core value in
the Blessingway, where “the only permanence is change.” Hence, “to be
traditional is to believe in change.”60 It is my contention that it is also
traditionally Christian to believe that Christian tradition is constantly
in an interpretive flux. Therefore, an expansive version of theological
hermeneutics must be able to recognize patterns as well as the diver-
gence thereof, of phenomena and articulations of a variety of religious
expressions: not just textual, but oral, ritual, and visual as well.
THOUGHTS ON METHODOLOGY:
POLYDOX PATTERNS
A polydox theological hermeneutics reveals a form of trickster knowl-

edge that, in the words of a well-worn truism, can comfort the afflicted
and afflict the comfortable, in ways that give profound contour and
depth to this overused phrase. Employing a polydox methodology has
the potential to show multilayered thinking and action patterns and
the many motivations, juxtapositions, and pitfalls that accompany such
interpretive moves. A polydox theological hermeneutics aims to con-
struct a method capable of perceiving and describing a complex range
of theological conceptions, interests, motivations, and dynamics that
obtain in a person’s or a community’s interpretive practices. Text and
culture, both sacred and secular, do not function as opposites, or even
complements. Indeed, the copula “and,” rather pointing out an addi-
tive approach, can point to sacred text as culture and secular as sacred.
Likewise, each cultural setting retells, reimagines, and produces faith-
ful renderings.61
In this project, I deploy an intersectional methodology, engaging a
variety of disciplines, perspectives, and discourses. Historical, herme-
neutical, and anthropological texts provide the bulk of evidence, seen
through the lenses of gender, coloniality, and race/ethnicity. The con-
ceptual space of this method is framed by the concept of polydoxy.
Polydoxy denotes several instances of multiplicity: the simple fact that
Christian theology, including its expressions of orthodoxy, has always
been multiple; that the divine enfolds manifold with itself;62 and that
the internal paradox of theological language expresses the coincidence
of opposites, often having to resort to apophasis, of “critical unknow-
ingness.”63 It may even “release a sense of (interreligious) peace if the
doxology of orthodoxy is inherently transformed into a para-doxology
of polydoxy.”64
Polydoxy might also make room for the multiple religious belong-
ings that are real in so many people’s lives.65 Therefore polydoxy favors
the paradox that resists simple doxa (opinion),66 and affirms the pos-
sibility of meanings that can be perceived through the kaleidoscope of
interpretation. Where layers of meaning intersect, polysemy becomes
pertinent: multiple meanings and many forms of doxa, of opinion man-
ifest, and of the adoration of “shining beauty” in doxology.67 Openness
to exchanges between cultures as in flux, and intent on capturing where

they show potential toward greater justice, is a feature of a polydox
sense of theological hermeneutics. The proposed approach questions
any emphasis on Christian interpretation as uniformly orthodox as
both unenforceable and inhospitable to the reality of multiple religio-
cultural belongings.
A polydox hermeneutics enables strong critiques of the abuse of reli-
gious and cultural power both within and without one’s own tradition/s
and seeks to provide a more flexible epistemology, methodology, and
hermeneutics for identifying objectionable theological speech and eth-
ical practice. How our context figures into our encounters with the
divine, and how we speak about it and express it—that is, do theol-
ogy—is a matter of negotiation. Context represents a powerful datum
and certainly suggests powerful priorities, vocabularies, epistemologies,
and conceptual frameworks. How a person or community chooses to
live out of it or into it, adjacent to it, or in resistance to it is a matter of
continual unfolding. Such unfolding engages in what Catherine Keller
identifies as one of the great struggles of contemporary Christianity in
the United States—and perhaps elsewhere in the Northern hemisphere
too: caught between the extremes of strong truth claims and the dan-
gers of relativism, between “the absolute and the dissolute.”68 Keller pro-
poses a third way that can inform a polydox theological hermeneutics,
where “all human truth-claims are relative to context and perspective.”
However, from that assertion it does not follow that “truth, or value, is
nothing but that perspective.”69 Though we may “relinquish certainty,”
we need to be able to speak and act with “confidence.”70
Polydox hermeneutics involves creative friction and adaptation rather
than assimilation or simple rejection. Cultural hybridity and mimicry
are embedded in multifaceted encounters, and polydox Christianities
emerge at the complex, constantly negotiated intersection of intercul-
tural interpretive practices. Polydox Christianities are found when there
is creative interaction between multiple hermeneutic styles and meth-
ods. They display openness to creative transformation and critically
challenge and identify and critique tendencies to violent domination.
In this hermeneutics, we find crossroads open up, pointing toward fur-
ther aporias. Lacking clearly marked signposts, we are better off know-
ing the baggage we carry with us on our interpretive journeys, along
with a diagnostic instrumentarium that helps us recognize patterns of
interpretation and see their potential and shortcomings. Each “angelic”

hermeneutic messenger will benefit from a fuller awareness of how
quickly she or he can participate in demonic patterns where the delivery
of the good message—eu-angelion—ceases to be one.
As we engage in practices of meaning making, we may consider the
words of Michel Serres, who reminds us that the multiple does not
represent “an epistemological monster” but is rather “the ordinary lot
of situations,”71 especially that of cross-cultural interpretation. Such
dynamics are particularly evident in zones of vibrant interaction. The
friction of “systematic misunderstandings”72 that mark intercultural
relationships are a major part of the reality of missionary environments
and encounters, that is, encounters where movable concepts and agents
interact to articulate, embody, and contest varieties of doxa, of opinion,
custom, and engaged perspective.
Polyphony, one of Bonhoeffer’s favorite musical concepts, offers a
related metaphor for the task of constructive theology. Responding
faithfully to the polyphony of life resembles improvising on the can-
tus firmus, the grounding chant of Christ, as polyphonous “harmo-
nies retextur[ing] the cantus firmus in multi-voiced counterpoint.” 73
The cantus firmus lends sound support for the “melodies that fragment,
mirror, echo, and retexture the original melody in other voices.” 74 It is
this polyphony of voices that I am seeking to trace in the theological
discipline of hermeneutics. “Weaving together the polyphonic realities
of the global village,” folk, classical, jazz, gospel, chant, and hip hop
each have some form of truth to offer, harmonious or not.75 A transcul-
tural theological hermeneutics that includes such remythologizing aims
to honor many voices, past and present, in a constant search for new
expressions of the divine.76
Christian faith always arrives embodied in a variety of accommo-
dations, political, linguistic, cultural, and economic, translated into
new technologies of writing, narrating, and forming subjects. Multiple
religious belongings constitute a significant reality also among church
members who find the sacred in many places: in Buddhist meditation,
in yoga classes, in Rumi’s poetry.77 This marks another realm of the
polydox, a more generous sense of orthodoxy less obsessed with tight
boundary controls and policing perceptions of divine power. A more
capacious sense of the Christian divine may both de-exoticize other
religious options and re-exoticize Christianity’s own wild spaces, be it
mystical writings, ritual practices, art work, or at the edges of monastic

and other ascetic practices. Stretching theological hermeneutics beyond
the atrophies of Roman traditionalisms and Protestant dogmatisms,
themselves localized but often encrusted options, we may yet see a shift
in retraditioning, resacralizing, and readapting Christian faith and prac-
tice both in the North and South, gaining rather than losing integrity.
In the gap between supersessionist and pluralist understandings of
other religions the category of a “resolute” theology of religions can
help us move beyond the polarizations of “the absolute” and “the dis-
solute,” proposing a resolute positionality that embodies the “practice
of discernment, which means to distinguish, to attend to difference, and
to exercise good judgment.”78
OUTLINE OF THE BOOK
Chapter 2 seeks to explore three instances of pattern recognition that

elucidate some of the dynamics of colonial interpretive practices. The
first case study discusses the interpretive acts of La Malinche, Hernan
Cortés’s translator, exploring the question of gender, power, and trans-
lation under the conditions of early Spanish conquest. The chapter
continues with an exploration the colonial effects on the formation of
notions of German national identity in the nineteenth century, espe-
cially as it concerns the shifting relationship to Jewish cosmopolitanism
in German lands. The section explores how colonial scientists made
available texts from India, which then were interpreted toward a histor-
ically nonfactual construction of an Aryan ethnic identity. The third
scenario of colonial hermeneutics discusses Saba Mahmood’s challenge
to a US think tank’s hidden assumptions about what constitutes an
appropriate hermeneutic of the sacred text of Islam.
In order to realize some of the poetic, transcultural, and interreligious
potentialities of a reframed theological hermeneutics, it is necessary to
examine certain concepts that have shaped Western hermeneutical prac-
tices. Chapter 3 introduces the history of dynamic tension between the
concepts of mythos and logos as terms that have informed and shaped
what counts as reliable and unreliable speech, and accounts of events
and truths. It raises questions about the interplay between mythos and
logos and how mysticism might be accounted for in the reframing of a
polydox theological hermeneutics.
Chapter 4 seeks to put Hermes back into Hermeneutics by exploring

the historic development of the term “hermeneutics.” By rediscover-
ing Hermes as a trickster, traveler between worlds, languages, religions,
currencies, a trader, traitor, and translator, the chapter seeks to expand
conceptions of what hermeneutics can involve. It becomes clear that
hermeneutical difference stands at the center of religious difference.
Jewish-Christian relations provide an example of how hermeneutical
difference radically alters a sense of perception of the world and of com-
munity. At the core of theological hermeneutics stands the question of
how to read the texts of biblical traditions in the shifting context of
early Christian doctrinal formation. As with the story of Hermes, the
question of whether logos or mythos provides an adequate account of
events and of faith has been at the center of theological hermeneutics.
Further, we ask how to account for gender and power differentials in
those interpreting and the interpreted, and whether there are certain
conditions that heighten the possibilities for witnessing to the ways of
Hermes, and the possibility of learning to engage with greater comfort
the indeterminacies of life and meaning making.
Chapter 5, “The Trickster as Hermeneut,” explores in greater detail
the figure of the trickster across cultural differences, focused on prob-
ing the hermeneutic and revelatory function of such tricksters. As a
cipher for polyvalence, tricksters function as agents of perspective in
narratives that often offer a paradox or a puzzle. Trickster figures can
have strange physical features, shape-shift between animal and human
form, or have other perplexing, and often hypermasculine, characteris-
tics. Female trickster figures are however also plentiful, though it may
mean seeking for different characteristics. Tricksters teem in the pages
of the Bible, ranging from the clever ancestor whose tricks help the peo-
ple survive a situation, to the foreign woman who comes to redefine the
tribal community, to Jesus of Nazareth. While some abhor the ambigu-
ity of the figure and can tend to sexualize or demonize them, the pres-
ent inquiry highlights the transformative aspects of trickster narratives,
as they help us keep our theologies and our interpretations open for
surprises and expressive of Divine constancy and capriciousness.
Chapter 6 explores the figure and characteristics of the fool and folly
as hermeneutical topoi and manifestations of the holy. To discern wis-
dom and folly is a hermeneutical challenge. Paul contrasts the folly of
God with what counts as wisdom of the world. The language of faith
has long circumambulated the boundaries of the wise person and the
fool as tropes of teaching and as theatrical devices. Holy fools have
populated the margins of sainthood, and it has not always been easy
to discern where wisdom resides and where madness. Collective joy
and carnival can quickly devolve into the destructive actions of a mad
crowd, and the exuberance of ecstasy can resemble demonic posses-
sion. Again, we are challenged to discern the spirits, and discern where
divine wisdom resides in folly.
Chapter 7 proceeds with an exploration of the interactive dual-
ity mythos and logos, which I hope to show is rather more a process of
nonduality than a hierarchical dualism. Recent work has challenged
the overdetermination of these concepts and suggests their fluidity,
vibrancy, and malleability. A reintegration of these modes of discourse,
I suggest, may contribute a key building block toward constructing an
intercultural hermeneutics, as well as to a rejuvenation of the appre-
ciation of biblical narrativity. It would rearticulate theology as mytho-
logy, as a form of discourse that that engages and needs many modes
of articulation.
Chapter 8 presents some concluding reflections and thoughts.
NOTES
1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” in Philosophical
Hermeneutics, The Continental Aesthetics Reader, ed. Clive Cazeaux
(London: Routledge, 2000), 183.
2. One could further argue that the relationality of the cosmos is of necessity
interpretive. Genes, hormones, synapses, nerves, cells, etc. communicate and
mis-communicate with each other. Health and disease in some sense thus are
engaged in interpretive processes, involving correct and incorrect readings of
and responses to stimuli.
3. Werner Jeanrond, “Belonging or Identity? Christian Faith in a Multi-Religious
World,” in Many Mansions: Multiple Religious Belongings and Christian
Identity, ed. Catherine Cornille (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), 107.
4. Additions of the transliterated Greek in brackets mine. Aristotle, The Categories:
On Interpretation, Loeb Classical Library, Harold P. Cooke (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1938), 115.
5. See Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato
to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), who traces these thought patterns
from Plato through Philo and Plotinus into Origen, the Nicene, and monastic
conversations to Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and medieval mysticism.
6. Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the

Politics of Translation (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2006), 21.
7. See Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider, eds., Polydoxy: Theology of
Multiplicity and Relation (London/New York: Routledge, 2010).
8. Andrew Walls argues that in fact there are so many parallels between the early
centuries of the formation of Christianity and the growth of Christianity that
“we now have better resources for understanding the patchwork of fragments
of Christian literature that survived from before the age of the great councils
by examining the recent histories of the churches of Africa and Asia than the
Bodleian or the Vatican libraries can yield.” Andrew F. Walls, “Eusebius Tries
Again: The Task of Reconceiving and Re-Visioning the Study of Christian
History,” in Enlarging the Story: Perspectives on Writing World Christian
History, ed. Wilbert R. Shenk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), 4.
9. Jennifer R. Rapp, “A Poetics of Comparison: Euripides, Zhuangzi, and the
Human Poise of Imaginative Construction,” JAAR 78, no. 1 (March 2010):
179.
10. Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God
(Louisville, KY: WJK, 2007).
11. Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep (New York/London: Routledge, 2003),
168–69.
12. I have written about the polymorphic layering of economic, missionary, and
theological concepts elsewhere. Suffice it to say that this layering of messages
and purposes has sparked the present inquiry from prior ones. See Marion
Grau, Of Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption (London/New York:
T&T Clark/Continuum, 2004), and Marion Grau, Rethinking Mission in
the Postcolony: Salvation, Society, and Subversion (London/New York: T&T
Clark/Continuum, 2011).
13. Judith Binney, The Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall (Wellington:
Bridget Williams Books, 1968), 83, 128.
14. Binney, Legacy of Guilt, 128.
15. Raimundo Panikkar, Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics: Cross-Cultural Studies
(Bangalore: Asian Trading Corporation, 1979), 9 (my emphasis).
16. As referred to in Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval
Germany, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism
(New York: Crossroad, 2005), 48, and Dorothee Sölle, The Silent Cry:
Mysticism and Resistance, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2001).
17. Acosta as quoted in David R. Brockman, No Longer the Same: Religious Others
and the Liberation of Christian Theology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011), 14.
18. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free
Press, 1925), 112.
19. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Jenseits von Mythos und Logos: Die Christologische
Transformation der Theologie, Quaestiones Disputatae Vol. 142 (Freiburg:
Herder, 1993), 24.
20. Robert Ellwood, Myth, Key Concepts in Religion (London: Continuum,
2008), 12.
21. Pew studies indicate that the US religious landscape, for example, is “very
diverse and extremely fluid,” that is, there is little to be taken for granted in
terms of affiliation, as there is a great mobility between faith expressions as
well as out of any organized expression thereof. The decline in affiliation with
both Protestant and Catholic churches corresponds to a rising percentage of
persons that are unaffiliated. Yet this unaffiliated population is very unstable,
and many reaffiliate eventually, but with a different religious tradition. There
is also a gender gap in affiliation with many more men being unaffiliated than
women. See http://religions.pewforum.org/reports Accessed June 20, 2014.
Also, for an exploration of the “spiritual but not religious,” or the “Nones,”
see Linda Mercadante, Belief without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual
but Not Religious (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
22. Luckmann and Taylor have both given greater contour to what is often described
as secularization, arguing that the dynamics have to do with a shift in rather
than a disappearance of religion. Different modes of engagement match differ-
ent modes of community, more focus on the personal over and against insti-
tutional affiliation, on the immediate and immanent over the “transcendent,”
and so forth. See, for example, Thomas Luckmann, “Shrinking Transcendence:
Expanding Religion?” Sociological Analysis 50, no. 2 (1990): 127.
23. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern
World (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 11.
24. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 11.
25. Panikkar, Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics, 8.
26. See, for example, Serene Jones and Paul Lakeland, Constructive Theology: A
Contemporary Approach (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005).
27. Henning Luther, Religion und Alltag: Bausteine zu einer Praktischen Theologie
Des Subjekts (Stuttgart: Radius, 1992), 254.
28. Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress, 2008), 83.
29. See Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic
Vocation (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 2013), 82–84.
30. Moe-Lobeda, Resisting, 85.
31. The constitutions of both Ecuador and Bolivia include the Rights of Nature.
Ecuador was the first country to do that in 2008. See, for example, Erin Daly,
“The Ecuadorian Exemplar: The First Ever Vindications of Constitutional
Rights of Nature,” RECEIL 21, no. 1 (2012).
32. Patricia Cox Miller, “Subtle Embodiments: Imagining the Holy in Late
Antiquity,” in Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and
Relationality, ed. Chris Bosel and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2010), 45.
33. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Dialektik der Säkularisierung,” Blätter Für Deutsche
und International Politik, no. 4 (2008): 36–37 Certainly, I do not think
Christian churches and other religious communities should be reduced to per-
forming only interpretive functions, since I do assume that interpretive acts
are always also acts that are embodied in the structuring of perception as well
as aiming for embodied structures that ground and transform communities.
34. See Frank Schirrmacher, Payback: Warum Wir Im Informationszeitalter
Gezwungen sind zu Tun, Was Wir Nicht Tun Wollen, und wie Wir die Kontrolle
Über Unser Denken Zurückgewinnen (München: Karl Blessing, 2009).
35. Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” The Atlantic, May 2012,
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-
us-lonely/8930/.
36. See Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and
Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
37. “Geopsyche” is a term coined by the psychologist Hellpach who wrote about
the connections between weather, climate, and other environmental factors
and their interaction with the animal and human psyche. Willy Hellpach,
Die Geopsychischen Erscheinungen: Die Menschenseele Unter dem Einfluß von
Wetter und Klima, Boden und Landschaft (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1911).
38. See, for example, J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between
Asian and Western Thoughts (London: Routledge, 1997).
39. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1.
40. See David Jasper, A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics (Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox, 2004).
41. James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now
(New York: Free Press, 2007), 664.
42. Kugel, How to Read the Bible, 665.
46. Kugel, How to Read the Bible, 678–79.
50. See Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic
Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory, SUNY Series on Modern Jewish
Literature and Culture (Albany: SUNY, 1982), and Daniel Boyarin,
Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington and Indianapolis:

Indiana University Press, 1990).
52. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1978), 122.
53. Quoted in Aquinas, S.Th. I, Q. 84, 1. The nature of such similitude is of
course controversial.
54. The same text proposes that Hermes is the Trismegistos, the “thrice-great,”
because he has access to, or possesses, “three parts of the Wisdom of the whole
World.” The Egyptian god Toth has the same appellation.
55. Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber, When They Severed Earth from
Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2004), 13–14.
56. Barber and Paul T. Barber, When They Severed Earth from Sky, 34.
57. Barber and Paul T. Barber, When They Severed Earth from Sky, 35.
58. John R. Farella, The Main Stalk: A Synthesis of Navajo Philosophy (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1984), 120.
59. Farella, The Main Stalk, 118.
61. See Seidman, Faithful Renderings.
62. Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider, “Introduction,” in Polydoxy: Theology
of Multiplicity and Relation, ed. Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider
(London/New York: Routledge, 2010), 1.
63. Keller and Schneider, “Introduction,” 3.
64. Roland Faber, “The Sense of Peace: A Paradoxology of Divine Multiplicity,”
in Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation, ed. Catherine Keller and
Laurel Schneider (London/New York: Routledge, 2010), 49.
65. See, for example, Catherine Cornille, Many Mansions: Multiple Religious
Belonging and Christian Identity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002).
66. Faber, “The Sense of Peace: A Paradoxology of Divine Multiplicity,” 45.
67. Faber, “The Sense of Peace: A Paradoxology of Divine Multiplicity,” 36.
68. Keller, On the Mystery, 2.
69. Keller, On The Mystery, 4.
70. Keller, On The Mystery, 8.
71. As quoted in Keller and Schneider, “Introduction,” 3.
72. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), x.
73. Craig Gardiner, “Worship in the Middle of the Village: The Reality That
Shines in and out,” in Dietrich Bonhoeffers Theologie Heute: Ein Weg Zwischen
Fundamentalismus und Säkularismus, ed. John D. De Gruchy, Stephen Plant,
and Christiane Tietz (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2009), 267.
74. Gardiner, “Worship in the Middle of the Village,” 266.
75. Gardiner, “Worship in the Middle of the Village,” 266.
76. For a related approach, using the metaphor of jazz and classical music to dis-
cuss the improvisational nature of hermeneutics, see Bruce Ellis Benson, “The
Improvisation of Hermeneutics: Jazz Lessons for Interpreters,” in Hermeneutics
at the Crossroads, ed. Kevin Vanhoozer, James K. A. Smith, and Bruce Ellis
Benson (Bloomington; Indiana University Press, 2006).
77. See Cornille, Many Mansions.
78. Keller, On the Mystery, 2–3.
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———. Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony: Salvation, Society, and Subversion.
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———. On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress,
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———. “Introduction.” In Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation, ed.
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2. Theological Hermeneutics as
Pattern Recognition
UNSEALING COLONIAL LANDS:

INTERPRETING THE “MIND OF THESE NATIONS”
Traveling the crossroads of colonial encounters involves decoding the

scrambled signals lost in the translations of bodies and lands. Times of
travel necessitate increase in interpretive skills and practices. An under-
standing of how deeply religious questions informed colonial relations
and continue to be present in contemporary quests for understand-
ing—all too often in order to dominate—the other, while also rethink-
ing the self, can be enhanced by exploring some of the dynamics of
colonial hermeneutics. Voltaire connects trade connections with those
of knowledge in a way that illustrates how hermeneutics and economic
exchange are interlaced:
Fed by the products of their soil, dressed in their fabrics, amused by games they
invented, instructed even by their ancient moral fables, why would we neglect
to understand the mind of these nations, among whom our European traders
have traveled ever since they could find a way to get to them?1
Understanding the “mind of these nations” was generally a stra-

tegic venture in colonial contexts. Insight into guiding values, power
structures, and motivations could be gained through learning lan-
guage, religion, and culture. In this chapter, I present three instances
of hermeneutics as pattern recognition: the case of La Malinche and
Hernan Cortés, the case of nineteenth-century German hermeneutical
endeavors involving Indian texts, and the case of contemporary impe-
rial cryptoreligious hermeneutics in US-Middle East relations.
COLONIAL MISSIONARY HERMENEUTICS: LA

MALINCHE AND TONGUE IN CHEEK
A remarkable case of a polymorphous colonial encounter is that of

La Malinche and Hernan Cortés in what today is Mexico. The tragic
yet impressive figure of La Malinche, whose multiply displaced body
learned to speak many tongues, was able to translate between various
Mexican indigenous communities and Hernán Cortés. Negotiating her
own survival, she was deeply involved in shaping the relations of what
would become a conquest and devastation of a continent.
Only rarely do we have a record of such persons as La Malinche, who
figures powerfully in the interaction between cultures. Hernan Cortés
called her “the tongue,”2 as she mediated and translated between dif-
ferent identities, cultures, and desires. Missionaries and friars were
some of the first Western anthropologists in colonial settings. They
observed, translated, wrote down. Some commentators like Fernando
de Alva linked her baptism into Christianity to the Holy Spirit’s gift of
tongues,3 though of course the knowledge of the various indigenous
languages long precedes her Christian baptism, and it was merely her
swift learning of Spanish from Cortés’s interlocutor, Aguilar, that could
seem unusual. Her agency, ambivalent to a high degree, has been puz-
zling her readers, to say the least:
Por lo que respecta a esta investigación, encontramos muchas ambigüedades,

contradicciones y lagunas referentes a la vida y hechos de nuestra Malinche.4
A major hermeneut herself, she has also been a hermeneutical puzzle for
those trying to understand her role in shaping post-conquest Mexican
national identity and the role accorded to her in shaping stereotypes
about Mexican women. She has been a major projection screen in the
search for the religio-cultural and natural identity of Mexicans, who
are a Mestizo people.5 La Malinche gave birth to Martin, one of the
first Mestizos and her son by Cortés.
While Cortés read the requerimiento in Spanish, La Malinche
translated phrase by phrase, but during a battle and far behind enemy
lines, and thus inaudibly. Thus, the royally required “propriety was
observed.”6 This deceptive act of “literal” reading out loud of the proc-
lamation, but out of earshot, represents a deep lack of respect for the
Hermeneutics as Pattern Recognition 37
actual communication that would have allowed an understanding and

an appropriate response to the implications of the colonial proclama-
tion of the requerimiento.
As with other hermeneuts, some of the ways in which misunderstand-
ing, deception, and trickery obtain have to do with the relationship
between literal and figurative meanings. Thus, the endless interpre-
tive puzzle of Moctezuma’s speech addressing Cortés—translated by
La Malinche—represents what is thought at least by some to include
deception based on taking literally Moctezuma’s more indirect, figura-
tive intent in welcoming Cortés.7 As to her linguistic abilities, it seems
that she was able to understand more than the usual variety of Nahuatl
dialects—distinguished mostly by pronunciation, but still imperme-
able to many—as well as Spanish and a certain register of Nahuatl, the
“lordly speech,” and its indirect style as employed by the upper echelons
to Moctezuma. Mere intuition would not have been enough to grasp
this sociolect, and her command of it seems to confirm her origin in
a noble family before she became a disposable property.8 Being trilin-
gual in Nahuatl, Maya, and Spanish, including a variety of dialects
and sociolects, she was extremely valuable to Cortés and was hence
respected and protected. She came into his possession as part of a bribe
of 20 women and male slaves intended9 to motivate Cortés to move on.
Cortés had them all baptized and the women distributed to provide
the men with sexual services, the juxtaposition of the Christian sacra-
ment with rape apparently not jarring to sixteenth-century Spaniards.10
Cortés only reclaimed her for himself when he found out about her
usefulness, representing a huge shift in power and access for her.11 At
times, the translation project could become complex in Cortés speak-
ing Spanish to Aguilar, who translated the speech into Maya, and then
Malinche translated that into Nahuatl to the interpreters, who in turn
translated it into the Totonac language. Her tasks included assisting
Cortés in his divide-and-conquer moves, “misleading them to keep
his potential enemies off-balance and acquiring allies through a mix
of sweet talk and intimidation.”12 Since the duplicity was mutual, but
spied by La Malinche, she was able to save the Spaniards on several
occasions, avoiding traps. This agency in warning the Spaniards of
Mexican strategies earned her the reputation of being a traitor. When
a noblewoman of Cholula revealed a certain plot to her, and offered13
her marriage and hence a new existence, she pretended to go along with
the plot but instead revealed it to the Spaniards. One would tend to
agree with Karttunen that the “question of ethnic loyalty” cannot be
legitimately raised here, since “at this time in Mesoamerica the indi-
genes had no sense of themselves as ‘Indians’ united in a common cause
against Europeans.”14 In fact we find similar dynamics on the fringes
of colonial encounters elsewhere, such as on the Eastern Seaboard of
North America, where some tribes allied with the French and others
with the British, against each other, and also in other contexts such as
New Zealand. Since La Malinche did not belong to any of the involved
ethnic groups, “how could [she] be a traitor to any or all of them?”15
asks Karttunen. Yet, she was obliged to respond to Moctezuma’s court
language, full of polite rhetoric and metaphors with Cortés’s crude and
plain rhetoric:
The Mesoamerican societies she knew, Nahua and Maya, observed elaborate
rules of behavior, and by word and deed she was implicated in heart-stopping
violations.16
Following initial flattery and promises, Cortés soon changed his

approach, using tactics and threats to turn tables. Malinche’s popular
reputation as seductress was patently questioned as it was only after
two years of “sexual use in Spanish hands” that she became pregnant.
She was dead within ten years of falling into the Spaniards’ hands and
did not have a chance to be with her children who were deprived of her
memory. Like many native women, she was impregnated by Cortés,
who was hardly her love slave. Their relationship was likely “prag-
matic in the extreme,” enabling each of them to survive, while Cortés
was clearly in power. With other cases of young female interpreters in
colonial circumstances, such as Sacajawea, “these competent, cheerful,
enduring young interpreters can be viewed as child survivors of chronic
sexual assault.”17 For Karttunen, she was “nobody’s woman and had
nothing to lose,” which made her “dangerous, but it says nothing about
her morality”:
This is no love story, no tale of blind ambition, and racial betrayal, no morality
play. It is the record of a gifted woman in impossible circumstances carving out
survival one day at a time.18
UN/SEALING COLONIES: TRANSLATOR, TRAITOR?19
La Malinche serves as an interpreter for Cortés’s appetites in the his-

tory and mythology of the conquest of Mexico. Given to Cortés by the
Aztec emperor Moctezuma along with 20 other slave girls—likely cap-
tives from conquered tribes and regions—the Nahuatl girl Malinulli
had already been through a dislocating journey between cultures and
languages.20 Gifted, smart, and with a skill for language and trans-
lation, she quickly established herself as indispensable to the Spanish
camp, and to Cortés. To Aztec and other indigenous interlocutors
she was so central that Cortés became known as El Malinche,21 or
Malintzin, Malinche’s captain.22 She was far more than a translator
and was consulted on policy, native psychology, history, religion, and
custom. Several Spaniards wrote sections on her in their accounts of
colonial ventures. With her help, Cortés took advantage of the fac-
tions and rivalry of the Aztec empire and its many nations and tribes.23
La Malinche herself had reasons to be less than loyal to Moctezuma,
after all she was a slave traded to him, and then on to Cortés. Thus
Cortés repeated the ancient “divide and conquer” tactics. Her own
religio-culture was different from Moctezuma’s, and Laura Esquivel
suggests in her novel that she was doubly baptised—as a devotee of
a water goddess and Quetzalcoatl, and later of Christ. Her interpre-
tive impetus includes the religious and cultural layers of any kind of
translation work: Effectively, her work and that of her interlocutors
include many layers of meaning and of import. Cypess and others have
argued that European historians have underemphasized military and
political aspects when assessing the Aztec practice of human sacrifice,
which followed successful military campaigns against enemies. It is
likely that “war was legitimized on religious grounds, while at the same
time serving economic and political goals.” Another question is that
of the significance of La Malinche’s contribution to the early colonial
period. Though some popular views may suggest that La Malinche’s
actions caused the downfall of the Aztec empire, this is not supported
by historical evidence. Rather, a series of complex religious, cultural,
and military confrontations, along with epidemic outbreaks of disease
that Mesoamericans did not have immunity to, is likely.24 Moctezuma
ruled the area around Tenochtitlan as a tyrant, using human sacrifice as
a way of intimidation, and his emotional vacillation, “stemming from
his mysticism, made him ineffective as a leader.” The Mexican empire

under his rule was “extremely vulnerable to internal destruction” and
aided Cortés’s progress.25 Thus, La Malinche certainly was an agent
in the process, but her intention and agency in the negotiation process
remain highly ambiguous.
After the Mexicans evicted the Spanish, La Malinche’s status as
a great, philanthropic conquistadora evaporated, and she became a
scapegoat for the centuries of colonial rule.26 Mexicans acknowledged
her contribution to the conquest with an ambivalent attitude. She was
accorded quasi-divine status as a goddess, associated with the Virgin,
and La Llorona interceding with the Spaniards on behalf of their own
people. Reviled as female Quisling27—the eponymous Norwegian who
collaborated with the Nazi occupation—she was seen as one who sold
soul and body to invader and exposed sacred soil to foreign corrupting
influences. Mexicans use the term malinchista to describe any person
who commits malinchismo28 —persons who wish to open Mexico to the
outside world. Contemporary Mexican American and Chicana writers
have seen her as a symbol of the tensions that exist in their own sexual,
racial, and religo-ethnic identity.29
Moctezuma and La Malinche, respectively, have been cast as male
and female devils in Mexican history, including La Malinche’s role as
the eternally weak feminine, linked to Eve and the Serpent (with asso-
ciations of Quetzalcoatl as the feathered serpent).30 This negative figu-
rative reading inverts Bernal’s more positive reading of La Malinche
as the biblical Joseph figure sold into slavery by his family, but gra-
cious when meeting them again later in life.31 The names given to her
display the range of roles and sentiments associated with her. Known
after baptism as Dona Marina, she was accorded great respect by both
Cortés and other Spanish writers, though her contributions are—pre-
dictably—minimized in Cortés’s letters to the crown. Both sides, the
Spanish and the Aztec/Toltec readers of the events, refer, in various
ways, to divine action or prophecy.32 Chicana writer Esquivel imag-
ines a double articulation of conversion: La Malinche undergoes her
baptism to Christ dressed as a devotee of Quetzalcoatl, not so much
as an act of deception but as an act of cultural appropriation in a con-
text where changing the names of deities was common as they were
known by at least two different names.33 Thus, the identification of
Tonantzin with the Virgen of Guadalupe is a hermeneutic act that links
the agency and presence of these divine figures.34 Likewise, the cross
of Christ fits with the cross of Quetzalcoatl.35 In reply to Malinalli’s
question about the name of the Christian God’s wife, Esquivel’s Cortés
dismisses her knowledge about God and makes the theological observa-
tion that “your gods [Huitzilopochtli et al.] demand all the blood in the
world in order to exist, while our God offers His own to us with each
Communion. We drink his blood.”36 This “liquid god,” matches the
peaceful Nahuatl Quetzalcoatl of Esquivel’s Malinalli. Thus the new
masters—seen for a while as emissaries of Quetzalcoatl—have come
to end the human sacrifices presumably required by the Aztec deities
in a departure from previous Toltec practices.37 This hermeneutic link
appears between prophecies of a return of Quetzalcoatl in both the
Aztec and Spanish versions of the initial discourse between Cortés and
Moctezuma.38 Later in her life La Malinche traveled with Cortés, revis-
iting like an uncrowned queen of Mexico the scenes of her childhood
and early misery and made a long legendary march across Yucatan with
an unflinching spirit.
The hermeneutical afterlives of La Malinche are many. In the pueb-
los of New Mexico on Christmas Day one could until the recent past
still see dances in which figures representing Christ, the Universal
Church, Moctezuma, Cortés, and La Malinche all performed together
in an “amiable religious syncretism.”39 Assessing the palimpsest that
is La Malinche remains a complex hermeneutical enterprise in itself.
Romantic readings,40 nationalist readings, tragic readings, feminist
readings, all reshuffle what evidence there is and attempt to reshape
the perception of this cultural icon. Ancestor of la raza mestizo, la raza
cosmica,41 inaugurating a painful mestizaje,42 La Chingada, the pen-
etrated one—and La Llorona, the weeping one43 —invoking images of
the biblical Rahab and Rachel, she is an enslaved woman who facilitates
the conquest of Latin America participating in less-than-savory prac-
tices. It seems that indigenous and Spanish patterns of deep patriarchy
have handily combined—as in other colonial settings—to create the
figure of the sexual temptress and betrayer, the needed entry into a
realm, and the mother of the bastard children of an empire, and thus
to inform and deform the agency of women then and now.44 In his The
Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz implies that until La Malinche is
integrated into the totality of the Mexican psyche, Mexicans will not
develop to their fullest potential.45 Thus, for many, she continues as
a shibboleth for Mexican Spanish identity and femininity, as synec-

doche of the role of women in the enterprise of conquest.46 This has
been especially experienced by Chicanas who have been maligned as
La Malinche by men who see them consorting with Anglos or Anglo-
American culture.47 Others see her as personifying a complex of
“resistance attributes—alliance, accommodation, self-preservation,”
epitomizing “half a millennium (and likely more) of Mexican Indian
women’s survival strategies.”48 Following Gloria Anzaldua, Robert
Maldonado invokes Guadalupe, La Malinche, and La Llorona as the
three mothers of La gente Chicana.49 They are all “mediators,” and have
been used to domesticate Chicano/as, “Guadalupe to make us docile
and enduring, La Chingada to make us ashamed of our Indian side,
and La Llorona to make us long-suffering people.”50 The quintessential
concept of mestizaje itself of course indicates the mediated, blended,
painful, and blessed mix of indigenous and colonial culture that marks
Chicano/as. Maldonado’s “malinchista biblical hermeneutics” involves
profound ironies, given that the mere word malinchista still refers to
(cultural) betrayal. But at this point, we should not be surprised that
such ironies appear when contemplating any kind of hermeneutic
activity. Maldonado identifies such malinchista figures in biblical texts
dealing with conquest, especially in Esra-Nehemiah, and Ruth. Ruth
can be read as a story of “ethnic universalism,” or “failed assimilation,”
where two women cling to each other, a term that elsewhere is used for
patriarchal marriage, but Ruth continues to be called Moabite, even
after providing Naomi with an heir.51 We can think of others, such as
Rahab, whose body bridges peoples and cultures in similar ways.
Various stories indicate that there was very real intermarriage and
inclusion of especially women such as Ruth, Rahab, Tamar, and others
into the line of ancestors of groups that also felt it necessary to tightly
police ethno-cultural boundaries. Ruth’s interethnic relation-building
foreshadows La Malinche, though, as Laura Donaldson argues, to
Native Americans intermarriage has often been a strategy that pushed
assimilation, rather than creating a new race of people.52 Some have
called this narrative the “Pocahontas Perplex,” indicating a story fea-
turing an indigenous woman who enters into a sexual relationship
with a male conqueror and thus enters the conqueror’s family line.53
Ruth, Rahab, Malinche, and Pocahontas are figures that illustrate this
dynamic, being both tricksters and survivors, the accounts producing
“the native women as a site of conflict” where battles of identity and

power are fought. And while in later interpretations of these narratives
of likely rape the conqueror himself appears conquered, there remains
for some a bitter taste to such hermeneutics of survival.54 A trickster’s
“victory” is often pyrrhic. For Maldonado’s malinchista hermeneutics,
“any facile identification with the conquerors or with the conquered
requires losing part of your self,” while keeping one’s identity requires
“living with conflict and ambiguity.”55
Thus the life and afterlives of La Malinche display the polyvalent
permutations of meaning and meaning making of women who stand at
crossroads between cultures. Readings and misreadings of their bodies
continue to inform, for better and worse, the way these women with
complex loyalties and survival strategies are viewed.
ASPECTS OF GERMAN COLONIAL HERMENEUTICS:

