Two sons of Africa and their mothers

Abstract

Augustine showed us a way how to deal with this “incompleteness” of our understanding of the Bible/ Old Testament, the postponement of meaning and the inability to exegete texts in absolute terms. To Augustine although not all is clear in the Bible/Old Testament we must nonetheless concentrate on the traces of God’s love and the love for the neighbour in a given text. This was Augustine’s answer to the problem of not knowing but Jacques Derrida handled the matter totally different. Derrida’s intense experience of loss made it impossible for him to speak in a “traditional” way about God, the Hebrew Scripture and the Jewish faith. He followed different intellectual routes and in the end he was confronted with this experience of loss and his inability to speak in conventional or orthodox terms about religion.

Keywords

• Hermeneutics
• Augustine
• Derrida
• understanding
• epistemology
• African Biblical Hermeneutics