Guidelines for a hermeneutics of the founding religious texts

If hermeneutics is the art of interpretation and of search for meaning, it lives by common and public rules (exegetical, philological, semiological, methodological) to subtract the text from the arbitrariness of the individual reader. Between these rules, the article points out: 1) a code of conduct embedded in four different postures of the interpreter in front of a sacred text; 2) the different regimes of truth found in textual statements, which result from contextual and historical processes and from instrumental mediations; 3) communication conditions to ensure a certain 'declarability' and audibility of sacred texts - for example, Biblical - in a secularized or 'post-religious' culture; 4) some conditions to promote a communicative mutual intelligibility or dialogue between sacred texts of different religious traditions (inter-religious hermeneutics); 5) finally, some methodological caveats about the sensitive urgent case of a comparative reading of texts of the abrahamitic traditions.