SCHLEIERMACHER AND BEYOND
Schleiermacher put the universality of misunderstanding at the center of
hermeneutic activity.56
In modern academic discourse the term “hermeneutics” designates

a specific cultural practice, an academic discipline and program of
inquiry, and is by many associated with F. D. E. Schleiermacher’s 1838
Hermeneutik and Kritik. Some see Schleiermacher as the first formula-
tor of a “general hermeneutics”; others see him as the “father of modern
hermeneutics.”57 This appellation displays the high cultural appeal of
graecophilia, a strong fascination with Greek antiquity. Renaissance,
Reformation, and humanism manifested also as hermeneutical enter-
prises, as they retranslated, rediscovered, and updated ancient Greek
and Roman cultural practices and texts.
At the same time, colonial encounters increasingly influenced the
rediscovery of ancient thought and the development of many aca-
demic discourses. Literary critic Terry Eagleton offers the following
angle on the genesis of hermeneutics as a modern European academic
discourse:
Even the most rarefied theories have a root in historical reality. It is generally
agreed that the founding father of hermeneutics was the German philosopher
Friedrich Schleiermacher. What is not so widely known is that Schleiermacher’s

interest in the art of interpretation was provoked when he was concerned about
how to translate a book entitled An Account of the English Colony in New South
Wales, which records the author’s encounter with Australian Aboriginal peo-
ples. Schleiermacher was concerned about how we could understand the beliefs
of people even though they seemed desperately alien to us. It was from a colo-
nial encounter that the art of interpretation was born.58
While it is an overstatement to say that “the art of interpretation was

born” from modern colonial encounters, it is certainly fair to note
that European interpretive arts faced new challenges with previously
unfamiliar lands, peoples, flora, and fauna. Schleiermacher was indeed
involved in the work of translating texts from other cultural settings on
several fronts. He interpreted new information coming in via travelers
to colonial expanses, in addition to the more familiar work of translat-
ing Ancient Greek texts such as Plato into German. Furthermore, he
was involved in a type of translation effort regarding Jewish-Christian
relations in the Berlin of his time.
In the early 1800s, the Jewish salons of Berlin were the “most
dramatic sign in cultural accommodation and interchange”59 as
upper-class Jewish homes became indispensable meeting places for
enlightened segments of the aristocracy and members of the German
intelligentsia: Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, the brothers
Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and von Chamisso were regular guests in the
salons of fashionable Jewish women such as Henriette Herz, Dorothea
Mendelssohn/Schlegel, and Rachel Levin Varnhagen.60 The herme-
neutics of similarity and difference, of Christian and Jew, shifts into
a fraught hermeneutics of as/simil/ation. In order to assimilate enough
to be able to enter German society as citizens and intellectual contribu-
tors, Jews were under pressure to convert, or at least decode themselves,
to German culture.
Aamir Mufti suggests that Christian-Jewish relations served as a cor-
relate for Christian-Other relations.61 In Enlightenment in the Colony:
The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture, he probes
the links between Ashkenazi Jewish and European Christian identities.
Mufti suggests that the negotiation of religio-cultural identity, nation,
state, and citizenship between these two populations informed the
colonial relations of empires. He has shown how British negotiations
of Jewish identity and citizenship have informed British governance in
India. His findings are relevant to that of a polydox theological herme-

neutics in that both inquire into the ways in which perceived and real
Jewish-Christian relationality continue to inform Christian identities
and therefore hermeneutical patterns of supersession as well as theolo-
gies that aim to overcome anti-Judaism and supersessionism. Mufti
argues that
many of the often contradictory facets of social and cultural life familiar to
us from prewar Jewish experience in Europe—cultural mobility, adaptability,
resolute attention to social life in the face of hostility from the “host” culture,
intense separatism and religious revival, political radicalism, cosmopolitan
elites, a cultural taste for transgression, irony and the irreverent gesture—have
reappeared in Europe in the experience of the “postcolonial” migrants, dis-
placed people, and refugees who have largely replaced Europe’s annihilated
Jews as the continent’s “Other within.”62
Mufti suggests that at the center of the crisis of modern postcolonial

secularism lie the terrorized and terrifying figures of minority and that
such crises must be understood in terms of the problematic seculariza-
tion and minority assimilation dynamics in post-Enlightenment cul-
tures. These, he insists, cannot be understood in isolation from the
“so-called Jewish Question.”63 This background and these questions
are also involved in the shaping of hermeneutics as a university disci-
pline at German universities.
Uncanny minorities are often felt to be a threat to if also a con-
sequence of the global establishment of the market, undermining the
culture, language, and literature of a host society.64 Purported univer-
salistic secularisms seem to display “indifference” at these “troubling
differences,” but fall short of providing contextually and religio-cultur-
ally informed and considered responses to the challenges of multiplicity
in globalizing societies. Thus, Mufti argues, a postcolonial understand-
ing of the Jewish Question might be helpful to counteract the problem-
atic Enlightenment goal of claiming political and public life as entirely
secular, presumably for greater inclusion.65
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing participated in the shaping of a segment
of the relationship between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. His play
Nathan der Weise is a morality play involving the proponents of the
three Abrahamic religions, set during the time of the Third Crusade,
yet pondering and shaping issues of Christian-Jewish relations,
majority-minority politics, and questions of assimilation. Signaling the

“breakdown of the ghetto as social space and paradigm,”66 Nathan’s
character marks a “tolerant” stance toward Jews, insofar as they are
willing to assimilate. Yet, the “always incomplete universalism of
Enlightenment”67 finds its shadow self in the “displacement of the abso-
lutism of Christian state authority onto medieval Islam” and represents,
so says Mufti, “an attempt to escape the censor while simultaneously
pulling off an unflattering comparison of absolutism with the despotic
‘Musulman,’ ”68 a familiar strategy in Enlightenment discourse on the
Other, and a version of orientalism, by projection.
Nathan the Wise is one of the Urtexts of “liberal concern with the
equality of the Jews,” a text tinged with a benevolent philosemitism,
feeding into an “Enlightenment cult of friendship across the divisions
of religious difference.”69 Arguably, the influence of Lessing’s play on
the “subsequent history of assimilation-emancipation can hardly be
overestimated” as European societies were struggling with how to relate
to the Jewish minorities within their states. But we know from history
that the philosemitic push for assimilation could not forestall outbreaks
of anti-Semitism from other quarters. The same soft imperialism con-
tinues to march all too confidently into other territories perpetuating
versions of the same, while failing to respect substantial differences. If
“emancipation has never meant the dissolution of the forms of differ-
ence in modern European culture that have come to us coded as the
Jewish Question,” it may, as Mufti suggests, function not only as a fig-
ure of the cultural majority-minority dynamic in this case, but serve as
a reminder for a particular kind of interpretive pattern touching upon
concerns relating to religious as well as political identity formations.
German lands became more self-conscious and insecure about
German identities and resulted in an ongoing complex negotiation of
both what it meant to be German and what it meant to be Jewish living
in German lands. To begin with, to identify what is “German” about
the cultural heritage of those lands was far from obvious. German
religio-cultural traditions were hardly homegrown: Like many other
Middle- and Northern European countries, German regions adopted
Roman, Greek, Jewish, and Christian religio-cultural traditions at a
minimum. Germanic religions were for the most part lost to memory,
though providing continued spectral effects in fairy tales and sagas
collected and told orally over centuries. These assemblages of national
religio-cultures are not unique to what flows into German cultures, of

course—cultural borrowing and creative reassembly is an ancient and
widespread cultural phenomenon. Yet, here we look at how the particu-
lar insecurities that accompanied the search for self and other in some
modern German contexts, within both Enlightenment and Romantic
discursive streams, have shaped the development of certain academic
fields of study as well as discourses of ethnic and national identity.
The question of the civic and religious status of the Jewish minor-
ity in Prussia and Britain proved to be a crucible for those societies’
struggle to come to terms with forms of universalism that exerted
considerable pressure on Jews to convert to Christianity. Decidedly
philosemitic intellectuals like Lessing, with often well-intentioned
zeal, both included but finally set apart both Nathan the Wise and the
personality it meant to represent: Jewish Haskala intellectual Moses
Mendelssohn.
Jews seemed to be eminently able to assimilate into European cul-
ture, given they did have a culture that preceded Christianity, and did
not have to be educated in literacy and other cultural skills considered
vital to entering the Bildungsbürgertum, the educated citizenship. At the
same time, the mosaic tradition Christians shared with Jews was pre-
ferred over the “post-Mosaic Talmudic Judaism,” which was often seen
as “riddled with superstition, sophistry, and irrationality.”70 In keeping
with the key claim of the Reformation to make the Bible accessible to
the people, “the image of a massively intricate and Byzantine Talmud,
as against the humble and simple little Bible, came to be a defining
motif of the Evangelical Revival’s “fever [ . . . ] for the conversion of the
Jews in nineteenth-century Britain.”71
Jewish bodies were made to function as a cipher of difference, or
originary disorder—a creative force that is both necessary and always
objectionable, the abject that cannot be disavowed as one’s own iden-
tity is founded upon it, resembling the mother figure in Kristeva’s
definition of the abject. In certain Enlightenment settings the “fig-
ure of the Jew,” as it emerged from the ghetto, “continually and para-
doxically undermined the universalist claims of the emerging liberal
order.”72 Napoleon’s excursions into Italy, the German principalities,
and the Near East had the side effect of installing a “machinery for
the management of others that has regulated relations between Western
and non-Western societies in the modern era,” challenging the discrete
boundaries of ghetto, beginning emancipation, and feeding a more

recent revival of ancient Christian apocalyptic and messianic scenarios
that included hopes for the restoration of the Jews to Palestine, a senti-
ment shared by the “Evangelical Revival in England,” 73 incidentally a
movement, from which many Anglican missionaries stemmed or were
related to.
Herder’s fascination with India was shaped by his Christian back-
ground, but his pantheistic and Spinozistic leanings shaped his reading
of both the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita. For Herder India was the site
of lost wisdom, cradle of humanity, of moderation, perfect in climate
to produce peaceful and well-shaped and educated people, romanti-
cized to a paradise-like state,74 to an extent that it makes it “difficult to
avoid the conclusion that Herder’s [translation of the] Gita foreclosed
as many hermeneutical possibilities as it opened.”75 At the same time,
the paradisiacal peoples, Jews, Zulu, Indians—these ethic and religio-
cultural others—provided fodder for colonial thinkers who sought to
understand and explain their historical, religious, linguistic, and cul-
tural standing to themselves and their contemporaries. Romanticized
beginnings and shared linguistic roots—if not Hebrew, then Sanskrit
as the sought-after Ursprache 76 —did not forestall supersessionist reli-
gious and cultural metanarratives:
Early Orientalist sources provided many of the myths, proto-ideas, and con-
ceptions that would guide German inquiry, but perhaps most importantly,
the British Orientalists in particular allowed German scholars to collapse the
distance between Europe and India and, in fact, to make distance a strength:
it allowed German scholars to deploy the logoi associated with purely textual
research.77
This form of inquiry ignored the people for the texts, as it had done
with the Jews: Reading the Old Testament was prioritized over engag-
ing with contemporary Jews and reading elite, ancient Sanskrit texts
over the encounter with contemporary Indians. The ancient past was
preferred over the real present. And if the past was no match for expec-
tations, the present was lost even more in value. In some of the modern
German variations on anti-Semitism, Herder, Feuerbach, and Wagner
considered Jews a people without history and without a language of
their own, seeing Yiddish as “a debased form of German.” Thus, they
suggested that “Jews (who also lacked a homeland) were not a proper
Volk.”78 From Herder’s writings, “talk about Aryans spread rapidly, for
it engaged and stimulated (but never really satisfied) deep and long-
frustrated desires in northern Europe for a distinguished collective
past, the search for a narrative of identity, and national future of unity
and power.”79 The construction of the “Aryan myth”—interpreting
oneself through the mythic Other—shows how myth can take over
method, while the “authority attributed to and derived from scholarly
logos at the same time buoyed the myth.”80 Hebrew had hitherto in
the Christian European context often been counted as Ursprache, that
is, the origin of all human languages. But Schlegel extends Herder’s
nascent “Indo-Aryanism” and devalues the Semitic languages as inher-
ently inferior, based, as Herling argues, on highly problematic assump-
tions, while elevating India to the “primal, linguistic paradise.”81 But
with Schlegel’s “narrative of Indian degeneration” where miscegenation
and corruption wear down a “primal linguistic, philosophical revela-
tion,” two language groups are devalued, and only vestiges of original
purity remain.82 And yet, Herling argues, it is “difficult to sustain” that
Schlegel argued for India as the Aryan homeland, but rather engaged
in a fair amount of guesswork offering only a very “tentative” account
for connecting “ancient Indo-Aryans to contemporary Germany,” and
much of the later theories were little more than a “growing patchwork
of guesses, hypotheses, and half-argued positions.”83
Herder himself voices anti-imperialist critique and argues that Britain
failed in representing Europe by “allowing colonial domination [ . . . ]
to rule over inter-cultural dialogue” with India.84 This ambivalence
in German intellectual culture persists even through Schleiermacher’s
remarkable awareness and appreciation of women and Jews, embod-
ied in his lifelong friendship with Henriette Herz. During his life he
wrote several essays arguing for extending full civil rights to Jews and
women.85 The “paradox of Jewish particularity” also undergirds “Jewish
cosmopolitanism,” a variation of diasporic living. Christian theology,
too, it may strike us oddly, has of course struggled with the “scandal of
particularity.” That one Jewish body Christian theology sees as a uni-
versal one links, through the concept of logos spermatikos, and stretches
that Jewish body to encompass, if not ground, the cosmic order.
The hermeneutical device of typology was applied to Jews and to
Indian culture as philosophers, such as Herder and Hegel, and theolo-
gians, such as Schleiermacher and others, had a tendency to see other
cultures and religions in the light of the “present European moment,”

and for what they could contribute to self-understanding by distinc-
tion. Colonial orientalist science contributes to this dynamic more
often than not.
The emerging “hermeneutic consciousness” was applied to the intel-
lectual encounter with India, but the “hermeneutical call” to India also
presented an inquiry into the inquiring German self.86 Early German
Indology gave India “mythological authority,” based on a romanti-
cized, near-paradisiacal, primitive, and pristine image. These accounts
employed deeply flattened, undifferentiated, and uncritical descriptions
based on only one particular stream of thought, the Advaita Vedanta,
which was taken to be the “essential, foundational teaching in Indian
culture.”87
The Grimm Brothers were influenced by the then relatively recent
theory of an Indo-Germanic family of language developed by the phi-
lologists Franz Bopp in 1816 and Rasmus Rask in 1818. They expanded
these theories to folk tales, arguing that the “Indo-Germanic inheri-
tance paradigm accounts for the connections not only between German
folktales” but with Scandinavians, the English, Welsh, Slavs, and “ori-
ental peoples” as well. The adoption of this theory widens the Grimms’s
very tight German frame of traditioning, while they continue to resist
allowing for a full acknowledgment that stories migrate and are shared
between cultures:88
This connection between Northern Europe and ancient India essentially short-
circuited a long history of racial intermingling between Aryan peoples and so-
called “lower races” (like the indigenous peoples of South Asia), [ . . . ] resulting
in the explosive Aryan, Indo-German theory of racial identity.89
Bopp also helped shape German Indology for yet another ideologi-
cal maneuver, the “desire to purify the study of India of Catholic, mys-
tical, Romantic overtones” and pursue the study of sacred texts with
“Protestant insistence on hermeneutical and philological rigor” as well
as Bopp’s more nonreligious impulses pushing for a textual ethos that
aimed to purge “both Romantic and religious assumptions.”90 At the
same time the religious framing of Western hermeneutical practices
is difficult to deny. It is embedded in modern German philology and
theological studies, and it is deeply tied to both the study of ancient
Middle Eastern sources and the translation of texts new to Europe,

such as the Bhagavad Gita:
Intellectual developments in Germany issued a hermeneutical call to India,

and in the end, its presence necessitated the development of Indology and
other philological disciplines that opened up the European episteme to global
knowledge.91
Departing from some of Herder’s writings,
talk about Aryans spread rapidly, for it engaged and stimulated (but never
really satisfied) deep and long-frustrated desires in northern Europe for a dis-
tinguished collective past, the search for a narrative of identity, and national
future of unity and power.92
Unfortunately, this patchwork of supersessionism and fascination with

oddly tilted “oriental” ideas and hermeneutical strategies was later ele-
vated to techniques of colonial control and then applied in the Nazis’
internal colonialist venture of the destruction of the European Jews.
The functionaries of the Third Reich applied “colonialist procedures
which until then had been exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coo-
lies of India, and the blacks of Africa,” hence suggesting that the Nazis
implemented the “most tragic expression of imperialism and thirst for
domination” in their own backyard.93
INTERPRETING IN DENIAL: UNACKNOWLEDGED

DIATOPICAL HERMENEUTICS
The legacy of imperialism continues, at times in blatant forms, and in

others more covert. Some forms of cultural imperialism are particularly
hard to detect because they are based on an unexamined continua-
tion of interpretive patterns that seem to those who employ them to be
commonsensical. Saba Mahmood has shown how the implicit and self-
unaware Protestant hermeneutics of a seemingly secular geopolitical
maneuver can shape and limit international relations. She argues that
the post-9/11 Western push for the reestablishment of secular regimes
in the Muslim Middle East arose from the assumption that “seculariza-
tion is a major step in bringing ‘democracy’ to the Muslim world,” and
the “particular understanding of secularism underlying contemporary
discourses of Islam” that inform it.94 Undermining the stated assump-

tion that secularism is “the best way to ward off the dangers of political
strife”95 and that it functions to “reorganiz[e] subjectivities in accord
with a modality of political rule” the goal has instead become achieving
a reform of scriptural hermeneutics among Muslims. Thus, these par-
ticular efforts to transform “Islam from within”96 have a rather “overt
theological agenda.”97 Consequently, the global policy think tank
RAND Corporation identified a “critical hermeneutic” of the Qur’an
as a prerequisite for cooperation with Muslim groups in the Islamic
world.
The most interesting point for the present inquiry is that this posi-
tion projects the framework of the Modern Western hermeneutics
onto a completely different religio-cultural hermeneutic and world.
Mahmood writes:
It is striking that a policy think tank concerned with issues of realpolitik and
geopolitical strategy should spend so much effort analyzing the theological
flaws and interpretive errors in traditionalist moral reasoning.98
This attitude, Mahmood observes, prevails not only in regard to

militant and fundamentalist segments, but perhaps even more so to
traditionalist communities. This deterministic reading of a certain
hermeneutic, no matter how it plays out in lived life, is strangely incon-
sequent, especially given that such hermeneutics is also quite preva-
lent among conservative Christians in the United States and given that
the United States has long tolerated the Saudi monarchy’s promotion
of Wahhabi Islam. This, Mahmood observes, is the equivalent of an
“ideological reformation” that has “taken a secular cast, especially if
we understand secularism to be not the dissolution of religion but its
rearrangement so as to make it more congruent with a certain modality
of liberal political rule.”99 Accordingly, RAND has outlined a strategy
that aims to “convince Muslims that they must learn to historicize the
Qur’an, not unlike what Christians did with the Bible,” and the “recal-
citrant Muslim is faulted for his inability to recognize that the truth
of Quranic scripture is grounded not in its theological claims but in
culture and history.”100 RAND then has partnered with liberal Muslim
intellectuals who represent a very small minority of Muslims and has
bypassed alliances with those who have a more traditional hermeneutic.
Most interesting for the present inquiry is the seeming denial and lack
of inquiry into the operative assumption about Qur’anic hermeneutics
based on patterns from Western Christian hermeneutic development.
It appears inadequate to judge Qur’anic hermeneutics by criteria
that were developed in societies shaped by Western Christian cultural
modes. In fact even in these societies those modes of reading continue
to be heavily embattled. I am arguing thus that to become aware, learn
about, and recognize one’s own religio-cultural hermeneutical stance is
key to a more appropriate and less ethnocentric engagement with other
religio-cultures. Far from arguing that one should attempt to avoid any
such hermeneutical positionality shaped by religions and cultures, it is
the denial of being shaped by them that undermines real encounter,
real work for peace, and real possibility for understanding. We have
then, in such cases, a hermeneutic problem of momentous proportions,
where ethnocentric criteria, often not recognized as historically, contex-
tually, and regionally specific by those who hold them, heighten rather
than defuse divisive ideologies of Samuel Huntingdon’s tired “clash of
civilizations.” It is this kind of trap and these kinds of unconscious
interpretive patterns that an expansive theological hermeneutics wants
to bring into consciousness so as to be able to consider constructive
theological responses.
NOTES
1. From Voltaire’s “Essay Sur Les Moeurs et L’Esprit Des Nations” as quoted
in Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), xv.
2. Laura Esquivel, Malinche (New York: Atria, 2006), 62.
3. Fernanda Núñez Becerra, La Malinche de la Historia al Mito (Mexico, DF:
Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1996), 39.
4. Becerra, La Malinche de la Historia al Mito, 22.
5. See, for example, Sandra Messinger Cypess, La Malinche in Mexican Literature:
From History to Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), and Octavio
Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico (New York: Grove
Press, 1961).
6. Jon Manchip White, Cortes and the Downfall of the Aztec Empire: A Study in a
Conflict of Cultures (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971), 237.
7. Buddy Levy, Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last
Stand of the Aztecs (New York: Bantam Dell, 2008), 110.
8. Frances Karttunen, “Rethinking Malinche,” in Indian Women of Early

Mexico, Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett (Norman
and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 300–1.
9. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
10. Karttunen, “Rethinking Malinche,” 301–2.
11. Karttunen, “Rethinking Malinche,” 302.
13. Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household.
19. Compare the Italian expression, “traduttore, traditore.”
20. The Aztec empire was composed of five classes, some of whom were slaves
from other regions and ethnic groups acquired through war. See Cypess, La
Malinche in Mexican Literature, 17.
21. Cypess, La Malinche in Mexican Literature, 27.
25. Cornelia Canderlaria, “La Malinche, Feminist Prototype,” Frontiers: A Journal
of Women Studies 5, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 2.
27. Esquivel, Malinche, 174.
29. Cypess, La Malinche in Mexican Literature, 6, 4.
30. See Becerra, La Malinche de la Historia al Mito, 112ff, and Cypess, La Malinche
in Mexican Literature, 49, 53, 61.
37. Esquivel, Malinche, 63, 54.
38. Levy, Conquistador, 110.
39. White, Cortes and the Downfall of the Aztec Empire, 313.

48. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett, Indian Women of Early
Mexico (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 21.
49. Robert D. Maldonado, “Reading Malinche Reading Ruth: Toward A
Hermeneutics of Betrayal,” Semeia 72 (1995): 98.
50. Maldonado, “Reading Malinche,” 98.
51. Maldonado, “Reading Malinche,” 101, 102.
52. Laura Donaldson, “The Sign of Orpah: Reading Ruth through Native Eyes,”
in The Postcolonial Biblical Reader, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah (Oxford: Blackwell,
2005), 164.
53. Donaldson, “The Sign of Orpah: Reading Ruth Through Native Eyes,” 166.
54. Steed Vernyl Davidson, “Gazing (At) Native Women: Rahab and Jael in
Imperializing and Postcolonial Discourses,” in Postcolonialism and the Hebrew
Bible: The Next Step, ed. Roland Boer (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature,
2013), 69.
55. Maldonado, “Reading Malinche,” 108.
Herder, 1993), 301.
57. For the first reference, see Günter Figal, “Hermeneutik, Philosophisch,”
in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 3, ed. Hans-Dieter Betz, et
al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck Verlag, 1998), 3:1653, for the second Werner
Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance (Beccles,
Suffolk: SCM Press, 1994), 44.
58. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 23.
59. Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 56.
60. See Hess, Claims, 175, and Deborah Hertz, How Jews Became Germans:
The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2007), 56–57.
61. Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis
of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 6.
62. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, 6.

74. Bradley L. Herling, The German Gita: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the
German Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–1831 (London: Routledge,
2006), 83.
75. Herling, German Gita, 73–75.
76. Herling, German Gita, 175.
78. Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship
(Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1999), 58.
79. Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 74.
85. Terrence Tice, Schleiermacher (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2006), 10.
88. Elliott Schreiber, “Tainted Sources: The Subversion of the Grimm’s Ideology
of the Folktale in Heinrich Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach,” The German
Quarterly 78, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 39.
91. This influence exceeds the discipline of Indology proper and extends to
much of philosophy and, in some aspects, to theology. Herling, German
Gita, 2.
93. Aimé Césaire and Amilcar Cabral as quoted in Mufti, Enlightenment in the
Colony, 6.
94. Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of
Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006): 323.
95. Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire,” 328.
WORKS CITED
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New

York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.
Becerra, Fernanda Núñez. La Malinche de la Historia al Mito. Mexico, DF:

Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1996.
Canderlaria, Cornelia. “La Malinche, Feminist Prototype.” Frontiers: A Journal of
Women Studies 5, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 1–6.
Cypess, Sandra Messinger. La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to
Myth. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991.
Davidson, Steed Vernyl. “Gazing (At) Native Women: Rahab and Jael in
Imperializing and Postcolonial Discourses.” In Postcolonialism and the Hebrew
Bible: The Next Step, ed. Roland Boer, 69–92. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical
Literature, 2013.
Donaldson, Laura. “The Sign of Orpah: Reading Ruth through Native Eyes.”
In The Postcolonial Biblical Reader, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah, 159–70. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005.
Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
Esquivel, Laura. Malinche. New York: Atria, 2006.
Figal, Günter. “Hermeneutik, Philosophisch.” In Religion in Geschichte und
Gegenwart. Vol. 3, ed. Hans-Dieter Betz, et al., 1648–64. Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck Verlag, 1998.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Herling, Bradley L. The German Gita: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German
Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–1831. London: Routledge, 2006.
Hertz, Deborah. How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and
Assimilation in Berlin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Hess, Jonathan M. Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2002.
Jeanrond, Werner. Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance.
Beccles, Suffolk: SCM Press, 1994.
Karttunen, Frances. “Rethinking Malinche.” In Indian Women of Early Mexico,
ed. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett, 291–312. Norman
and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.
Levy, Buddy. Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of
the Aztecs. New York: Bantam Dell, 2008.
Lincoln, Bruce. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship. Chicago,
IL: Chicago University Press, 1999.
Mahmood, Saba. “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic
Reformation.” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006): 323–47.
Maldonado, Robert D. “Reading Malinche Reading Ruth: Toward A Hermeneutics
of Betrayal.” Semeia 72 (1995): 91–109.
Mufti, Aamir. Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of
Postcolonial Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. New York:
Grove Press, 1961.
Schreiber, Elliott. “Tainted Sources: The Subversion of the Grimm’s Ideology
of the Folktale in Heinrich Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach.” The German
Quarterly 78, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 23–44.
Schroeder, Susan, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett. Indian Women of Early
Mexico. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.
Tice, Terrence. Schleiermacher. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2006.
White, Jon Manchip. Cortes and the Downfall of the Aztec Empire: A Study in a
Conflict of Cultures. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971.
3. Logos, Mythos, and
Mysticism
THEOLOGY AND MYTHOLOGY
In much of Western Christian discourse, faith seeking understanding

has manifested as mythos-seeking logos. While these terms have often
been positioned as alternatives, even opposites, Panikkar suggests that
“mythos and logos are two human modes of awareness, irreducible one
to the other, but equally inseparable.”1 In fact, he argues that “myth
and faith defy hermeneutics, but without hermeneutics myth and faith
would perish the moment that [sic] the innocence of the ecstatic atti-
tude passes away.”2 The oscillation between these forms of expression is
deeply shaped by the Greco-Judaean philosophical context from which
they were formulated. A theological hermeneutics that embraces the
inevitability of indeterminacy and unknowability aims to deconstruct
the opposition between these categories, because viewed as binary
opposites, they prevent theological articulation from more fully realiz-
ing its poetic, transcultural, gendered, and interreligious potentialities.
Ingolf Dalferth holds that the strong distinctions between mythos
and logos were worked out in the process of the self-definition of
those who thought themselves to be engaged in the discourse of logos.
Hence, the asymmetry between mythos and logos has become a part
of European and thus Western thought structures.3 The terms are
applied both internally to these traditions as well as to mark external
traditions, such as by linking Eastern traditions, paganism, women,
or mysticism with myth, and thus marking them as exotic, irrational,
primitive, or otherwise questionable discourse. The terms mythos and
logos and the forms of discourse associated with them have a long and
complex history, but throughout that history, the relationship has gen-
erally been imagined as a Kontrastformel,4 a formula of contrasts. Yet, it
is important to highlight that on taking a closer look a uniform under-

standing of mythos or logos cannot be located.
The distinction between mythos and logos, Western philosophy,
and theology is ancient, but a closer look reveals that it becomes dif-
ficult to maintain a clear separation between the two.5 The terms are
abstractions specific to Occidental contexts,6 concepts that have more
or less helped people distinguish between certain forms of utterances,
and at times tended toward an imaginary distinction.7 Homi Bhabha
hints at the political consequences of these terms as they have reverber-
ated in colonial discourses:
The struggle is often between the historicist teleological or mythical time and
narrative of traditionalism—of the right or the left—and the shifting, strategi-
cally displaced time of the articulation of a historical politics of negotiation.8
The stark boundaries between mythos and logos ground the logocen-
trism of a history and historiography that tends to devalue “mythic”
tales as inferior to “logical,” reasonable narration
. . . a history—or rather, of History—which has been produced in its entirety

in the philosophical difference between mythos and logos, blindly sinking down
into that difference as the natural obviousness of its own element.9
Thus, the emergence of Christian theology included an articulation of

the stark contrast between Christian logos and pagan mythos,10 that
is, despite its dependence on the structures of mythos, Christocentric
interpretation positioned the christological Logos as the core principle
of the structure of history.11 Thus Christian theology was articulated as
“logocentric,” though the term “Logos” varies considerably in its mean-
ings and forms.
Another noteworthy aspect is the tenuous relationship between
medieval monastic mysticism and academic theological articulation,
including the question of gender, style, and authority in theological
discourse. Ingolf Dalferth claims that it is not until modernity that
theology’s need of mythos is challenged from the outside.12
Most scholars fall into one of several categories in trying to decode
myth. Some try to find explanations in natural history, such as earth-
quakes, volcanic explosions, and incidents, as well as floods to explain
(away) the gods or personified forces of nature and come up with
Logos, Mythos, and Mysticism 61
scientific explanations. Others argue that myths, over time, lost their
initial meaning as the first tellers passed away and then other inter-
pretations were attached. This mode, interpreting myths as having
changing forms and meaning depending on the different times and
situations of the narrating community, is represented by William G.
Doty and others. Narratives host multiple self- and other reflections,
and become a mirror in which one sees one’s own world reflected. Still
others, in a variation on this theme, have—most famously Freud and
Jung—interpreted them as nonliteral narratives about tragic human
relationships or human archetypes and characteristics that can be told
to help us recognize not only our own fallacies and weaknesses, but also
our talents and great hopes. These interpretations can become, as any
interpretations, rather rigid, and as ever, it seems, after a time of crystal-
lization, a time of iconoclasm has to occur, painful as it is. When we
become too sure about what the story of Oedipus or Odysseus “mean,”
we lock the narrative down and don’t allow it to breathe and take on
new meanings. Similar claims could be made for biblical texts: the mod-
ern historical critical impulse is to carry off the layers of accretion and
tradition from the “original meaning” and to deliver interpreters and
hearers from false interpretations. While the impulse is understand-
able given the many problems accretions and false interpretations have
caused over time and place, the practice also, as all practices carried out
with obsessive intensity, throws out the baby with the bath water.
Since myths are often close to orally transmitted materials, they dis-
play patterns that make it easier to remember; they are in some sense
mnemonic devices.13 Thus, “understanding immediately becomes an
exercise in story rather than abstract logic,” and thought is stored in
stories.14 Any future articulations of theology, Dalferth suggests, must
relate in some form to this relational pair, no matter how tired the
relational patterns may seem.15 Dalferth describes eight familiar pat-
terns of relating mythos and logos in the history of Western thought,
from replacement to integration, to merging, to succession, and finally
a respect for seeing them each as a separate form of expression of
discourse.16
Dalferth suggests that a compelling mythos cannot be countered
with rationality, but must be countered with another, more powerful
myth.17 We can restate this to say that the rationality of a particular
mythos might be best contested by constructing a more compelling
mythos. Such a mythos would gain additional purchase if it can be

translated into the genre and epistemology of a modern scientific-tech-
nological ontology.
Many have noted the tight links theology has to mythos and mythol-
ogy. Mythos and logos are deeply intertwined in Christian theology, as
well as other discursivity.18 What then makes Christian theology, its
cross-genre combination of “history” and “myth,” so compelling and
problematic? The tension is ancient.
Theology is a term adapted from the Greek pagan context. Aware
of this, Christians slowly, and with caution, began to use it even while
defending and defining themselves in resistance to many aspects of
Greek metaphysics and mythology to which the term is conceptually
linked.19 Where Aristotle distinguished between philosophy and poetic
myth/fable, Cicero and Varro adapted this distinction and accepted
poets as “theologians of myths—teachers by way of fabulae.”20 In medi-
eval theology Bonaventure’s sense of theology as wisdom was eclipsed
by Aquinas’s notion of theology as scientia.21 And though scientia
for Aquinas had very different connotations—an organized body of
knowledge and the speculative habit of the soul—the reigning notion
of post-Newtonian science eventually came to hold theology account-
able to a changed notion of “science.”
Theology, a way of speaking about things divine, can be said to
involve a science of the threshold, an intent to explore the territory that
both connects and separates the human and the divine, a threshold
across which messages are shuttled and interpreted.22 Yet, the logos of
theology depends on and engages the blend of history and myth that
we find in much of the biblical narrative. Thus Karmen Mackendrick
expresses the tension she sees between philosophy and theology:
Much of theology is mythical, by which I do not mean it is false or make-

believe (in the literal sense of making ourselves believe what we otherwise
might not). The truths of myth are evasive of other discursive modes, and
philosophy, accordingly, has long met them with distrust.23
Yet, she admits that “this distrust of myth is actually central to the
seductiveness of theology for the philosopher, not least where theol-
ogy emerges as a discipline distinctly elusive of mastery.”24 Theology,
despite its intimate historical ties to philosophy, employs a form of
mytho-logy, combines forms of mythos—timeless narratives of that

which never occurred but always exists—with historically specific
data—logos.
Certain philosophers of the Enlightenment found in the “criticism
of myth, like that of ‘superstition,’ ” a convenient vehicle for veiled cri-
tiques of the Bible and the church that made “irrationality the hall-
mark of myth and constituted philosophy—rather than the Christian
kerygma—as the antidote for mythic discourse.”25 Some forms of
modern theology preserve this narrative supersessionism of logos over
mythos. However, myths, far from being from being superseded, along
with the “primitive” prerationality that supposedly accompanied them,
as imagined in some enlightenment fantasies,26 have proliferated, even
(or especially) in seemingly rationalist, economistic settings. At the
same time, many forms of discourse that mask as logos have their own
mythological traits. As was often said in critiques of mythos, logocentric
discourses too can be ideological and manipulative. Today, scientific
and economic reductionisms—the claim that technology or financial
profit overrides all other human needs—may be the most common and
powerful myths that mask themselves as logos.
SOME HISTORICAL NOTES
In Greek antiquity, attitudes toward myth varied. Aristotle’s Poetics

describes mythos as the mimesis of acts (1449b–1450a), close to what
we would call a plot, while Euhemeros argued that myths are inflated
versions of historical events and hence ought to be stripped of their
mythical elements.27 For Aristotle, it is a narrative device akin to dra-
matic storytelling, while for Euhemeros it is a form of deception.
Philo allegorized texts with mythological elements, such as those of
the myths of Genesis, rejecting, for example, the “making of woman
from man’s rib” as “too irrational to be literally true.”28 Philo rejects
that Moses, in writing this, would be mythoplassein—making myths—
but favors the allegorical reading29 that becomes central to biblical
interpretation in the Alexandrian school and later Origen, informing
the treatment of mythical material. Origen thought that doctrines were
taught to the Jewish “still in the form of a fable (mythikoteron) when
they were children and lived in the world of childhood [ . . . ] but when
they progressed further in the Word (logos) the things which once were
fables were changed to hidden truth.”30 One of Marcion’s students
“held the writings of the Jews to be a fable (mython),”31 the untruths of
the demiurge that therefore need to be rejected in favor of the teachings
of Jesus.32 So, the “myths of the Jews” are the narrations of an earlier
stage, superseded when the believer moves to adulthood. Origen uses
the term “mythos” in the sense of “worthless legend,” virtually hun-
dreds of times in his writing.33
Yet, Christian theologians routinely weave extant myths of their
cultural context together with their theological articulation. Famous
examples are Augustine’s weaving of the Roman and biblical history
of Genesis 1–3 in his City of God, Gregory of Nyssa’s deception of the
devil, the anonymous gospel harmonization of the Saxon Heliand, the
Dream of the Rood, and Anselm’s satisfaction theory.
Theology cannot shed its links and its need for mythological articula-
tion, extended metaphors, allegories, parables, and healing narratives that
illustrate its concepts. Greek mythoi and logoi became shared European
heritage and influenced philosophy, literature, and other fields in many
European cultural contexts. Yet often forgotten is the cultural hybrid-
ity underlying the sharing and merging of cultural texts and traditions
through trafficking along the trade routes of the Roman Empire.
It is ironic that this assimilation of “foreign” mythology, philoso-
phy, and narrativity would later be propagated as universal. The claim
for transcultural significance is already implicit. That is by adopting
and adapting Greek, Jewish, and Roman thinking and integrating
it into central European and northern thinking, formerly Barbarian
peoples, who produced mythoi, could now feature logoi as their cultural
heritage.
Certainly, the relationship between the mythos and the logos of the-
ology, like that of the public and philosophical use of reason, entered
a new phase through Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment
sensibilities, and theology itself became suspect because of its indis-
soluble relationship to mythos. The history of modern theology can
be seen as trying to retain credibility, and trustworthiness, despite the
use of mythological language, at the same time as mythos mushrooms
within the context of Romanticism.34 The dominant theological modus
becomes a Mythenhermeneutik, a hermeneutics of myth,35 focused on
questions about the relationship between mythos and history, mythos

and truth.36
In biblical studies, the demythologization involved in the histori-
cal critical method has been a highly debated concept. In the quest
for objectivity, Bultmann himself claimed that he did not so much
want to dispense with mythos, as to render it in terms that can be
made palatable to minds seeking a more “logical” or reasonable tex-
tual witness of divinity. Bultmann insisted that kerygma, proclama-
tion of the word, was the only way to connect existentially to Jesus,
and that historical facts are negligible. The christological Logos,
Bultmann argued, is indeed a mythos, noting that the term is depen-
dent on Jewish and gnostic sources that portray Wisdom/Sophia as a
redeemer figure.37
But the need to render mythos intelligible at a “reasonable” level,
to tender it in terms of logos, Bultmann’s existential approach moved
from the cosmological to the anthropological, matching the modern
focus on the individual human person, and, as Dalferth points out,
risking the reduction of theology to anthropology, a pervasive distor-
tion today.38 Barth took Bultmann to task for sacralizing Heidegger’s
pagan antimetaphysics, while Karl Jaspers felt it was the task of theology
to recover and appropriate Christian myth, rather than seek to abolish
it.39 In the end, Bultmann displayed a rather negative attitude, arguing
that “myth is a primitive worldview that has to be overcome.”40
This need to render mythos intelligible at a “reasonable” level, to
tender it in terms of logos, foreclosed much of its characteristic quali-
ties and reduced it to the need to discern a single intelligible meaning
from it. Myths were seen in a diachronic view as pre-historic, pre-civi-
lized, and pre-scientific modes of narration primarily orginating from
the Orient—and read in an orientalist fashion—that is, synchronically
from peoples that were considered inferior in their rationality.41 Tillich,
however, wanted to maintain myth not as an inferior disposable form
of religious expression, but as an essential component of human life
and thought:
If mythology is in its essence a cultural creation like science, art, law, it is dif-
ficult to understand why it should be destroyed, indeed it is impossible that it
should decline, for it has its own proper and necessary place in the meaningful
structure of life.42
Thus,
myth, far from having disappeared, has only altered its form. Thus the conflict
between religion and myth would not be a conflict with myth as such but
rather of one particular myth with another.43
Karl Jaspers and John Cobb ultimately argued for a myth-negating,

philosophical theology to overcome the “pre-rational mythical con-
sciousness.”44 While Barthians proclaimed the “total truth of Christian
myth,” Reinhold Niebuhr argued that a Christian articulation of myth
cannot be done without facing the claims of other religious traditions.45
It is this claim by Niebuhr that compels the present inquiry, the need
to formulate compelling theologies that engage other religious truth
claims in a way that honors and respects religious difference within
and without one’s own religious community of accountability. In a
pluralistic setting where religious options are more readily accessible
and present, it is mandatory to do theological hermeneutics and doc-
trinal articulation in tandem with ongoing interreligious learning.
THE POWER POLITICS OF LOGOS AND MYTHOS
Ohne Logos kann eine grosse religiöse Lebenswelt ebenso wenig bestehen wie ohne
Mythos.46
Myth—like the divine—is unseen except from behind, when it has already
passed, and then only in the vestiges it leaves in the logos.47
Ancient uses of these terms were far from consistent, as even a brief
account of the historical definitions of the terms shows. Hesiod and
Homer created myths that showed the world as kosmos, as ordered by
divine, if capricious, forces that can be engaged through such narra-
tivity.48 Greek natural philosophers critiqued these narratives as fan-
ciful for their anthropomorphisms and the amorality of the deities.
Meanwhile, natural philosophers focused on describing the forces of
the four elements in atheistic or pantheistic fashion, while Socrates
aimed at overcoming the alternative between Homeric and material-
ist explanations, opening the way for Platonic articulations of logos.49
Bruce Lincoln comments on the specifics of pre-Platonic uses of the
term “logos.” It
should be clear that the most ancient texts consistently use the term logos
to mark a speech of women, the weak, the young, and the shrewd, a speech
that tends to be soft, delightful, charming, and alluring, but one that can also
deceive and mislead. [ . . . It is the] nature—indeed, the genius—of this dis-
course to outflank and offset the physical, political, and material advantages of
those who are accustomed to prevail on just such terrains.50
Mythos and logos were highly contested. Bruce Lincoln suggests that
“the mythos Plato sought to devalue had little in common with what
Hesiod and Homer understood by that term.”51 Plato suggested myth
is a form of deception, “juvenile and irrational”52 and corrosive, when
in the hands of the Sophists. For Plato, poets use mythoi in a form of
“mimesis that satisfies audiences with cheap imitations of what is real,
making them lazy consumers of images rather than devoted seekers
after truth,”53 a form of speech that divorces the spoken word from any
mental process. Mythoi here are seen not, as in earlier writers, as sacred
truths but as “false on the whole, but still having some truth in it.”54
What irony, then that “Herodotus was not only the father of his-
tory but as he was once called by the Greco-Roman philosopher and
biographer Plutarch, the ‘father of lies.’ ”55 These histories, ideologies,
and lies were closely involved in styling what later emerged as civiliza-
tional thinking, as Herodotus tells us much about Europa and Asia and
Africa, tracts that, according to Herodotus, should be considered one,
and are all the most unhelpfully separated by “women’s names at that.”56
History, likewise, has a mixed record when it comes to reliability.
In Plato’s Republic his philosopher state involves a highly structured
narrativity, where the words that form young minds are carefully struc-
tured, programmed, and applied. “Myths will do the trick” of captur-
ing and forming audiences—such as children and lower classes—that
cannot appreciate “the subtleties of philosophical analysis and argu-
mentation but still need to be convinced of certain propositions.” Thus
“mythoi serve as the prime instruments of indoctrination, which the
state [ . . . ] uses for its own purposes.”57
This attitude toward myth prevailed through the Enlightenment
and “produced a master narrative” of Western civilization envisioned
as a supersession of mythos and a shift toward “dynamism, progress,
science, and rationality.”58 A veritable myth of such a shift has become
foundational for how entire nations have perceived their identity—as
beyond and apart from mythos in all of its forms—the cultural other,
the feminine other, those different in religion and class. Such narra-
tives, arguably myths of their own, meet us again in the reductionist
rationalisms, of “technoscientific salvation stories.”59 Tillich writes “sci-
ence comes into a new mythical situation and itself becomes myth-
creative; thus concepts like evolution, will to power, life, etc., have a
mythical character.”60
We see thus that the terminology for deceptive and truthful dis-
course can vary. The need to distinguish different forms of discourse
from each other can be found in many societies and cultures. In each,
a different context will determine how the distinctions are made, and
what symbols and forms of embodiment are associated with it. We are
here most concerned with the conditions of reliability and the condi-
tions of interpretation.
We might say today that the logoi of scientific rationalism function
as such instruments of indoctrination, claiming that neoliberal econo-
mism and the strip-mining of scientific disciplines for the purposes of
technological power regimes are simply the “rational” thing to pursue
and affirm. Indoctrination and ideology obtain in either structure of
thought and genre of articulation; yet some forms of scientific real-
ism—of logos—claim to be above bias. Nevertheless, whenever we
employ the term “reasonable,” there is always already an a priori reason-
ing that has proceeded to establish what the content of this rationality
ought to be.
George Lakoff suggests in his work that reasoning is a deeply physi-
cal process and occurs to a large part unconsciously, and through
frames.61 This would help deflate some of the more incendiary claims
that people without “articulate speech,” also known as “Barbarians,”
had no capacity to reason (logos).62 Rather, while the “rational part” and
the “irrational part” in all humans may be “at constant war with each
other,” it is unhelpful to conclude that
in the truly civilized being—in the Greek, that is—the rational mind gener-
ally, if not always consistently, triumphed over the irrational. In Barbarians,
however, the reverse was frequently the case.63
This framing of the question of intelligibility and ethnic difference did

not pose a barrier to its adoption and internalization by those same
Barbarians over time.64
We see thus that the terminology of what describes deceptive and

truthful discourse can vary. The need to distinguish different forms of
discourse from each other can be found in many societies and cultures.
In each, a different context will determine how the distinctions are
made, and what symbols and forms of embodiment are associated with
it. We are here most concerned with the conditions of reliability and the
conditions of interpretation.
Whatever importance the study of myth had acquired in academic
settings paled in comparison with the force unleashed when the Nazi
party and state learned how to rally the German Volk around myths
old and new:65
But whatever the particulars [of the Third Reich’s master narrative], the collec-
tive hero was always the Aryan Volk, bound together by Blut und Boden. Its vil-
lain, the Jew, was misshapen of body, bereft of his own language and land [ . . . ]
and, therefore, not just a racial other but a Gegentypus: the antithesis of what
a proper Volk should be. The opposition of Aryan and Jew was thematized as
essential. Inscribed in their nature from time immemorial, it could end only
in Armageddon, or better, Ragnarök. Crude (and effective) propaganda to be
sure, but also a myth: a myth originated and elaborated by scholars of myth,
language, and prehistory, whose researchers proved hideously recursive.66
However, although knowledge and truth always are embodied in

the particular and the contingent, and produce regimes of power and
discursivity, we are not helped in assessing the soundness of a narra-
tive by simply judging it based on its location and origin, or its genre.
It is perhaps not only theology but also many other forms of speech
that find themselves precariously perched in negotiating the problems
of interpretation—in discerning forms of reliable speech.67 A polydox
theological hermeneutics calls for a flexible interpretation of discourse
with varied markers, genres, and styles, employed by a variety of speak-
ers and writers, whose trustworthiness and reliability will be informed
but cannot be reduced to their particular situational embodiment.
This raises the question of what the relationship between mythos
and mysticism might be: Are both variations of nonfactual, yet
“strong” forms of knowing? Multiple hermeneutical strategies coexist
in cultures, at any given time, though one may dominate. One of the
most perplexing claims in conservative Christian circles is the denial
of hermeneutics, and the claim “just to read the bible” as if it were
possible to do so apart from one’s own cultural and linguistic contexts.

