Modernist hermeneutics saved scripture by converting it to abstract existential themes

Evidence

That possibility no longer exists for a nineteenthcentury bourgeoisie within a life-world of factories and artificial streetlights, railroad trains and contracts, representative political institutions and telegraphs: what can stories about pastoral peoples dressed up in exotic costumes possibly mean for such modern Western men and women? A modernist hermeneutic then intervenes to save the day: the biblical narratives, including the gospel itself, are no longer to be taken literally — that way Hollywood lies! They are to be taken figuratively or allegorically and thereby stripped of their archaic or exotic content and translated into existential or ontological experiences, whose essentially abstract language and figuration (anxiety, guilt, redemption, the “question of being”) can now, much like the “open works” of aesthetic modernism, be offered to a differentiated public of Western city-dwellers to be recoded in terms of their own private situations. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 835

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s method — reading a cultural transformation through how a mode of life makes old texts unreadable and demands reinterpretation.