One fundamental principle of historicist hermeneutics underlies the foregoing observations: that the anticipated whole under whose conditions of purpose and procedure an interpreter singles out relevant parts is itself completed only through understanding the parts. Significant becoming emerges from such meaningful reformulations of a postulated whole. This is why it was possible, in the first place, to loosen the traditional rigidity of a Christian narrative without yet losing its traditional effect, or to have a poetic experience of one’s moral sentiment. Being accessed through the distinctive resources, practices, and norms of a literary experience, the Christian narrative no longer remains a merely dogmatic structure, but proceeds along the questioning enhancements of a poetic intentionality. What this seems to require of the interpreting mind is a clear demarcation beforehand of the provisional whole in terms of which one perceives significant contributions, and an equally clear delimitation of the new competence through which that whole is to be enlarged. This, I believe, Gadamer suggests by his notion of an acknowledged bias, of being aware of one’s prejudice rather than endeavouring pointlessly to stand outside it.