Rather, communities and persons jump back and forth—often uncon-
sciously—between hermeneutical methods. Most Christians routinely
mix literal with figurative and historical reading strategies, sometimes
no matter where they stand in terms of their biblical hermeneutics.
Ironically, some of the literalisms of conservative Christianity can be as
hostile to the possibility of biblical myth as the literalisms of fundamen-
talist atheist readers of the Bible. This raises the question of what the
background of our atrophied ability to recognize and playfully engage
the polyvalent possibilities of narratives and genres might consist of.
Is, for example, the common elision of mystical texts in accounts of
hermeneutics a factor?
MYSTICISM’S INVISIBILITY IN THE DISCOURSE

OF HERMENEUTICS
Theology seduced me. I wanted to resist being drawn into its constant uncer-
tainty and intellectual discomfort, but was enticed by its history of gorgeous
writing [ . . . ] and by the willingness of theological thinkers to take up thought
at the limits of thinking, to say at the limits of language, to experience at the
limits of the subject.68
Nor does mysticism eliminate the myth, though it has broken the immediately
mythical consciousness, for example, in India. The highest concept of even
an abstractly transcendent mysticism has necessarily a mythical element still
within it.69
The vehicle of the mysterium is the myth itself. Without myth, the mystery is
doomed and, vice versa, without this sense of mystery, myth dies.70
In his account of early Christian mystical traditions, Andrew Louth

observes that mystical and dogmatic theology are “fundamentally
bound up with each other,” but that at least in Western theological
tradition, they have become separated so that “theology and ‘spiritual-
ity’ have been set apart in mutually exclusive categories, as if mysticism
were for saintly women and theological study were for practical but,
alas, unsaintly men”:71
In the middle ages, mysticism functioned as a counterpoint to male, clergy

dominated life. The mystics and their theological thinking helped prepare the
reformation, though the closing of the monasteries where that theology flour-
ished eroded queer spaces, spaces for women outside of marriage, and aspects
of feminine divinity such as saints and the Virgin Mary.72
This gendered duality more or less corresponds to the exclusion of

mysticism from historical accounts of theology as well as hermeneu-
tics, that is, a narrowing of the canon of writings that is considered
to be within the genre of dogmatic or systematic theology. One may
resist the inclusion of these texts if one considers one of the down-
falls of Christian theological traditions the influence of platonizing
tendencies, for when early Christian writers “ ‘think’ their mysticism
they platonize.”73 My contention here is, however, that the naming of
the unknowable is not exclusive to the Christian tradition, mysticism,
or certain forms of Platonism. Rather the unknown, the hidden, the
inexplicable, and the strange appear in the representational systems of
many cultures, if in somewhat different form. In fact, it is the claim
of this book that Hermes, trickster, and fool, are some of the ways in
which the unknowable, the multivalent, and irreducible polyvalence
are expressed in various interpretive cultures. That is to say, aspects of
the unknowable—that remain ungraspable and shape-shifting—find
many expressions. Ergo: You don’t have to be platonizing to think that
humans cannot ever know certain things conclusively, or explain and
understand God and the cosmos.
Along with the Song of Solomon, Pseudo-Dionysius was the source
for much of Christian mysticism.74 One might say that Pseudo-
Dionysius offered a method for conceptualizing the practice, affect,
and possibility of theological language, while the Song of Solomon pre-
sented interpreters with a highly unruly, erotic text that, however, could
not be neglected and received heavy allegorical interpretation in Jewish
and Christian traditions. Pseudo-Dionysius reframed the transcendent
Logos in a mythical framework that develops its own double un/know-
ing: the via positiva/eminentiae and the via negativa.75 For Gregory of
Nyssa and Pseudo-Dionysius, an ascent on the mountain—a place
from which one can see and perceive a great many things—is in some
spiritual sense interrupted by the weather systems that mountains gen-
erate around their peaks, fog and clouds that frustrate the viewer and
wanderer in their attempt to gain perspective and oversight, or insight:
“those who travel through foul and fair, who pass beyond the summit
of every holy ascent, who leave behind them every divine light, every
voice, every word from heaven, and who plunge into the darkness.”76
As mystical as the text is, it is deeply grounded in a geopsyche that
grounds the spiritual analogies he employs: the experience of a body on
the mountains, what it means to be drawn to climb them for the sake
of the views, and what trouble and lack of visibility might befall one
while ascending.
The eloquent silence of apophatic theology, that is, a discourse that
proclaims the impossibility of expressing the divine through human
embodiment and its attendant conceptual functions, presents a para-
dox. Even in the unknowing of the divine, some certainties seem to
remain: For Gregory of Nyssa, “the Divine” cannot be enclosed by any
boundaries, for it cannot be “ruled over by its opposite.”77 In Pseudo-
Dionysius, God remains the “cause,” an assertion that is never ques-
tioned in The Mystical Theology. The paradoxical nature of this search
to know the Divine manifests as mind-bending paradox: “what Moses
yearned for is satisfied by the very things which leave his desire unsat-
isfied.”78 Thus, at least part of theology is paradoxology, needing to
resist the limitations of even opposites by resisting their separation. In
that same mystical conceptual tradition, Nicholas of Cusa refers to the
“coincidence of opposites” as something that is the characteristic of the
paradoxical divine, confounding forever all attempts to nail down the
indeterminable.
The mystical theologians insist on the impossibility of knowing
God through their intellectual forces and resist, in the words of Pseudo-
Dionysius, those who “imagine that there is nothing beyond instances
of individual being and who think that by their own intellectual forces
they can have direct knowledge of him who has made the shadows
his hiding place.”79 Writers in at least the Alexandrian tradition favor
multiple meanings of texts, though even a fourfold sense of scripture
(distinguishing literal, allegorical, ethical, and eschatological angles)
is, given the stark determinacy of christocentric, supersessionist alle-
gorical readings of scripture, no guarantee for polyvalence and inde-
terminacy.80 The literal, or “historical,” sense referring to actual events
remains primary and the main source of multivalency.
Perhaps, the “paradox of multiplicity witnesses to the fact that multi-
plicity is not determined by dualism.”81 Nicholas of Cusa’s most mature
text, De Visione Dei, in a version of “love hermeneutics,” focuses on love

of God as a primary characteristic informing Christ’s image of God.82
Cusa “persistently lacked either the opportunity or the inclination to
provide intellectual closure,” and therefore “never has to warn us, as did
Thomas, that ‘it was all straw.’ ”83
In Aquinas, the mystical elements are more restricted than in
Albert the Great, his teacher. Thomas did not write a commentary on
Dionysius’s Mystical Theology and does not quote it as often as others
before him.84 Despite an absence in his writing of direct mystical theo-
logical expressions, he was deeply concerned with visio dei in this life
and subsequently concerned with it as a mystical and doctrinal problem
in his own time, and therefore he treated themes that concern the ques-
tion of mysticism.85
Some contemporary theologians have re-engaged mysticism in com-
pelling ways that resist the claim that mystical theology is by default
disengaged from society or social engagement. Howard Thurman
challenged this classical tension between mysticism and ethics in
Western Christian traditions in his lectures on “Mysticism and Social
Change,” arguing that while the experience of union with the divine
is intensely personal and private, for Thurman it also always includes
an ethical demand that brings the mystic face to face with the society
in which one lives.86 This renewed valuation of mystical theology is
also found in Dorothee Sölle’s The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance
and the work of Catherine Keller.87 James Noel finds in the apophatic
tradition of silence and nothingness a space for the Black experience
of “Non-Being” in the Middle passage.88 There was simply no lan-
guage to articulate what occurred, and the silence, Noel argues, might
not be unlike Troeltsch’s “religious a priori,” where “nothingness was
apprehended in the primal mood of the black religion and black con-
sciousness.”89 Noel sees an analogy to John of the Cross’s Dark Night
of the Soul and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing and the “ineffable
in religious experience.”90 These are hopeful signs toward an increas-
ing articulation of mysticism’s renewed contribution to theological
articulation. The key questions to carry forth are, then, how the inter-
play between mythos and logos can be reconstructed and how mysti-
cism might be accounted for in the reframing of a polydox theological
hermeneutics.
NOTES
1. Raimundo Panikkar, Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics: Cross-Cultural Studies

(Bangalore: Asian Trading Corporation, 1979), 100.
Herder, 1993), 23, 22.
4. Dalferth, Jenseits von Mythos und Logos, 28.
8. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London/New York: Routledge, 1994),
35.
9. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), 86.
12. Dalferth, Jenseits von Mythos und Logos, 101. He jumps from Anselm straight
to modern critical hermeneutics of biblical texts.
13. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London/
NewYork: Routledge, 1982), 34–35.
2008), 136.
16. Dalferth, Jenseits von Mythos und Logos, 28–35.
19. Ulrich Körtner, Der Verborgene Gott: Zur Gotteslehre (Neukirchen-Vluyn:
Neukirchener, 2000), 75–76.
20. Christopher Ocker, Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1.
21. Ocker, Biblical Poetics, 1.
Des Subjekts (Stuttgart: Radius, 1992), 254.
23. Karmen MacKendrick, Divine Enticement: Theological Seductions (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2013), 2.
24. MacKendrick, Divine Enticement, 2.
25. Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago,
IL: Chicago University Press, 1999), 49–50.
26. Thus, it has been argued that tales of the supersession of mythos by logos cor-
respond to the self-mythologization of certain forms of philosophy and their
supposed accomplishments. Dalferth, Jenseits von Mythos und Logos, 25.
27. Ellwood, Myth, 30.

28. R. P. C. Hanson, Allegory & Event: A Study of the Sources and Significance of
Origen’s Interpretation of Scripture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox,
2002), 51–52.
29. Hanson, Allegory & Event, 52, fn. 6.
30. Hanson, Allegory & Event, 212.
33. Hanson, Allegory & Event, 762, fn. 3.
37. G. Christopher Stead, “Logos,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, Vol. 21, ed.
Gerhard Müller (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991), 439.
38. Dalferth, Jenseits von Mythos und Logos, 138, 141.
39. Gary Dorrien, The Word as True Myth: Interpreting Modern Theology
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1997), 102, 108.
40. Dorrien, Word as True Myth, 117.
42. Paul Tillich, “The Religious Symbol,” in Symbolism in Religion and Literature,
ed. Rollo May (New York: George Braziller, 1960), 84.
43. Tillich, “The Religious Symbol,” 84.
46. Ernst Troeltsch, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 2 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1913), 817.
49. Dalferth, Jenseits von Mythos und Logos, 42–43, 45.
54. Cited in Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 39.
55. Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and
West (New York: Random House, 2008), 6.
56. Pagden, Worlds at War, 6.
58. Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 209–10.
59. Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_
Meets_OncoMouse™ (New York/London: Routledge, 1997).
61. Cf. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2003).
62. This despite what Plato and others may have said in their attempt to dis-
tinguish between reason-driven Greeks and belly/heart-driven Barbarians.
Pagden, Worlds at War, 42.
63. Pagden, Worlds at War, 42.
64. Cf., for example, Snorre Sturlason’s claim that the culture of the North (and
its presumed Barbarians) originate from Troy. Edda Prologue, 3. Snorri
Sturluson, Edda (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997), 11.
67. It is interesting to note the difference in the length of articles in, for example,
the Theologische Realenzyklopädie on logos and mythos. The mythos article is
significantly longer.
68. MacKendrick, Divine Enticement, 1.
71. Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to
Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), xi–xii.
72. Kirsi Stjerna, Women and the Reformation (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008),
12–13.
73. Louth, Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, xiii.
74. Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 125.
76. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, The Classics of Western Spirituality
(New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 136.
77. Paragraph 238. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, The Classics of Western
Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 116.
78. Paragraph 234. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, 115.
79. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, 136.
80. I thank Knut Alfsvaag from Stavanger School of Mission, MHS, for this
insight.
81. Roland Faber, “The Sense of Peace: A Paradoxology of Divine Multiplicity,”
in Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation, ed. Catherine Keller and
Laurel Schneider (London/New York: Routledge, 2010), 43.
82. Arnold Angenendt, Geschichte der Religiosität Im Mittelalter (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), 100.
83. Lawrence H. Bond, “Introduction,” in Nicholas of Cusa. Selected Spiritual
Writings, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press,
1997), 18.
84. Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany, The
Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York:
Crossroad, 2005), 27.
85. McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany, 28.
86. Howard Thurman, “Excerpt from ‘Mysticism and Social Change’ (1939),” in
A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and
Public Life, ed. Walter Earl Fluker and Catherine Tumber (Boston: Beacon,
1998), 108.
87. Dorothee Sölle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress, 2001).
88. James A. Noel, Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic
World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 65.
89. Noel, Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World, 74.
90. Noel, Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World, 66,
68, 70.
WORKS CITED
Angenendt, Arnold. Geschichte der Religiosität Im Mittelalter. Darmstadt:

Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London/New York: Routledge, 1994.
Bond, Lawrence H. “Introduction.” In Nicholas of Cusa. Selected Spiritual Writings.
The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1997.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Dorrien, Gary. The Word as True Myth: Interpreting Modern Theology. Louisville,
KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1997.
Faber, Roland. “The Sense of Peace: A Paradoxology of Divine Multiplicity.” In
Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation, ed. Catherine Keller and Laurel
Schneider, 36–56. London/New York: Routledge, 2010.
Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Moses. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New
York: Paulist Press, 1987.
Hanson, R. P. C. Allegory & Event: A Study of the Sources and Significance of Origen’s
Interpretation of Scripture. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002.
Haraway, Donna J. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_
OncoMouse™. New York/London: Routledge, 1997.
Körtner, Ulrich. Der Verborgene Gott: Zur Gotteslehre. Neukirchen-Vluyn:
Neukirchener, 2000.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 2003.
Louth, Andrew. The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to
Denys. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.
MacKendrick, Karmen. Divine Enticement: Theological Seductions. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2013.
McGinn, Bernard. The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany. The Presence
of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. New York: Crossroad,
2005.
Noel, James A. Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Ocker, Christopher. Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London/New
York: Routledge, 1982.
Pagden, Anthony. Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West.
New York: Random House, 2008.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.
Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New
York: Paulist Press, 1987.
Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997.
Sölle, Dorothee. The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. 2nd ed. Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress, 2001.
Stead, G. Christopher. “Logos.” In Theologische Realenzyklopädie, Vol. 21, ed.
Gerhard Müller, 432–44. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991.
Stjerna, Kirsi. Women and the Reformation. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
Thurman, Howard. “Excerpt from ‘Mysticism and Social Change’ (1939).” In
A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and
Public Life, ed. Walter Earl Fluker and Catherine Tumber, 108–23. Boston,
MA: Beacon, 1998.
Tillich, Paul. “The Religious Symbol.” In Symbolism in Religion and Literature, ed.
Rollo May, 75–98. New York: George Braziller, 1960.
Troeltsch, Ernst. Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 2. Tübingen: Mohr, 1913.
4. Putting Hermes Back into
Hermeneutics
This chapter discusses Hermes, messenger of the Greek pantheon,

and explores this figure’s connection to interpretation as a sacred, yet
profoundly tricky, practice in and beyond Greek culture. This chapter
attempts a re-mythologization of theological hermeneutics by way of
remythologizing Hermes. A rediscovery of Hermes as a trickster—a
traveler between worlds, languages, religions, currencies, a trader, trai-
tor, and translator—will expand our conception of what hermeneutics
can involve. The chapter also introduces other “hermeneutic” figures
across time and place, gender and ethnic identities.
As a denizen of the crossroads, the figure of Hermes is associated
with travel, trade, writing, communication, translation, and other
processes of encounter and the negotiation of differences. Among the
Greeks, the messenger of the gods is etymologically linked to the sacred
practice of interpretation. Hermeneutics manifests with ambivalence,
with dramatic potential for mistranslation, shifts of meaning, and out-
right deception.1 Hermeneia, the practices and skills associated with
interpretation, powerfully ground, bind, and shift relationships, mean-
ing, and ways of human interaction with the forces of the universe.
Hermeneutics as an interpretive, translational act is a deeply transcul-
tural practice, at the core of communication across difference.
The Wirkungsgeschichte—effective history—of the figure of Hermes
provides a striking example of the merging and accessorizing of various
religio-cultural traditions, reinterpreted and merged with other figures
that represent translating, trading, and traitorous traditions. Hermes
became associated with the Roman god Mercury, the Egyptian god
Thoth, the Nordic god Odin, and aspects of Christ, the mediator
between God and humans. We will trace Hermes’s migration across
cultural and religious boundaries and examine related interpretive pro-

cesses and practices across cultural difference.
At the center of the Jewish and Christian symbol systems are collec-
tions of sacred texts with a complex and varied history of transmission,
translation, and interpretation. The Christian tradition has its own
set of divine messengers: angels, prophets, dreams, Holy Spirit, and
Jesus of Nazareth. While the gospel of Mark portrays Jesus as a shape-
shifting messiah, keeping a Messianic Secret,2 reportedly unwilling to
be identified as such, the gospels of John and Luke depict him as both
boldly revealed and strangely hidden from the eyes of those unable to
access the appropriate vision, or hermeneutic. The Johannine Logos
is uniquely equipped to access and interpret the will of the Father to
those who have eyes to see and ears to listen, that is, those who have
hermeneutic access. Mary the mother of Jesus translates God into flesh,
facilitating a variety of hermeneutical exchanges.
PUTTING HERMES BACK INTO HERMENEUTICS
Language gives one to think but it also steals, spirits away from us, whispers
to us [elle nous souffle] and withdraws the responsibility that it seems to inau-
gurate; it carries off the property of our own thoughts even before we have
appropriated them.3
The modern term “hermeneutics” harks back to a cultural force field

centered on Greek and Greek-influenced cultures. The discipline of
hermeneutics carries a recurrent reference specifically to Greek mythol-
ogy and the god Hermes, messenger of gods to humans and hence
interpreter of divine action. It is thus unavoidable that a Greek con-
ceptual framework shapes and limits any inquiry undertaken in its
name. Centered in and adopted by subsequent European traditions,
the history and method of “Western” hermeneutics mark the starting
point and cultural context where I stand in the stream of cross-cultural
communication. Yet, I propose that the concept of hermeneutics be
stretched to imply patterns of interpretive discursivity across religions
and cultures. In fact, tracing the figure of Hermes and its characteristics
may help us reframe the work and scope of theological hermeneutics by
affirming polyvalence and indeterminacy as at the core of the work of
interpretation. To be clear, this move suggests that many cultures and
Putting Hermes Back into Hermeneutics 81
religious discourse engage in some form of what could be called herme-

neutics, of interpretive pattern recognition, perhaps in different and
often “tricky” ways. It is the occurrences of similarities and difference
in those attempts to communicate that particularly interest me here.
The anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano describes Hermes as the
“tutelary god of speech and writing,” one who introduces techniques of
interpretation to the people. Historically, such interpretive power has
been associated with the phallus, with features that oddly resemble the
logos spermatikos. A phallic god of fertility, Hermes has been linked to
interpretation as a “phallic-aggressive, a cruel and violent, a destruc-
tive act” even as it appears a “fertilizing, a fruitful and creative one.”4
Hermes’s messages can be disruptive, as they “toppled the worlds of
many to whom they were delivered”; meanwhile the messenger god can
function “as a gadfly who constantly irritates the intellectually com-
placent by reminding them of the possibility of other ways of artic-
ulating and understanding the world and themselves.”5 We see here
one articulation of the destructive and generative potential of words.
The Greek god’s story is wrapped up with the contested discourses of
mythos and logos,6 his moves of communication through territories of
space and meaning always suspect. Hermes matches many character-
istics of a trickster figure, and we will consider here how these charac-
teristics recapture hermeneutics as the work and art—the poesis—of
the trickster.
To begin with, it is useful to remember that hermeneutics may be
a “Western” term, but the discipline’s history and method is culturally
complex. When Roman soldiers and colonists moved into the outposts
of the empire, they took with them their deities. Hermes thus became
associated with the Roman Mercury and the Germanic Wotan. These
figures of the crossroad were again identified in some aspects with
Christ. In Carolingian times Christian clergy like Paul the Deacon and
Rudolf of Fulda argued that the god Wotan was the older god Mercury
from Greece, or that Mercury was the principal god of the Saxons.7
Likewise, the practices of interpretation known to the Greeks were
adopted by Romans and the cultural inheritors of the Roman Empire
to the North. Christian theology, articulated by intellectuals well versed
in rhetoric, writing, and translation, was articulated and shaped by the
methods and practices of Greco-Roman hermeneutics, and developed
in distinction from, if not unrelated to, rabbinic ways of reading. Justin
Martyr’s accusation that the Jews had hardened their hearts against the
Christian hermeneutics of Jewish scripture is a sharp judgment that
equates varying readings with ethical inferiority. Trypho’s inability to
see the “correct meaning” of the Christian interpretation of scripture
was for Justin not morally neutral. Indeed, he, with increasing exas-
peration, accuses Jews’ readings of their own scriptures of being not
only misleading but also tainted by ethically objectionable behavior
and hardened hearts.8
Interpretive acts engage in sealing some relationships and unsealing
others. Crapanzano argues that “a certain vulnerability” marks our acts
of interpretation, and that such vulnerability comes with a temptation
to adopt assumptions about identity and difference: either “they are just
like us, or more often, that because they are different (primitive, Black,
Hopi, heathen) they must be so and so.”9 The identification of dif-
ference and sameness can enforce hierarchies and cement stereotypes.
Thus,
as early as the mid-eighteenth century, David Hume (and later Immanuel Kant
and Thomas Jefferson, among scores of other commentators) argued that black
authors were not original in their writings. They were “imitative.” Hume [ . . . ]
argued stridently that [the poet Francis] Williams, widely held by abolitionists
to be an irresistible argument against the Europeans’ fairly widespread doubt
about the African’s inherent incapacity to create the arts and letters, exempli-
fied nothing of the sort.10
Given the imitative shape of culture and tradition as something that is

traded between generations as much as between locations and peoples,
combining massive forms of imitation with equally constant forms of
innovation by recombination of known themes and forms, drawing the
line between imitation as inferior mimicry and superior improvisation
on cultural roots is a highly politicized maneuver. The irony of the
claim to lack of creativity is particularly poignant given the colonial
enforcement of mimicry, that is, pressure on the colonized to imitate
and mimic colonial cultures, styles, and languages.
At the same time, colonial encounters at the crossroads of mutual
interpretation resemble the shape-shifting acts of the Greek messenger
god. Exploring colonial interpretive exchanges and the archetype of un/
sealing interpretive practice, Hermes helps give contour to a polydox
theological hermeneutics. Precisely because variations in interpretation
are a deeply common occurrence in human encounters between per-

sons and groups, discursive paradoxes are both par for the course and
cause for disagreements that can take on a life of their own. Diverging
hermeneutic frameworks instantiates different ways of standing in the
world that can tend to insider/outsider dynamics that forestall the pos-
sibility of a polydox hermeneutics, that is, a hermeneutics that accepts
and engages the possibilities of multiple valid and useful meanings.
Recognizing the polyvalence of narratives and texts can reveal a shared
sense of openness and humility among interpretive communities. A
polydox hermemeutics requires engagement with views that could shift
our own sense of the world and the divine, resisting both strict refusal
of a different hermeneutic and a simple capitulation to other views.
TRACING HERMES’S TRANSITIONS
The Greek god Hermes relays messages between gods and humans.
He is a messenger, a guide of souls, and a trickster figure, associated
with merchants and tradespersons who frequent the crossroads he is
imagined to inhabit.11 The name of his Roman equivalent, Mercury,
is a cognate to the terms mercator, merchant, mercenary, mercurial,
market, and so forth.12 Crossroads and markets are spaces teeming with
interpretative actions and translational needs.
Hermes is associated with boundaries and crossroads. The root
of the word “Hermes” stems from the term for cairn, pathmarker, or
boundary stone. The figure of Hermes is thus associated with a pre-
Hellenic character, “a god of the cairn, of the herm,” initially perhaps
also a gravemarker. Others propose that he is “the god of everything
that makes a link between humans,” as well as a guide to the dead.
Dominique Briquel suggests any associations of the boundary stone
as a phallic symbol are secondary and therefore suspects little associa-
tion with fertility cults. Instead he assumes that the cairns—assorted
stone pile arrangements—relate to travel and roads, as Hermes appears
to be the god of paths and travelers.13 Cairns can be found in a num-
ber of cultures, marking ways in the wayless wilderness.14 In Arctic
regions, the Inukshuk, a human-made stone landmark or cairn, is used
by the Inuit, Inupiat, Kalaallit, Yupik, and other peoples of this region
of North America, from Alaska to Greenland.15 Arctic landscapes have
been dominated by the tundra biome, containing areas with few natural
landmarks, and in this setting, the cairns function as signposts and

markers of human presence, directions, paths, food stashes. As “memo-
ryscape,” they mark a people’s “sensual and mental apprehension of
their environment” and as “remembered places.”16 Thus the landscape
is marked, interpreted, and memories of circumambulations of many
are inserted as waymarkers.
In various cultures, naming landscape features inscribes them and
ancestors who have traveled or lived there in memory. These memories
come alive when they are retold, often, when traveling through that very
same landscape. Visiting an Icelandic friend in Reykjavik one winter,
we made use of an unusually clear and sunny day to drive toward the
Vatnajökull glacier. Weaving together past and present memoryscapes,
the outing became laced with verbal detours when my friend explained
that a certain plain we were crossing on our way to Vatnajökull was
named after Njáll, whose actions and life are recorded in Njáls Saga,
one of the great Icelandic epic narratives. The past lingers through such
narrated memoryscapes, seemingly imposing itself upon us seeking to
inform subsequent readings of self and other. Catching each other up
on the last ten years of our own lives in the car, our lives and loves
became interlaced with the deep local histories of Njáll, his hates, loves,
friendships, and feuds. In such ways, our narratives continue to mark
the landscape for its Icelandic inhabitants and those passing through.
Similarly, in Navajoland, remarkable landscape features link stories and
various life lessons about human, animal, and plant ancestors to the
features encountered.17 Where important life lessons are remembered
and taught through a readable landscape, an anamnetic hermeneutics
of landscape is operative. Hermes moves through such memoryscapes,
carrying stories across time and place.
Hermes represents a regional figure invested with sacred power,
functioning as an interpreter between parties and as a teacher and
administrator of oral and writing skills. Some scholars have highlighted
the similarities and connections between Hermes and trickster figures
in other cultural circles.18 Gathering these figures one might identify
something like a guild of tricksters: the Pacific Northwest raven, the
desert coyote, the sacred fools of the ancient Mediterranean, of Russian
orthodoxy, Till Eulenspiegel, the monkey god of Asia, the signifying
monkey, Europe’s tricky fox, the Yoruba Legba/Esu. And those are just
some of the possibles.
During the Roman occupation of lands north of the Alps, Germanic

gods such as Wodan are associated with Hermes/Mercury and appear
on many interculturally translating statuaries and reliefs. Already
Tacitus’s Germania mentions Teutonic adherents of Hercules and
Mercury, and various scholars have tentatively identified Hercules as
Thor and Merkur as Odin. Several sources confirm this, and a par-
ticular Anglo-Saxon tradition reports that the Christian missionary
Columbanus encountered Wodan worshipers among the Swabians of
the Danube. There the deity was identified with Mercury, who shares
some of the features with Wodan, among them ecstatic, wild behavior,
distinctive clothing, and a connection to travel and trade.19
In Germanic mythologies Woden/Wotan is “always depicted with the
black ravens Hugin and Munin (memory and mind) perched squarely
on his shoulders.”20 The birds function as messengers that keep the
god “aware of all things.” In the Saxon epic Heliand, Christ’s baptism
recasts the symbolism and situates the spirit dove not as descending
from above, but as perched right on Christ’s shoulder, thus announcing
a new Wotan.21
As an “auxiliary of sovereignty,” that is, a manifestation of a divine
power that appears delegated onto a personified force, Hermes
presides over every form of exchange among members of society, even the non-
material ones. He is the god of crossroads, of places where people meet, of
language and of the eloquence which makes communication possible.22
The figure of Hermes shares communicative features with the mes-

sengers/angels of Jewish and Christian traditions, and with some
Christian saints.23 Augustine highlights that though Hermes/Wotan/
Mercury is believed to have invented letters, nothing precludes the
use of pagan cultural techniques he recommends in On Christian
Doctrine,24 a hermeneutical handbook for the learned Christian intel-
lectual. It comes complete with theories of signs and signification, sug-
gestions about best practices of how to identify trustworthy texts, and
how to engage with translations and textual variants. On Christian
Doctrine engages the hermeneutical practices of the dominant culture
for the purposes of Christian interpretation—that is, it embraces a local
hermeneutical option as a useful tool for the formation of Christian
imagination.
Hermes’s presence abounds where certain forms of transcendence

occur—at the crossroads—where gods and humans meet, where famil-
iar places and their inhabitants fade and new places and inhabitants
become present.25 If gods or divine figures often represent particular
forces or conundrums in the lifeworld, then perhaps Hermes, in the
cultures influenced by Greek culture, represents the flux and mutabil-
ity of life, communication, the exchange of goods, technologies and
traditions, and the challenge of traveling and living in strange places,
of splicing traditions, cultures, languages. Hermeneutic help is espe-
cially needed in new homelands, when invaders enter, exile looms, and
migration calls for adjustments to perspective. When traditions fuse,
habits change, new technologies appear.
Renaissance practitioners of alchemy employed ancient forms of
establishing credibility, in a quest for legitimation of their art. They
claimed connections between Hermes and biblical tradition, and
ultimately themselves as legitimate practitioners of an art that was
sanctioned by biblical tradition. From such contestations, we might
well gather how controversial such links were. Hermes Trismegistos
manifests as a Greek-Egyptian syncretistic fusion of the Greek-Stoic
Hermes Logius and the old-Egyptian triply great god of wisdom, Thoth.
Scholars estimate that this tradition first became known in the third
century before Christ. He plays a central role as the revealer, founder,
and mystagogue of the monotheistic salvific doctrine propagated in the
Corpus Hermeticum—texts that were known only in fragments until
the discoveries of Nag Hammadi.26 Mauricio Ficino was convinced that
Christianity and Platonism had a “common origin in the more ancient
thought of Hermes Trismegistus and Zoroaster.”27 While the theory
of such a common origin is historically unrealistic, the idea of such a
connection was key to the development of the origins of modernity.
Ficino and others assumed that the texts in the Corpus Hermeticum
represented the voice of Egyptian wisdom that had flown into Judaic
and Christian streams of thought. Yet, the texts were most likely writ-
ten by Alexandrian Platonists between the third and fourth centuries,
and even though Ficino erred about the dating, he was right about their
importance to Christian thought, as they helped shape ideas of God’s
absolute power and freedom.28
This culturally hybrid Hermes became linked into biblical genealogies
as a grandson of Ham and was considered, along with Moses, as cofounder
of the “Mosaico-Hermetic Art” of alchemy, or even, in “a remarkable

feat of syncretistic ingenuity” conflated and identified with Moses.29
Hermetic thought was particularly present in the Latin Christianity of
North Africa. Most often, hermetic teachings were assumed to be a con-
firmation of Christian doctrine rather than a competing system, though
some postulated that Arian teachings originated with Hermes.30
An Arabic-Muslim stream of thought integrated Hermes as the
founder of philosophy and science. Under the name Hirmis, he was
on occasion identified with the Islamic prophet Idris or with the bibli-
cal Enoch.31 Such graftings, some more tenuous than the others, con-
cerned the establishment not of flesh-and blood-relationships, but of
association with a legitimate tradition, an adoptive process. The herme-
neutical technique of grafting the practitioners of a contemporary art
into a renowned genealogy for the purposes of legitimacy is an ancient
trope, a device used by some pseud-epigraphical authors in biblical and
other sacred texts.32 We see the same technology in the church fathers,
perhaps most strikingly in Justin Martyr, who still has to establish
credibility, and that means also the hermeneutical approach to known
ancient scriptures of the new religion he is defending.33 In medieval
Europe, too, Hermes was by some considered to be the “legendary first
alchemist and alchemy as the ‘hermetic art.’ ”34
HERMES DECONSTRUCTED
Many of Jacques Derrida’s reflections around deconstruction and

“grammatology” revolve around Plato’s Phaedrus. With some irony,
the Phaedrus issues a written warning about “the claims of the written
word and the difficulty of interpreting it.”35 Derrida’s own hermeneu-
tic work—surely by some considered ‘hermetically sealed’ and close
to impenetrable—then, traces the gaps within assumed meanings, for
example, famously, by “deconstructing” what we mean when we talk
about “being.” Derrida traces the way in which messages are relayed,
full of assumptions and axioms that are uninterrogated. The com-
plexities of such processes of meaning making, Derrida agrees, seem
engraved in the figure of Hermes and Thoth and their cognates:
It is not by chance that in mythology, the Egyptian in particular, the god of

sciences and technologies is also the god of writing; and that it is he (Thoth,
Theuth, Teuthus of his Greek homologue Hermes, god of the ruse, of trade,
and of thieves).36
Derrida, concerned in his writing with discussing forms of in/ade-

quate representation in oral or written communication, writes:
[The god of writing] cannot be assigned a fixed spot in the play of differences.
Sly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither
king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one
who puts play into play.
Derrida continues:
Every act of his is marked by this unstable ambivalence. This god of calcula-
tion, arithmetic, and rational science also presides over the occult sciences,
astrology and alchemy. He is the god of magic formulas that calm the sea, of
secret accounts, of hidden texts: an archetype of Hermes, god of cryptography
no less than any other -graphy.37
The economic imagery employed for language and meaning making

highlights the speculation that can occur in representation. Derrida’s
work of deconstruction traces ambivalence, the stealing, the spiriting
away, the loss and gain of properties involved, and it indicates a state of
confusion manifest as an “entropy of meaning” that evaporates, while
producing a surplus of difference.38 Trader and traitor are closely asso-
ciated with each other, and in Hermes, as well as in other mercurial
figures, appear to be housed in the same body, their transgressions both
economic and linguistic. Having been suspected of doing negative the-
ology, Derrida indeed links Hermes to Nicholas of Cusa’s notion of the
coincidence of opposites:
If [Thoth] had any identity—but he is precisely the god of nonidentity—he

would be that coincidentia oppositorum to which we will soon have recourse
again. In distinguishing himself from his opposite, Thoth also imitates it,
replaces it, by violence if need be.39
Thus these gods of interpretation stand as a cipher for ambivalence, if

not polyvalence, marking the spaces of indeterminacy in meaning mak-
ing. What is more, as figures they point to an indeterminacy so wide
that opposites can coexist within it. Derrida’s link between Thoth and
coincidence of opposites, one of the names of God in Cusa, points also
to an indeterminacy at the core of our experience of the Divine, one

connected to the interplay of apophasis/denial/absence and kataphasis/
affirmation/presence.
THE GENDER OF HERMENEUTICS AND THE

