Doing Theology in Metaphoric Language: Ricoeur’s Theological Hermeneutics

Approaching the tension between critical thinking and religious conviction in a modern secular context, this study explores Paul Ricoeur’s theological hermeneutics as a potential metaphoric language for doing contemporary theology. Utilizing Ricoeur’s hermeneutic method of the “long route”—a patient detour through text, symbol, and narrative that refuses the direct existential decoding of myth—the research qualitatively analyzes his interdisciplinary insights across biblical interpretation, revelation, and narrative theory. The analysis reveals that Ricoeur’s integration of philosophical and biblical hermeneutics facilitates what he calls a “second naïveté”: a post-critical posture in which religious symbols can be inhabited again only after, and through, the labour of critique, never before or around it. Such a posture addresses the specifically modern difficulty of making Christian faith argumentatively responsible to contemporary readers, believers and reflective non-believers alike. Key findings highlight the poetic dimension of theological language—its capacity to disclose rather than merely describe—as essential for reconfiguring reality and for redefining revelation as an event that takes place between the “world of the text” (the possible world projected by a biblical text read as discourse) and the “world of the reader.” This reorientation does not dismiss dogmatic-theological formulation; it holds the systematic–speculative and the poetic–hermeneutic together rather than letting either collapse into the other. The study concludes that doing theology through metaphor—specifically through the dialectic between “being” and “being-as” of God—opens a generative hermeneutic perspective for articulating the divine in a post-critical age, where the category “post-critical” designates not a repudiation of critique but the reflective stance that remains possible only on the far side of it. Rather than providing a unified theological system, this perspective preserves the tensions—between philosophy and theology, critique and conviction, metaphor and its ontological reach—that Ricoeur deliberately leaves unresolved.