Hermeneutical Tension

Hermeneutical Tension names the irreducible interpretive condition that Rollins proposes as the only honest and theologically adequate mode of reading scripture. Rather than resolving the classical opposition between exegesis—the extraction of meaning already lodged within the text—and eisegesis—the projection or reading of meaning into the text—Rollins argues that the faithful interpreter must inhabit the gap between these two poles without collapsing it. The attempt to achieve pure exegesis is denounced as a modernistic, foundationalist illusion: the fantasy that a neutral, presupposition-free reader can simply retrieve objective textual meaning. Conversely, pure eisegesis risks solipsistic projection. Hermeneutical Tension is the name for staying rigorously between these, which is not a methodological compromise but an ethical posture — the "prejudice of love" — that acknowledges the subject's constitutive involvement in the act of reading while remaining answerable to what the text says.

This move structurally displaces the Enlightenment ideal of value-neutral interpretation and replaces it with what might be called a confessional hermeneutics: one that owns its situatedness and orients that situatedness toward a specific ethical commitment (love). The tension is not a problem to be solved but the productive site of faithful reading. In this sense, Rollins converges with the broader post-foundationalist argument that interpretation is never innocent of the interpreter's desire, while insisting that acknowledging this does not license arbitrary meaning-making — it licenses only a particular, theologically constrained kind of committed reading.

Within the source peter-rollins-how-not-to-speak-of-god-paraclete-press-2006, Hermeneutical Tension is conceptually downstream of the Prejudice of Love — the positively valenced pre-understanding that Rollins substitutes for the Enlightenment fiction of neutrality. Without the Prejudice of Love supplying the affective and ethical orientation, Hermeneutical Tension would be merely an unstable methodological impasse; the prejudice is what transforms it into a stable theological practice. The concept also touches the corpus's treatment of Truth: just as Lacanian truth can only be "half-said" and belongs irreducibly to enunciation rather than to a neutral statement, Rollins's hermeneutical tension enacts a structurally analogous impossibility — complete, objective extraction of meaning (pure exegesis) is as fantasmatic as claiming to say the whole truth. The reader, like the speaking subject, is always already implicated in what is said.

The connection to Ethics of Psychoanalysis is equally significant: Rollins's rejection of "neutral" foundationalist ethics maps onto the Lacanian dismissal of any Sovereign Good or universal calculus as the ground of moral action. In both frameworks, the subject cannot occupy a view from nowhere; ethical seriousness demands fidelity to a particular orientation of desire rather than its bracketing. The cross-reference to Ideology is also operative: the pretense of pure exegesis is precisely an ideological gesture in the Lacanian-Žižekian sense — it disavows the interpreter's constitutive investment in the text while continuing to act on it. Hermeneutical Tension is therefore Rollins's way of breaking with that ideological disavowal, making the reader's situatedness explicit and thereby — paradoxically — more responsible rather than less.

How (Not) to Speak of GodPeter Rollins · 2006 (page unknown)

we must be committed to living in the tension between exegesis (by which we extract meaning from the text) and eisegesis (by which we read meaning into the text).

The phrase "committed to living in the tension" is theoretically loaded because it reframes a methodological aporia — the exegesis/eisegesis split — as an ethical vocation: "committed" and "living in" both signal that this is not a provisional state to be overcome but a permanent posture to be inhabited. The paired parenthetical glosses ("extract meaning from" vs. "read meaning into") make the directional asymmetry explicit, precisely in order to insist that neither direction alone is adequate — the tension between them is where the interpretive subject properly resides.