HERMENEUTICS OF GENDER
In some cultures, Hermes had been snugly fit into ideas of masculinity
and property. The roaming male, with its disloyal and lecherous mem-
ber always on the go and seeking access, moving around and traveling,
has in many cultures been juxtaposed to the type of female that stays at
home and tends to hearth and home.40 In the Greek pantheon the figure
of Hermaphrodite, the mythical child of Hermes and Aphrodite, sym-
bolized the androgynous result of the merger of two divine subjects, two
principles, perhaps. A human body with an intersex condition appears
easier to imagine as an ideal double-gendered person (which is ana-
tomically impossible), and harder to accept as an anatomic reality that
refuses both the either/or and the both/and. While mythic androgynes
have both sets of ‘fully developed’ genitalia, but often cannot copulate,
intersex people are not considered to have “fully developed” genitalia,
even while they can have satisfying sexual intercourse.41 The confusion
this interpretive ambiguity, this sexual “uncertainty” of bodies, engen-
dered was often meted out against those bodies, again, punishing the
messenger, rather than absorbing the message.42
No coincidence then, perhaps, that it is Hermes who, with Aphrodite,
brings forth an ambiguously gendered body, a hermaphrodite, and itself
a figure, if not an actual body, that resisted simple classification and
identification. While the term Hermaphrodite has become a category,
it is highly problematic in contemporary gender discourse and rejected
in particular by intersex people. This is due the historical assumptions,
categorization, and pathology the term carries. As a concept it therefore
does not hold promise when attempting to queer theological hermeneu-
tics beyond masculinity.
There are some minor mentions of Iris and Harpyies as intercos-
mic messengers in Greek mythology and iconography. Iris (rainbow),
for example, is the “breathtaking messenger of the gods,” suspended
between heaven and earth.43 Unfortunately, these tantalizing hints
offer little solid basis to reconstruct a feminist theological hermeneutics.
Since women were often associated with particular forms of speech,

and their bodies were treated with suspicion as well as being held vul-
nerable to much abuse, it is crucial to consider the gendered body in its
relations in any future anatomy of polydox theological hermeneutics.44
The power exerted by bodies and over bodies provides a key piece in
the critical reconstruction of practices of interpretation.45 At the same
time, it is important to note that using a feminist hermeneutics does
not mean the reading is liberating around readings of ethnicity, race,
or colonial and class power imbalances. Rather, a polydox theological
hermeneutics necessitates an intersectional approach.
As we explore the gender anatomy of theological hermeneutics,
we note patron saints for women translators and hermeneuts: biblical
women who build a bridge between peoples with their bodies, through
sexual encounters, and through marriage and children. But the most
significant translation act for Christian theology was the hermeneutical
act of Mary. As the theotokos, she gave flesh to the word, thus translat-
ing divinity into the flesh of humanity. For some of the church fathers,
the virgin birth replaces the “horizontal model, whereby translation
and conception occur through copular situated between languages,
texts, translator-pairs, and bodies” with a “vertical model, whereby
meaning flows ‘down’ into language and the Logos is fully embodied
in human flesh.”46 Thus, Mary is a translator into Jewish flesh, the
body that will become expanded as divine logos. She births the Word
that becomes conceivable in other tongues. Mary thus translates Jesus,
and she does so according to Philo’s rather than Aristeas’s model. The
theory of Mary’s conception of Jesus through the words of the angel
was literalized in popular Christian belief that it was through her ear
that Mary conceived. Mary’s body, like the translator’s cell, is open
above; below she’s impenetrable and intact.47
The Navajo hunter tradition described by Karl Luckert finds “an
intimate connection” between the hunters and the trickster, the para-
digmatic hunter. Here, the trickster is “a positive figure, a wily hunter
or animal who lives by killing his kin, the animals. There is a distance
between him and the animals, but it is not so great that through his
shamanistic visions he cannot participate in their world.”48 This hunter
myth may have been superseded by emergence myths aiming to cope
with transition from migrant hunter to settled agricultural frameworks.
The mediation between these discordant strands of tradition might have
been attempted by way of the mediating figure of Changing Woman,

central to the Blessingway ceremony.49 She can be seen as a “culture
hero,” the “originator of a specific group of people,” a “transformer”
who may or may not be a trickster—who often is more unpredictable
and paradoxical—as she, too, is a mediating, hermeneutic figure who
allows transition, crossing of boundaries, integration of contrasts, and
movement toward hozho, harmonic peace:50
The all-good Changing Woman is born of a union that transcends human

norms of propriety, she is raised by the evil primal pair and learns from them,
but somehow she maintains her aloof sanctity.51
Thus, there are ways in which she shares features with Mary, Jesus’
mother, who gives birth from an unknown or non-human source.
Jesus’s public career can be seen as a circumambulation, travel-
ing under imperial conditions, in occupied land. Hermes, Mercury,
Odin, and Christ mingle and merge as their characteristics are recog-
nized, recombined, and blended in the borderlands of Roman imperial
presence. Prophets, apostles, and missionaries have been the angeloi,
the messengers of such complexly bounded gospel and a boundary-
blurring Christ. Some missionaries were traders, artisans, or peasants,
often drawn from rural lower classes and only slightly educated, and, at
times, intellectuals, each in their own way struggling to discern what
goods can be and should be transmitted. Their motives are often mixed
and complex. Their trading partners, too, have multiple motivations,
interests, and trade secrets. But while exchanges never are simply equal,
forms of reciprocity are manifold. In order to distinguish whatever
may constitute “good news” of the gospel from empire, capital, trade,
and culture, it is key to examine the way all of these together become
embodied and traverse territory.
HERMENEUTICS AS INTERCULTURAL PRACTICE
Hermeneutics manifests as a profoundly cross- and intercultural prac-

tice, whether it is between divinity and humanity, among humans,
or among animals and humans, and so forth. The Homeric Hymn
to Hermes, Lewis Hyde argues, manifests as a trickster tale in which
Hermes shows us how the “encoding (imagining, signifying) mind
comes into being.”52 It would seem that many different kinds of infor-
mation could be encoded in mythological narratives at different times
in the life of the narrative. One level may indeed be cosmological, or
astronomical;53 other levels, perhaps accretions over time,54 may have
more relational levels, expressing indeed the projections of humans
working out their own concerns by way of the stories, and, of course,
discerning a sense of the sacred and divine.
Vincent Crapanzano has compared the activity of the modern colo-
nial anthropologist to that of the trickster, and that of Hermes. Like
Hermes, he suggests, the generally male anthropologist encounters in
the locals he investigates a “difference that demands a translation.”55
Yet in that process of translation the difference to be translated is para-
doxically affirmed. When it comes to claims of appropriate representa-
tion, “like the trickster the anthropologist risks tricking himself,” led
around perhaps by a “giant penis” that reflects colonial anthropology’s
“predominantly male orientation” that ultimately appears governed—
and misled—by its own appetites.56 Interpretation includes “distorted
repetitions” of provisional renderings.
Meanwhile, Crapanzano avers, the “rise of Protestant Hermeneutics”
grew out of the Reformers’ refusal to accept “the Roman Church’s
authority in understanding Scripture,” and laid the ground for forms of
interpretation that did not accept one single authorized interpretation,
or institution. Some forms of Protestant hermeneutics thus seek divine
guidance, read scripture through hermeneutic principles, such as the
sola principles, or see scripture as not yet fully understood, and thus
requiring “careful linguistic and hermeneutical preparation.”57
Any act of interpretation runs the risk of misunderstanding and mis-
translation. Misunderstanding, misinterpretations, and misapprehen-
sions can be deadly, for persons and communities, for common efforts
to get things done, to organize oneself, to communicate one’s message.
Our frameworks for reading texts, for interpreting others’ actions, are
highly biased to our context, and most often we do not realize this.
Hence the Eurocentrism that critics attribute to many efforts at “com-
parative religion.”58 It is true that the discourse of hermeneutics has
taken a particular shape deeply informed by Western European cul-
tural traditions, questions, and fascinations. These have led to the for-
mulation of particular questions and methods, influenced by Greek,
Roman, medieval, Reformation, and modern European concerns. For
any explictly transcultural theological hermeneutics of the future, the

first look has to be to the many layers of past practices.
Christian interpretations of Hebrew biblical texts have long been
troubled by a hermeneutics of supersessionism. We should not pro-
ceed without constructively integrating the consequences of this tragic
hermeneutical history, where there is both much to learn and much
not to be repeated. Religions such as Christianity have tended in some
of their incarnations to a certain interethnic and relatively egalitarian
approach that “attempted to banish foreignness by reinterpreting it,”
while many service nomads, such as Jews and Gypsies, remain “largely
unpersuaded by universalist rhetoric” and have retained their resis-
tance to assimilation and the deconstruction of purity rules.59 Yuri
Slezkine has described Jews as “service nomads” or “Mercurians.”60
Jews, who relatively early lost their indigenous idiom in diaspora, gen-
erated “unique vernaculars,” such as Yiddish, that blended Hebrew and
German idiom, and thus formed a “mercurial” hybrid language that
both connected and maintained a distance from the host culture. This
in turn was responsible for the creation of languages that defy outside
interpretation and present a multilingual hermeneutical puzzle, leading
to service nomads being both loathed and admired.61
HERMETIC BOUNDARIES AND INTERPRETIVE

SERVICE NOMADS: SEALING, UNSEALING,
AND CONCEALING
The border guards, were operating on both sides; hybridity was threatening to
a “pure” Judaism as it was to an orthodox Christianity. [ . . . ] the Jews celebrat-
ing Abraham; the Christians the appearance of the Logos; and the pagans,
Hermes.62
Christian theology, like many other religious discourses, has been a

transcultural, interreligious, and comparative practice from its incep-
tion. The initial questions its writers were formulating had to do with
relating the known to the unknown—the ancient, honorable Mosaic
tradition, with the newfangled Apostolic writings. Borrowing from
multiple languages, traditions, and streams of thought, Christian think-
ers sought to find concepts that could express this particular messianic
experience of individual and community. Many of those concepts were
borrowed, piled on top of each other, makeshift and underdeveloped.

They did not fit perfectly then, nor do they now, with centuries of
layers of reinterpretation upon them. Yet, this struggle to unseal the
divine, to say the unsayable, continues as a pointer toward something.
Always tripping over the hermeneutical threshold, we stumble, and try
to regain balance.
The earliest differences manifested in interpreting the shape and place
of Jesus of Nazareth were initially part of a conversation among differ-
ent Jewish communities. Yet, soon they became more strictly defined
separate communities with unclear and threatening boundaries.
Naomi Seidman has pointed out that the emergence of Christianity is
intimately tied with translation, and some have gone further to describe
the religion itself as the expression of a translational impulse.63
The dynamics of translation manifest themselves in all situations
involving the overlay of native and imported religious features. One
example is found in the need to translate into other terms the complete
transcendence characteristic of the Platonic forms. Both Judaism and
Christianity thus teach a hypostatic presence of God in the cosmos.64
The figure of the Jewish “demiurgic angel” Metatron and a logos/
wisdom Christology featuring a preexistent and creative Christ share
baffling similarities that could suggest an “absorption of the Jewish
doctrines on the forms of God by both Christians and Gnostics.”65
As a kind of translation, theological hermeneutics runs all the risks
associated with translation and with bringing the Other into a realm
that is understood by its difference from the Other. Translation is dan-
gerous—because of what it can do and, as a result, for those who do
it.
For example, Naomi Seidman argues that
not only have Jews often welcomed translation, translation has sometimes been
seen as particularly characteristic of Jewish culture; this is not surprising, given
the dispersion and mobility of Jews.
In Seidman’s words “the Jew—almost by definition—is Europe’s

translator,”66 and, one could add, trader, as a dominant minority des-
ignated to do be an economic intermediary for Christians forbidden
to charge each other interest. Yet, Slezkine’s description of Jews as
“Mercurians” goes beyond Jews; in fact, he argues that there
was nothing particularly unusual about the social and economic position of
the Jews in medieval and early modern Europe. Many agrarian and pastoral
societies contained groups of permanent strangers who performed tasks that
the natives were unable or unwilling to perform.67
Such “specialized foreigners” and “service nomads” can be found in

a number of contexts around the world. In Europe, Jews and Roma
“gypsy” have occupied this slot, but similar groups can be found in
Korea, India, Japan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Nepal, and many
other places.68 Slezkine argues that these groups, “nonprimary pro-
ducers specializing in the delivery of goods and services to the sur-
rounding agricultural or pastoral populations,” are in some sense the
“descendants—or predecessors—of Hermes (Mercury), the god of all
those who did not herd animals, till the soil, or live by the sword; the
patron of rule breakers, border crossers, and go-betweens; the protector
of people who lived by their wit, craft, and art.”69
In Slezkine’s idiom, does Jesus represent a person of service nomad
stock, who is a Mercurian, becoming the translational impulse for a
more universalist version of that way of being in the world? This ques-
tion may be anachronistic at best. Slezkine may be onto something
with his Mercurian service nomads, but his analysis leaves out the uni-
versalist and endogamic strands found in Hebrew scriptures and later
Jewish traditions.
According to Slezkine, “what all of Hermes’ followers had in com-
mon was their mercuriality, or impermanence,” many of them being
“transients and wanderers,” “perpetual resident aliens and vocational
foreigners.”70 Mercury’s folk then were seen as key “manipulators of
texts,” and often literate in predominantly oral cultures.71 Hence,
Slezkine’s claim about the “Jewish century” is “modernity was about
everyone becoming a service nomad: mobile, clever, articulate, occu-
pationally flexible, and good at being a stranger.” 72 Not surprisingly,
these service nomads were “often considered indispensable as well as
dangerous,” which meant they were often both “resident” and “alien,”73
and in times of the rise of nationalisms, are notoriously vulnerable.
Indeterminacy is not always easily accepted and engaged.
Hermes, or Mercury, his Roman manifestation, is in transit here,
and reemerges in a different guise on the other side of the border.
Hermeneutic practices, broadly conceived, can be “tricky,” because
Hermes represents a key trickster figure of this action in certain parts

of Europe influenced by Greek thought. Hermes is the messenger god,
generating often unreliable communication between the Greeks and
their deities. The trickster as messenger appears with some degree of
regularity as a symbol of the difficulty of communication along cross-
roads of culture, language, and religion. Hermes is the Grenzgänger,
ghost, trickster, Schalk and Narr, tricking and being tricked, always
already deferred meaning, gapping in space, time, and understanding.
Making sense, making worlds, making stories, and twisting stories—all
these qualities are embodied in the figure of the hermeneutic messenger.
Muses bring divine inspiration, spawn spirit children for inventions,
images, poiesis. Aspects of this symbolism occur in the biblical tradi-
tion as well. Shape-shifter, fool, and sage, too, translating and trad-
ing divine, animal, and human secrets, he announces the message of
the Gospel as eu-angelion, a good message. This figure has many other
look-alikes elsewhere on the planet, characters that navigate and nego-
tiate relations, technologies, the dangers of living at the crossroads and
margins, and the dangers of translation and communication. Trickster
figures and practices conveying hermeneutical interpretive and com-
municative processes appear in cultures across the globe.
NOTES
1. See, for example, 1 Kings 22:23, where the Lord put a “lying spirit” into
the “mouth of all these your prophets,” thereby decreeing “disaster” to King
Ahab. See especially Esther Hamori, “The Spirit of Falsehood,” Catholic Bible
Quarterly 72 (2010): 15–30.
2. William Wrede, Das Messiasgeheimnis in Den Evangelien: Zugleich ein Beitrag
Zum Verständnis Des Markusevangeliums (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1901).
3. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 80.
4. Vincent Crapanzano, Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the
Epistemology of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1992), 44.
5. Crapanzano, Hermes’ Dilemma, 140.
Herder, 1993), 5–6.
7. James Palmer, “Defining Paganism in the Carolingian World,” Early Medieval

Europe 15, no. 4 (2007): 419–20.
8. Thus Justin writes that it is with “feelings of pity that I exert every possible
effort to help you understand our teachings, which to you seem paradoxical”
(Dial. 38). From there, for him, it was eventually a short step to a more serious
condemnation than simply not understanding or disagreeing about what which
scripture “proves”: his frustrated conclusion that it is Christians who are the true
Israelites and that Jews have been rejected because of their “disobedience” and
their failure to agree with the Christian reading of scripture sharply highlights
the tragic and eventually lethal hermeneutics of Christian supersessionism.
9. Crapanzano, Hermes’ Dilemma, 147, 148.
10. Henry Louis J Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American
Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 113.
11. William Doty suggests that it is significant that one of the Greek terms for
merchant is “boundary crosser,” presumably as one who connects communi-
ties in trade. William G. Doty, “Hermes Guide of Souls,” Journal of Analytic
Psychology 23, no. 4 (October 1978): 359.
12. It may come as no surprise that economic exchanges and cultural exchanges
are often experienced as tightly related, as many peoples negotiated trade
alongside cultural and linguistic differences throughout history. The market-
place and exchanges would seem to have been a primary location of sociocul-
tural and socioreligious negotiation.
13. Dominique Briquel, “Some Remarks about the Greek God Hermes,” Mankind
Quarterly 26, no. 1/2 (Fall/Winter 1985): 83, 84, 86.
14. Hikers in various locations may place a stone on top of a cairn to mark their
passage or their having reached a high peak.
15. The Inukshuk has become a symbol of regional identity for Nunavut, a ter-
ritory in Canada newly formed in 1999. Compare André Légaré, “Nunavut:
The Construction of a Regional Collective Identity in the Canadian Arctic,”
Wicazo Sa Review Sovereignty and Governance, II 17, no. 2 (Autumn 2002):
80.
16. Peter Nabokov, A Forest in Time: American Indian Ways of History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 149.
17. See Paul G. Zolbrod, Diné Bahane’: The Navajo Creation Story (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1984).
18. Thus, Henry Louis Gates notes that the “most direct Western kinsman” to
the Yoruba divine trickster figure Esu-Elegbara, an interpreter, is Hermes.
Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 8.
19. See Gro Steinsland, Norrøn Religion: Myter, Riter, Samfunn (Oslo: Pax Forlag,
2005), 172.
20. G. Ronald Murphy, The Saxon Savior: The Germanic Transformation of the
Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand (New York/Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 78.
21. This imagery is repeated in the famous Ragnarok stone found on the Isle of
Man. Murphy, Saxon Savior, 79–80.
22. Briquel, “Remarks,” 87.
23. Thus, for example, did Plato associate Hermes and Iris with angels in his
Cratylus. See W. R. Inge, “Great Thinkers: (IV) Plotinus,” Philosophy 10,
no. 38 (April 1935): 146, and for further associations between Hermes and
angels, Rebecca Lesses, “Speaking with Angels: Jewish and Greco-Egyptian
Revelatory Adjurations,” Harvard Theological Review 89, no. 1 (January
1996): 51.
24. See On Christian Doctrine 18, 28. Also, Torsten Krämer, Augustinus Zwischen
Wahrheit und Lüge: Literarische Tätigkeit Als Selbstfindung und Selbsterfindung,
Hypomnemata: Untersuchungen Zur Antike und zu Ihrem Nachleben
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 109.
25. Transcendence here means simply to move further than the realm of the prox-
imate, known, seen, felt, and heard. I am thinking particularly of the work of
Moltmann, Cobb, and Keller.
26. Kurt Rudolph, “Hermes Trismegistos,” in Religion in Geschichte und
Gegenwart, vol. 3, Hans-Dieter Betz, et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck Verlag,
1998), 1667.
27. Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago, IL:
28. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, 83.
29. Raphael Patai, “Biblical Figures as Alchemists,” Hebrew Union College Annual
54 (1983): 202, 213, 216.
30. Jens Holzhausen, “Hermetik/Hermetika, Wirkungsgeschichte, Kirchenges-
chichtlich,” in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 3, Hans-Dieter Betz,
et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck Verlag, 1998), 3:1670.
31. Kurt Rudolph, “Hermetik/Hermetika, Schrifttum,” in Religion in Geschichte
und Gegenwart, vol. 3, Hans-Dieter Betz, et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck
Verlag, 1998), 3:1669.
32. This is a common ancient practice, familiar from historical studies of biblical
texts and the claims made for authorship by schools of thinkers that associated
themselves, say, with Isaiah, or other prophets, and later were conflated with
the author. Similar arguments have been made for some of the letters of Paul.
33. See Rebecca Lyman, “The Politics of Passing: Justin Martyr’s Conversion as a
Problem of Hellenization,” in Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages:
Seeing and Believing, ed. Anthony Grafton and Kenneth Mills (Rochester,
NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 36–60.
34. Tara Nummedal, “Alchemy: Europe and the Middle East,” in New Dictionary
of the History of Ideas (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), 41.
35. David Jasper, A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics (Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox, 2004), 10.
36. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Spivak

(Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997), 313.
37. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, IL:
38. Derrida here refers to Theuth and his cognate divine energies. Derrida,
Dissemination, 89.
39. Derrida, Dissemination, 93.
40. Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self (Boston,
MA: Beacon, 1986).
41. I am grateful to Susannah Cornwall for pointing out this distinction in an
e-mail to the author. See also Alice Dreger, “Progress and Politics in the
Intersex Rights Movement,” GLQ 15, no. 2 (March 2009): 209.
42. Wendy Doniger and Mircea Eliade, “Androgynes,” in Encyclopedia of Religion,
2nd. ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Macmillan, 1987), 341. Thus, the kill-
ing of actual “hermaphrodite” infants could coexist in antiquity with the
idealization of the male who could integrate both masculine and feminine
aspects within themselves. Today, surgical procedures on intersex newborns
have contributed to their physical and psychological mutilation in a society
that feels compelled to assign sex as either/or while playing with the aesthetic
aspects of androgyny. See Susannah Cornwall, Sex and Uncertainty in the
Body of Christ: Intersex Conditions and Christian Theology (London: Equinox,
2010).
43. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the
Opening of Awe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 11.
44. See, for example, regarding biblical texts Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, Gossip
and Gender: Othering of Speech in the Pastoral Epistles, BZNW (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2009).
45. Nancy Cardoso Pereira, “The Body as a Hermeneutical Category: Guidelines
for a Feminist Hermeneutics of Liberation,” The Ecumenical Review 54, no. 3
(2002): 237.
46. Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the
Politics of Translation (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2006), 68.
47. Seidman, Faithful Renderings, 68.
48. Mary Ann E. Sheridan and Daniel P. Sheridan, “Changing Woman and the
Dis-Ease of the Navajo Psychological and Historical Perspective,” Anima 6,
no. 2 (1980): 90–91.
49. Sheridan and Sheridan, “Changing Woman,” 94.
50. A Navajo Christian reported that a Navajo Christology would have to begin
with Changing Woman as related to Mary, the mother of God. Personal con-
versation with Cathlena Plummer. See also Farella, The Main Stalk, 62–64,
and Jerry H. Gill, Native American Worldviews (Amherst, NY: Humanity
Books, 2002), 54–55.
51. Farella, The Main Stalk, 57. Changing Woman also conceives without her
consent and knowledge, during her sleep. Gill, Native American Worldviews,
243.
52. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 59.
53. As proposed by the Barbers in Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber,
When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
54. William Doty, in his review of the Barbers’ book, sees them captive to the
“fallacy of the primal origin” and urges them to remember that mythic sto-
ries are recreated in each telling, and that searching for a rational reason-
ing reduces their changing shape and context over time. William G. Doty,
“Review of When They Severed Earth From Sky: How the Human Mind
Shapes Myth,” Journal of Religion 86, no. 4 (2006): 717.
58. Certain scholars’ practice of comparing patterns common to different reli-
gious traditions became known as the religionsgeschichtliche Schule, which
sought to analyze connections to the Old Testament as shared theologi-
cal and interpretive movements, transethnic exegetical techniques, “being
diffused throughout scribal centers in the Eastern Mediterranean world.
Texts are used and reused, glossed, interpreted and reinterpreted in a con-
tinual process of ‘updating’ the materials.” Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not
Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago, 1978), 77.
59. At the same time, Slezkine suggests that the service nomads among Christians
and Muslims tended to belong to endogamous, nonproselytizing “national”
churches such as Armenians, Nestorian, Maronite, Coptic, etc. See Yuri
Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2004), 14.
61. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 18–20.
62. Daniel Boyarin, Borderlines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 14–15.
64. See, for example, Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish
Christ (New York: The Free Press, 2012).
65. Gedaliahu Stroumsa, “Form(s) of God: Some Notes on Metatron and Christ,”
Harvard Theological Review 76, no. 3 (1983): 287, 288.
66. Seidman, Faithful Renderings.
67. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 4.
69. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 7–8.

WORKS CITED
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University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
———. The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. New York: The Free
Press, 2012.
Briquel, Dominique. “Some Remarks about the Greek God Hermes.” Mankind
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Cardoso Pereira, Nancy. “The Body as a Hermeneutical Category: Guidelines
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Cornwall, Susannah. Sex and Uncertainty in the Body of Christ: Intersex Conditions
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of Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
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———. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago,
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———. Of Grammatology. Corrected ed. Translated by Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore,
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———. “Review of When They Severed Earth From Sky: How the Human Mind
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5. The Trickster as Hermeneut
Having identified Hermes as a particular expression of the mythologi-

cal figure known in many cultures as a trickster, this chapter further
explores the characteristics and story patterns associated with this char-
acter. Looking for ways this figure participates in sealing and unsealing
messages, we search for patterns that might describe ways in which oral
cultures narratively capture the quandaries of interpreting bodies and
situations. We will then explore insights to be carried over for a refram-
ing of theological hermeneutics.
Most trickster narratives feature male, if not hypermasculine, fig-
ures with boundless sexual appetites that latch on to anything that
moves. Many trickster figures engender trouble, and trouble gender
through their actions. Thus, the trickster is “usually referred to as he,
Trickster can easily switch gender.”1 And yet, there is no lack of female
tricksters.Though characteristics can differ according to culturally pre-
scribed gender roles, tricksters often can be seen to bend gender, for
a multiplicity of reasons—sometimes to reinforce gender roles, even
while marking and permeating the boundary at the same time. Some
have identified Hermes as a “classic example of what is known in North
America as a trickster figure,” and, what is more, as “one of the most
essential deities for surviving our times: he is a figure of transition, of
duality and complexity, a messenger and interpreter, [ . . . ] a figure who
encompasses both poles of human sexuality.”2
TRACING THE TRICKSTER

It is best to think of tricksters not as those who mediate dualism or “biva-
lence” (any stay-at-home can do this) but rather as those whose wanderings
reveal to us “polyvalence,” the many-sidedness of what is, in all of its perplexing
dynamics.3
One of the recurring figures in my theological work has been that of

the trickster, fascinating because of how it functions as a cipher for
ambiguity, polyvalence, paradoxicality, connecting the seemingly
unconnected, traveling the borderlands of the sacred.4 We will look at
some similarities as well as dissimilarities among “trickster” figures in
various contexts, cultures, across space and time.5 These patterns might
suggest related yet distinct ways of hermeneutical activity.6 While such
patterns are far from identical, especially since oral cultures have a wide
variety of versions in which the stories are told, they yet might suggest
degrees of similarity as they engage various levels of the sacred and sec-
ular. If tricksters, jesters, and clowns are “agents of perspective,”7 which
at times are attributed certain forms of perception that separate them
from dominant ways of viewing, then they have a central place in theo-
logical hermeneutics. Even trying to grasp how trickster figures func-
tion or how to understand them is fraught, but “few people can resist
a puzzle,” and even Native authors “find tricksters to be an enigma,”
with Mohawk poet Maurice Kenny being unsure whether listeners and
readers are “supposed to understand coyote,” and wondering if that
is why people keep writing stories about tricksters.8 The trickster can
be a symbol of ambivalence, indeterminacy, polyvalence, contingency,
openness, danger, dis/ability, manifesting while contesting the limits of
a community’s social mores. The figure’s slipperiness in fact represents
its usefulness for theological hermeneutics: texts and interpretations are
slippery; multilayered, they often unveil our prejudices, our histories,
our deepest secrets, while they also reveal something profound about
God, the sacred, and fellow beings, human and animal.9
Some tricksters are theriomorphic, some human, some change shape
between animal and human. Whether in folktakes or Darwinian dis-
course, the monkey functions as a boundary marker between animal
and human, and between humans. Some have strange physical features,
talk in funny ways,10 or change gender and appearance. Levi-Strauss
has asked what sets Raven and Coyote apart from other animals that
make them the most prevalent tricksters in North America.11 The same
could be asked for the fox in Central and Northern Europe. Perhaps
it is their capacity for survival or their adaptability, their roving hab-
its,12 that endows them with shape-shifting characteristics. Standing
between human and animal, these “First Peoples,” preceded humans
and are deeply interrelated to them.13
The Trickster as Hermeneut 107
In Norse myth, Odin, who is one-eyed, uninformed, and forgetful,

has two Ravens, Hugin (mind) and Munin (memory), who daily gather
information from the ends of the earth and report it back to him. They
interpret the world for him, living in symbiosis with the more ethereal
Odin and two wolves. The myth could be a metaphor for the symbiosis
of several species and their combined talents and characteristics14func-
tioning as a metaphor for the complexity of hermeneutical, interpretive
action. In the Koyukuk boreal forest, the raven is perceived as having
the “gift of cleverness and a potent ego, combined with audacious wit,”
and emerges as “a liar, a thief, a glutton, and a trickster of the highest
order.” Raven, a “magical clown,” is both “king and court jester,” with
a spiritual power that both creates a world of flawless order, and then
transforms it into the imperfect one we know:15
In some ways the raven is a clown, but only if the humans it is said to have cre-
ated are clowns as well. Both have genius, both love play, both are perhaps too
much inclined towards guile.16
Trickster figures can be the “engine of the movement,”17 central to

the narrative plot. Scheub argues that they contain an essential aspect
of the heroic, a potential for good and ill; in a choice the heroic figure is
often forced to make, it is often the trickster in the hero who provides
the energy that drives the idealism integral to the hero, a force that can
move either toward order or chaos.18 Hence, the trickster can appear to
always dance on the “edge of chaos.”19 This proximity to chaos displays
the “potential for good or ill,”20 rather than simply being either good or
evil. The trickster Enkidu displays an undifferentiated energy, betwixt
and between, manifesting the liminal boundary, yet unformed, in the
process of becoming.21 Satan/Lucifer is the classic divine trickster, the
biblical references stay far from an association with pure evil, but rather
portray a figure that is in some ways potentially the servant of God (in
the book of Job), or otherwise represents the shadow side of the divine.
Again, the snake in the garden gets the story going; temptation is essen-
tial for the hermeneutics that disrupt paradise, the question of what is
good and evil, creating an alternate reality and interpretation, getting
Adam and Eve to doubt their epistemological framework. Hence the
temptation is to see the illusion for the real world.22 Here we see on
full display the disruptive potential of the hermeneutic power of the
trickster. Tricksters are less creators “in the sense of being originators,”
and more transformers not unlike Levi-Strauss’s bricoleur, a jack-of-all-
trades, “manipulating what already exists.”23
NARRATING AMBIVALENCE AND ETHICAL

COMPLEXITY
Trickster figures challenge listeners to grow and expand their percep-

tion, comprehension, mind, and heart. They force us to think about
causality and consequences, the lack thereof, and may introduce an
element of apophasis and tragicomedy. Some tricksters teach, and at the
same time are being taught by the events in the story. Thus the African
trickster Mantis “reveals as he himself is taught”:24
In the orbit of normative tribal practice, [the trickster] represents an example of

precisely how not to behave or an opportunity, argue psychological interpret-
ers, for people to experience vicariously the transgressions that their society
prohibits.25
In certain myths a trickster figure can have an etiological function,

explaining “something which ought not to be, yet is.”26 Depending on
the teller and the mood of the tale, the trickster can either be mischief
maker, a catalyst to get the plot started, or close to the force that intro-
duces death and evil into the world:27
The divine may also have other purposes, some of which have a harmful
impact. There is a sense in which, for early religions, the divine is never simply
well disposed towards us. The gods (or some of them) may also be in certain
ways indifferent; or there may also be hostility, or jealousy, or anger, which we
must deflect. Although benevolence, in principle, may have the upper hand,
this process may have to be helped along by propitiation or even by the action
of “trickster” figures. But through all this, what remains true is that divinity’s
purposes are defined in terms of ordinary human flourishing. Again, there
may be capacities that some people can attain, that go way beyond the ordinary
human ones, which, say, prophets or shamans have.28
The trickster then in some ways negotiates questions of causality and

the impact and intentionality of occurrences in the world. While in
Christian theodicy the classic choices offered to rationalize the exis-
tence of evil and the way it can maim and destroy the lives of good
people are between God’s goodness and God’s total power over the
universe, these narratives see the world quite differently. In the first
instance, there is no such quality as complete divine power. Nor do
we hear much about “good” and “evil.” Rather trickster narratives are
perhaps so confounding and compelling to many because they refuse to
make those assertions or perhaps are completely uninterested in them.
Some trickster narratives display
evil’s ironic, inconsistent character, have chosen to treat death more as a joke
than a tragedy. It intrudes in human life out of some little, almost ridiculous
thing that went wrong. If one cannot do anything about it, why not laugh at
it instead of weep.29
Likewise, tricksters are “always ambivalent, requiring the discern-

ment of those who hear their stories,” and “create multiple perceptions
of their own antics.”30 Sometimes a trickster is idiot savant, culture
hero, an exposer of vanities and illusions, including their own often
larger-than-life desires. Some remind that such myths, told in many
variations, are “not intended to be believed in any literal or profoundly
theological sense” despite their clear engagement of topics like creation,
human life, social relations, and death.31 Tricksters can be “ ‘announc-
ers’ of changes in the world,”32 thus messengers of divine occurrences.
The trickster can function as introducer of culture, inaugurating or
facilitating the introduction of new technologies, foods, practices, and
knowledge:
As Raven, a trickster figure similar to Coyote, witnesses the first man [sic]
coming into the world, he tries to teach humanity how to live and relate to the
world. Once again, we see the theme of emergence as a tale of learning respon-
sibility [ . . . ] how they learn responsibility for such knowledge, and then how
knowledge is applied in the proper context.33
The figure appears often at a transitional moment in a commu-

nity’s way of being in the world. Trickster narratives negotiate a cul-
ture now marked by a certain geographic or interpersonal knowledge
or technology, whether it is the becoming sedentary of a nomadic
tribe, the encounter with missionaries or colonists, and, at times, the
ambivalent impact of Christian narratives. Trickster narratives name
the ambivalence of the status quo or new developments in the form of
an event-based narrative, rather than a philosophical dialogue on the

complexities of meaning. Thus it is one way for tellers and listeners
to negotiate contradictions, examine shifting boundaries, and contem-
plate forms of transition. The trickster introduces danger, deception,
and death into the world, at times by disseminating new knowledge or
new technology.34
Yet another subset of trickster tales casts the trickster “less as buf-
foon or transgressor than as culture hero or insurrectionary protector,
a guerrilla fighter of the spirit and the imagination, helping his tribal
children to survive the legacies of invasion and occupation.”35 The
trickster encompasses confounding personas: that of the glutton, sexual
predator, narcissist, and clumsy bumbler.
BEYOND AMBIVALENCE: THE DEVIL AND

THE TRICKSTER
The question of the ethics or morale of trickster tales seems pressing.

Some tricksters appear as a type of savior figure, but more often we see
a “hero-that-failed,” a character unsuccessful in its task to overcome
death, its own limits, or the limits imposed by its environment. Thus,
Jonathan Z. Smith observes of some tricksters that
through rebellion against order, he was initiated into, discovered and assumed
his humanity. By his hard-won affirmation of both the human and cosmic
structures of destiny, he became the model for his fellow-men.”36
The trickster can veer into the realm of pure evil and stand as a cipher
for the monstrosity, deception, and oppression of human agents, or
take on characteristics associated with satanic figures. In some Native
American lore he can be a stand-in for the deceptive and destructive
agency of the “white man.” It is in these narratives that the trickster
often is no longer merely morally ambivalent, but in fact takes on char-
acteristics overwhelmingly destructive.
Because some of Christianity’s emissaries were Europe’s earliest and
most intrusive representatives, it receives particularly harsh treatment
in some trickster tales. One darkly ironic plotline, turning up in nar-
ratives from California to Canada, has the Trickster exploiting the
Catholic rites of baptism and communion to the satisfaction of his own
bottomless stomach. In a Kumeway example from southern California,

Coyote promises a hen that if she loans him her chicks, he will embrace
them in the Christian fold. But instead of baptizing them, one by one
he pops them into his mouth, and tops off the sacrament by crunching
down mother hen and father rooster to boot.37 One of the functions
of such stories was to lampoon “overbearing missionaries and bossy
employers,”38a hidden transcript, but a distinctly hermeneutical action:
When we read of how whites and their ways are likened in other Indian stories
to “rattlesnakes” and “monsters” whose large-toothed, merciless presence posed
a threat to ancestral “mythic people” and their historical descendants, we can-
not deny the consistency of his behavior there.39
In other stories trickster remains the benefactor of his people. In

Herman Melville’s Confidence Man the shape-shifting eponymous
figure can appear Christlike or completely evil in the narrative, and
depending on the reader. In Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, the char-
acter of Lucifer resembles trickster figures who function as “agents of
chaos” in the “paradoxically redemptive function they perform,” rock-
ing the “assumed stabilities of truthtelling, identity, and judgement.”40
Flannery employs the trickster as a narrative device, as the “principle of
necessary disruption when individuals and societies have become too
rigid in their beliefs.” The character then proceeds to shatter compla-
cency, resulting in either “downfall” or “redemptive transformation.”41
NATIVE AMERICAN THEOLOGIES AND TRICKSTERS
John Sutton Lutz claims that the “transformer myths” of Native America
provided a framework for the worldview of indigenous peoples similar
to how Christian conceptuality and narrativity framed European self-
understanding:
Christianity is to Europe what the transformer stories are to the indigenous

west coast of North America. Indigenous rationality rested on the transformer
myths as European rationality and assumed superiority rested on Christian
mythology.42
Indeed, there are some similarities not only in the function of these
narratives for the attendant cultures, but some have argued that Christ
is also a transformer of sorts. In their approaches to a Native American

theology, for example, Kidwell, Tinker, and Noley wish to add the trick-
ster as a theological category rather than simply revisioning Western
systematic theological doctrine.43 They identify the biblical Jacob as
one of the more typical examples of a trickster figure. Trickery here is
less a lesson in behavior to avoid, than pride in the clever ancestor who
made a way out of no way helping his kin to survive. Some aborigi-
nal Canadians see the function of the trickster as “teaching humility,
primarily by luring people into feeling certain about something, then
turning everything upside down at the last moment.”44
The authors of A Native American Theology wonder whether modern
society, churches, and the powerful in the West abhor such ambiguity
and thus flee from it to their own and others’ detriment.45 Many mis-
sionaries rejected the trickster figure because of its oversexed aspects,
thereby repressing a key aspect of native cultures, at times confusing,
if not equating trickster with the devil.46 But the trickster is rendered a
caricature if associated with only evil and malice, and the figure’s rejec-
tion “only serves to push the ambiguities of life into the background.”
The authors of Native Theology instead recommend that we inflict more
damage by ignoring the ambiguity of our actions, than if we do con-
sider the possible undesired and unintentional impact of our actions.47
Another aspect of the trickster narrative is an example of the “imagina-
tive defenses of the politically powerless,” along with other performance
practices such as parable, satire, irony, mockery, and parody.48
Another manifestation of a trickster figure can be found in the
Native sacred clowns in the Southwest United States. They often
mock and disrupt ceremonies, serving as important social regulators,
inserting liveliness and making us think harder about what we often
do routinely.49 The trickster is a “breaker of barriers, and an eraser of
boundaries,” moving between heaven and earth, “between deity and
mortals, between the living and the dead,” and the “ultimate symbol
of the ambiguity of good and evil and the essential statement of the
human condition.”50 Trickster symbolizes the human aspiration toward
goodness being foiled by basic impulses and desires. At times, when
the path between the human and divine is not open, a trickster will
steal what humans need to exist; thus Raven steals light and brings it
to earth, functioning more like a demiurge rather than a creator of the
world.51 Tricksters are generally not imagined as evil, but indeed they
can be rude, thuggish, and cruel. In post-contact times, they took on

the features of colonizing whites, and hence became less identifiable, if
relevant in a new way.52 In trickster’s less colonially inflected versions,
he “punctures pomposity,” turns the world upside down, “disordering
the normal patterns of tribal life and values and subverting expecta-
tions,” thus keeping the world imaginatively in balance.53
TRICKSTERS IN BIBLICAL LITERATURE
The serpent near the tree of knowledge in Genesis is often read as a

satanic presence, manifesting perhaps subconscious desires and danger-
ous knowledge. In gnostic texts, though, it can be the manifestation
of Christ who calls humans to greater knowledge and gnosis.54 The
serpent as a symbol of wisdom is also proverbial in gospel texts:
See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as
serpents and innocent as doves. (Matthew 10:16)
Trickster figures often employ what are called the “weapons of the
weak,”55 such as speech, rhetoric, strategic dispensation of informa-
tion, intrigue, and deception. While many male traditional trickster
figures are denizens on the road, female tricksters are mobile in their
own ways, their bodies instantiating access, boundary, wisdom, and
the power of attraction. Biblical texts teem with tricksters, jesters, and
characters employing such strategies of the weak, such as in the three
“wife-sister tales of Genesis,” where a husband (Abraham or Isaac) fac-
ing a powerful ruler passes his wife off as his sister in order to avoid
feared death by the powerful male competing with him.56 The sto-
ries of Joseph and Esther concern a trickster hero who helps his people
survive under the conditions of empire and situations where economic
and political survival is tenuous.57 Jacob is one of the biblical figures
most typically read as a trickster, both tricking his brother and being
tricked by his sons and Laban.58 But even a less obvious character such
as Salomo has many qualities of a trickster: lascivious sexuality (the
number of his lovers comical rather than realistic),59 and wisdom that
is related to the serpent’s cunning and becomes associated with a kind
of foolish wisdom or even magic in postbiblical literature.60 We may
overlook some of the female tricksters, and thus focus on Jacob rather
than Rebekah, who is the actual initiator of the scheme to trick Esau
out of his birthright (Genesis 27:6–10), in order to promote the son
who stayed close to her, Jacob, “a quiet man, living in tents,” over
Esau, her husband’s favored son, “a skillful hunter, a man of the fields”
(Genesis 25:28).
Some of these figures can appear as boundary crossing “coyotes”
that challenge the ethnocentric morality and actions of a nation elect,
pushing for the challenging of borders that have become an idol to
a community. Daniel Smith-Christopher argues that Second Isaiah,
Jonah, Jacob and Esau, Joseph, Jesus and Paul can be seen as those
“good coyotes,” who push for transformation of boundaries, and chal-
lenge the hatred of enemies and the purity of ethnicity.61 Some of these
figures can have a hint of the prophetic about them, helping those
around them to “see into the heart of things.” Like the monkey king
trickster, “the one who has perception,” they are able “distinguish the
perverse from the real.”62 The monkey trickster can furthermore func-
tion as a “term of (anti-)mediation, as are all trickster figures, between
two forces he seeks to oppose for his own contentious purposes, and
then to reconcile.”63
Some female figures in biblical texts function as boundary crossers
of various kinds, challenging strands of biblical narrative that outline
harsh, if unrealistic, and unenforcable communal boundaries: Ruth,
Esther, Rahab, the Samaritan woman, and even Mary the mother of
Jesus. Esther, in particular, shows the use of beauty and influence as a
weapon of the weak, especially some women, against political power,
though Esther has also been read as a collaborator with colonial power
and Vashti, the rejected queen who resists the wiles of her husband,
Ahasveros, as the trickster heroine.64 But it is also possible to conclude
that
the Book of Esther encourages attempts to work from within the system, to
become an indispensable part of it. This model personified by Esther is strongly
contrasted with that of Vashti. Direct resistance fails.65
Female/male, human/animal, divine/human, good/evil—shape-shift-

ers navigate the borderlands of such identities in tension. Their devices
can be employed both on the way or manifest as “the stealthy, home-
based power of the women, the emphasis on clever, behind-the-scenes
manipulation”;66 these “wisdom hero/heroines” seek to become “part of
the system that threatens them and, like Esther and Joseph, enjoy being
a part of the establishment, deriving much benefit from it.”67
Women with such a transgressive communal memory comprise also
the questionable ancestors and “prostitutes in the family tree”68 of Jesus
in the gospel of Matthew (esp. Matthew 1:2–6). Once we adjust our
vision to recognize those female figures, they appear in rather central
places: Eve, the Serpent, Miriam, Rahab, Ruth, Judith, Tamar, the
gnostic Sophia, and Mary, among others, provide for their families,
and employ tricks to ensure survival.69
Tribal tricksters are embodied in imagination and liberate the mind; an

androgyny, she would repudiate translations and imposed representations, as
he would bare the contradictions of the striptease.70
Many tribal trickster narratives feature a masculine agent. Upon

redefining the characteristics of tricksterdom, one discovers more trick-
ster figures, with varying markers. Male trickster figures can take on
androgynous or cross-dressing characteristics, which are distinct from
those of an actual female trickster. Gerald Vizenor sees the trickster
more in the vicinity of a hermaphrodite, a lascivious gender transgres-
sor, an androgyne, raising questions about gendered embodiment.71
Some narrative expressions of the trickster can function to inquire,
mimic, and mock gender configurations rather than merely rearticulate
them. Yet, the potential for an actual transformation of the gendered
aspects of the figure seems limited.
JESUS OF NAZARETH: RIDDLER, LOGOS,

