Journal of Philosophy and Theology

Metaphorical Language and Polysemy of the Religious Texts
Ioana Claudia Horea, Cristian Dorin Horea

Abstract
The current study undertook to compare two paradigms of interpretation, paralleling multiple senses in religious and literary texts and analyzing them through philosophical and semiological means. We pointed out features of sacred text interpretation in contrast with the way of depicting meanings involved in daily language, also employed in literary productions. We remarked that while the former paradigm is meant to lead to spiritual elevation, the latter is less capable of providing such experiences, unless with oriented and experienced readers. From the countless types of hermeneutics of religious texts, we chose literary hermeneutics to approach the Bible. Works of Paul Ricoeur and Northrop Frye are a must for such endeavor, as are the narrative criticism and the reader-response criticism. In pursuit of peculiarities that make Scripture reveal the sacred, we employed ideas of Jean Paul Sartre, Umberto Eco, Mikhail Bakhtin and Mircea Eliade to render the indeterminacy and polysemy related to the metaphors and parables. The study resulted in the conclusion that every interpretation of the Bible should consider its final goal: to alter the readers' being-in-the-world and provide them with a wide perspective of the numinous.

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