From Sacralization to Reading: an Enunciative Approach to the Bible

Abstract

In spite of the common expressions, it is not certain that
Christianity belongs to “the religions of books” and that the
Bible should be considered as a “sacred text.” “Scripture is
the word of God:” this paradoxical and traditional expression
that associates scripture and word without a doubt limits the
sacred character of the text while installing it in the dynamics
of an enunciation that relates itself as much as with the
structure of biblical corpus as with the modalities of its
reception. It would be interesting to see how semiotic
reflection on the enunciation permits us to give an account of
such a dynamic.
We know the composed and diverse character of biblical corpus,
with the multiplicity of “books” included in it. However
in relation to the Christian corpus one must give an account
of the radical cut that crosses and organizes the whole
between the books of the Old Testament and the writings of
the New Testament. We will be able to show how literary
semiotics permits us to describe the effects of sense of this
singular this textual structure. Traditional Christian hermeneutics
strived to make a principle of interpretation out of this
structural particularity that implies an original theory of
enunciation surrounding the notions of inspiration, observance
and reference.
In this article, we plan to revisit these old proposals starting
from semiotics in order to show how the Bible, which is
presented as a text to read, evades a sacralizing objectivation
and assists (from reading) an enunciative establishment of the
subject.