TEACHER, MESSIAH
As part of its engagement with differences, their interpretations, and

their interpreters and translators, a diatopical theological hermeneu-
tics—intercultural and interreligious—needs to consider Christ the
mediator and Word of God together with trickster figures across the
world. These figures stand as brokers, messengers, interpreters of the
in-between; they frequent the threshold and the crossroad, and indeed,
theology can be appropriately called a “science of the threshold.” They
are Grenzgänger der “Schwellenkunde,”72 those who know the bound-
ary, dwell on it, or cross it. Trickster figures are present in many cultures
and represent a certain force and agency that interest us here, that of the
translator, broker, trader, introducer of writing and technology, and a
symbol of the ambivalence of values.73
The synoptic Jesus is perpetually on the move, crossing boundaries
and offending people right and left, challenging convention when it has
begun to run counter to the core of communal values.74 He tells riddles
in ways that confound audiences. Riddles, that is, “intentionally ambigu-
ous statements that challenge the audience to identify which of several
possible things the speaker is talking about,” are common in oral cul-
tures, taking on a large number of “forms and styles, across cultures and
even within one culture.”75 Riddlers and those solving them negotiate
“the ability to pose and answer difficult verbal puzzles” that often “carry
high stakes in the marketplace of ideas.”76 Riddles appear also as a way to
underscore the “Johannine theme of ‘misunderstanding,’ ” and heighten
the ambiguity of many of the portrayals of Jesus in the gospel texts.77
It seems quite likely, then, that “Jesus asked and answered riddles on a
regular basis,” employing riddles to “play with the audience’s sense of
order and values,” in ways that “topple the very hierarchy of ideas that
normally allows us to make sense of the world.”78 Sometimes the disciples
in the gospel are the butt of the jokes, but often the readers of the gospel
remain in the dark as well, possibly because they do not (longer) share the
insider or cultural knowledge needed to solve the riddle.79 Elsewhere, it is
others who try to “riddle” Jesus, by asking trick questions about whether
it is lawful to pay taxes to the emperor (Matthew 22:15–17 and Matthew
17:24–27).80 What is more, Jesus’s answer is a riddle in answering a riddle,
that is, Jesus’s statement about Caesar and God is “inherently ambigu-
ous, pointing to numerous possible meanings,”81 from possible revolt to
obediently paying taxes to the occupiers.
Tom Thatcher outlines four criteria for identifying a riddle in gospel
texts: if the teller identifies it as such, if it occurs in a riddling session, if
other characters are confused, and if it represents a challenge to estab-
lished thinking.82 Thatcher proposes that
Jesus’ riddles, parables, and parable-riddles all functioned in a similar way: to
confront his audience with something ambiguous or absurd, something that
would force them to redefine key terms and realign mental boundaries.83
Riddles are a way to establish authority in traditional cultures,

where unusual wit can be seen as a form of giftedness or “supernatural
endowment.”84 Thus they function as “teaching tools,”85 to “demon-

strate Jesus’ superior wit and wisdom,” “intellectual agility,” and “quali-
fications as a theological thinker.” Thus, it is likely, Thatcher suggests,
that riddling reflects “a very real and important dimension of the career
of the historical Jesus,” and that he both “consciously postured him-
self as such,” and that his contemporaries thought of him as such.86
Furthermore, many of Jesus’s riddles are not “answered,” and while they
challenge conventions, “the challenge is never fully resolved to a point
where we could feel absolutely certain of Jesus’ meaning.”87 In the gos-
pels, Jesus is shown as always “winning” a riddling session, announcing
a basileia tou theou that is in the form of an “invisible empire of wit.”88
It is a way to demonstrate his authority, his “superior wit and wisdom.”
Thus, he “consistently defies the odds” by not only answering oppo-
nents’ challenges. Instead, “he answers them in a way that displays so
much genius that the riddler generally slinks away in shame, afraid to
provoke him further.”89
The gospel of Mark in particular seems to display a Jesus playing hide-
and-seek with those encountering him in the narrative. Furthermore,
Jesus’s crucifixion can be seen as a “parodic exaltation,”90 mocking the
hierarchies of imperial colonial Palestine and Rome. A good way to
understand the fact that Jesus is never called a king until he stands
before Pilate could be to see it as a deep ironic trait in the gospels to
turn the shame of the crucifixion into Jesus’s elevation as “king of the
Jews.”91 Kingship is thus precisely shown by “not saving himself but by
dying on the cross.”92 Paul preaches the cross as a folly, even perhaps
“a coarse and vulgar joke,” that illustrates the paradoxical quality of
divine wisdom and folly as articulated by Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:17–
25.93 Even the resurrection does not negate the folly of the cross, but
rather could “constitute the cross as folly” for without the resurrection
the cross would be little more than yet another cruel premature death
of a colonized person. The “joke” lives on in Christ’s resurrected body
that is marked by scars and wounded by the nails of the cross.94 The
first witnesses to the resurrection are unreliable witnesses, or rather,
women witnesses unapproved by the courts of the time. They are disbe-
lieved and their words described as leros (Luke 24:11), a kind of foolish-
ness or nonsense, or likely a less polite four-letter word.95 If the “gospel
is at its heart scandalously ironic and paradoxical,” then any attempt to
account for it in a logical manner and explain it according to some kind
of rationality will always be caught up in the originary paradox, which

is and should be unerasable. It is the skandalon, the scandal of reversal,
of topsy-turvy, where the trickster’s upside down perspective turns the
world the right way up.96
Many tricksters engage in riddling, as, for example, in “trickster-
against-spirit” legends and riddler legends from various phases of tradi-
tion in Hawaii.97 Though there are indications that in some traditions,
the trickster represents agency in an earlier period of the people’s heri-
tage, where some men “became a trickster to survive” in the context of
threatening forces of land and sea “filled with unknown terrors.” Later,
living under strict “laws of things forbidden,” one way to read the rid-
dler tales is that they were told with “mischievous delight in telling of
ones who did rebel” in competition for leadership of the group. Thus,
in societies where wit was valued as part of the desired mental quali-
ties of leadership, or as a form of contesting established leadership, “he
became a riddler to win a place for himself.”98
Trickster Jesus eludes those who would seek to trap him and makes
a way out of no way, becomes the ultimate boundary crosser, bridging
the gap between human and divine, the great bridge builder pontifex
maximus, straddling the gap between life and death.99 Jesus circumam-
bulated various occupied territories in Judaea and Palestine, interacting
with people he should not be seen with, crossing ethnic, religious, ethi-
cal, and ritual boundaries. He routinely “employs the rhetorical moves
of the jester”100 in parables and has other verbal interactions with inter-
locutors that puzzle, confuse, and perplex his audiences. And like a
trickster, he “escapes the trap and rearranges the world”:101
Like a trickster, Jesus leaves with the elusive and indeterminate task of herme-
neutics, which will probably reveal our convictions and commitments more
clearly than it will provide any final word on Jesus’ riddle.102
The authors of A Native American Theology argue that “trickster dis-

course has something vital and important to tell us about the nature
of the Christ event and of ultimate reality itself.”103 They encourage
all Christians to affirm the life and passion of Christ, to “embrace and
revel in his humor and his passions,” see God as “both constant and
capricious” asking them to “recognize the deity for the trickster that it
is” and like truth, trickster and God are “far too slippery to be easily
grasped.”104
Rabbinic Tricksterdom: Tribal Survival and

Sacro-Secular Trickery
Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin has highlighted the trickster aspect
of rabbinic literature, where feats of disguised identity, doublespeak in
front of the powerful, and other evasive techniques preserve the life of
a tribal community in an imperial context.105 The biblical Jacob func-
tions as the exemplary rabbinic male trickster, a figure of identification
for the diasporic Jew, a trickster par excellence. Trickster action and
martyrdom comprise two different actions in the face of overwhelm-
ing power: getting out and defiance.106 Highlighting various echoes
between Plato’s dialogues and the stories of Rabbis, Boyarin exposes
the tension between normative rabbinic ethos and burlesque heroes
engaged in transgressive behavior.
Julia Watts Belser has identified further “sinful sages” and “dubious
heroes” in the Babylonian Talmud’s counterhagiographical impulses.
There, concealment and disguise are at the heart of versions of jus-
tice these sages—or tricksters—procure for their communities. These
figures challenge while reinforcing—a typical aspect of trickster nar-
ratives—the community’s sense of order, custom, and law. Intent on
the survival of the tribal group that lives as a minority in an imperial
setting, these tricksters show a capacity for “strategic sin.” The language
employed in the tales of trickster rabbis as well as the actions employed
play with the paradox of piety; they engage in sexual impropriety, raun-
chy metaphors, and practices. Jewish jailers—guardians of the thresh-
old and thus Hermes figures—smuggle valuables and people over the
threshold, playing with multiple boundaries and navigating through
non-Jewish space.107 It seems, then, that tricksters permeate the ranks
of Jewish and Christian holy persons, both wise and cunning, working
with the weapons of the wise and the weak.
HOLY SPIRIT AND THE SPIRITS:

ULTIMATE TRICKSTER AND HERMENEUT
The experience of sacredness and divinity in form of the Spirit/s cries

out for an alignment with tricksterish-ness. Unseen, blowing where
it will, it is a metaphor of unpredictability, power, and invisibility of
divine presence. Itself needing hermeneutical action for any kind of
recognition, the Holy Spirit itself is paraclete, an advocate, and accord-

ing to Oopke Noordmanns, also the great hermeneut, interpreter,
messenger, and communicator, helping to “interpret and continuously
cross this membraneous border [between Spirit and form].”108 Thus,
pneumatology and hermeneutics can largely be seen as identical.109
While this may be overstating the case, there are certainly strong links
between the two. One of the reasons, apart from the priorities of histor-
ical doctrinal development, why many have stated that the Holy Spirit
was for a long time a doctrinal “stepchild” may well be that its very
experience is one that necessitates and is connected profoundly to its
elusive power, a translational impulse and interpretive energy.
Thus, the foolishness of God far expands beyond the cross, to the
incarnation, the ministry of Christ, the presence of the Spirit, and per-
haps the notion of the creation of the universe. Some trickster figures
are involved in creative endeavors as certain myths of the lifeworld gen-
eration suggest. Experiences of the Spirit are not always those of a holy
spirit. Pentecostal theologian Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen has challenged
Christian theologians to move pneumatology beyond the Holy Spirit to
acknowledging the great variety of spirit/s that are being experienced in
the cosmos and that are part of many religio-cultural narratives often
absent from theological discourse. He writes that
by and large “mainline” Christian pneumatologies are still imprisoned in

what may be called a “unitive” pneumatology, that is, they only speak of one
spirit, the Spirit of God, and leave out of consideration other spirits, powers,
energies.110
Instead, he argues what is needed is “a “plural” pneumatology,” mind-

ful of the effects of other spirits in contrast to the “Spirit of God.”111
Some anthropologists have articulated a similar, if unrelated, desire by
reinvestigating the category of animism and its colonial formations and
thinking toward new forms of animism.112 Mark Wallace has proposed
a Christian animism, pushing Christian theology further in the direc-
tion of immanent transcendence in the context of panentheism.113
In Navajo thought, the Holy Wind, Nilch’i, is the life force of the
world that animates everything. This unified force of the Wind has
many different aspects manifest differently depending on cardinal
direction. The act of breathing is itself a holy thing because one is tak-
ing in diyin, holy people.114 The powerful ones enter one’s lungs and
are both a part of the breather as well as his being, a part of and linked
to all other beings. By means of Nilch’i all Navajo are connected to all
beings, and by this means human feelings and thought are aspects of
connectedness, rather than attributes of an illusory self.115 In this con-
text, bik’e hozho is entivivity, that is, the inner form of the earth and
the source of goodness in the universe.116 Sa’a naghai bik’e hozho then is
continuous generational animation and represents the central animat-
ing powers of the universe.117
Wind is an interpretive force: It functions as a messenger, bring-
ing and taking news of events to other places. The Winds were in fact
“stationed at the horizon to guard the earth and at the four sacred
mountains [ . . . ] to act as messengers.118 It is the “means of communi-
cation between all elements of the living world.”119 By way of Wind, the
Navajo Holy People take a “direct role in shaping and enforcing moral
behavior.”120 In some accounts, mists of light generate a “Supreme
Sacred Wind” that became the creator of the Navajo universe.121 Wind
is what gives people the means to communicate with each other and is
closely associated with concepts of word or language.122 Wind “knew
all” and “made available of speaking particular words.”123 The elements
“provide guidance and instruction, by means of Wind, to Earth Surface
People.”124 There are various aspects of this Holy Wind. Wind’s Child,
placed at a being’s ears, became the means of “hearing, knowing, and
communicating with others” for various living things.125
The various Winds influence humans to make decisions about their
actions. If one does not listen to the good aspects of Wind, the teacher
of wisdom, and shows oneself as not being teachable, one’s spirit is
weakened. This often results in the weakening and eventual loss of
Wind, that is, of life. One interpretation of the early loss of life can be
the lack of listening to the Wind.126 In some accounts it can seem as if
Wind’s influence is so powerful so as to suppress the agency of those
under its influence,127 and questions about theodicy and human agency
familiar from Christian and Western contexts impress themselves.
This Navajo conception of Holy Wind can push Christian pneu-
matologies toward a more expansive sense of what spirit, and the Holy
Spirit, may encompass.128 It may raise questions that have not ever or
not in a long time been asked about pneumatology. A look at Hebrew
scripture shows, however, that spirits are of various types. They, too,
often transmit a message.129 Spirits and demons act as divine agents,
themselves neutral, but, depending on the will of the deity, act either
to the benefit or the detriment of the recipient.130 Often this is due to
the actions of individual spirits rather than because of their “essential
natures,” that is, one should resist the temptation to assign terms like
good and evil to them. Thus, a divinely sent ruah can cause a person
or group “to hear falsehood or otherwise be deceived.”131 YHWH can
send a spirit that “brings deception to those already in the wrong,” a
deception that “produces destructive justice.”132 Thus, the actions of the
spirit “reveal previously existing spiritual conditions,”133 which angles
the question of divine and human agency slightly, if not conclusively.
DIVINE ANIMALITY: TRICKSTERS AMONG

ANIMALS AND OTHER ANIMATEDS
Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into
things.134
Are the living creatures of this world no longer to be regarded as persons simply
because we claim to have more intellect than they to manufacture knives, guns,
and printing presses to turn out hunting licenses?135
Another form of ambivalence expressed in trickster figures is shape-

shifting, or metamorphosis—the direct Latin cognate is transforma-
tion. In his classic text on Navajo hunters, Karl Luckert describes such
shape-shifting as identified with the “prehuman flux,” where animal
and human were not so different at all, and it was possible for certain
animals and humans to cross that boundary at will. He finds traces
of such flux in mythologies of many other peoples—such as Egyptian
therioanthropomorphic deities—and wonders if it might be the “oldest
still discernible coherent world view.” In the case of the Navajo accounts
he received, Luckert argues they denote a reminder of humanity’s
primeval kinship with all creatures in the living world and to the essential con-
tinuity among them all. In prehuman mythical times all living beings existed
in a state of flux—their external forms were interchangeable. [ . . . ] What dif-
ferentiates one species of “people” from another is not something essential but
is a matter of appearance only.136
A deep awareness of connections beyond the human includes

animals and other beings in “all my relations.” In now-authoritative
Navajo accounts, this ability to shape-shift and transform ended with a

certain “creative event, which ended the primeval condition of prehu-
man flux” and permanently fixed “different groups of ‘people’ to par-
ticular types of garments, shapes, and sizes,” so that they can no longer
change shapes as easily as one changes clothes.137 This mythic harmony,
Luckert reminds his readers, stands in tension with the actual food
quest of a hunter culture, and therefore is balanced with myths about
tricksters and cultures heroes, which “legitimize the control-oriented,
scientific, or profane quest for food.” Thus, the notion of a “harmoni-
ous prehuman condition [ . . . ] supports a religious nostalgia concern-
ing a time when man [sic] had not yet begun eating divinely forbidden
fruits—bodies of animal kin.” Luckert suggests that the prehuman flux
and trickster myths need to be read together for a full expression of
Navajo hunter life.138 It is tempting to find in this narrative a memory
of past senses of closeness, before a more well-defined rise of human
culture and distinction from other animals. One central Navajo value
is the acquisition of knowledge, and parts of the Diné Bahane’ may well
reflect a sense of “movement from relative ignorance” in the first four
worlds to a “more complete knowledge on the earth’s surface.”139
It is possible to read the Adam-Eve story similarly as a story of ado-
lescence in the vein of Irenaeus and others,140 rather than a singular
tragic act that changed the world, the constant processes of growing up,
a changing sense of identity that includes distinction from other ani-
mals, while it acknowledges a close and ambivalent relationship. In her
reflections on Genesis, Avivah Zornberg links the commandment to “be
fruitful and multiply” not only to a simple propagation of the human
species, but referring to Elias Canetti’s work, proposes the possibility
that humans “incorporated into [themselves], by transformations, all the
animals [they] knew,” and that only through this internal integration
humans realize their “specific gift and pleasure.”141 As animals increased,
so did humans, depending on them for nourishment. Hence, the totem
animal could become a point of identification and connection.142
A reading of Genesis 3 as a narrative of humanity’s degeneration
often expressed hostility or at least suspicion toward the seeking of
knowledge. Seeking out new kinds of knowledge may be considered
dangerous and ethically problematic as such activities may disobey
divine commandment or will, and are seen to derail human relation-
ships. Seeking new knowledge implies a shift in hermeneutics, new
perspectives, new ways of reading the world. This transgression into

knowledge is reminiscent of some tricksters’ propensity to introduce
new technologies and the upheaval it can bring to their native society. It
also represents a hermeneutical revolution: humans can now interpret,
know, and discern good and evil, they know shame, and they experi-
ence limitation of life and love.
In the context of the present inquiry, engaging the animality of many
trickster figures might help dislodge some of the hegemonic anthropo-
centrism so systemic in theology and find ways to consider more than
humans and their utterances, thus tuning into a manifold of still, small
voices, that too often are not considered. Virulent anthropocentrism
then, I argue, demeans both humans and animals: humans that are
considered to be on the level of animals are “lower,” and they continue
to reify the lesser value and moral status of all animal species, except
the human. We will also explore here whether a new way of conceptu-
alizing animism can contribute to rethinking animality, human and
other. The sense of prehuman flux encountered in Navajo narratives
of generations may point to a consciousness of familiarity with animals
that humans continue to sense within.143
Trickster figures consistently appear to cross human-divine dis-
tances as well human-animal boundaries, or, if you will, the fluid mem-
branes between various species of animals. Cognate figures of Hermes
manifest in several other cultural contexts as shifting shapes between
human and animals, specifically animals that make their home close to
humans, that appear to have human qualities, and that seem to inter-
act or live in direct symbiosis with humans. Limping between worlds
and messages,144 the Yoruba Esu or “Signifying Monkey,” the Western
United States coyote, Pacific Northwest Raven, the European Reineke
Fuchs or Reynard the Fox, and in India the monkey god, Hanuman,
are depicted with human-like intelligence and often speech.145
Gates sees the Signifying Monkey as the “ironic reversal” of the
“black as simianlike.”146 This pokes fun at the ways in which racial,
ethnic, and cultural differences can be interpreted as so starkly differ-
ent as to not be counted as fully human. Comparisons of some ethnic
groups as more animal-like have been common devices for dehuman-
ization, at least since antiquity.
The boundary between animal and human is interpreted in many
ways, depending on the politics and ideology of the interpreter. If
animals are considered inferior and morally problematic, then com-

parison with an animal is an insult. Where animals stand for particular
positive or neutral personality traits, the connections made are more
complex in their potential. Derrida reminds us that Jews were treated
in concentration camps as “quasi-human,” like apes, “signifiers without
a signified” [!] a “sort of monkey with ‘monkey talk’ precisely what the
Nazis sought to reduce their Jewish prisoners to.”147
The sacred trickster of language can shape-shift between human
and animal. Raven and coyote exhibit behavior that brings their path
close to human beings. Often they appear close to human habitation
and can seem to mirror certain facets of human behavior. In North
American Native cultures, they are tricksters that interact with humans
in a variety of ways, teaching new technologies, displaying and subvert-
ing moral codes, among other. In some African and Asian contexts the
monkey has a similar function: not quite not human, but not quite
human, monkeys have been imagined as mimicking human behavior.
In Gene Luen Yang’s brilliant reinterpretation of an ancient mythos, the
graphic novel American-Born Chinese, we find contemporary reimagi-
nations of Asian monkey trickster figures like the monkey king test
and mark the boundaries between human and animal. Yang’s graphic
novel reimagines the ancient mythos in the context of the boundar-
ies between dominant culture and foreign minority culture, and the
contestations of who and what counts as fully human and who does
not, showing the consequences of arrogance, self-hatred, denial of one’s
identity, and final coming to peace and integration with one’s own cul-
tural and personal identity.148 Luen Yang works here a genre similar
to Whiti Ihimaera’s Whale Rider, a contemporary reinterpretation of a
traditional Maori migration myth. Both rearticulate ancient myths for
contemporary circumstances, especially invoking modern myths, both
timeless and revaluing a minoritized ancestral tradition in the context
of other dominant religio-cultures.
In Navajo thought, trickster coyote, an animal that can be observed
criss-crossing the landscape in what might seem like running errands,
is known as the “roamer,” and a go-between for the Holy People, espe-
cially for First Man. Coyote can also function as a bad example for
action, and a figure of witchcraft. In the slaying-the-monsters sequence
of the Diné Bahane’, the monster slayers spy “an animal with a dull
brownish coat and a pointed snout.” Changing Woman and White
Shell Woman ask people to beware of this animal: “You must never
try to follow him. And you must not follow his ways. [ . . . ] He makes
great mischief, and he brings disorder wherever he goes.”149 And, he
could be a spy for one of the monsters. He is the “first scolder,”150 per-
haps a reference to the animal’s howling, today sometimes explained
to outsiders as the expression of highly undesirable and frowned-upon
behavior, that of dressing down and mobbing other persons, a corrosive
of social relations.
As a go-between and broker,
Coyote is almost always someone’s agent. This circumstance is the main reason
for his being regarded as a fool. He is always working for someone else and not
watching out for himself.151
In this function, Coyote interferes and causes “death to be part of the

state of man and thereby incurring the anger of the other diyinii [Holy
People].”152 In Navajo thought, the reality of death is “part of the birth/
death whole,” and not a fall into sinfulness, though of course it would
be tempting to consider the similarities.153 Indeed, the entering of death
into the world affirms that “we ought to move on” and “leave everything
behind for the young,” thus making “room for the next generation.”154
Death allows sustainable living on the land that has limited carrying
capacity. Though its experience is painful, ultimately, the survival and
health of the people requires death as a reality. Hence, this sense of
the intricate relationship between life and death is not simplistically
“bio-centric” by denying and banning death, but rather recognizing
that an unsustainable use of the lifespace of the world will not sustain
ongoing life. Nevertheless, “for those who will be the first generation
to die,” this change will not be popular or easily acquiesced. Hence, it
is accomplished through the “meddling, or interference, or mistakes of
Coyote.”155 Coyote here appears as the bearer of unwelcome news, the
messenger, even bringer of the end of life—gain and loss are intricately
interwoven, and increase of life energy and wealth can not come other
than by letting other things die off. The larger implications concern a
grounding ambivalence of life:
Entities are never one-sided, and entitivity is defined essentially by that two-
sidedness that is completeness. Coyote alone is wise enough to see and express
this.156
Coyote hence interprets and expresses the truth of life and death, of the
complexity of negotiating difference, identity, and change.
SIGNIFYIN’: NOTES ON AN AFRICAN AMERICAN

HERMENEUTIC157
The African monkey trickster teaching generations about interpretive

skill joins African slaves in the Middle Passage and teaches them and
their free descendants how to survive in a hostile racial and economic
climate. He is frequently characterized as an inveterate copulator on
account of his enormous penis; linguistically Esu is the ultimate copula,
connecting truth with understanding, the sacred with the profane, excel-
lent interpretation, or the word (in the form of the verb to be) that links
the subject with its predicate. He connects the grammar of divination
with his report on structures. In Yoruba mythology, Esu is said to limp
as he walks precisely because of his mediating function: his legs are dif-
ferent lengths, because he keeps one anchored in the realm of the gods,
while the other rests in this, our human, world.158
This trickster teaches to “signify,” helps translate, and enable physi-
cal, cultural, and emotional survival in a hostile panoptic environment.
These forms of signification, hidden transcripts, irony, mimicry, and
mockery, are employed by the black literary critic as well as the aver-
age African American. The “ ‘little man’ or woman is bound to surface
when the literary critic begins to translate a signal concept from the
black vernacular milieu into the discourse of critical theory.”159
Signifyin’ is a concept in US African American slang that refers
to wordplay and related interpretive techniques. Henry Louis Gates
defines it as a
trope, in which are subsumed several other rhetorical tropes, including meta-
phor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (the master tropes), and also hyperbole,
litotes, and metalepsis. [. . .] To this list we could easily add aporia, chiasmus,
and catechresis, all of which are used in the ritual of Signifyin(g).160
In The Signifying Monkey, his theory of African American Literary

Criticism, Henry Louis Gates relates the following story about Esu,
a Yoruba trickster figure, messenger, interpreter god, and all-around
figure of indeterminacy. In this story, Esu brings discord among two

old friends by the following scheme:
[Esu] made a cloth cap. The right side was black, the left side was white. The
two friends [were] out in the fields, tilling their land. Esu came by on a horse,
riding between the two men. The one on the right saw the black side of his hat.
The friend on the left noticed the sheer whiteness of Esu’s cap. The two friends
took a break for lunch under the cool shade of the trees. Said one friend, “Did
you see the man with a white cap who greeted us as we were working? He was
very pleasant, wasn’t he?” “Yes, he was charming, but it was a man in a black
cap that I recall, not a white one.161
The two friends start arguing about the color of the cap, and eventually
their neigbors have to pull them off of each other so they would not kill
each other. Esu returns to the brouhaha and reveals: “Both of you are
right” by showing them his cap:
When you vowed to be friends always, to be faithful and true with each other,
did you reckon with Esu? Do you know that he who does not put Esu first in
all his doings has himself to blame if things misfire?162
Were we to replace the word Esu in the above narrative with indeter-
minacy, ambivalence, and different perspectives, we might be asked
to consider that in all our relationships, we need to consider the inde-
terminacy of communication, the difference between the truths we
perceive, and the ambivalence of experience. One might take this as a
warning to consider the multiple truths and the indeterminacy of any
text or narrative in all relations, in all attempts to make meaning and
to inform identity and relationships through such meaning making.
In his elaboration of “an indigenous black hermeneutical principle,”
Gates suggests that Esu is the “muse of the critic,” not the author, as
“divine linguist and divine interpreter, the controlling principle of its
representation and its interpretation,” and hence if not entirely explic-
itly, perhaps implicitly suggests a link between tricksters and critical
engagement and thinking with the world: “It is the pleasure of the critic
to open the text, even if not quite as readily as one opens a calabash’
and to shift metaphors, the difficulties that await the traveler down
his road most urgently demand supplication from the trickster figure,
the orisa of the critic.”163 In some Yoruba creation myths, Esu is the
first primal form to exist, and as a “figure of indeterminacy extends
directly from his lordship over the concept of plurality.”164 Gates argues
that this Esu, the “open-ended-ness of figurative language, rather than
its single-minded closure, is inscribed in the myths of the Signifying
Monkey”165 who travels with the slaves to the Caribbean and North
America.
Esu carries a calabash -ase- that African American literary theorist
Henry Louis Gates translates as Logos, “the closest analogue through
which ase can be rendered in English.”166 According to Gates, his “clos-
est kinsman is Hermes” and just as Hermes
lent his name to hermeneutics, our word for the study of methodological prin-
ciples of interpretation of a text, so too is it appropriate for the literary critic
to name the methodological principles of the interpretation of black texts Esu-
tufunaalo, literally “one who unravels the knots of Esu.”167
Thus, Gates proposes an African discipline of interpretive methodol-

ogy, the “secular analogue of Ifa divination.” Esu’s skill is needed to
interpret the divine will; he is the “one who translates, who explains,
or ‘who loosens knowledge.’ ”168 Esu teaches the system of interpreta-
tion and confirms or condemns the message of the Ifa, which con-
sists of the sacred texts of the Yoruba people and also “contains the
commentaries on these fixed texts, as does the Midrash.” This system
of interpretation draws upon a “marvelous combination of geomancy
and textual exegesis,” and “configurations or signs then read and trans-
lated into the appropriate, fixed literary verse that the numerical signs
signify.”169 Gates further argues that Esu’s functional equivalent in
“Afro-American mythic discourse” is the “oxymoron, the Signifying
Monkey.”170 Yoruba oral culture also absorbed a theory of how writing
came to be invented:
In the morning all the Whitemen used to come to Ela [the father of the divin-
ers] to learn how to read and write, and in the evening his African children,
the babalawo, gathered around him to memorize the Ifa verses and learn divi-
nation. Ifa taught them to write on their divining trays, which the Muslims
copied as their wooden writing boards (wala), and the Christians copied as the
slates used by school children and as books.171
The Yoruba thus felt it necessary to account for a variety of prac-

tices of writing, such as those used by “Muslims” and “Whitemen.”172
As happens when traditions become assimilated, they may reflect an
outsider’s view, just as they may reflect a resilient tradition adapting

its own narratives to contemporary challenges, and potentially some
of both, where historical events and encounters become engaged in an
etiology, an interpretation of what the origin of a particular practice,
name, or place of significance may be. Hence, the above etiology of
writing appears
remarkably compatible with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European

speculations on the absence of writing among Africans and its significance.
For, without the presence of writing as the visible sign of reason, the Africans
could not demonstrate their “innate” mental equality with the European
and hence were doomed to a perpetual sort of slavery until such mastery was
demonstrated.173
At the same time, African Americans were kept from acquiring the
skills needed for such mastery. Like many slaves, Frederick Douglass
could not with any security establish his date of birth, a fact that con-
tributed for many slaves to a sense of rootlessness and seemed to point
out the irrelevance of their existence. Fathered by a white man whose
identity he never knew, he only knew his mother fleetingly, as she was
sold elsewhere while he grew up. In his autobiography he reports that he
felt “chosen” by Providence, felt that God had a plan for him, something
better than chattel slavery. And it seemed to look this way. He came to
Baltimore into a home where he was treated like a person, rather than
property and even learned to read and write at age ten, from his mis-
tress Sophia Auld.174 Lewis Hyde reads Douglass as a trickster figure,
“put on the threshold” in a liminal stage. Dwelling on the boundaries
of plantation culture, Douglass became a cunning go-between, “a thief
of reapportionment who quit the periphery and moved to the center.”175
A trickster challenges and changes crystallized systems and patterns,
by tricking his/her way through them. His central theft is literacy and
oratory skills; they enable him to transgress from where society locates
him. With a strong will to test the forbidden, he challenges bound-
aries and limits, living life on the edge, moving between worlds, as
does the mythical figure of the trickster. Douglass changes his name to
escape capture. He unveils the use of the Bible to promote slavery as the
clearest case of “stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the
devil in.”176 The trickster is a figure that often dwells on the margins of
cultures, a liminal shape-shifter, a transgressor of rules and regulations,

or perhaps a secret reinforcer of those same morals (mostly he) defies.
Gates reconstructs the concept of signifying in the African American
context beyond its often “phallocentric orientation”—again we see
hypermasculinity associated with male trickster figures—as describ-
ing “any number of modes of rhetorical play.”177 As a form of mean-
ing making in situations of perpetual panopticon, that is, an unnamed
version of the African trickster figure comes to the aid of African-
descended persons, the critic of black literature as well as any person
seeking survival and flourishing in the context of white supremacy.
They may encounter “a trickster figure surfacing” when least expected
“at a crossroads of destiny,” at “discursive crossroads at which two lan-
guages meet,”178involved in encoding and decoding and involving a
“rhetorical process that we might think of as the Signifyin(g) black
difference.”179 Signifyin(g) also refers to “what the white folks call ver-
bal skills,” “black rhetorical devices,” “innuendo,” indirection, “making
fun,” “in recurrent black-white encounters as masking behavior,” and
various other strategies.180
Tricksters can manifest as prophets of chaos, showing the way in
which creativity can overcome overwhelming odds. Tricksters see
beyond the limits of the system and bend the rules. They induce dis-
comfort, if not anger, in those on whom they play their tricks and make
those who rely on the rules of a system uneasy. This can make their
existence dangerous. They can be found in our religious texts, in the
myths of a variety of cultures, they can be found in our own actions.
They unveil our rigidities and complacencies through their actions.
We need them to unseal the hermetic seals of our social and economic
systems, exposing flaws so they can be addressed. We need them to
reframe our practices of interpretation.
NOTES
1. Clara Sue Kidwell, Homer Noley, George E. Tinker, and Jace Weaver, A
Native American Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001), 114.
2. William G. Doty, “Hermes Guide of Souls,” Journal of Analytic Psychology 23,
no. 4 (October 1978): 358. See also Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World:
Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
3. My emphasis. Franchot Ballinger, Living Sideways: Tricksters in American

Indian Oral Traditions (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 30.
4. See Chapter 5 in Marion Grau, Of Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption
(London/New York: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2004) for an engagement of
the figure of the holy fool and trickster versus the confidence man as eco-
nomic agent in the divine economy.
5. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2004), 2.
6. As Ballinger notes in his writings on Native American tricksters, “some gen-
eralizations about American Indians are possible, but their cultural diversity
makes generalizing risky.” This is valid, mutatis mutandis, for tricksters across
the world’s oral traditions. Ballinger, Living Sideways, ix.
7. Charles Campbell and Johan H. Cilliers, Preaching Fools: The Gospel as a
Rhetoric of Folly (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012), 80.
8. Quoted in Ballinger, Living Sideways, 9.
9. It is incumbent upon members of nontribal, historically colonizing cultures
to beware of too easily sidling up to a Native American trickster. Some
would say that it is not all that different from saying, beware of identifying
with the meek and poor when you are actually much more like the self-righ-
teous religious functionaries whom Jesus challenges. That is, you may end
up being the butt of the joke, just the way King David realizes he has con-
demned himself after he listens to Nathan’s parable. Nabokov warns that
many white writers have not always appreciated that the trickster does not
“return their affections when, in their numerous anthologies and catalogs
of his multiple personalities,” they have “mostly ignored his keen awareness
of the political and historical facts of life. They may chortle over Coyote as
glutton, thief, clown, and mischief maker and think they know him” while
they, and we, for that matter, are all too included to be in hearty denial of
those episodes in which the trickster emerges as our “direct antagonist.”
The trickster is not simply a “subversive” figure, often may in fact not be, or
at least not in ways that are readily visible. Peter Nabokov, A Forest in Time:
American Indian Ways of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 110.
10. Ballinger, Living Sideways, 39.
13. Ballinger, Living Sideways, 43, 45.
14. So argues biologist Bernd Heinrich who has observed ravens to better under-
stand their behavior and close association to humans. Bernd Heinrich, Mind
of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds (New York: Harper
Collins, 1999), 355.
15. The motif of an initially perfectly ordered creation that is somehow disrupted
is a common motif in creation narratives from around the globe. Richard
K. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 79–80.
16. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven, 79.
17. Harold Scheub, Trickster and Hero: Two Characters in the Oral and Written
Traditions of the World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012),
137ff.
18. Scheub, Trickster and Hero, 140, 189.
19. Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep (New York/London: Routledge, 2003),
198.
20. Keller, Face of the Deep, 81.
21. Scheub, Trickster and Hero, 182.
25. Nabokov, A Forest in Time, 112.
2008), 103.
28. Charles Taylor, “The Future of the Religious Past,” in Religion: Beyond A
Concept, ed. Hent De Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008),
185.
29. Ellwood notes further that this attitude is particularly typical for certain
African myths; Myth, 104.
30. Campbell and Cilliers, Preaching Fools, 101, 102.
33. Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe:
Clear Light, 2000), 44.
34. The ambivalence of trickster figures can also be associated with other charac-
ters in a narrative. Scheub, Trickster and Hero, 165.
35. Nabokov, A Forest in Time, 100–11.
37. Nabokov, A Forest in Time, 111–12.
40. Melita Schaum, “ ‘Erasing Angel’: The Lucifer-Trickster Figure in Flannery
O’Connor’s Short Fiction,” The Southern Literary Journal 33, no. 1 (Fall
2000): 2.
41. Schaum, “ ‘Erasing Angel’: The Lucifer-Trickster Figure in Flannery
O’Connor’s Short Fiction,” 6, 7.
42. John Sutton Lutz, “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance: Encounters on
the North American West Coast,” in Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous-
European Contact, ed. John Sutton Lutz (Vancouver/Toronto: University of

British Columbia Press), 41.
43. Kidwell, Noley, Tinker, and Weaver, Native American, 113.
44. Rupert Ross, Returning to the Teachings: Exploring Aboriginal Justice (Toronto:
Penguin, 1996), 71–72.
46. For example, Birgit Meyer argues that in the case of the Ewe in Ghana, some
German Pietist missionaries overlaid their notions of the devil onto Ewe tra-
ditional narratives that featured characters that they felt were ambivalent
or represented features of ancestral, animistic, or polytheistic nature. Birgit
Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana
(Edinburgh: Africa World Press, 1999), 94.
52. Kidwell, Noley, Tinker, and Weaver, Native American, 116–17.
54. See, for example, Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York:
Vintage, 1988), and Karen King, Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism
(Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1988).
55. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
56. See, for example, Chapter 2 in Susan Niditch, A Prelude to Biblical Folklore:
Underdogs and Tricksters (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000),
Dean Andrew Nicholas, The Trickster Revisited: Deception as a Motif in the
Pentateuch, Studies in Biblical Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), and
a Jungian reading of Jesus by Elizabeth-Anne Stewart, Jesus the Holy Fool
(Franklin, WI: Sheed & Ward, 1999).
57. Niditch, Biblical Folklore, 126ff.
58. Robert D. Miller, “Solomon the Trickster,” Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011):
497.
59. Miller, “Solomon the Trickster,” 500.
60. Miller, “Solomon the Trickster,” 501, 502, 504.
61. Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Jonah, Jesus, and Other Good Coyotes: Speaking
Peace to Power in the Bible (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2007), 62–63, 65, 77.
62. Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, 283.
63. Henry Louis J Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American
Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 56.
64. Niditch, Biblical Folklore, 133.

