Minds nurtured on the canon must read the text carefully (Hays’s descriptive task) and place it in canonical context (Hays’s synthetic task). As to relating the text to our situation (Hays’s hermeneutic task), this requires “an integrative act of the imagination” whereby the community views itself as indwelling the world implied by the biblical texts.49 It is just here that the norm of the implied canonical reader comes into its own. Finally, what Hays calls the pragmatic task (“living the text”) we have treated under the rubric of performative understanding.
Content (descriptive), canon (synthetic), confession/culture (hermeneutic), competence (pragmatic).
