Please create a "hermeneutics" tag

Question

I realize that having a "hermeneutics" tag may seem overly generic to some... they might think "well surely we don't want an exegesis tag linked to every exegesis question, so why would we want a hermeneutics tag?" Others may object on the grounds that we already have a "hermeneutical approaches" tag. However, I think we need one -- at least for now, and here is why:

• We don't have many hermeneutics questions, so the first objection is invalid.

• There are many potential hermeneutics questions that are not questions about hermeneutical approaches, so the second objection is invalid.

• For people like me who are far more interested in "hermeneutics" than "exegesis", there is no way to track hermeneutics questions as a "favorite" tag if it doesn't exist.

I recently posted a question about how to identify literary genre. The only tag I could find that might be relevant was "litarary-genre" (which is an appropriate tag), but my question isn't about hermeneutical approaches, so I couldn't use that tag [...before I continue that sentence let me prove my claim:

• A person's hermeneutical approaches does not indicate their criteria for determining genre

  • People using different hermeneutical approaches may well use the same criteria for determining genre -- in fact, it is conceivable that people from every hermeneutical approach could share the same criteria for genre identification

  • Within a single hermeneutical approach (e.g. Historical-Grammatical) there may well be many different opinions about how to properly determine genre

• I'm not really asking about the peculiarities of Historical-Critical, Sensus Plenior, Pardes, or the slew of other hermeneutical systems.

Thus, my question is not a question about hermeneutical approaches. Back to my sentence...] nor is it specific to NT or OT, nor to a particular book of the Bible, etc. So there is no tag out there for the miscellaneous hermeneutics questions that are not asking about hermeneutical approaches.

There may come a day when the "hermeneutics" tag gets unwieldy and needs to be replaced with new tags which can cover all of the bases in smaller segments, but for now, can we get the "hermeneutics" tag back?

Answer 1

I appreciate the thought you've put into taxonomy and even if we disagree on this case I believe it is helping to improve the site. My main concern is that this tag would quickly turn into a meta tag. Of course there would be a way to use it that wasn't too meta-y, but we would constantly be ripping it out of places in didn't belong.

As for the one example question you cite I think it's somewhat of an edge case. We have very few like it and I think for now it is best lumped in with hermeneutical-approaches. That being said I would love to see more questions like it and perhaps as we get more another pattern will emerge that distinguishes them.

In the mean time I think you'll just have to follow more than one tag to pick up everything you're interested in. The SE engine makes this fairly easy to build a whole collection of tags to focus in on.