68. Douglas Adams, The Prostitute in the Family Tree: Discovering Humor and
Irony in the Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 4–5.
69. Lewis Hyde highlights in his text that female tricksters can often be harder
to identify since many of the anthropological categories defining this figure
have been aggregated primarily based on trickster figures with stereotypical
masculine attributes, at best on masculine tricksters with androgynous or
gender-ambiguous features. Hyde, Trickster Makes This World.
70. Gerald Vizenor, The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to Wild Baronage
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988), x.
71. Vizenor, Trickster of Liberty, x.
Des Subjekts (Stuttgart: Radius, 1992), 254. See also Lewis Hyde describing
the trickster as “the spirit of the doorway leading out.” Quoted in Kidwell,
Noley, Tinker, and Weaver, Native American, 114.
73. Obviously trickster figures are varied and diverse, and these are just some of
the features that stand out for this particular inquiry. Not all trickster figures
may share these features, but they serve here as a smallest common denomina-
tor of sorts.
75. Tom Thatcher, Jesus the Riddler: The Power of Ambiguity in the Gospels
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 111.
76. Thatcher, Jesus the Riddler, xv–xvi.
77. Thatcher, Jesus the Riddler, vii.
78. Thatcher, Jesus the Riddler, 15.
79. Thatcher, Jesus the Riddler, 36–37, 47.
80. Thatcher, Jesus the Riddler, 40–42.
86. Thatcher, Jesus the Riddler, 94, 114.
90. Joel Marcus, “Crucifixion as Parodic Exaltation,” JBL 125, no. 1 (2006):
73–87.
91. Marcus, “Crucifixion as Parodic Exaltation,” 73.
92. Marcus, “Crucifixion as Parodic Exaltation,” 74.
93. Laurence L. Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ: A Study of 1 Corinthians 1–4 in
the Comic-Philosophic Tradition, JSNT Supplement Series (London: T&T Clark
Continuum, 2005), 2. Paul famously engages in “hyperbolic self-parody”
and takes up the “rhetoric and role of the fool” thereby subverting some of
the principles of classical ancient rhetoric. Rather than building on “com-
mon wisdom” (gr. endoxa), he relies on paradox (para-doxa), that which is
outside of opinon, or common sense. Campbell and Cilliers, Preaching Fools,
23, 31.
94. Campbell and Cilliers, Preaching Fools, 34.
96. Beatrice K. Otto, Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester around the World
97. Vivian L. Thompson, Hawaiian Legends of Tricksters and Riddlers (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1969), 8.
98. Thompson, Hawaiian Legends of Tricksters and Riddlers, 7.
99. Kidwell, Noley, Tinker, and Weaver, Native American, 122–23.
105. Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and The Making of Christianity
and Judaism, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999), and Daniel Boyarin, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis,
The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 2009), 44, 45.
106. Boyarin, Dying for God, 50, 52.
107. Julia Watts Belser, “Sinful Sages, Dubious Heroes, and the Bavli’s Counter-
Hagiographical Impulse,” Talmudic Transgressions: Engaging the Work of
Daniel Boyarin (Berkeley, CA, 2014).
108. As discussed in Campbell and Cilliers, Preaching Fools, 45.
110. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, “Spirit(s) in Contemporary Theology: An Interim
Report of the Unbinding of Pneumatology,” in Interdisciplinary and Religio-
Cultural Discourses on a Spirit-Filled World, ed. Amos Yong and Veli-Matti
Kärkkäinen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 29.
111. Kärkkäinen, “Spirit(s) in Contemporary Theology,” 29.
112. See, for example, the work of David Abram and Graham Harvey. David
Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Random House, 1996), and
Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2006).
113. Mark I. Wallace, Green Christianity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2013).
114. In the context of the Navajo diyin—holy people—holy should be under-
stood as those “people” who are powerful, who can affect Navajo life, and
who have to be reckoned with in some way. “People” is a term not restricted
to humans or animate beings. John R. Farella, The Main Stalk: A Synthesis of

Navajo Philosophy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984), 67.
115. It is important to remember there are many versions of these myths.
Comparison and variety is already part of the myth, as myths mean on
multiple levels, exist in multiple versions, and are always adaptive, and are
often adjusted under existential stress that necessitates new interpretations.
Farella, The Main Stalk, 181.
118. Quoted in James Kale McNeley, Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1981), 21.
119. McNeley, Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy, 1.
126. McNeley, Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy, 45–47.
128. McNeley finds evidence of similarities between Navajo Wind concepts
and Dakota Skan/Great Spirit and suggests that the Navajo version may
be a variant of a concept that has a wide distribution among Native North
Americans. McNeley, Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy, 61.
129. Esther Hamori, “The Spirit of Falsehood,” Catholic Bible Quarterly 72
(2010): 25.
130. Hamori, “The Spirit of Falsehood,” 17.
134. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 21.
135. Karl W. Luckert, The Navajo Hunter Tradition (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1975), 204.
136. Luckert, The Navajo Hunter Tradition, 133.
137. Luckert, The Navajo Hunter Tradition, 133.
138. Luckert, The Navajo Hunter Tradition, 134. Another stackable interpreta-
tion of these liminal worlds is that the “prehuman flux” represents a preco-
lonial world, with an “unbridgable gulf between mythic and contemporary
times.” Nabokov, A Forest in Time, 124.
140. Cf. Ellwood, Myth, 105–6.
141. As quoted in Avivah Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis

(New York: Three Leaves Press, 1995), 9.
142. Zornberg, Beginning, 10.
143. Luckert writes: “While Navajo Holy-people may still appear in both their
animal and their human form, the gods of the younger generation are
thought of more frequently as appearing in human-like form.” Maybe the
Hebrew Scriptures’ Adam naming animals and in search of a companion
echo a similar sense of familiar-ity with animality, showing a glimpse of
“pre-human flux”? Luckert, The Navajo Hunter Tradition, 204.
144. David Jasper compares the interpretive effort to wrestling with the angel at
the Jabbok, in which “what we seek from the text is not meaning so much
as a blessing on us,” to being prepared to struggle though we might become
“wounded by its mystery” in a struggle with texts, where “it is no sin to
limp.” David Jasper, A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics (Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox, 2004), 27, 28.
145. The Yoruba hermeneutic trickster Esu is said to limp as his legs were of dif-
ferent lengths “because he keeps one anchored in the realm of the gods while
the other rests in this, our human world.” Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 6.
146. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 52.
147. Derrida here discusses Levinas. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore
I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2008), 118.
148. Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese (New York: First Second Books,
2006).
149. Paul G. Zolbrod, Diné Bahane’: The Navajo Creation Story (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 189.
151. Emphasis mine. Farella, The Main Stalk, 42.
153. It may be a useless venture to decide whether Christian amendments or
similar motifs included in Navajo telling are overlaid through the Christian
background of the anthropologists. But being aware of all these possibilities
seems wise.
154. Zolbrod, Diné Bahane’, 82.
156. Emphasis mine. Farella, The Main Stalk, 62.
157. Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber, When They Severed Earth
from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2004).
158. Emphasis mine. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 6.
161. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 32–33.

172. It would be interesting to compare these accounts of intercultural exchange
with the way in which the Navajo creation narrative explicates the creation
and existence of animals brought to the four corners by European colonists.
174. Patrick Allitt, Major Problems in American Religious History (Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 253–54.
177. The phallocentric and implicitly or explicitly misogynistic articulations of
signifying as detailed by Gates highlight the problem of phallogocentrism of
much of hermeneutic discourse, here too, across cultural difference. Gates,
The Signifying Monkey, 65.
180. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 75, 77.
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Comic-Philosophic Tradition. JSNT Supplement Series. London: T&T Clark
Continuum, 2005.
Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second Books, 2006.
Zornberg, Avivah. The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis. New York: Three
Leaves Press, 1995.
6. Fool’s Errand: Holy Fools and
Divine Folly as Hermeneutical
Figures
OF VILLAGE IDIOTS, FOOLS, AND OTHER

BOUNDARY DWELLERS: TRUTH, REASON,
AND MADNESS
I grew up in a town that included persons often labeled as “village idi-

ots.” One of them was Lina, a simple elderly woman, who lived a few
houses up the hill. A few decades ago, it was still possible for people
like her, who neither had an education nor were able to hold down a
full-time job, to more or less live on their own without being institu-
tionalized or homeless. She took care of horses in a stable in the back
of a farmhouse that had belonged to her parents before they had died.
Lina’s holy folly decentered and upended my assumptions about what it
meant to live a good and happy life in a world where the hyper-effective
and productive are the ideal. The local drunk who ranted and raved
next door seemingly every night was a lot harder to take in.
Their urban contemporaries—homeless, drug addicts, the dis-
turbed at the street corner, the veteran unable to keep a job, the dis-
traught and the otherwise mentally abled—may appear in their own
new ways in cities, in old and new guises, their presence questioning
us in many ways. How we treat the “fools” among us speaks eloquently
about the values and beliefs that underlie and inform our social order-
ing. Where is the place among us for folly—as holy innocence defeat-
ing the wisdom of the world—and how do we engage with its more
unholy manifestations?
This chapter ponders on some of the territory of figures that have

traditionally been considered fools, holy and otherwise. John Saward
claims:
Holy folly is but one manifestation of our baptismal non-conformity to the

grown-up world in all its “cleverness.” [ . . . ] Folly for Christ’s sake as a specific
charism in the Church dramatizes the vocation of us all.1
It is this claim that we will explore somewhat more closely here.

Certainly, the terms “folly” and “madness” have as ever been complex
and highly dependent on the perspective. What is folly in the eyes of
some can be wisdom in those of others. What masks as “wordly wise”
can seem the highest madness in the realm of God. Indeed, many of
these forms of seeming folly and madness may strike us as harmless
when compared to the structural forces imbuing madness by racism,
the proliferation of guns and violence, the greed and selfishness we see
around us. The hermeneutics of madness,2 of wisdom and folly is not
just a metaphorical one; it is directly relevant to the hermeneutics of
madness, disease, and sanity, an area where theological thinking has
much room to grow. What is true, reliable? What is “reasonable” and
foolish, and hence, what is “reason”? What is the function of sanity in
our society? What is the theological sense of in/sanity? The holy fool
can pop up anywhere; if we just open our eyes, a divine folly manifests
itself in the cracks of the slicked-over surface of our overly mediated
lives. Especially in a post-Christendom era, the symbol of the foolish,
clowning God may make new sense.
HOLY FOOLS AS HERMENEUTIC FIGURES
Among the hermeneutic figures, border-crossers, crossroad-sitters, and

borderline cases, the Holy Fool seems to have crossed the boundary to
crazy, or at least pretends to have. Biblical prophets can behave in ways
that are odd or paradoxical and wildly demonstrative. They take whores
as wives, walk around naked, wearing yokes, or horns. Socrates embod-
ies Greek and, more specifically, Cynic ideas that true wisdom may be
hidden under the guise of stupidity.3 The holy fool combines prophetic
and cynical features.4 There are shamanic practices, sacred clowns and
tricksters in North America, where thieving gods and coyotes in oral
Fool’s Errand 145
transmissions of life wisdom abound. Holy fools as interpretive figures

interpret or translate for those around them a sense of the mystical
holiness of a life in God that does not conform to the norms of their
attendant societies. At the same time, they reveal vital aspects of the
divine that could not, perhaps, otherwise be perceived.
“WE ARE FOOLS FOR THE SAKE OF CHRIST”:5

PAUL PERFORMS THE FOOL
God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger
than human strength. (1 Corinthian 12:25)
We were trapped by the wisdom of the serpent; we were freed by the foolish-
ness of God.
Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine, 1, XIV.
Tertullian, Chrysostom, Erasmus, and Kierkegaard described the

Christian message as a folly. Paul’s move to describe the cross as folly is
a hermeneutical strategy that connects it to a religio-cultural location
that provides a variety of rhetorical advantages. Speaking of the cross of
Christ, Paul invokes ancient theatrical rhetoric and lore. According to
the apostle, the word of the cross is foolishness of a particular manner:
it confounds the powerful elite watching the drama of the crucified
slave that is meant to instill fear in the lowly outcasts, the disfigured,
the enslaved and the grotesque; rather it articulates the divine truth,
defies the powerful elite, and escapes in the end through resurrection.6
Thus making space for “laughter of liberation,” Paul invokes the myth
of redemptive suffering of a god from mystery cults and combines it
with the theatrical trope of the underclass fool on the theater stage.7
When Paul speaks of folly, he may not think of the folly referred to
in Hebrew wisdom literatures. Rather, it appears that the Sitz im Leben
was the fool in the context of the Greek theater, where the figure of
the fool is despised yet strangely attractive and prominent. The Greek
term moria describes a lower-class person marked by a certain kind of
stupidity, weakness, deficiency, and often physical grotesqueness.8 The
cross was a lower-class punishment, and Paul rhetorically associated
his preaching of the cross to playing the fool in lower-class entertain-
ment, shocking and disgusting to the elite, and yet also profoundly
revealing and fascinating. The theatron functioned as the scene of the

world where divine acts appear like the acts of the fool on the stage
highlight the grotesque performance of divine power in contrast to elite
power.9 The theater is also a place where a seat for a god is reserved, a
place where the theos views what humans do. The god is the producer
and editor of the cosmic spectacle.10
The fool’s role, while secondary in the play, is often the most reveal-
ing, and in some instances the fool practically monopolizes the stage.
Theatrical fools’ bodies were grotesque in a number of ways: their heads
were generally shaved, ugly, and defective, they often seemed effemi-
nate or had a speech impediment. These features were considered to be
laughable, hence “foolish” and a source of amusement.11 They wore a
short chiton thereby likely to expose their private parts to the audience,
another source of laughter. They were poor, ragged, and close to naked.
Certain body functions in particular, sexual and digestive, were con-
sidered vulgar, but amusing.12 Their character is often pitched to imi-
tate the main characters and ape them and comment on their actions.
They often display an anxiousness that is comic, and they are thin
and gaunt.13 Often plays without fools lacked in originality.14 Paul con-
sciously appropriated a theatrical role talking about the cross as a “spec-
tacle to the world” (1 Cor 4:9).15 He identifies himself with slaves and
actors, and the poor in general, and describes himself and the apostles
as “pure trash” by associating with these underclass performers.16 Like
many of the poor in his times, he was astatein, unsettled, homeless, and
constantly on the move, like Jesus.17 Like Socrates and the Aesop of folk
tales, he is a “wise fool.”18 His “thorn in the flesh” might have been a
type of disability similar to those marking a stage fool.19
The struggle between wisdom and folly appears to be connected
to the struggle between faith and reason. Being wise in the ways of
God and wise in the ways of the world, appear often to be mutually
exclusive.20 Origen, for example, was not willing to dismiss intelligent
discourse and proposed that it is better to argue the doctrines of faith
with wisdom than with insistent folly.21 Intellectual smugness, wilful
ignorance, anti-intellectual fundamentalism, and humility struggle
with each other.
One of the earliest Christian saints with characteristics of the holy
fool is Symeon the Fool. Symeon the Fool was famous for the way in
which his actions resembled those of the cynic Diogenes, defecating in
Fool’s Errand 147
public, running around naked, and invading women’s baths—all to

show forth his immunity to the vagaries of human desire and etiquette
and his supposed conformity to things spiritual and ascetic. The true
asceticism, his defender Leonidas argued, lay in his utter indifference to
the temptations that would have affected any unholy person, had they
not been genuinely immune to the various temptations of the flesh.22
The wise fool has many ways of appearing, generating a space for the
“extremely complex” relationship between folly and perception where
fools go beyond merely changing our perspective. They “create a liminal
space where new perception becomes possible, but where discernment
is both invited and required.”23 Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, for example,
opens up a space in which the reader has to decide what is folly and
what is wisdom: “If the world has gone mad, Folly might be the only
one speaking truth,” but can Folly be trusted to speak truth?24
Associated in Central Europe with mirrors (speculae), fools often
function as spectacles, sharpening perception, and as mirrors for
onlookers and society. Some fools carry a mirror as their trademark:
showing us ourselves and our society. Their mirrors are often a perfor-
mance that attracts observers. These mirrors, then, are held up to pow-
erful authorities to reveal and to teach. Thus, fools function as “truth
revealers” as they “speculate” on different perspectives, seeing things at
times “upside down”:25
Like tricksters themselves, the trickster tales were masterful hermeneutical

constructions, which required distinctive forms of interpretation and percep-
tion. In complex ways these tales highlight the interplay of illusion, deception,
and perception within which fools often operate to change the perspective not
just of the powerful, but of the powerless as well.26
Some of them live on the boundary between wisdom and insanity; their
folly can vibrate between true insight and forms of desperate madness.
The bodies of some fools can deformed, “disabled” from the dominant
forms of embodiment. Theologian of disablement Sharon Betcher dis-
cusses the revelatory experience, perspective, and embodiment of the
disabled theologian,27 [ . . . ] whose “monstrosity,”28 the demonstrative
event of the prosthesis, is its own hermeneutic prop.
For feminist theorist Irigaray, women can function as such a mir-
ror, with more a tragic and often less subversive function: as a convex
mirror that enlarges men and mirrors them back to themselves with
confirmation and enhancement of the phallic power they desire mirrored

by women.29 The holy fool can be a diagnostic tool, a test for the level
of madness of the system, which often turns out to be greater than the
madness of the holy fool. The question of madness, insanity and reason is
indeed never far from human enterprises, and perhaps, sometimes, more
visible than elsewhere in religious activities. The line between sanity and
sanctity at times might appear hard to discern and is often an expression
of the power/knowledge regimes of a community of society. Such hege-
monic primacies of whatever is defined as “reason” produce their own
mechanisms to repress and institutionalize fools and their “madness.”30
THEATRICAL FOLLY: COURT JESTERS AND

HOLY FOOLS
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth, act 5, scene 5, lines 22–28 (emphasis mine)
Many fools’ tales in Europe and the Middle East are linked to histori-
cal characters, and some of their tricks are played on citizens in known
cities or places.31 We know of laughter-makers in Greece, Arab jesters,
Welsh, Irish, and Icelandic poet-jesters.32 We find holy fools not only
in monastic orders, such as the Cistercians and the Fransciscans, but
also among the laity.33 Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Francis, Ramon
Lull, and Ignatius of Loyola explicitly described themselves as fools for
Christ’s sake, their excessive monasticism being a case in point.34
Many of the jesting “parasitic” and buffoon fools in German,
French, and English courts were clever, observant people that were
deeply engaged in the religious and political controversies of their
times.35 Such professional or “artificial fools,” were anything but fool-
ish. Often they were quick-witted individuals, skilled at repartee games.
They were employed for their poetic and comedic abilities, especially
in high-pressure and high-deception areas such as royal courts and in
Fool’s Errand 149
political situations. Some were close to power, on terms of intimacy

with their employers. The pontificate of Leo X saw fools with their own
special apartments in the papal palace. Such fools could be observed
slapping bishops and cardinals and sparing none in the church hierar-
chy.36 English court fools served as entertainers, and each court could
house several of them.37
Others were visiting or traveling fools.38 The German jester/Narr
Till Eulenspiegel often “worked” as a jester in the employ of some
nobles or priests who enjoyed his tricks, until he played one that went
too far on his employer and he had to leave, moving on to the next town
where people had not yet heard from him. Eulenspiegel may have been
a pathological grifter, unwilling to put in a day of work, and appears
to have lost the funds he swindled as fast as he made them.39 At times
he seems close to the boundary of pathological unsociality, of inability
to function in a social setting, other than by forming quick relations
that he then uses and destroys. Bote’s collected stories show him as a
serial defrauder who has to move from place to place because word gets
around. He scopes out a new community and finds weaknesses and
obsessions while planning his next trick. Some nobles hire him as a
form of entertainer, but only until he plays one of his often proctologi-
cal jokes and he is forced to leave the scene.40 Nevertheless, his antics
are popular among the people, and Bote’s collection of the histories
satiristically exposes the follies and greed of people in a variety of social
classes. Bote’s collection was a major best seller in medieval German
lands reaching translation into most of European languages by the six-
teenth century.41
The line between cleverness and madness can be blurred. Some
fools were “natural fools,” some developmentally disabled and of vari-
ous intelligences; others were persons with brain injuries.42 These were
often employed as professional fools and thus were housed and less
dependent on charity:
The “natural” fool [ . . . ] belonged in a deeper and more important sense: [s]
he had a home. At Rievaulx, and at other religious houses, the physically and
mentally infirm were given a refuge and true family life.43
While fools were fashionable and famous during the Renaissance,

they began to lose importance during the eighteenth century in most
countries except Russia, where they survived for possibly as long as

into the nineteenth century.44 Some Russian fools were young men in
a degraded position because they had offended the Czar; others are
described as “half-witted.” The line between fools who were made fun
of, for the possible sadistic enjoyment of those in power over them,
and those abusing others, including their employers for another kind of
entertainment, was often thin.45
Enid Welsford argues that the king, the priest, and the fool all
belonged to the same régime, a “society shaped by belief in Divine
order, human inadequacy, efficacious ritual,” and that there is “no real
place for any of them in a world increasingly dominated by the puri-
tan, the scientist, and the captain of industry.”46 While we may not
agree with her conclusion that these fools have entirely vanished from
our societies, we may agree that their lot often was a brutal one. John
Saward also argues that the sixteenth century was an “age of transition
and conflict in the history of the fool”:
Folly, whether sacred or secular, real or feigned, had now to contend with a
new, strident and essentially hostile worldly wisdom.
Yet, mutatis mutandis, there are fools to be found across cultural differ-
ences even today, though they may differ in their stature and appear-
ance throughout.
Fools are hermeneutical artists, able to speak about things in cir-
cumlocutionary ways, to deliver points others dare not make for fear
of displeasing the recipient of the message, and get away with telling
the truth because they told it in ways that were socially sanctioned and
provided a venue for a version of free speech in otherwise highly ritual-
ized and guarded settings. Till Eulenspiegel ridiculed the greed of mer-
chants, guild members, priests, and nobles, parading their willingness
to cheat the poor and mistreat their employees. He did this in some
instances by acting out literally the metaphorical commands of those he
went into service with, or by telling outrageous tales aimed at embar-
rassing his victims. Eulenspiegel is an example of a jester who was a
historical person, but has over time morphed into a German mythos.47
His name, a combination of owl and mirror, became a symbol of the
jester, combining the notions for wisdom and for holding up a mirror
to people.48
Fool’s Errand 151
The German/Low Countries’ traditions include Simplicissimus,

Pieter Brueghel’s paintings of foolery and sin and Sebastian Brant’s Ship
of Fools, which depicts a rich tradition in the discourse of folly. Brant’s
Narrenschiff, a serious tome with little entertainment value, managed
to capture the imagination of its contemporaries primarily through the
plotline and the illustrations. Brant’s Ship of Fools and Erasmus’s In
Praise of Folly are the most serious attempts to check the extravagances
and antisocial follies of their ages. For these moralists, the utmost folly
is to forget one’s eternal ultimate self-interest, and not seeing one’s life
sub specie aeternitatis is the ultimate idiocy.49
Women are routinely found among court jesters and holy fools. The
sources indicate there are fewer female court jesters known than male.
Beatrice Otto lists around 25 women jesters who served at courts in
Spain, France, England, Scotland, and Saxony.50 This does not include
women who may have lived as village fools, or Russian holy fools
like Saint Xenia and Saint Pelagia.51 Court jesters in particular, were
granted “far greater privileges of free speech and ready access,” their
salient characteristics being “humor and fortrightness.”52 The fool and
Hofnarr—the German equivalent—spoke the truth, but with a twist, a
narrative version of the emperor without clothes; they mocked regents,
courtiers and their affairs.
FEASTS OF FOLLY
Barbara Ehrenreich points out that the tendency to highlight the “col-
lective effervescence”53 of indigenous peoples in places new to European
travelers as particularly “primitive,” “grotesque,” “sensual,” and “hid-
eous,” often occurred in denial of homegrown forms of ecstatic and
carnivalesque practices.54 They were often described as either out of
control and lacking in discipline and restraining or too controlled by
various “witch doctors,” shamans, and thus under the spell of some
kind of primitive collective mind-set.55 Yet what we know about the
carnivalesque and the preoccupation with the spectacle of court fools,
jesters, and feasts of fools in medieval and Renaissance European con-
texts shows otherwise.56 Rather, what Frantz Fanon observed as the
splitting of the self functions as the projection of a repressed internal
hierarchical dualism onto an external relationship.57 Lower-class local
“heathens” celebrating carnivals were identified as such by a “converted
Hottentot,” that is, the familiar trope of the noble savage who is more
civilized than the “savages” within one’s own culture was employed
when deemed useful.58 The imaginative construct was an “essence of
the Western [male, upper-class] mind” that is immune to ecstatic rit-
ual, self-loss, and abandonment and marked by the “ability to resist the
contagious rhythm of the drums” to retreat into a “fortress of ego and
rationality.”59 Some of these attitudes lost at least their scientific basis
with the development of social sciences and the recognition of the con-
nectedness of the human family.
Several church fathers saw that Jesus and the Greek god Dionysius
shared a number of features. That is, there were Dionysian aspects to
early Christianity.60 Both were open to lower classes and women, and
involved in common meals that included wine. Dionysian worship
attracted particularly the women of Greek cities, featured “rituals of
inversion,” cross-dressing, and was little concerned about procreation.61
The medieval feasts of fools originated in the Roman Saturnalia and
Kalends, which the Roman Church attempted to co-opt by inclusion.
The church reframed it as a festival in which the powerful were humbled,
and the clergy were allowed to act out and participate in dances and the
parody of sacred liturgies.62 Cross-dressing was common; a “mère-folle,”
mother Folly, was a man dressed up as a woman parodying the Mother
Church represented by its male clergy.63 It was celebrated during the
Twelfth Night between Christmas and Epiphany, the traditional time
of the Saturnalia. By writing Twelfth Night, Shakespeare transposed the
Saturnalia into poetry.64 At the same time it can be said that despite this
pagan background, the Feast of Fools was in deep resonance with the
spirit of Christian values as well as those of medieval times.65
There appear to be connections between such activities and church
dancing, which had been a Christian custom since the early church.
In the medieval church, dancing could involve the clergy in particular,
with certain saint’s days reserved for dancing of the order of deacons,
priests, and choirboys, respectively. In Limoges, priests performed an
annual ring dance, and at times new priests were expected to perform
a sacral dance at their first mass.66 Yet such activities and feasts of fools
were increasingly driven outdoors as the burlesque cross-dressing rev-
elries regularly got out of hand.67 Over time, much of the celebration
was driven out of the church, resulting in a certain secularization of
communal pleasure and often its further derailment into brawls and an
Fool’s Errand 153
overindulgence in alcohol.68 Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist

forms, pushed a work ethic that frowned upon such feasting, which was
often profligate with ecclesial resources.69
French and German fool societies were founded, and it is those
who until today hold the carnival traditions in those countries alive,
especially in traditionally Roman Catholic areas.70 The fool societies
were founded on the idea that fool and court jester could speak the
truth with impunity, be truth-tellers thinly disguised by false insanity,
offering the possibility of reversal and counterreversal of critique and
convention.71
FOLLY AND PARADOXICALITY IN

REFORMATION TRADITIONS
The apostle Paul experienced a paradoxical turnaround in his life when

he turned from being a persecutor of the folly of Christ to a messenger
of the wisdom of the cross.72 The device of paradoxical reversal is key
to the articulation of wisdom/folly themes in the Western Protestant
Christian tradition, straight from Paul to Luther’s paradoxical chris-
tological and anthropological loci such as simul iustus et peccator, free
person and slave, and so forth. Luther is prolific in his use of the term
stultus/i (fool/s) both referring to himself and to his opponents.
The reformer Martin Luther appears to have likened his situation
at least in some sense to that of a court jester, as well as invoking the
biblical trope of the play of wisdom and folly. Erasmus of Rotterdam
wrote an entire treatise on Folly, while his contemporary and theologi-
cal opponent on matters of the human will, Martin Luther, relished in
making “stultifying” remarks about his own folly and that of others.
With characteristic bombast, Luther proclaims in some preliminary
remarks to his 1520 treatise To the Christian Nobility of the German
Nation,
Perhaps I owe my God and the world another work of folly. I intend to pay my
debt honestly. And if I succeed, I shall for the time being become a court jester.
And if I fail—no one need buy me a cap or put scissors to my head. [ . . . ] More
than once a fool has spoken wisely, and wise men have been arrant fools. Paul
says, “He who wishes to be wise must become a fool.” [I Cor. 3:18]. More over,
since I am not only a fool, but also a sworn doctor of Holy Scripture, I am glad
for the opportunity to fulfill my doctor’s oath, even in the guise of a fool.73
Welsford suggests that the popularity of the fool may have been a
symptom of crisis in medieval society, and that its framework was no
longer holding up. Thus, Erasmus would have been a helpless specta-
tor to a tragic conflict he knew would be ending in catastrophe.74 In
Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the fool serves as a touchstone of the qual-
ity of people and manners. King Lear’s fool, while “half-witted,” is nev-
ertheless endowed with penetration deeper and more far-reaching than
superficial sharpwittedness. He is the sage fool who sees the truth.75
Consider also the narrative of an anonymous slave who sees visions
of her deceased master and the ensuing ambivalence of power played
out between her, having been “his pet in his lifetime and he used to
keep mistress from whipping me,” and that same mistress whose power
appears deeply challenged—we know not quite how—by the appari-
tions privy to the slave. The slave finds comfort in having become an
“elect in the House of God.” Fearless now, the illiterate woman rejoices
that God has
taken me—a fool—for sometimes my head was so beat so I thought I was

foolish—and hidden with me the secret of eternal life. He has made me to
stand up on my feet and teach the world—wise out of His wisdom that comes
from on high.76
This black woman, a “fool” through the injury of her slavehold-

ers, reinterprets the violence brought upon her head as holy fooldom
that allows her access to a divine wisdom that transcends the knowl-
edge of the learned. God is the trusted friend who takes watch over her
ways, protects her from dangers, and with whom she can think through
things. Despite her lack of biblical knowledge, being unable to read the
Bible, she can access and know God directly. It was in the hush harbors
and gospel choirs that communal joy found a new expression even in a
time of deep oppression.
RUSSIAN HOLY FOOLS
Eastern Orthodoxy harbors rich traditions of wisdom and folly. Russia

sports a number of holy fools, some of whom were pronounced saints.77
Russia’s most famous building, Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow with
its onion bulb shaped towers is dedicated to an iurodivyi, a holy fool.
Fool’s Errand 155
Ivanov, in his book Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, argues that the
genuine fools, by the standards he outlines, are performing fools who
are signifying bodies manifesting an aspect of the holy life in service to
God.78 Their performance reads on the surface as crazy, and generally
not in ways perceived as holy. These fools are able to pass on messages
that others do not dare to speak. They can be consulted as advisers, or
even oracles, depending on how they were viewed. In Russia, some holy
fools were considered so powerful that people were afraid to cross them
for fear of their powers to bring bad luck to the person who offended
them.
Russian holy fools are rather complex, while Ivanov’s taxonomy is
rather limited. If one took the categories a bit broader, it seems that
those read and passed off as Holy Fools in Russia were of three basic
categories: real fools (that is, mentally abnormal but harmless people),
artful fools (so called in central Europe, who are performers but who
never show their real face), and the truly insane (people we would call
sociopaths or paranoid schizophrenics, such as Rasputin). Their cul-
tural imprint is enormous. The trademark image of Russia and Moscow
are the colorful and artful towers of St. Basil the Fool’s Cathedral.
Before the October Revolution, every sizable town or village in Russia
had an iurodivyi Khrista radi, a holy fool.79 They were of the town and
fed and sheltered by people voluntarily. The fool’s unique characteris-
tics were thought to signify mysterious powers, some contact with the
supernatural. The boundary to outright madness is often unclear, as in
many instances of holy fools and saints across culture.80 Often assumed
to be clairvoyant,their advice on personal, business matters, marriages,
medical issues, and travel was eagerly sought. The alleged psychic abili-
ties of the fool evoked both respect and fear. Holy Fools were an ancient
institution in Russia, the first recorded fool in the region being in elev-
enth century; from then on they exerted social and political influence
on the vast spectrum of Russian society. In Ivan the Terrible’s time they
were famous for their nakedness but wore spectacular rags in the nine-
teenth century. In distinction from hermits and monks, they did not
seek solitude and did not thrive in it.81 Marketplace and neighborhood
gathering were their popular haunts. Often they shouted, cried, and
abused passersby to get attention, while others required people to come
to them. If they condemned or praised somebody, everybody would
follow suit and they often received more respect than the local priest,
potentially because they occupied a quasi-shamanic function that hear-

kened back to pre-Christian leadership models. Both master and serf
minded their advice, and the veneration of holy fools was widespread
in urban surroundings and among the Russian nobility. This context
made the Rasputin phenomenon possible, when what in contempo-
rary terms may be called a charismatic sociopath was able to gain tre-
mendous political and social power. Rasputin’s magnetic personality
gave him entrance and influence in many powerful circles; he became
a personal friend of Czar Nicholas II and his wife. His role paralleled
the shamans among the non-Slavic tribes of central Russia in the late
nineteenth century. Rasputin exposes contradictory personality traits
in quick succession. His sexual escapades and other misdeeds were
accepted as part and parcel of being a Holy Fool. He was called “holy
devil,” which in ways sounds fitting. Some considered him to have car-
ried out a massive case of self-hypnosis on the Romanov family. His
was a particularly prominent example of the relationship that existed
between holy fools and the Russian society. It was widely believed in
Russia that holy fools were spiritual leaders who could affect the fate
of those who came into contact with them, and not even the impe-
rial family was considered immune to their powers. Holy Fools fea-
ture some characteristics of paganism, and share some characteristics
with Turkic and Finnish shamans in their way of dressing, their mental
abnormality, their piercing shouts, nervous agitation, etc. Holy Fools
were feared, and so were shamans.82
Public performances by holy fools were eventually banned by the
Russian Orthodox Church, though a form of worship of Holy Fools
continued virtually uninterrupted until the October Revolution of
1912. Apologists for Holy Fools refused to admit they had real mental
problems and that they bore a greater resemblance to shamans than
to Christian saints—assuming there exists a solid boundary between
them. Tears in the cloak appeared in the nineteenth century, and peo-
ple began to question the custom. However, until today, Thompson
asserts, Holy Fools have left an indelible imprint on Russian society
and its understanding of social priorities. The Holy Fool code of behav-
ior merged shamanic and Christian features and articulated what con-
stitutes a worthwhile behavioral model in culture. It consists of five
tensions: wisdom-foolishness; purity-impurity; tradition-rootlessness;
meekness-aggression; and veneration-derision.83
Fool’s Errand 157
Sergey Ivanov claims the iurodstvo, the Holy Fool, as a sign “instantly
accessible to anybody in Russia,” invoked, so that in Russia connota-
tions of rashness or error are not invoked, as they are in English society.
In Russia, social practices denoted as holy foolery, at least in Ivanov’s
definition, are “caused neither by mistake nor by feeble-mindedness,
but is deliberate, irritating, even provocative.”84 Other words have
taken over the meanings of crazy, deranged, and so forth, though their
“semantic paths” intersect in the “multivalent concept of the iurodivyi,
whose very essence is that volatility: now he is insane, now he is not;
now quiet, now wild; now manifestly pious, now obscene—or several
or all of these things at once.”85
In this perspective, a Holy Fool is a person who feigns insanity, pre-
tends to be silly, or provokes shock or outrage by deliberate unruliness.
But not all behavior is to be assigned this label. It is only accepted by
onlookers as Holy Fool if sanity and high morality can be detected
by them as underlying this behavior. Ivanov argues that the Russian
Orthodox Church holds that the Holy Fool is a mask taken on inten-
tionally so that the Holy Fool’s perfection is concealed from the world.
A comical, paradoxical form of spiritual instruction is also seen as
legitimate by the Orthodox Church. If the Holy Fool reveals himself,
he subverts his own vocation.86 Ivanov takes no position on the Holy
Fool’s sanctity or how to distinguish between “true” and “false” Holy
Fools. Various approaches to study the Holy Fool include: psychiatry
or a typological comparison between the Holy Fool and the Finnic sha-
man or the Suibne Geilt cycle of early Irish legend.
Ivanov considers the influence of biblical instances that can serve as
a genealogy for the holy fool and the ethical ambivalence of divine and
human action: God’s instruction to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and the
license given to Satan to torture Job. Also, an act of creation that has
room for evil might then appear as such an act of holy folly on the part
of God. The holy fool’s insanity might even be compared to Christ’s
kenosis in Philippians 2, which may contain an act of concealed provo-
cation, as hinted at by the term skandalon, which may even allude to
Christ himself as a stumbling stone, temptation, and provocation.87
What are we to make out of the substantial and sometimes con-
tradictory body of evidence surrounding holy foolishness? Thompson
raises questions for the Russian context that may be worth considering
for other scenarios: Which aspects may be (1) a remnant of Shamanic
beliefs; (2) a result of widespread ignorance of certain mental medical

problems; (3) mere barbarism and hypocrisy; or (4) a uniquely Russian
manifestation of Christian piety?88 What is the relative importance of
each of these factors for the holy fool as a hermeneutic trickster?
FOLLY IN THEOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS
Certain Russian holy fools appear as a figure hovering between madness

and wisdom, between the court jester’s truth, intentionally articulated
with a special dispensation, and the more unintentional appearance of
wise folly. Historically, narrowly understood notions of possession and
demonic powers have victimized many, and still do through witchcraft
trials then and now. Perhaps the notion of Holy Folly can provide a
space to conceptualize mind as an integral part of the body, and hence
not simply sever scientific medical diagnosis from spiritual issues, nor
collapse them. Holy Folly may provide a conceptual space where a vari-
ety of kinds of folly and madness can be recognized and discerned.
The challenge to conceptualize mental disability, mental suffering, and
other variations of mental consciousness more deeply theologically is
considerable. Theologians have to provide a workable framework, as
scholars like Nancy Eiesland and Sharon Betcher have done for physical
disablement.89 This, however, is not the theological task here. It is the
way in which these variations of wisdom and folly, mental ability and
disability, interact in discerning the Holy, in describing the Madness
and Wisdom of God and in those who chose to follow God, down a
path that often is not considered wise in the ways of the world. Where is
that foolish hermeneutic necessary for the discernment and articulation
of holiness, for witnessing a God so often hidden, whose messengers are
many, and whose messages we continue to assess, ponder, and divine?
NOTES
1. John Saward, Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ’s Sake in Catholic and Orthodox
Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 10.
2. Certainly much has been gained through the work of Michel Foucault on
these issues. While I am of course aware of his work, it has not been central
to the present exploration of fools, though the questions he has raised surely
hover at the margins here.
Fool’s Errand 159
3. Sergey Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and beyond (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 15–16.
4. Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and beyond, 18.
5. 1 Cor. 4:10a.
6. Laurence L. Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ: A Study of 1 Corinthians 1–4
in the Comic-Philosophic Tradition, JSNT Supplement Series (London: T&T
Clark Continuum, 2005), 146, 233, 253.
7. Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ, 188, 214.
8. Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ, 1.
9. Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ, 2, 7, 12, 19–20.
10. Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ, 2, 46, 52, 54.
12. Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ, 33, 38–39, 42.
13. Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ, 59–60.
22. See, for example, Derek Krueger, Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’ Life and the
Late Antique City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
23. Charles Campbell and Johan H. Cilliers, Preaching Fools: The Gospel as a
Rhetoric of Folly (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012), 87.
25. Beatrice K. Otto, Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester around the World
27. Sharon Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis, MN:
Fortress, 2007).
28. Sharon Betcher, “Monstrosities, Miracles, and Mission: Religion and the
Politics of Disablement,” in Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire,
ed. Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Marya Rivera (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2004).
29. See Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Ironically, Irigaray’s readings perform
perhaps their own folly, granting so much power to the male gaze and the
hom(m)osexual libidinal and linguistic economy that women seem to remain
with little or no agency left.
30. See Michel Foucault’s work on these matters.
31. Otto, Fools Are Everywhere, 38.
32. Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber and
Faber, 1968), 5, 29, 100ff.
33. Saward, Perfect Fools, 58ff, 84ff.
34. Saward, Perfect Fools, 58, 86, 91, 107.
35. Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History, 139.
39. Historie in Hermann Bote, Till Eulenspiegel (Frankfurt: Insel, 1981), 107,
see n 36.
40. Historie in Bote, Till Eulenspiegel, 74ff, see n 23.
41. Bote, Till Eulenspiegel, 17.
43. Saward, Perfect Fools, 99.
44. Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History, 182, 186.
47. Bote, Till Eulenspiegel, 19.
48. Otto, Fools Are Everywhere, 98–99.
49. Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History, 235–37.
50. See the exhaustive table of named jesters in the appendix. Otto, Fools Are
Everywhere, 271–96.
51. Russian Holy Fools, Yurodivyi, include Saint Pelagia and Saint Xenia
of Petersburg, Saint Basil, Fool for Christ, Blessed John of Moscow, John
the Hairy, and others. See, for example, Holy Transfiguration Monastery,
Seraphim’s Seraphim: The Life of Pelagia Ivanovna Serebrenikova, Fool for
Christ’s Sake of the Seraphim-Diveyevo Convent (Boston, MA, 1979).
52. Otto, Fools Are Everywhere, 12.
53. Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New
York: Metropolitan/ Henry Holt, 2006), 14.
54. Ehrenreich, Dancing, 5.
55. Ehrenreich, Dancing, 6–7.
56. See, for example, Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History and
Saward, Perfect Fools.
57. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 147.
61. Ehrenreich, Dancing, 34–35, 38.
Fool’s Errand 161

