Aging & Wisdom Quote by Paul Ricoeur

Ricoeur is pointing to a power move disguised as devotion: when the New Testament is treated as the master key to the Old, interpretation stops being inquiry and becomes enforcement. The phrase "served to decipher" sounds almost technical, as if scripture were a coded message needing a single authorized solution. That’s the subtext: hermeneutics presented as neutral decoding, while quietly installing a hierarchy in which the later text polices the earlier one.

"Absolute norm" is the tell. Ricoeur isn’t mainly litigating theology; he’s diagnosing how communities secure certainty. Once an interpretive framework is declared absolute, the Old Testament loses the right to speak in its own idiom - historical, poetic, legal, prophetic - and is conscripted into a Christian teleology where meanings are validated only insofar as they prefigure Christ. This is the classic "figural" reading: powerful, coherent, emotionally satisfying, and institutionally useful. It produces a seamless narrative of fulfillment, but at the cost of flattening difference and turning ambiguity into error.

Context matters: Ricoeur wrote in the long shadow of modern biblical criticism, postwar suspicion of totalizing systems, and growing awareness of Judaism not as Christianity’s prologue but as a living tradition. He’s not denying that the New can illuminate the Old; he’s warning about what happens when illumination hardens into law. The intent is to pry open interpretive space: to let texts generate meanings that aren’t pre-certified by a single, "absolute" horizon, and to expose how claims of interpretive inevitability often function as claims of authority.