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as historical sets of topics, arguments, tropes, ideologies, and so forth which determine how texts are established as meaningful through rhetorical exchange (Mailloux 1989: 15). Socio-rhetorical hermeneutics, then, "ground[s] itself within rhetorical histories" and provides "thick descriptions of interpretative practices that are mindful of the shifting political positions of those who engage in them" (Mailloux 1989: 16-18; cf. Leff 1997: 197). A. The Interactionist Nature of Socio-Rhetorical Hermeneutics As a hermeneutical approach, socio-rhetorical criticism has a natural affinity with theological study of religion. Theological studies are accustomed to a practice of parsing different dimensions of a tradition and constructing a system that explains the relationships of the parts to one another and to the whole system (cf. Robbins 1996a, 1996b). Yet hermeneutics is under attack from at least two sides. E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley have sharpened the attack from the side of the sciences (1990, 1993). For them, hermeneutic methods focus on "understanding" in a manner that excludes explanatory modes of analysis that are systematic, focused on the general rather than the specific, and testable (Lawson and McCauley 1993: 201-202). In a section of an article entitled "The Harmful Effects of Hermeneutic Method," they introduce the problems with a hermeneutic approach in the following manner: That approach appeals to the particular over the general. It is unconcerned with systematic patterns. It is usually historicist in the extreme. Most importantly, though, it privileges in the study of religion not only religious texts but the category of texuality in general (Lawson and McCauley 1993: 214). From their perspective, hermeneutic methods introduce a "textual straightjacket" that "leaves many features of symbolic-cultural systems (not just religious systems) in a cognitive vacuum" (Lawson and McCauley 1993: 214). One of the accompanying results is the neglect of religious practices in non-literate societies. Another is the inability to investigate the beginnings of new religions, since the earliest stages of a new religion do not yet possess developed texts or traditions (Lawson and McCauley 1993: 217). For them, "only novel explanatory theorizing can break through the confines of the hermeneutic circle" (Lawson and McCauley 1993: 203). Hermeneutics is also under attack from the side of rhetorical interpretation. Wilhelm H. Wuellner assaults hermeneutical theory for suppressing the rhetorics of texts with a "theory of extracting 'the' meaning (usually restricted to theological, occasionally also ethical, but rarely any other meanings)" from a text. For him, rhetorical interpretation should explain the text's power and explore "possibilities" manifestly awak- |