73. Martin Luther, Three Treatises (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1970), 7–8.
76. Taken from: [quoted in Allitt, 138–139] George Rawick, ed., The American
Slave. Vol. 19 (Nashville, TN: Fisk University Social Science Institute,
1945).
77. See, for example, Saward, Perfect Fools.
78. Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond.
79. For a broad description of the features of the Russian holy fool, see esp.
Chapter 1 in Ewa M. Thompson, Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in
Russian Culture (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 1–23.
80. See, for example, Michael Dols, Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic
Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Michael Dols, “Insanity
in Medieval Islamic Society,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 38, Symposium on
Byzantine Medicine (1884): 136 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1884).
81. Thompson, Understanding Russia, 2.
84. Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, v.
85. Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, vi.
86. Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, 1.
87. Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, 6.
89. See Nancy Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of
Disability (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994), Sharon Betcher, Spirit
and the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), as well as
Thomas Reynolds, Amos Yong, and others.
WORKS CITED
Betcher, Sharon. “Monstrosities, Miracles, and Mission: Religion and the Politics
of Disablement.” In Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire, ed. Catherine
Keller, Michael Nausner, and Marya Rivera. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.
———. Spirit and the Politics of Disablement. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007.
Bote, Hermann. Till Eulenspiegel. Frankfurt: Insel, 1981.
Campbell, Charles, and Johan H. Cilliers. Preaching Fools: The Gospel as a Rhetoric
of Folly. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012.
Dols, Michael. “Insanity in Medieval Islamic Society.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers
38, Symposium on Byzantine Medicine (1884): 135–48. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
———. Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society. Oxford: Oxford
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. New York:
Metropolitan/ Henry Holt, 2006.
Holy Transfiguration Monastery. Seraphim’s Seraphim: The Life of Pelagia Ivanovna
Serebrenikova, Fool for Christ’s Sake of the Seraphim-Diveyevo Convent. Boston,
MA, 1979.
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Ivanov, Sergey. Holy Fools in Byzantium and beyond. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006.
Krueger, Derek. Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’ Life and the Late Antique City.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Luther, Martin. Three Treatises. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1970.
Otto, Beatrice K. Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester around the World. Chicago,
Rawick, George, ed. The American Slave. Vol. 19. Nashville, TN: Fisk University
Social Science Institute, 1945.
Saward, John. Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ’s Sake in Catholic and Orthodox
Spirituality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Thompson, Ewa M. Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture.
Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987.
Welborn, Laurence L. Paul, the Fool of Christ: A Study of 1 Corinthians 1–4 in the
Comic-Philosophic Tradition. JSNT Supplement Series. London: T&T Clark
Continuum, 2005.
Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. London: Faber and
Faber, 1968.
7. Reframing Mythos and Logos:
Theology as Mytho-Logy
REFRAMING MYTHOS AND LOGOS
What myth means and how myth means something can be very dif-
ferently perceived and manifested, especially across religious and cul-
tural differences. Consider the following conversation that was part of
a colonial encounter in Bali. Each person in the conversation mani-
fests particular assumptions about the connection between mytho-
logical narrative and the ways in which it expresses truth, history, and
invention:
One day the German [writer Bichsel] asked a Balinese [Hindu] whether he
believed the history of Prince Rama—one of the holy books of the Hindus—is
true.
Without hesitation the Balinese answered “Yes.”
“So you believe that the Prince Rama lived somewhere and somewhen?”
“I do not know if he lived,” he said.
“Then it is a story.”
“Yes, it is a story.”
“Then someone wrote this story—I mean: a human being wrote it?”
“Certainly some human being wrote it,” he said.
“Then some human being could also have invented it.” The German felt that
he had triumphed, and thought that he had convinced the Indonesian.
But the Balinese said: “It is quite possible that somebody invented this story.
But true it is in any case.”
“Then it is the case that Prince Rama did not live on this earth.”
“What is it that you want to know?” the Balinese asked. “Do you want to know
whether the story is true, or merely whether it occurred?”1
“What is clear from this conversation is that the German and the Hindu
had different concepts of truth and what is history,” R. S. Sugirtharajah,
who relates this encounter, comments. Different representational econ-
omies pertain in this conversation as do different understandings of
myth and its relationship to reliability.
Part of the project of cracking theological hermeneutics involves
finding ways to speak of the divine that do not foreclose different forms
of knowing, but that develop fruitful and dynamic ways of connecting
them. This includes a remythologization, that is, a rearticulation of
mythological layers of meaning of the world, among the scientific, the
religious, and the secular.2 It involves a greater openness toward “myth-
ological reasoning” and its ability to articulate greater truths, and have
its own kind of reliability hint toward common perceptions among
indigenous peoples, including forms of reasoning, that have been lost
in the inscrutable past of the sagas, myths, and fairy tales of European
peoples. Such integrated mytho-logical reasoning could help recon-
ceive the world as a place where the spiritual and the material are not
separate. Rather, they are deeply interconnected and our actions and
interactions must satisfy the claims of both.3 This does not mean that
we should be uncritical toward the underlying ideological and politi-
cal goals of myths, but it does mean we would not categorically rule
out mythos as unreliable. It is not about abandoning a hermeneutics of
suspicion, but it would mean applying a hermeneutics of suspicion and
grace to forms of mythos and logos. Furthermore, it stands to reason that
theological discourse that entirely gives up on mythos severely limits its
own freedom of expression:
If Tillich, Niebuhr, Gilkey, McFague, and the Jungians are right that myth is
intrinsic to theology, it follows that theologians should use mythical language
in as creative a manner as possible.4
What is truth, what constitutes proper representation of history,

what is reliable information upon which one can build a life, “depends
on the context of the spirit: it is in touch with the very love it names.”5
Wrestling likewise with the interpretive dilemma that marks Christian
faith expressions from the very beginning, the relationship between
actual events and religious imagination and narration, there is nothing
to be won by giving up history for myth or vice versa. Rather, the ques-
tion remains: What kinds of productive relationships between history
Reframing Mythos and Logos 165
and myth can one imagine? It is worth learning from accounts such as
the ones mentioned earlier, and challenges like those following next:
Panikkar compares the intercultural transition between Christological
myth and the historical Jesus by using the example of Krishna:
From the contemporary [modern] perspective, historical means real, and

therefore true: while mythic signifies nonhistorical, thus fantastic, imaginary,
unreal. From a myth’s ahistorical point of view, historical facts are only transi-
tory examples—often deceptive and always partial—of a reality that is always
transhistorical. [ . . . ] Except for those who live in the myth of history, historical
facts are merely events that have not reached their full reality.6
The astonishing conclusion here might be that myth expresses the full
unfolding of a truth, rather than the more episodic partiality pointed to
by history. In this view then, myth offers more truth, not less! Different
conceptions of knowledge, or science, remember, transmit, and narrate
knowledge in different ways. Myth imparts a “worldview and model of
life in story form.”7 Myths can thus signify on multiple levels simul-
taneously, on “evolutionary, ecological, spiritual, psychological, and
creative” levels.8 Jonathan Z. Smith argues that “the incongruity of
myth is not an error, it is the very source of its power.” Creation myths
often function to guide present identity with ancient story, associ-
ated with geographical features and places that carry special meaning
for the group and influence ideas of contemporary reality. For many
Aboriginal Australians, dreamtime, or “the dreaming,” seems to have
a similar function of conceptual grounding and reentering ancient and
contemporary identities.9 A greater conscious openness toward what
might be called “mythological reasoning” also promises to be more hos-
pitable to ways of perception that are common among many indigenous
peoples. Ultimately, these forms of reasoning are common around the
world, but sometimes lost, forgotten, or dismissed, as many of the sagas,
myths, and fairy tales of European peoples.
TOWARD A REVALUATION OF MYTH
Man [sic] cannot live without myths, without indeed a plurality of myths that
intertwine and follow upon one another in a way that allows the continual
passage from mythos to logos, and the constant “re-sourcing” of the logos in new
mythoi.10
Raimundo Panikkar suggests that theological activity can carry the

width of theopoetics, as the injunction in the letter of James 1:22:
Γίνεσθε δὲ ποιηταὶ λόγου καὶ μὴ μόνον ἀκροαταὶ παραλογιζόμενοι
ἑαυτούς. (But be then doers [literally: poets] of the word, and not only
hearers who deceive themselves.) Panikkar argues that this verse carries
a broader meaning inviting to become doers/artists/makers/poets of the
Logos, not hearers only who miscarry/mislead/misplace the logos. It
is crucial, he argues, “to bring together heart and mind, mythos and
logos, personal involvement and critical reflection,” in a cosmothean-
dric “unity of the universe, that unity which neither destroys diver-
sity nor forgets that the world is inhabited.”11 Jonathan Z. Smith sees
myth as a “strategy for dealing with a situation.”12 Thus, “there is some-
thing funny, there is something crazy about myth for it shares with
the comic and the insane the quality of obsessiveness.”13 Mythos can
be described as a form of expression of rational thinking that simply
functions according to different rules. It may entail a different ontol-
ogy, a different perspective on the world, but not one that is inferior,
less rational, or less advanced.14 Its articulations have different kinds
of structures, some of which share patterns across many cultural dif-
ferences. Yet, mythos frustrates all attempts to find clean definitions
and renders impossible neat summaries or final interpretations.15 That
refusal in itself is a strategy.
In response to strong juxtapositions between mythos and logos,
Dalferth advocates a self-corrective, flexible reasoning process rather
than a reversal of Enlightenment insights into the critical use of rea-
son.16 If one employs a more flexible understanding of the terms, the
critical qualities of certain forms of myth can be taken seriously while
inquiry into the unproblematized labeling of some forms of thinking as
reasonable becomes routine.
Or to put it positively, myths invite interpretation, and they do
so by representing the embodiment of the transcendent in the every-
day human world. Many myths do not distinguish between material
and spiritual occurrences and entities, do not prioritize overall logi-
cal coherence, but focus on the formulation of what grounds, troubles,
and sustains a community’s world in a holistic manner. Myths speak,
often within a cyclical framework, about the kinds of rituals and feasts
that are required to mark the times and transformative occurrences in
communal life.17 The narratives are simply not intended to signify in
naturalistic, materialistic terms, but the prejudice against them being
prerational or irrational is as old as the Greek myths that have func-

tioned as the basis of the critique of myths.18
MYTH AND ANIMISM
Part of the project of outlining the contours of a possible polydox

theological hermeneutics therefore involves finding ways to speak of
the divine that do not foreclose either form of knowing, that despise
neither, but that develop fruitful and dynamic ways of connect-
ing them—consciously reintegrating mythos into theology, resisting
a univocal hermeneutics. This also engages an animist sense of the
world as alive in all its entities that underlie civilized reason, as David
Abram has proposed,19 in ways that present a repression of that same
animism that can result in destructive uses of reason. Highlighting
the “hermeneutic” quality of Christian theology allows it to become
a more emphatic conversation partner with “animistic” features in a
variety of cultures, and to resist the perpetuation of “a modern preju-
dice, a disdain, and a projection of inferiority toward the worldview of
Indigenous peoples.”20
Gregory Cajete’s account of Native Science proposes an inclusive
definition of “being alive.” Everything is viewed as possessing energy
and its own unique intelligence and creative process, not only obvious
entities, such as plants, animals, and microorganisms, but also rocks,
mountains, rivers, and places large and small. Everything in nature has
something to teach humans. In this version of indigenous “animism,”
the anthropologically defined, superficially understood, and ethnocen-
trically biased term that means “being alive” is used to categorize indig-
enous way of knowing the world:21
Along with words like “primitive,” “ancestor worship,” and “supernatural,” ani-
mism continues to perpetuate a modern prejudice, a disdain, and a projection
of inferiority toward the worldview of Indigenous peoples.22
Cajete argues instead that animism is a “basic human trait common

to both Indigenous and modern sensibilities.”23 Native science is a
“metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking,
acting,” and coming to know that does not distinguish between know-
ing nature, spirituality, community and creativity and that is based on
participation in the natural world.24 The conceptual framework for this
native science is the spatiality of the cosmos, with the four directions,
and above and below.25
Most films and novels work according to a formula, even the most
innovative storytelling employs ancient themes, tropes, and techniques.
What some of us consider a brilliant movie, novel, or story is one that
uses familiar patterns and genres in unfamiliar, innovative, and surpris-
ing ways. Consider, for example, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy,
which was a runaway hit in some countries. Certainly, the audience
had read crime novels before, ones in which vulnerable women are the
preferred victims of sociopathic killers. Nothing new there. One of the
things that rendered it a phenomenon was the way in which its hero-
ine—the girl with the dragon tattoo—Lisbeth Salander was imagined.
The brilliance with which her persona was portrayed came through in
Larsson’s ability to combine multiple genres and narrative traditions. As
a Swede, as many Europeans, intimately familiar with his compatriot
Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking novels, he tried to imagine what a
contemporary Pippi would be like, look like, and what her relationships
would be. Like Pippi, Lisbeth has rather off-kilter social skills, uncanny
strength, and brilliant intellect; she is intrepid, if emotionally aloof. She
is not a victim, but fights back against those who abuse and kill women.
She has a criminal father, a (close to) dead mother, a creepy guardian,
and a brother-and-sister duo, who she counts among her best friends
and who are deeply loyal to her. Combine this with some undigested
Swedish World War and Cold War histories, and a feminist socialist
crime writer, and you get Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist.
Thus, Larsson tells a better story through creatively combining known
tropes and vestiges of the same old, same old, that neither seems to
be the same, nor seems old. By fictionalizing real historical and social
issues in past and contemporary Sweden, Larsson created both a power-
ful social commentary and feminist heroine who is a survivor, and not
another victim. Here, too, a larger truth is imagined, and few of us care
whether “it happened” this way.
ACCOUNTING FOR PHALLOGOCENTRISM:

GENDERED SPEECH, EMBODIMENT, AND PERCEPTION
A tendency toward a hierarchical dualism, an instance of the “fallacy

of misplaced concreteness,” continues to inform much of public and
religious discourse around the question of reliability and trustworthi-

ness of an account. Some have described this discursive preference as
logocentrism, and in recognition of its gendered interpretive bias, phal-
logocentrism.26 Logocentrism as the privileging of a certain kind of
discourse tends to ascribe mythos characteristics that depict it as unreli-
able, unmanly, uncultured, and unworthy forms of speech that should
be ignored and avoided in particular by the cultured male of a certain
class, ethnic, and political status.
The mode and genre of mythological rendering of important truths
were often identified as untruths or primitive truths,27 and mythos
continues to labor under a cloud of suspicion, especially when held
up to the demands of techno-scientific reasoning. As a first step in
overcoming the opposition between mythos and logos, a theological
hermeneutics needs to renarrate mythos in a way that reconnects it
symbiotically—or perhaps polyphonically—with the logos to which it
is organically related.
The prevalence of this invidious comparison as a way of establish-
ing and policing the boundaries between truth and untruth is rightly
ascribed to the pervasiveness in the West of Platonic conceptions of
truth and the role that discourse plays in its articulation. However, even
in ancient Greece, the opposition between mythos and logos was not
always employed in a way that denigrated mythos and privileged logos,
and the dichotomy between mythos and logos was not the only set of
oppositions employed to establish and police those boundaries. In such
accounts, which retain their power today, neither mythos not logos can
have a monopoly on truth or falsehood.
Bruce Lincoln suggests that the questions at stake here are better per-
ceived as struggles around reliable and persuasive articulations of life,
rather than simply about truth and falsehood, struggles that involve the
nature and location of and about “discursive authority,”28 and hence
also resistance to that authority. “Whose speech would be perceived
as persuasive, and whose merely beguiling? Who would inspire trust,
and who arouse suspicion? Which discourses would be associated with
“truth,” and which (at best) with “plausible falsehoods”?29
This is not a question of the difference between logos and mythos
and of policing the boundaries between them, because both can be
used to articulate plausible falsehoods. Regarding the question of false-
hoods and truth, Hesiod recounts the story of Pandora, “the first and
prototypical woman,” into whose breast Hermes placed “falsehoods,

seductive logoi, and a wily character.”30 Thus, in this foundational
myth of truth and lies, it is gender, not mythos or logos, that is the
criterion by which what is likely to be true is to be distinguished from
what is not. Women’s communicative action in this narrative tradition
features often as inherently suspect, and gender marks the difference
between reliable and suspect speech acts. In consequence, women’s ver-
bal agency can be restricted to the “erotic power of beguilement and
attraction exercised”31 by her words, or other forms of persuasive and
manipulative speech acts.
While women are not the only agents that can engage in deceptive
speech in ancient Greek texts, their deceptive agency occurs apparently
primarily in terms of verbal conflict “in which women excel,” rather
than physical conflict, as in the case of men.32 Again, it is gender, not
mythos or logos, that distinguishes what it is likely to be true from what
is likely to be false. In Homer, as in Hesiod, “mythos often denotes
[ . . . ] a blunt and aggressive act of candor, uttered by powerful males
in the heat of battle or agonistic assembly.”33 Men who use deceptive
forms of speech are often understood as “somehow less than fully male,
or somehow more.”34
The few intertestamental and New Testament texts that employ the
term mythos uniformly portray it as a form of deceptive and unreli-
able discourse, or as false interpretations with no basis in truth, and
associate it with a lack of moral integrity. They were written in a con-
text where middle Platonism had shaded mythos negatively and reflect
this perspective, and showed a preference for a particular rationality.35
Christian texts take a dim view of mythos, showing similarities with
Plato’s distinction between mythos and logos: most famously, in 1
Timothy 4:7, “irreligious and old wives’ tales,” βεβήλους καὶ γραώδεις
μύθους are juxtaposed to the gospel, the true word about God and
the godliness, εὐσέβειαν, recommended by the writer. In Titus 1:14,
it is “Jewish myths” Ἰουδαϊκοῖς μύθοις in particular, that are untrust-
worthy, as they give an alternate account of biblical logoi.36
Logos, in the context of the apostolic writings, can be a speech of any
length, an account, a question, commandment, exhortation, lament or
message, and is primarily oral. It often stands in contrast to deeds and
facts and can indeed be deceptive. Close to its classical meaning, it
signifies account, accounting; in relationship to the divine, it describes
God’s word in scripture, the words of Jesus, the kerygma of the early
church, and functions as a Johannine christological term.37
In Homer and Hesiod the term “logos” describes an account of com-
pelling or convincing features, and can mean a content-heavy speech
of any length, usually in prose format.38 Logos is also a christologi-
cal term, and hence the privileged term for divine word, speech, and
thought.
The Stoic concept of the omnipresent logos allowed a more open
engagement and productive relationship with ancient polytheistic
mythologies. It then became possible to suggest that the old mytholo-
gies had contained a blurred version of what had been revealed about the
cosmic logos now.39 Since this logos, wisdom, and knowledge underlie
the structure of the university, myths were a reflection of that underly-
ing principle.40 Via middle Stoa and Varro, Augustine refers to a triple
concept of theology, distinguishing between mythological (poetic),
physical (philosophical), and political theology, neither one of which is
useful for his purposes.41 Augustine finally positioned Christian theol-
ogy somewhere between religious mythology and political ideology as
a scientific discourse intent on articulating cosmological truth. Under
Augustine’s influence, the question of truth becomes the primary occu-
pation of theological discourse in Western contexts. Mythos sinks fur-
ther in estimation, despite Augustine’s sense of ambiguity elsewhere.
The opportunity to employ mythical narrative structures to speak of
God as a person rather than a principle becomes obscured.42
The Prologue of John invokes, relies upon, and transposes the first
chapters of Genesis with the help of the logos spermatikos and a wisdom
Christology articulated as a logos Christology.43 This radical reinter-
pretation of the Genesis creation story, which shifts its predecessor as
it repeats it, was formative for a transformation of religious community
that led, eventually to new ones that saw themselves in more or less tense
relationships with post-Temple rabbinic Judaism. Thus, Christian theol-
ogy manifests as a Logos mythology, that is, it creates a mythos of the
logos of Christ who grounds and unites the cosmos as the mediative
principle between world and transcendent God.44 This mythology of the
logos employs Stoic notions of logos spermatikos and Philonic and other
Jewish notions of Chokhma as hypostatic wisdom for its articulation and
is developed by the ancient church in terms that see the Logos as a cosmic
wisdom principle and mediator between the divine and the world.45
The concept of the logos helped negotiate the cosmologies and gen-
erative narrativity of a variety of deities and forces. The logos presented
by Philo functions as a kind of “shock absorber between the transcen-
dent God and His creation.”46 The christological Logos is indeed a
mythos, as Bultmann argues, noting that the christological term is in
its development dependant on Jewish and gnostic sources that portray
Wisdom/Sophia as a redeemer figure.47
Native American theologian Jace Weaver insists that the admission
that “there was something of the divine in Native religious traditions,
albeit fractured and diminished” affirms the “classical doctrine of the
logos, which had been interpreted so that the ancient Church cast itself
as the ‘heir of the pagans’ and claim for itself the wisdom of the Greek
philosophers.” He concludes that, had the doctrine of the logos been
consistently applied, it “should have provided a means to affirm indig-
enous cultures.”48 In this way, too, certain manifestations of logos and
mythos became separated and divided, affirming some traditions more
than others. Thus, in the history of the Christian church, for a variety
of reasons, the only time
Christians seem to have remembered the doctrine of the Logos [was] when
approaching cultures and civilizations they had no possibility of overpowering.
When, on the contrary, they faced cultures or civilizations they were deter-
mined to overrun [ . . . ] they saw in those cultures and civilizations nothing but
idolatry and ignorance.49
This pattern of reading and how it shifts shape with the variables
of power in colonial settings and the reading and recognizing of logos
caution readers to note how variations of power intersect with herme-
neutics of the divine and with the interpretive anatomy of bodies.
Hermeneutical strategies are particularly crucial for with people
with limited physical or political power. The discourse represented by
Hermes, the trickster messenger, the younger, weaker, duplicitious,
inventive, wily interpreter of differences, might thus not always be
best described as deceptive but rather as making a way out of no way.
What is striking is that in at least one account, it is not the opposi-
tion between mythos and logos that is decisive, but an opposition
between a whole nexus of terms embodied in the figures of Apollo,
the god of light, and Hermes, the trickster. The Homeric Hymn to
Hermes compares Apollo and Hermes along multiple lines: “elder
versus younger, stronger (krateros) versus younger, truthful versus

duplicitious, responsible versus inventive, moral versus wily.” In this
opposition, it is Hermes who crosses gender boundaries and employs
“crafts and seductive logoi” in his attempts to trick Apollo.50 Hermes
is here clearly the weaker character in the comparison; in fact he has
nothing to recommend himself. If then “deceptive” forms of logos are
“particularly associated with women and figures of limited physical
or political strength who manage to overcome stronger adversaries by
their shrewd speech,”51 logos as employed by women and the weak
are deceptive from a particular perspective only. Seen from another
angle, they represent a survival strategy. It is through words that bibli-
cal figures such as Ruth, Tamar, Judith, and Esther seek survival for
themselves and their people. Such logos, as a “weapon of the weak,”
shares significant characteristics with what centuries later James C.
Scott describes as “hidden transcript,” a form of hidden, often ver-
bal, form of resistance.52 As the strategy of those seen as weak, and
powerless—as well as seductive and dangerous—discourse as repre-
sented by Hermes uses any resource available, both logos and mythos,
to say what otherwise cannot be said, to do what otherwise cannot
be done.
MYTHS AND “HERMENEUTIC SURVIVAL”
Anthropologist Peter Nabokov reports that Cherokee scholar Robert K.

Thomas found four vital possessions characterizing ethnic minorities
that have managed to survive for a long time with their culture intact.
They preserved their “distinct language, even if it was more revered than
functional,” had a “unique religion, even if it was only their regional or
syncretized version of a world religion like Christianity or Islam,” had a
“sacred history, which told them who they had been and were and why
they must endure,” and that their accounts of the past, both recent and
ancient, are “rooted in visible, and visitable, corners of their familiar
landscape.”53 This visitation of loci memoriae, memory places, contin-
ues even when the place is developed, built over, or even flooded by a
dam. Thus, some Indian peoples “at least conceptually ‘reinhabit’ their
age-old tribal territories, together with the histories that transpired on
them [ . . . ] ‘remapping’ terrain, and, in a virtual sense at least, ‘reclaim-
ing place.’ ”54
Hermeneutical survival can also be found in the articulation of criti-

cal hermeneutics of race. We know of the logic behind depriving some
bodies of their full humanity with the help of theologians furthering
colonial narratives.55 James Noel and Willie Jennings, for example, have
pointed to the force of imagination in the interpreting of racial and
ethnic difference. Noel pushes the limits of expression of “the archaic,”
the already given, and how often it fails to find adequate expression in
language:
If this level of reality is grasped at all, it will be done through the activity of
interpretation. Thus the epistemological problem is related to the problem of
hermeneutics. The interpreter will then discover the inadequacy of the lan-
guage of interpretation or, we should say, the inadequacy of language per se.56
Noel further points out that “blackness has served as a potent symbol
in the semiotics of Western racism,” thus imposing on “black persons
the task of deciphering the symbolism of their own materiality.” Since
this is difficult to achieve through language, he argues, and since
“identity is archaic,” transformation of identity has to occur at the
same level, “at the level of the symbolic,” such as black preaching, the
moan and shout as wordless expression, or African American art.57
Noel asks what it would mean to take seriously James Cone’s “admon-
ishment that we derive our hermeneutical principle for interpreting
black sources from those sources themselves,”and suggests that African
American art will be indispensable as a dialogue partner to black the-
ology and religion.58
Around the world, many forms of writing and memory-keeping
come in the form of narratives passed on through generations, cycles
of stories remembered and told as full of multilayered meanings, and
not fully appreciated if understood only as clues to a temporal sequence
of events. Many cultures have produced narratives such as the likes of
an Iliad, Odyssey, the Gilgamesh Epic, the Navajo creation epic Diné
Bahane’, the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyana, the Nordic Sagas, El Cid,
the Nibelungenlied, and various collections of fables and fairy tales that
gathered the lore of the people still orally passed on in European cul-
tures and elsewhere, as well as the Pentateuch. Most of these were trans-
mitted orally for extended times and existed most likely in a variety of
versions.59
Many of them combine ethnogenesis, historical events, and tales of

sacred power and knowledge with social psychology; stories of tensions
between corporate survival and individual assertion; relationships with
gods and holy people as well as with animal peoples; and geography
and memories of volcanic events and climate shifts; all written as an
experience of the sacred power and the links to land and people. The
themes often resemble each other, though the particular ways in which
they are highlighted, the importance given to them, the nature of the
resolution, and so forth all differ widely in each account, showing the
difference of cultural expression as well as the similarity of the ground-
ing challenges of life.
What does it mean when a migratory people inscribes itself into
the landscape? We could ask the same question of the Navajo, rela-
tives of a number of Dene people (Athabascans in Alaska and Canada,
etc.), whose languages are related and where there is evidence they are
genetically related. The Navajo moved further south at some point,
reinventing themselves, inscribing the creation of their world into the
new place, putting down roots, and stacking versions of myths on top
of each other:
In laying claims to the high desert plateau of New Mexico and Arizona as their
site of creation, however, the Navajo had a problem. Pueblo Indians, descen-
dants of the “ancestral pueblo” ruins found in Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon,
were the first. From the start, little love was lost between the two peoples. One
strategy that the Navajo employed to claim the Southwest as their motherland
was to smother it with stories. Few American Indian nations have produced
such a crowded atlas of place-names and localized narratives.60
Ancestral links are retold visually in something like a totem pole in a tiny
Maori village along the Whanganui River. During a trip to Aotearoa/
New Zealand, our group of canoe travelers stopped at the village to stay
there overnight. One of the guardians of the village explained to me that
the “totem” pole in the center of the village square had to be read top-
down, from origins to downriver directions. While I do not recall the
specifics, I do remember that it included personified representations of
the mountain Taranaki and the Whanganui River. From the forces of the
Taranaki snow meltwaters the Whanganui river flows, and marked the
flow of the river by way of several ancestral forces, until, at the bottom,
the male human ancestor was depicted. Judson Brown, a Tlingit, describes
a similar form of writing among tribes of the Pacific Northwest:
Totem poles were our history books. Unfortunately, the missionaries who came
early on in the 1800s and the public officials thought that totem poles were
our idols. They weren’t. They all told a story, usually of achievement or the
overcoming of some obstacles.61
FRAGMENTS TOWARD REMYTHOLOGIZATION
One of the connotations of logos is counting and accounting, Aufzählen

und Erzählen, listing and narrating, so to speak.62 Employing Jacques
Derrida’s idiom, one could say that each discursive economy attempts
to “render an account,” that is, a representation of an exchange of
meaning and value, linguistic and economic. Derrida continues that
“one must also render an account of the desire to render an account,”63
indicating that his interest is deeply hermeneutic as well as “economic,”
having to do with the desire to render, to interpret, to transfer meaning,
at the same time as it is continuously inverted, subverted, and reverted
to the lost trace, to that which is lost in translation, and gained in
translation. Each of his texts that discusses these speech forms partici-
pates ironically, as Derrida has famously elaborated upon, in explain-
ing these questions. For Derrida, language and money and accounting
have striking commonalities: Word, sign, and coin are “counterfeit,”
that is, they claim to represent what is unrepresentable.
Derrida was fascinated by the relationship between text, writing, and
monetary instruments as forms of counterfeit, of displaying value that
ultimately is not congruent with what it represents. Money, like writ-
ing, aims to re-present, to make present again meaning and value, but
ultimately is “always already,” a present absence, continually reminding
us of the absence of presence, meaning, and value in its representa-
tions.64 This absence of presence also extends, for him, to the messi-
anic, a notion for Jews and Christians of a play of presence and absence
of the desired for leader and ruler, for transformation, for a new age, a
new spacetime, a new divine presence.
All we have are counterfeits, and though they can be fairly reliable,
they are never fully representative of “truth” or “content.” Hermes is a
counterfeiter, a trickster, as well as messenger.
Though Jacques Derrida has had an ambivalent relationship with

hermeneutics and there are ways in which his own work traces the
“impossible possibility” of writing, Toth, the Egyptian god of writ-
ing and scribes, makes several appearances in Of Grammatology and
Dissemination. Derrida was forever wrestling with what one might
call a “Hermes-effect”: dissemination, diffèrence, and its many “semi-
synonyms.”
Modern anthropologists offer their own approaches to mythos:
structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss and others attempted to reconceptu-
alize logos and reconceive rationality under the inclusion of mythical
thinking.65 Levi-Strauss thereby emphasizes the logic resident within
the myths themselves, not a logical interpretation of an external inter-
preter:66 the expression of aporetic experiences of human existence,67life
and death, moral quandaries and choices, experiences of healing and
transformation, the quest to contain desire, and others. Deep questions
of life are symbolically expressed in ways that do not necessarily offer a
solution, but continue to elaborate on the quandaries and choices.
Thinkers, such as Hegel and Nietzsche, perhaps more easily associ-
ated with logos were clear about the importance of mythos, though
they sought to supersede it each in their own way.68 Yet no attempt at
dismantling and discrediting mythos has been able to repress its ongo-
ing vibrancy. Even in societies that deem themselves dedicated to the
pursuit of reasonable discourse, “mythos” as a genre and form of imagi-
nation is alive. The fascination with spirituality, myth, and fantasy pro-
liferates seemingly impervious to critical inquiry, even in those places
where secularism and rationalism appear to rule.69 Those who prefer
mythological thinking, too, can exhibit unhelpfully dichotomic juxta-
positions between mythos and logos that privilege one form over another.
Such false dichotomies often underlie some of the more extreme cel-
ebrations of the one at the cost of the other. Bultmann’s program of
demythologization did not attempt to get rid of myth, but sought to
interpret it, thus respecting its importance even at a time when critique
of mythical narrativity was at a high point.70
More recently, ethnographers have observed hermeneutical strate-
gies in myths that correspond to the “ ‘stacking’ of former experiences
and events” with contemporary overlays, without a strict distinction
between particular time frames.71 While the layering of narratives
makes for a very complex and presumably “contradictory” experience
for the listener, it is the agency and its ability to remind, instruct, teach,
and enlighten, not the temporal sequence or even “historicity” that is
of primary concern. Hence, the proliferation and varieties of the details
and turns of oral narratives have their own logic. A metaphor for such
narrative polyvalence is given by an Ojibwe orator with an arboreal
metaphor: “there are many species of trees, and each tree has leaves that
are not alike.” The Hidatsa liken the tribe’s inventory of origin stories
to “the branches of a tree,” in stark contrast to the “one way to know
the Great Spirit” presented by a Jesuit priest. Branches are connected to
the stem and the crown, so that, according to a Blackfeet of northern
Montana, “the parts of this weed all branch from the stem. . . . So it is
with the versions of a myth.”72 It may strike us that the Jesuit priest’s
position may not necessarily be the one we might have to take if we con-
sider that the Bible only with hermeneutical violence can be described
as a unitary text with a unitary theology. Rather, there may be many
species and variations teaching us many forms of divine wisdom in the
texts of the Bible and tradition, and elsewhere.
Many ancient texts of culture are complex narratives of generations
of layers of retelling and meaning. Often, new influences are overlaid
over older bedrock. Thus, there is, for example,
no guarantee that the Beowulf manuscript, surviving as it does with mani-

festly Christian overtones, does not represent something of a denial of an older
Germanic religion. How can we be sure that some old Anglo-Saxon story-
teller—wary of a scribe’s eagerness to put things in writing—did not choose
to hold something back? Nor do we have any assurance that the text records
the full range of social functions served by that narrative poem about monster
slaying and ring giving.73
Whether it is Beowulf, the Navajo creation story, or Eusebius’s account

of the history of the Christian Church, bowdlerization and idealization
of the content are a clear and present danger. That is precisely what
the figures of Hermes, trickster, and fool are here to remind us of. It
is perhaps more surprising that in some instances of biblical narrative,
harshly critical accounts of leadership survive. Narratives shape iden-
tity, and in turn, how those narratives are shaped has great influence
over the shaping of persons and communities. They encourage, disci-
pline, teach values, courage, social values, heroism, beliefs, and ways to
engage with the world around the community out of which they arise.
While Ingolf Dalferth’s helpful and learned reassessment of the rela-

tionship between mythos and logos makes short shrift of many of the
more untenable claims and unhelpful developments in the history of
Western philosophy and theology, he continues to speak of logos as
“kritischer Maßstab des Mythos,”74 thereby continuing to give logos an
evaluative quality over mythos that seems to be a one-way street. This
continued preference of logos over mythos can proliferate the assump-
tion that mythos does not contain forms of rationality or that logos can
be arrived at in some absolute form that makes it possible to evaluate
mythos from its perch.
In addition, one can think of myths of going through life cycles.
One example is offered by Richard Rohr. He suggests that mythos des-
ignates a community’s common vision and argues that communities go
through phases of varying trust in a common myth, roughly follow-
ing the outline of a bell curve. Thus, a myth shapes a common vision
of community composed of preconditions, shared foundations, goals,
means, programs, and finally structures, that then are beset by a vari-
ety of doubts or inquiries, such as functional doubt, ideological doubt,
ethical and absolute doubt.75 At that point, the myth either ends, or is
recreated. Thus myths not only narrate such processes but their func-
tion in a community undergoes similar life cycles. There are many
signs that the mythos of some Christian communities has experienced
several of these forms of doubt. And therefore the challenge for theolo-
gians is that it be recreated. It is my contestation that this occurs with a
theology that engages the fullest possible range of genres and discourses
and resolutely claims its space as that of mytho-logy.
NOTES
1. R. S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Refigurations: An Alternative Way of Reading

the Bible and Doing Theology (London: SCM Press, 2003), 90.
2. This has also been proposed by Teilhard the Chardin and Sallie McFague.
Cf. Gary Dorrien, The Word as True Myth: Interpreting Modern Theology
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1997), 223, and Sallie McFague,
The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993),
81.
3. For example, Alejandro Haber’s attempt at integrating the practice of Western
archaeology with rituals signifying the spiritual ancestors in place at the site
in Catamarca, Argentina, and thus forming the beginnings of an intercultural
archaeological practice. Alejandro F. Haber, “Reframing Social Equality within

an Intercultural Archaeology,” World Archaeology 39, no 2 (June 2007): 281–97.
Beyond romanticizing indigenous practices, Haber sees them as fraught with
problems and challenges as any other. Haber describes the creation of an epis-
temological framework that can integrate multiple narratives as a form of per-
ception and knowledge. Certainly it is necessary always to engage cautiously,
critically, as well as generously with any number of transcultural practices.
5. Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress, 2008), 13.
6. Italics mine. Raimundo Panikkar, Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics: Cross-
Cultural Studies (Bangalore: Asian Trading Corporation, 1979), 99–100.
2008), 8.
8. Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe:
Clear Light, 2000), 13.
9. Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Jonah, Jesus, and Other Good Coyotes: Speaking
Peace to Power in the Bible (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2007), 91.
13. Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 300.
14. Kurt Hübner, “Mythos I,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard
Muller (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994), 599, 601, 607.
15. Fritz Stolz, “Mythos II,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, Vol. 23, Gerhard
Muller, ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994), 609.
Herder, 1993), 16.
17. Hübner, “Mythos I,” 599–602, and Stolz, “Mythos II,” 610, following
Christian Gottlob Heyne.
18. Hübner, “Mythos I,” 597.
19. See David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Random House,
1996). Underlying this connection is the question of the relation between
myth and animism in modern Western scientific and theological discourse.
See also Anselm Franke, Animismus: Moderne Hinter Den Spiegeln = Animism:
Modernity through the Looking Glass (Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König,
2011), Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2006).
20. Cajete, Native Science, 27. Some, as I propose here, might include a remy-
thologization, a rearticulation of mythological layers of meaning of the world
among the scientific, the religious, and among the secular. A new respect for
the forms of spirituality found across the globe would mean engaging them
just as the seemingly “rational” discourses of logos, with a hermeneutics of
suspicion and grace. Much mythos has been outsourced to popular media,
can be found in urban communal practices and forms of community. Indeed,
we often rehash and rethread the same stories over and over again, often with
decreasing conviction, it seems. While mythos can often have the character of
a metanarrative, mythos today often functions as one story among many, but
one that for many functions as a metaphor to live by.
21. Cajete, Native Science, 21.
25. Cajete, Native Science, 5–7.
26. The term “logocentrism” was coined by Ludwig Klages and popularized by
Jacques Derrida who picked it up from De Saussure. See, for example, Jacques
Derrida, Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins, corr. Ed. 1997), 12.
27. Hübner, “Mythos I,” 597.
28. Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago,
IL: Chicago University Press, 1999), 43.
35. G. Christopher Stead, “Logos,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, Vol. 21, ed.
Gerhard Müller (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991), 436.
36. See also Dalferth, Jenseits von Mythos und Logos, 72.
37. Stead, “Logos,” 438.
38. It can also signify sentence, language, discourse, reason, and so forth. Stead,
“Logos,” 433.
41. Dalferth, Jenseits von Mythos und Logos, 58–59 See De Civitate Dei, VI, 6.
43. See Elizabeth Johnson, A., She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist
Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992) and Catherine Keller, Face
of the Deep (New York/London: Routledge, 2003), as well as Stead, “Logos,”
439. Gnostic and Jewish sources can feature Sophia as the redeemer figure.
45. Dalferth, Jenseits von Mythos und Logos, 67 and Stead, “Logos,” 437, 439,
442–44.
46. Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the
Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 31.
48. Nancy Cardoso Pereira, “The Body as a Hermeneutical Category: Guidelines
for a Feminist Hermeneutics of Liberation,” The Ecumenical Review 54, no. 3
(2002): 9–10.
49. Justo Gonzaléz, Out of Every Tribe and Nation: Christian Theology at the
Ethnic Roundtable (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1992), 43, quoted in Jace
Weaver, “From I-Hermeneutics to We-Hermeneutics: Native Americans and
the Post-Colonial,” in Native American Religious Identity, ed. Jace Weaver
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998), 10.
50. Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 9. Ironic then, perhaps, that Hermes came to stand
as the patron of interpretive studies, maintaining a link to the deceptive
nature of intercultural and interreligious discourse, rather than invoking the
“reliability” of Apollonian words.
52. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990) and Scott, Weapons of the
Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1985).
53. Peter Nabokov, A Forest in Time: American Indian Ways of History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 130.
55. See Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors,
Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000), Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man:
The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982).
56. James A. Noel, Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic
World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 122.
57. Noel, Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World,
122.
58. Noel, Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World, 143.
59. Paul G. Zolbrod, Diné Bahane’: The Navajo Creation Story (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 21.
60. This writing oneself into the landscape was, of course, not without challenges,
because the Four Corners where the Navajo live were not, in fact a tabula rasa,
a world created ex nihilo, but had previous occupants. Peter Nabokov, Where
The Lighting Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places (New York:
Penguin, 2006), 91.
61. Nabokov, A Forest in Time, 150 Ancestors, as so often, are therefore not
worshipped, but honored. The memory of ancestors carries the memory of
cultural identity, naming and identifying the forces that have shaped and
continue to shape the community that continues through some oral and some
written remembered pieces. An ancestor can therefore be described as a force

