Ricoeur's hermeneutics tries to erase the borderline between history and story, affirming that a text has autonomy meanings independently of its original author and original situation from which it emerged. Although theologians would accordingly criticize Ricoeur's debasing historical factuality of the Bible's texts, they neglect Ricoeur's recognizing that there are objects beyond symbols, words and texts and which are denoted by the latter. In contrast to Saussure of linguistic structuralism and Derrida of Post-modernism who deny real referents outside symbols (system or structure), Ricoeur emphasizes the really referential relation between symbols and referents. Accordingly, though Ricoeur does not explicitly express that his narrative hermeneutics is a proof of God's existence, one of the most essential issues of traditional philosophy of religion, the position of his discourse implies it. For Ricoeur affirms that biblical texts as meaningful textual records have real referential objects beyond the texts. For Ricoeur's hermeneutics, objects and phenomena involved in the narrative contents of biblical texts would be regarded as records of truly historical events. In other words, biblical narratives would be regarded as a documentation of actual experiences of God by the mainly related folk, Israelite, and figures in the Bible. Ricoeur's hermeneutics thus can serve to be a narrative proof of God's existence and His works.
