It is always through the fallen that the primordial shines through.

PAUL RICOEUR'S work is astonishing in its scope. He has addressed audiences in virtually all of the humanistic and social scientific fields about the most significant questions facing them. Scholars in theology and religious thought increasingly find their own questions shaped by the questions of Paul Ricoeur. Nonetheless, consensus eludes those who think about Ricoeur's place in current theology: where does Ricoeur belong within current theological debate? Various possibilities have suggested themselves. Some scholars hold that Ricoeur's religious thought belongs to the family of postliberal or narrative theology as it flows from the broad stream of Barthian theology. I review a recent form of this claim in part I of this essay, and challenge the claim in part II. I propose an alternative interpretation in part III: Ricoeur's religious thought continues the line of mediating theologies, which stretches from Schleiermacher to Paul Tillich. Within this context, I attempt to interpret the religious meaning of Ricoeur's rhetoric of'overturning', namely, that 'it is always through the fallen that the primordial shines through.' My thesis is that Ricoeur's mediations proceed by way of reversals which culminate in the figure of overturning; the rhetoric of overturning which encompasses the mediations aims to persuade us that a transfigured existence is possible—not as a result of the triumph of reflection and hermeneutics, but through a felt appropriation of their limits. At stake in this inquiry is something more important than a decision concerning Ricoeur's theological identity. My concern is that Ricoeur's valuable contribution to hermeneutical inquiry be not skewed by selective reading for confessional interests. We should not think of Ricoeur's hermeneutics as a prolegomenon or Hilfsdiziplin for confessional Christian theology. Hermeneutics is a reflexive way of inquiring about meanings in texts and existence. It is a global philosophy of finitude, focusing o