that has shaped and continues to shape a community, often a person, but also
may be geographic features or animals.
62. Stead, “Logos.”
63. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 31.
64. See Derrida, Given Time.
66. Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language
(Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1982), 175.
68. Dalferth, Jenseits von Mythos und Logos, 26. Hegel through Aufhebung, by
seeking to articulate the absolute contained therein, and Nietzsche through
beginning a psychological interpretation. Hübner, “Mythos I,” 598.
69. Dalferth notes that in some contexts, such as in Germany, there are layers of
uncritical fascination with myth and new age patchwork narratives that resist
critical inquiry. Dalferth, Jenseits von Mythos und Logos, 16.
72. Nabokov, A Forest in Time, viii.
73. Zolbrod, Diné Bahane’, 24.
75. Richard Rohr, “Das Glockenkurvenprinzip: Vom Mythos der Gemeinschaft,”
in Der Nackte Gott, in Der Nackte Gott: Plädoyer Für ein Christentum Aus
Fleisch und Blut, ed. Richard Rohr (Munich: Claudius, 1998), 48–49.
WORKS CITED
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Random House, 1996.
Cajete, Gregory. Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. Santa Fe: Clear
Light, 2000.
Cardoso Pereira, Nancy. “The Body as a Hermeneutical Category: Guidelines
for a Feminist Hermeneutics of Liberation.” The Ecumenical Review 54, no. 3
(2002): 235–39.
Derrida, Jacques. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Dorrien, Gary. The Word as True Myth: Interpreting Modern Theology. Louisville,
KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1997.
Franke, Anselm. Animismus: Moderne Hinter Den Spiegeln = Animism: Modernity
through the Looking Glass. Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2011.
Gonzaléz, Justo. Out of Every Tribe and Nation: Christian Theology at the Ethnic
Roundtable. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1992.
Haber, Alejandro F. “Reframing Social Equality within an Intercultural
Archaeology.” World Archaeology 39, no. 2 (June 2007): 281–97.
Harvey, Graham. Animism: Respecting the Living World. New York: Columbia
Hübner, Kurt. “Mythos I.” In Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Muller,
597–608. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994.
Johnson, Elizabeth, A. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological
Discourse. New York: Crossroad, 1992.
———. On The Mystery: Discerning God in Process. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress,
2008.
Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves,
Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston, MA:
Beacon Press, 2000.
McFague, Sallie. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis, MN:
Fortress, 1993.
———. Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language. Philadelphia,
PA: Fortress, 1982.
———. Where the Lighting Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places.
New York: Penguin, 2006.
Noel, James A. Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of
Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Rohr, Richard. “Das Glockenkurvenprinzip: Vom Mythos der Gemeinschaft.” In
Der Nackte Gott: In Der Nackte Gott: Plädoyer Für ein Christentum Aus Fleisch
und Blut, Richard Rohr, 45–61. Munich: Claudius, 1998.
Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
———. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1985.
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Gerhard Müller, 432–44. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991.
Stolz, Fritz. “Mythos II.” In Theologische Realenzyklopädie, Vol. 23, ed. Gerhard
Muller, 608–25. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994.
Sugirtharajah, R. S. Postcolonial Refigurations: An Alternative Way of Reading the
Bible and Doing Theology. London: SCM Press, 2003.
Walls, Andrew F. The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the
Transmission of Faith. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996.
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1–25. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998.
8. Reframing Theological
Hermeneutics
In arguing for the expansion of the term hermeneutics, have I, against

my own best intentions, staged a hostile takeover of the cultural pro-
duction of other societies? Is the venture of reframing theological
hermeneutics little more than a form of recolonization? Perhaps the
present project does not escape this danger. And yet, it has been the
intent to highlight some of the shared interpretive traits across cultural
and religious difference, rather than argue that one culture has some
kind of claim to have originated certain types of techniques, insights,
or interpretive achievements.
Cultures engage in a variety of meaning-making processes, involv-
ing hermeneutical practices and methods, though they can at times
seem unrecognizable one to another. Assimilation happens; cultural
hybridity happens. There is no such thing as perfect representation,
just as there are no transference-free relationships. The more important
question to ask is: How does representation happen, and what are the
intents and effects in each particular case? How does power function,
and are subjects and practices being reshaped? The present inquiry can
only point to various patterns, hope to show some points of connection,
and hint at some spaces for expansion, but can hardly populate them.
That will be a larger, communal effort.
In the movement toward reconstructing theological hermeneutics on
a broader place and across cultural shifts and transformations, we have
circumambulated a tricky territory. Any attempt to shift toward a more
expansive theological hermemeutics is faced with the challenge of not
repeating the rendering of the religio-cultural Other as the “exegetical
horizon of difference,” as Homi Bhabha warns:
The Other loses its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its historic desire, to
establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse. However impeccably
the content of an “other” culture may be known, however anti-ethnocentrically

it is represented, it is location and the closure of grand theories, the demand
that, in analytic terms, it be always the good object of knowledge, a docile body
of difference, that reproduces a relation of domination and is the most serious
indictment of the institutional powers of critical theory.1
We have tried here to peer beyond such strategies of containment of

the “Other” as “forever the exegetical horizon of difference,” attempting
to come to a more “intersubjective” hermeneutical horizon, circumam-
bulating rather than “reproducing a relation of domination.” There is
no pretense here that we have been representing “anti-ethnocentrally,”
as it is unclear whether nonethnocentric representation is possible, or
even desirable. Rather, it is the pretense at a view from nowhere that
actually is from a very specific, yet unnamed place, that can serve to
powerfully exoticize some interpretive practices as primitive and others
as culturally advanced.2
AN INDETERMINATE IN/CONCLUSION
It has been the claim of this book that interpretive agency has aspects
that are represented by the figures of Hermes, trickster, and fool. These
figures reveal, perform, and challenge the status quo of a society and its
structures of power, knowledge, and belief. Remembering that herme-
neutical acts are notoriously multivalent, it is my hope that engagement
with these figures can help reframe hermeneutical work as a vibrant
reminder of the play between humility and courage in reinterpreting
the divine through mythos and logos anew each day. These figures,
I suggest, can help to reconstruct theology as mytho-logy in teaching
us greater respect for the dynamics of mythological narrativity and its
logical exfoliation.
These figures circumambulate loci, they are on the move, exposing
them to multiple vistas and encounters. Like travelers, they negotiate
culture shock, messages that strain the system, are hard to capture, easy
to misunderstand, and resist the temptation to overgeneralize, dismiss,
and think that “home-sweet-home” culture is always better, smarter,
and generally have the “right” take on the divine. Instead, the chance
of opening oneself up to radical hermeneutical openness, of living on
the borders of the divine and struggling to carry and decode messages
that simply cannot be fully captured, the task of the theologian, the
Reframing Theological Hermeneutics 189
preacher, the pastor, or the witness to faith, is in many ways similar to

that of the trickster. We may accept this as a fact of our own complex
involvement in meaning making, or we may want to deny it, insisting
that we have access to a greater truth that somehow, we, and our com-
munity of discourse, have particular access to. It seems to me that the
greater humility and the greater possibility to be surprised anew by the
divine lie in the gift of embracing our own foolish, tricky, hermeneuti-
cal positionalities.
Embracing the fragmentary nature of our knowledge and of the
narratives we weave seems overall a more helpful strategy for resourc-
ing the retelling and reimagining of ancient narratives newly experi-
enced, more respectful for the fragility, beauty, and yes, the sacredness
of these narratives. The sacred and the holy thus receive a more fully
captured respect for all its qualities, not just the domesticated ones, but
indeed touching with respect as well as joy the mysterium tremendum et
fascinans, its complexity, its indeterminacy.
INTERPRETING BODIES
Bodies interpret, that is, as humans we interpret in full embodiment,

enfleshment, and we interpret bodies divine, human, animal, and ele-
mental. These bodies matter and our interpretations of these bodies
matter. What we leave out in denial remains outside of frameworks that
strive to account for the vision of community and the sacred.
Hermeneutics can be said to be operative when something is not
immediately intelligible: that which presents a challenge departing
from the seemingly obvious. And, perhaps hermeneutics is also what
we engage in attempting to unseal what seems obvious, and known.
The divine and the experiences of God and the sacred are of course a
notorious hermeneutical problem. How to render, translate, interpret
the unintelligible, the infinitely untranslatable without indeed admit-
ting to its impossibility? No surprise then that the messengers of the
divine have shape-shifting, circumambulating, tricky, deceptive, and
shifty characteristics associated with them. Pretending that in fact
it would be possible to render divine messages without some kind of
interference seems in itself ethically problematic. Thus, the apophatic
moment in theological language, the denial of the appropriateness of
linguistic expression, is a necessary countermove for all kataphatic
expression—unsaying that which was said; exhaling that which was

inhaled; and letting go that which had been touched upon.
Recognizing the temptation to solidify and strengthen our inter-
pretive habits and convictions on the differences and hermeneutic
resistances that other bodies represent presents a further challenge.
Christian theological hermeneutics has been different from and yet
invariably close to that of Jewish interpretive traditions. It is perhaps
the narcissism of small differences that has made this hermeneutical
relationship so complex, tragic, and central to how entire cultures
shape communal identities. The dangers of drawing lines between
hermeneutical differences can very quickly become significant in the
interpretation of bodies as well as texts. The ambivalence of hermeneu-
tical difference, and its potential for violent self-definition and hostile
supersessionisms, is another one of the deep dynamics we have to be
cautious of when interpreting with a difference. It is thus crucial to
be aware of the complexity of difference within one’s own tradition
as well as that of another and to be wary of jumping to hermeneutical
conclusions.
It has thus been the hope here to show some of the more surprising
commonalities between various interpretive traditions: some patterns
that might be recognized. As before, these are simply suggestions, hop-
ing to engage the mind of the reader toward exploring their own inter-
pretive traditions, for most likely we have inherited several ones and
perhaps are struggling to reconcile them.
We have considered three examples of hermeneutical pattern rec-
ognition, attempting to reveal the complexity and learnings of bodies
that interpret: the tragic, and complexly powerful and yet powerless
position of La Malinche in the negotiation of the Spanish presence in
Mexico; the twists and turns of German Jewish and German Christian
negotiations of religious and political identities and the complex mis-
use of ideologically distorted information obtained through oriental-
ist colonial centuries to invent a historically inaccurate romanticized
“Aryan” identity to tragically negotiate Jewish Christian relations;
and the present-day troubles of unacknowledged Christian theologi-
cal hermeneutics in US attempts to determine which Islamic nations
or groups are considered having an “appropriate” hermeneutics of the
Qur’an.
Reframing Theological Hermeneutics 191
Tracing the history of the figure of the Greek god Hermes attempted
to expose the indeterminacy at the core of the practice of hermeneutics.
The sacred duty of delivering messages and the reality of the mistransla-
tions, omissions, additions, and shifts that obtain in such communica-
tion were explored. Attempting to “put Hermes back into hermeneutics”
meant to affirm the polyvalence of interpretation of sacred messages as
well as help establish a set of characteristics that Hermes shares with
trickster figures in other cultural contexts. These patterns of similarity
then hoped to argue that trickster figures can articulate a form of nar-
rative hermeneutics, that is, they teach about the downfall of relying
on easy similarities and assuming identity where differentiation is the
overwhelming experience. Another example of this kind of figure was
shown to reside in the many narratives of fools, who teach through
deception, articulate uncomfortable truths in the face of power, and
generally point out that the emperor has no clothes on. The folly of
God, of the apostles of faith, feasts of fools, court jesters, and the holy
folly of the saints provide a corollary to the tricksters, each contributing
their own hermeneutical arts.
Theological hermeneutics as proposed here is the quest of forming,
articulating, and communicating an understanding of the world in
which humans live and the events and agents experienced therein. It
includes the art and skill of negotiating exchanges, connections, and
differences (and presences/absences) between and among God/s and
humans, between cultures, times, places, ecosystems. Thus, I have sug-
gested that hermeneutics describes polymorphic acts of interpretation.
Our sacred texts teem with tricky, foolish hermeneuts of the divine.
Messages of the divine are communicated through an amazing range
of words and actions; and they are always already sandwiched in the
layers of other information that enhances, distorts, reveals, or confuses.
At times the divine message is communicated through intentional mis-
leading. Riddling, the telling of parables and the use of metaphors and
analogies, while attempting to express the inexpressible is also employed
as a tool to confound the readers and potentially to encourage revela-
tory transformation by way of these interpretive actions.
The present proposal for a polydox theological hermeneutics has
hoped to reveal a certain commitment to the foolishness of theol-
ogy, the tricky nature of our language of faith, and the hermeneutical
in/conclusions that routinely frustrate, yet enliven, the labor of theo-

logical expression.
That a renewed openness to indeterminacy, to the complexities and
polyvalences of mythical narratives, and a reengagement in theology
as mytho-logy might be a compelling invitation to invigorate the dis-
course of theological hermeneutics has been the hope here. Whether
this is something you want to participate in you must, dear reader,
discern for yourself.
NOTES
1. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London/New York: Routledge, 1994),

31.
2. See, for example, Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982), and Jacob K. Olupona, Beyond
Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity (London:
Routledge, 2003).
WORKS CITED
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London/New York: Routledge, 1994.

Olupona, Jacob K. Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and
Modernity. London: Routledge, 2003.
Wolf, Eric. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1982.
Index
Adorno, Theodor, 18 Barber, Paul T., 21, 100n54

Aesop, 146 Barth, Karl, 65–6
Aguilar (Cortés’s interlocutor), 36–7 Belser, Julia Watts, 119
alchemy, 86–8 Beowulf, 178
Alva, Fernando de, 36 Bhabha, Homi, 60, 187–8
American Indian. See Native Bhagavad Gita, 48, 51
American Bible, New Testament, 19, 170
angeloi kyriou, x 1 Corinthians 1:17–25, 117
angels, x, 24, 80, 85, 90–1, 96 1 Corinthians 3:18, 153
animism, 120, 124, 134n46, 167–8, 1 Corinthians 4:9, 146
180n19 1 Corinthian 12:25, 145
anthropology John, 80, 171
and animism, 120, 167 Luke, 80
and Christianity, 36, 138n153, 153 Luke 24:11, 117
and cultural survival, 173 Mark, 80, 117
and female tricksters, 135n69 Mark 9:40, 2
and Hermes, 81, 92 Matthew 1:2–6, 115
and logos/mythos, 65, 177 Matthew 10:16, 113
and Otherness, 17 Matthew 12:30, 2
and pattern recognition, 5, 8 Matthew 17:24–27, 116
Anzaldua, Gloria, 42 Matthew 22:15–17, 116
Aphrodite, 89 Philippians 2, 157
Apollo, 172–3, 182n50 Bible, Old Testament, 19, 48, 100n58
apophasis (critical unknowingness), 2, Genesis, 63–4, 113, 123, 171
22, 89, 108 Genesis 3, 123
Aquinas, 62, 73 Genesis 25:28, 114
Aristotle, 2, 62–3 Genesis 27:6–10, 113–14
Aryan identity, 25, 49–51, 69, 190 1 Kings 13, x
Augustine of Hippo, 27n5, 171 1 Kings 22:23, 96n1
City of God, 64 Blessingway ceremony, 21, 91
On Christian Doctrine, 85, 145 Bolivia, 29n31
Bonaventure, 62
Ballinger, Franchot, 132n6 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 24
Barber, Elizabeth Wayland, 21, Bopp, Franz, 50
100n54 Bote, Hermann, 149
194 Index
Boyarin, Daniel, 119 Genesis, 171–2, 143n138

Brant, Sebastian: Ship of Fools, 151 Navajo, 139n172, 174–5, 178
Briquel, Dominique, 83 Yoruba, 128
Brown, Judson, 176
Brueghel, Pieter: Simplicissimus, 151 D/divine, 1–2, 7–10, 12, 19, 40–1,
Bultmann, Rudolf Karl, 65, 172, 177 170–2, 188–9, 191
fools/folly, 144–6
cairns (stone pile arrangements), 83–4, and logos/mythos, 4, 66, 72–3
97n14 messengers, 6, 80, 189, 191
Cajete, Gregory, 167–8 and theology, 12, 62, 72
Canetti, Elias, 123 tricksters, 107–9, 112, 118–19,
cantus firmus (grounding chant of 121–4, 128–9
Christ), 24 Dalferth, Ingolf, 10, 59–61, 65, 166,
capitalism, 17 179, 183n69
Catholicism, 29n21, 50, 110, 153 death, 16, 18, 108–9, 113, 117–18,
Chamisso, Adelbert von, 44 126–8, 148, 177
Changing Woman, 91, 99n50, deception, 37, 40
100n51, 125–6 and fools/folly, 147–8, 191
Chicano/a, 40, 42 and Hermes, 182n50
Chingada, La, 41–2 and logos/mythos, 63–4, 67, 165–6,
Christianity 170–3
Catholicism, 29n21, 50, 110, 153 and tricksters, 110, 113, 122
fools and folly, 144–8, 152–8 See also truth
Jesus as trickster, 114–18 deconstruction, viii, 59, 87–9, 93
Jewish-Christian relationality, Derrida, Jacques, viii, 87–8, 125,
25–6, 44–7, 49, 82, 85, 171, 190 176–7, 181n26
Protestantism, 19, 25, 29n21, 50–1, Dionysius, 152
92, 153 Donaldson, Laura, 42
and translation, 90, 94–5, 115–16 Doty, William G., viii, 61, 97n11,
See also Bible: New Testament; Jesus 100n54
of Nazareth Douglass, Frederick, 130
Cicero, 62 doxa (opinion), 22, 24
Cobb, John, 66 dualities
coincidence of opposites (Nicholas of hierarchical, 151, 168–9
Cusa), 72, 88 logos/mythos, 14, 18, 59–73,
colonialism, 5, 7, 17, 25, 35–41 163–79
colonization, 11, 82, 113, 117, 132n9, and multiplicity, 72
187 and tricksters, 105
Cone, James, 174
Corpus Hermeticum, 86 Eagleton, Terry, 43–4
Cortés, Hernan, 25, 35–41 ecology, 4–5, 7, 13, 16, 165
Crapanzano, Vincent, 81–2, 92 Ecuador, 13, 29n31
creation narratives, 132–3n15, 165 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 151
Index 195
embodiment, 8, 13, 15–18, 68–9, 72, gender

90–1, 96, 115, 147, 166, 189 female tricksters, 26, 105, 113–15,
Emerald Tablet (Hermes), 20 135n69
enlightenment, European, 17–18, and fools/folly, 147–8, 151–2, 154
45–7, 63–4, 67, 166 and hermeneutics, 89–91
entivivity, 121 and speech, 168–73
Erasmus: In Praise of Folly, 145, 147, geopsyche, 16, 30n37, 72
151, 153–4 Germany, 183n69
Esquivel, Laura, 39–41 colonialism, 43–51
ethics, 5, 13–14, 23, 48, 73, 82, 108– fools and folly, 149–51, 153
10, 123, 157, 179, 189 national identity, 25, 190
ethnicity. See race/ethnicity Nazism, 40, 51, 69, 125
ethnogenesis, 175 Wotan, 81, 85
ethnography, 5, 8, 177–8 graecophilia (fascination with Greek
eu-angelion (good message), 24, 96 antiquity), 43
Eve, 40, 107, 115, 123 Gregory of Nyssa, 64, 71–2
exchanges, 5–7, 23, 35, 82, 85–6, 91, Grimm Brothers, 50
97n12, 139n172, 176, 191 Guadalupe, 40, 42
Fanon, Frantz, 151 Haber, Alejandro, 179–80n3

Farella, John R., 21 Harpyies, 89
Ficino, Mauricio, 86 Hebrew (language), 48–9, 93
fool and folly Hebrew scriptures, 93, 95, 121,
carnival, 27, 151–3 138n143
Christian, 144–8, 152–8 Heidegger, Martin, 65
Eastern Orthodox, 150–1, 154–8 Heinrich, Bernd, 132n14
female, 147–8, 151–2, 154 Heliand, 64, 85
holy fools, 27, 106–7, 113, 118, Heliand, The, 64, 85
144–8, 151, 154–8, 191 Hellpach, Willy, 30n37
jesters, 148–51, 153, 158, 191 Hercules, 85
madness, 27, 143–4, 147–50, 155, Herder, Johann Gottfried, 48–9, 51
158 Herling, Bradley L., 49
reformation, 153–5 hermaphrodite, 89, 99n42, 115
in relationship to wisdom, 26–7, hermaphroneutics, 15
143–7, 150–8 hermeneia, 2, 79
Symeon the Fool, 146–7 hermeneutic impulse, 17
Till Eulenspiegel, 84, 149–50 hermeneutics, 1–4
“village idiots,” 143 colonial, 35–51
Foucault, Michel, 13, 158n2 defined, vii, 1, 6
and folly, 144–7, 150, 158
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1 and gender, 89–91
Gates, Henry Louis, 97n18, 124, and Hermes, vii–viii, 6, 12, 26,
127–9, 131 79–86, 129, 191
196 Index
hermeneutics—Continued Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 44

history of, 81–2 hybridity, cultural, 23, 64, 93,
indeterminacy of, 59, 72, 80, 88–9, 187
95, 188–92 Hyde, Lewis, 91–2, 130, 135n69
as intercultural practice, 91–3
and mysticism, 70–3 identity, 114, 119, 123, 125, 127–8,
as pattern recognition, 5–10, 35–53 130, 165, 174, 190–1
polydox, 22–5, 83 Aryan, 25, 49–51, 69, 190
and power, 172–3 ethnic, 14, 25, 36, 40, 42–51, 79,
and riddling, 10–13 173–4
stereotypes of, ix German, 25, 46
See also theological hermeneutics Jewish, 44
Hermes, 2, 4, 18 national, 25, 36, 46–7
deconstructed, 87–9 Ihimaera, Whiti: Whale Rider, 125
Emerald Tablet, 20 indeterminacy, 59, 72, 80, 88–9, 95,
and gender, 89–91 106, 118, 128, 188–92
and hermeneutics, vii–viii, 6, 12, India, 44–5, 48–51, 70, 95
26, 79–86, 129, 191 interpreting bodies, 189–92
“Hermes-effect,” 177 intersex, 89, 99n42
history of, 79–80, 83–7 Inukshuk, 83, 97n15
Logius, 86 iridescence, 15
and logos/mythos, 26, 170, 172–3 Irigaray, Luce, 147, 159n29
and Mercury, 79, 81, 83, 85, 91, 95 Iris, 15, 89, 98n23
as patron of interpretive studies, Islam, 25, 45–6, 51–2, 87, 100n59,
182n50 129, 173, 190
and the sacred, 79–80, 84, 87, 92 Ivanov, Sergey, 155, 157
as trickster, 26, 79, 81, 83–4, 105,
119, 124, 176, 191 Jasper, David, 18, 138n144
as Trismegistos (thrice-great), 31n54, Jaspers, Karl, 65–6
86 Jeanrond, Werner, 1
hermeticism, 20 Jennings, Willie, 174
hermiridescence, 15 Jesus of Nazareth, 2–3, 6, 26, 64–5,
Herodotus, 67 146, 152, 165, 171
Herz, Henriette, 44, 49 and hermeneutics, 80, 90–1, 94–5
Hesiod, 66–7, 169–71 as trickster, 114–18
Hiobsboten, x Jews, 44–51, 64, 82, 93–6, 97n8, 117,
Holy Spirit, 36, 80, 119–22 125, 176
Homer, 66–7, 170–1 John of the Cross, 73
Horkheimer, Max, 18 Judaism, 80, 94–5
hozho, 91 Jewish-Christian relationality,
Hügel, Friedrich von: Mystical Element 25–6, 44–7, 49, 82, 85, 171,
in Religion, The, 10 190
Humboldt, Alexander von, 44 and logos/mythos, 63–5, 171–2
Index 197
oral tradition, 20 and truth, 62, 64–9, 163–4,

Pentateuch, 20, 174 168–73, 176
tricksters, 119 use of the terms, 66–7, 170–2
Justin Martyr, 81–2, 87, 97n8 and wisdom, 94, 171–2
Louth, Andrew, 27n5, 70
Karkkainen, Veli-Matti, 120 Luckert, Karl, 90, 122–3, 138n143
Karttunen, Frances, 38 Luckmann, Thomas, 29n22
Keller, Catherine, 23, 73 Luther, Martin, 153
Kenny, Maurice, 106 Lutz, John Sutton, 111
Kidwell, Clara Sue, 112
Kontrastformel (formula of contrasts), 59 Mackendrick, Karmen, 62
Kugel, James, 19–20 Mahmood, Saba, 25, 51–2
Maldonado, Robert, 42–3
Lakoff, George, 68 Malinche, La (Cortés’s translator), 25,
landscape, 83–4, 125, 173, 175, 35–43, 190
182n60 Mary, mother of Jesus, 71, 80, 90–1,
Larsson, Stieg: Millennium trilogy, 99n50, 114–15
168 theotokos, 90
leadership, 10, 40, 118, 156, 176, McNeley, James Kale, 137n128
178 Melville, Herman: Confidence Man,
Leo X, Pope, 149 111
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 106, 108, 177 Mercurians, 93–5
Lincoln, Bruce, 66–7, 169 Mercury, 79, 81, 83, 85, 91, 95.
Lindgren, Astrid, 168 See also Hermes
Llorona, La, 40–2 messengers
logocentrism, 60, 63, 169, 181n26 angels, x, 24, 80, 85, 90–1, 96
logos/mythos, 2, 4, 10, 14, 18, 25–7 divine, 6, 80, 189, 191
and deception, 63–4, 67, 165–6, Mexico, 36–42, 190
170–3 Meyer, Birgit, 134n46
and the divine, 4, 66, 72–3 Miller, Patricia Cox, 14
duality, 14, 18, 59–73, 163–79 missionaries, 7–8, 24, 28n12, 36–8,
and Esu, 129 48, 85, 91, 109–12, 134n46,
and Hermes, 26, 170, 172–3 176
and Judiasm, 63–5, 171–2 Moctezuma, 37–41
and mysticism, 69–73 Moe-Lobeda, Cynthia, 13
New Testament, 170–1 Moses, 63, 72, 86–7
and power, 66–70, 165, 168–72 Mufti, Aamir: Enlightenment in the
and power politics, 66–70 Colony, 44–6
and rationality, 61–2 Muslim. See Islam
remythologization, 24, 79, 164–7, Mystical Theology, The, 72. See also
176–9, 180–1n20 Pseudo-Dionysius
spermatikos, 49, 81, 171 mysticism, 25, 27n5, 49, 59–60,
and theology, 59–66 69–73
198 Index
mystics, 70–1, 73 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 66, 164

myth Njáls Saga, 84
and animism, 167–8, 180n19 Noel, James, 73, 174
and deception, 165–6, 170–3, Noley, Homer, 112
182n50 nomads, 93–5, 100n59, 109
and gender, 168–73 Noordmanns, Oopke, 120
and hermeneutic survival, 173–6
and mysticism, 70–3 O’Connor, Flannery, 111
and power politics, 66–70 Odin, 79, 85, 91, 107
remythologization, 24, 79, 164–7, Old Testament. See Bible: Old
176–9, 180–1n20 Testament
and theology, 59–66 online communication, 16
See also logos/mythos Origen, 63–4, 146
Mythenhermeneutik (hermeneutics of Orthodox Church, 154, 156–7
myth), 64–5 orthodoxy, 22–4, 84, 93
mythos. See logos/mythos Otherness, 3, 17–18, 44–6, 49, 94,
187–8
Nabokov, Peter, 132n9, 173
Nag Hammadi, 86 Pachamama, 13
Native American, 42, 132n6, 132n9, Pandora, 169–70
172, 175 Panikkar, Raimundo, 12, 59, 165–6
Inukshuk, 83 paradox, 22, 26, 47, 49, 72–3, 83,
survival, 173 91–2, 97n8, 117–19, 135–6n93,
tricksters, 106, 110–13, 125, 132n9 153
See also Navajo paradoxology, 72
Navajo, 84 Paz, Octavio: Labyrinth of Solitude,
Blessingway ceremony, 21, 91 The, 41–2
Changing Woman, 91, 99n50, Peri Hermeneias (Aristotle), 2
100n51, 125–6 phallocentrism, 131, 139n177
creation narrative, 21, 139n172, phallogocentrism, 168–9
174–5, 178, 182n60 Philo of Alexandria, 27n5, 63, 172
diyin (holy people), 136n7n114 Plato, 3, 20, 27n5, 44, 76n62, 119
hunter tradition, 90–1, 122–3 on Hermes, 98n23
and landscape, 84, 125, 175, on logos/mythos, 66–7, 170
182n60 Phaedrus, 87
Nilch’I (Holy Wind), 120–2, Republic, 67
137n128 Platonism, 20, 71, 86, 94, 169–70
tricksters, 120–6, 138n143 Pocahontas, 42
Nazism, 40, 51, 69, 125 polydoxy, 4, 12, 20, 22–5, 45, 69, 73,
New Testament. See Bible: New 82–3, 90, 167, 191
Testament polyphony, 24, 169
Nicholas II of Russia, 156 polyvalence, 4, 6, 26, 43, 70–2, 80,
Nicholas of Cusa, 72–3, 88 83, 88, 105–6, 178, 191–2
Index 199
postmodernism, viii, 11 sacred, 2, 4, 8–10, 13–14, 18

postsecular society, 7, 14–15 folly, 144, 150
power, 4, 9, 13, 15, 187–91 and Hermes, 79–80, 84, 87, 92
and colonialism, 35–8, 43 power, 84, 175
and fools/folly, 145–50, 152, 154–6, texts, 20, 22, 25, 50, 80, 87, 129,
158 189, 191
and logos/mythos, 66–70, 165, tricksters, 106, 112, 119, 121, 125,
168–72 127, 144
sacred, 84, 175 salvation, 7
and tricksters, 107–9, 112–14, Saward, John, 144, 150
119–21 Scheub, Harold, 107
privatization, 11 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 44
Protestantism, 19, 25, 29n21, 50–1, Schlegel, Dorothea (Mendelssohn), 44
92, 153 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich,
Pseudo-Dionysos, 27n5, 71–3 44, 49
De Visione Dei, 72–3 Schleiermacher, F. D. E., 43–4, 49
Mystical Theology, The, 73 Hermeneutik and Kritik, 43
Scott, James C., 173
Quetzalcoatl, 39–41 secularization, 11, 29n22, 45, 51, 152
Seidman, Naomi, 94
race/ethnicity, 5, 69, 90, 124, 127, serpent, 40, 113–15, 145
169 Serres, Michel, 24
and colonialism, 38, 40, 42, 47 Shakespeare, William
identities, 14, 25, 36, 40, 42–51, 79, As You Like It, 154
173–4 Macbeth, 148
Rachel, 41 Twelfth Night, 152
Rahab, 41–2, 114–15 shaman, 90, 108, 144, 151, 156–7
Rask, Rasmus, 50 signification, 18, 84–5, 88, 91, 124–5,
rationality, 61–8, 88, 100n54, 108–9, 127–31, 155, 165–6, 187
111, 118, 152, 177, 179, 180–1n20 Slezkine, Yuri, 93–5, 100n59
redemption, 7, 65, 172, 181n43 Smith, Jonathan Z., 110, 165–6
relationality, 7, 16, 27n2, 45 Smith-Christopher, Daniel, 114
religionsgeschichtliche Schule, Socrates, 66, 144, 146
100n58 Sölle, Dorothee, 73
religious affi liation, 11, 29n21–2 Song of Solomon, 71
representation, 8, 14, 18, 71, 88, Spanish conquest, 25
92, 115, 128, 164, 175–6, speech, 25, 67–9, 81, 90, 113, 124, 176
187–8 free, 150–1
riddles and riddling, 10–13, 115–19, gendered, 168–73
191 storytelling, 8, 18, 21, 63, 168, 178
Rohr, Richard, 179 Sugirtharajah, R. S., 163–4
Russia, 84, 150–1, 154–8 supersessionism, 25, 45, 48, 61, 63, 67,
Ruth, 42, 114–15, 173 72, 93, 97n8, 190
200 Index
Tamar, 42, 115, 173 Thurman, Howard, 73

Taylor, Charles, 29n22 Tillich, Paul, 65–6, 68, 164
technology Tinker, George E., 112
of “carry-over,” 20 trade and traders, 17, 26, 35, 64, 79,
and ethics, 13 82–3, 85, 88, 91, 94
and Hermes, 86–7 transcendence, 5, 14, 71, 86, 94,
and logos, 62–3, 68 98n25, 120, 166, 171–2
technophilia, 16 translation, 1–3, 7, 9–10, 25–6, 176,
and tricksters, 109–10, 116, 124–5 189, 191
of writing, 17–18, 24 and Christianity, 90, 94–5, 115–16
theological hermeneutics and colonialism, 35–6, 39, 43–4
and colonialism, 35–51 and Hermes, 79, 81, 83, 85, 02
defined, 1–4, 6 and Mary, mother of Jesus, 90
diatopical, 9–10, 51–3, 115 and tricksters, 127–9
and embodiment, 14–18 travel, 9, 12, 17, 35, 44, 71–2, 91,
folly in, 158 188
and gender, 89–90 and fools/folly, 149, 151, 155
indeterminacy of, 59 and Hermes, 26, 79, 83–6, 89
as pattern recognition, 35–53 and tricksters, 91, 106, 128–9
polydox, 4, 12, 20, 22–5, 45, 69, 73, tricksters
82–3, 90, 167, 191 African, 108, 125, 127–31
reframing, 4, 15, 25, 169, 187–92 African American, 127–31
remythologization, 24, 79–80, and ambiguity, x, 112, 116
164–7, 176–9, 180–1n20 and ambivalence, 108–11, 116,
transcultural, 24–5, 79, 93 122–3, 126–8
as translation, 94 animal, 84–5, 106–7, 109, 111–2,
theology 122–7, 129, 132n9, 144–5
apophatic, 2–3, 21, 72–3, 189 Asian, 84, 125
constructive, 4, 12, 24, 53 biblical, 113–15
kataphatic, 2–3, 190 Coyote, 84, 106, 109, 111, 114,
and mythology, 59–66 124–7, 132n9, 144–5
via negative, 71 Esu, 84, 124, 127–9, 138n145
and philosophy, 62–3 and ethics, 108–11
polydox, 4, 12, 20, 22–3, 45, 69, 73, female, 26, 105, 113–15, 135n69
82, 90, 167, 191 Fox, 84, 106, 124
via positiva/eminentiae, 71 Hermes, 26, 79, 81, 83–4, 105, 119,
as Schwellenkunde, 12 124, 176, 191
and science, 2, 62 history of, 105–8
use of the term, 62 Holy Spirit, 119–22
as wisdom, 62 and indeterminacy, xi, 106, 118,
theopoetics, 4, 12, 166 128
theotokos, 90 Jesus of Nazareth, 115–18
Thomas, Robert K., 173 Malinche, 25, 35–43, 190
Thoth, 79, 86–8 Mantis, 108
Index 201
Monkey, 84, 106, 114, 124–5, 127, Wallace, Mark, 120

129 Walls, Andrew, 28n8
Native American, 106, 110–13, 125 Weaver, Jace, 172
and paradoxicality, x, 106, 111, Welsford, Enid, 150, 154
117–19 wisdom
Pocahontas, 42 divine, 27, 117, 153–4, 178
and polyvalence, x, 105–6 and Hermes as the Trismegistos,
Rabbinic, 119 31n54, 86
Rahab, 41–2, 114–15 and logos, 94, 171–2
Raven, 84–5, 106–7, 112, 124–5, relation to folly, 26–7, 143–7,
132n14 150–8
Ruth, 42, 114–15, 173 serpent as symbol of, 113–14
as shape-shifters, vii, 26, 106, 111, Sophia, 65, 115, 172, 181n43
114, 122–5, 131 theology of, 62
signifying monkey, 84, 124, 127–9 Wotan, 81, 85
Troeltsch, Ernst, 73 writing, 18–19, 24–5, 81–2, 84,
truth, 10, 18, 23–5, 189 87–8, 116, 129–30, 174, 176–8,
and fools/folly, 147, 150–4 182n60
and logos/mythos, 62, 64–9,
163–4, 168–73, 176 Yang, Gene Luen, 125
and tricksters, 118, 127–8 Yoruba mythology, 84, 97n18, 124,
127–9, 138n145
Varnhagen, Rachel Levin, 44
Varro, 62, 171 zones of interaction, vii, 24
Voltaire, 35 Zornberg, Avivah, 123

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Refiguring Theological Hermeneutics

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1. Hermeneutics. 2. Hermes (Greek deity)

Preface: On the Poetics of Christian Theological Hermeneutics vii

CIRCUMAMBULATING THE CROSSROADS;

It is no accident—nor is it insignificant—that the discourse of herme-

William Doty remarks, “What comes as a message through Hermes

embodied knowing. Traveling across territories we must often rely on

WHERE THIS BOOK FITS IN—OR STICKS OUT

This book continues an interpretive circumambulation begun in

naming sacred relations of the cosmos, divinity, and humanity trou-

An appreciation of indeterminacy will help to identify how trickster

5. David Jasper, A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics (Louisville, KY:

Caputo, John D., ed. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques

THE “NOT IMMEDIATELY INTELLIGIBLE”

“Hermeneutics operates whenever something is not immediately intelligible.” 1

With this basic, if broad, definition offered by Hans-Georg Gadamer,

It is thus evident that any consideration of the various forms of belonging as

Acknowledging the apophatic strands in the engagement with the

Here, these terms are simple grammatical distinctions. Denial/

Divine and the sacred elements of the universe—happens within and

REFRAMING HERMENEUTICS AS PATTERN

Understood as pattern recognition, hermeneutics is a common human

some patterns of interpretation here is not to assume any kind of grasp

I see it more as a kind of manifesto, trying to imagine a recombination

Even as we are unable to eradicate errors in crossing the boundaries

is in that sense an attempt at translation and therefore a hermeneutical

RIDDLING AND HERMENEUTICS

Theological discourse has been navigating a messy territory that

to “explain, instruct, justify and warn,”20 grounding present practice in

If the collapse of metanarratives alone characterized the postmodern condi-

Furthermore, the decline of strong religious affiliation is a regional

longer assume a resident or sometimes even residual knowledge of the

the art and science of interpretation, of bringing forth significance, of convey-

That is, hermeneutical activity engages in bridging distances between

alternatives that are resourced from a deep engagement with tradition

As Patricia Cox Miller notes, in response to the problem of “how to

postsecular contexts, changing religious membership and commitment,

I considered proposing alternate names for the discipline of hermeneu-

INTERPRETING BODIES: THEOLOGICAL

that give us a different sense of connection. Yet, while we can keep in

This shift in connectivity and relationality appears to be changing

the dynamics of the ambivalence of interpreting acts: Hermes, the

DISENCHANTED WITH DISENCHANTMENT:

While it is all too easy and certainly common to generalize profusely

This development left both liberals and conservatives in “profound

dangerous territory where one’s own interpretation becomes the one

INTERPRETING SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE

and cosmos, underlies many hermeneutical maneuvers in a variety of

two entities bear a resemblance, they must be related. [ . . . ] All we need is to

The tendency to look for similarities and differences is related to the

A polydox theological hermeneutics reveals a form of trickster knowl-

to exchanges between cultures as in flux, and intent on capturing where

interpretation and see their potential and shortcomings. Each “angelic”

mystical writings, ritual practices, art work, or at the edges of monastic

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

Chapter 2 seeks to explore three instances of pattern recognition that

Chapter 4 seeks to put Hermes back into Hermeneutics by exploring

6. Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the

Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington and Indianapolis:

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford:

UNSEALING COLONIAL LANDS:

Traveling the crossroads of colonial encounters involves decoding the

Understanding the “mind of these nations” was generally a stra-