The Spirit and the Letter: A Tradition and a Reversal 9780567272898, 9781472551412, 9780567252197

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Part One
The Project
1
Whatever Happened to a Pauline Text? 2 Cor. 3.6 and its Afterlife
1 Two traditional models of interpretation
2 The challenge to tradition
3 A third model: Change of media
4 A text open to spirit
5 The significance of the sign
6 Derrida, reversal and antipolarization
7 The Romantic reversal
8 Living with the wounds of discourse
9 Spirit in the world
10 Spirit and letter: Overcoming polarization
Part Two
Spirit and Letter: A Tradition
2
‘Spirit’ and ‘Letter’ in the New Testament
1 Tracking the words
2 Current readings of the antithesis between letter and spirit
3 2 Cor. 3.6
4 Rom. 2.29
5 Rom. 7.6
6 Conclusion
3
Spirit and Letter: Mapping Modern Biblical Interpretation
1 A new use for old terms: Introducing a proposal
2 From Paul, through Origen and Luther to modernity: The proposal defended
3 Modern biblical interpretation: The proposal applied
4
From the Letter to the Spirit to the Letter: The Faith as Written Creed
1 From the letter to the spirit to the letter
2 The origins of Christian confession
3 The ‘rule of faith’ in anti-heretical polemics
4 The emergence of the fixed creed
5 Epilogue: Back to the spirit?
5
Spirit and Letter in Origen and Augustine
1 Origen and three kinds of meaning
2 Origen and two ways of reading
3 Origen and reading as transformative practice
4 Augustine and the meaning of the author
5 Augustine and reading the signs properly
Part Three
Letter and Spirit: A Reversal
6
The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film
1 The deadly dominance of the subject
2 The deadly dominance of the book
3 The deadly dominance of the voice
4 Life-giving death in the text
5 The spirit that gives life
6 Trinity, spirit and life
7
Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ‘On Religion’
1 Dead letter
2 Theology
3 Written text
4 An excursus on Plato and Paul
5 Critique of writing and critique of language
6 Peripeteia: Kant’s spirit and Kant’s letter
7 The art of language and the art of music
8 Allegory, wit and irony
9 Religion – religion without religion
10 Living letter
8
Inspired Reading, Speaking and Listening: Letter and Spirit in Preaching
1 Preaching as conversation in the spirit
2 The distinction between letter and spirit in the context of practical theology
3 The play between text, history and interpretation in preaching
4 The two-term hermeneutic of text and experience in preaching
5 Text, history and interpretation: A three-term model of preaching
9
Letter and Spirit Adrift: Kafka, Scholem and the Late-modern Crisis of Hermeneutics
1 The crisis of ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ as a feature of late-modernity
2 Fatal celebrations of ‘spirit’
3 Kafka, Scholem and the necessary decay of tradition
4 Meaning in the midst of the violation of meaning
5 Meanings from the abyss
Part Four
Conclusion: Spirit in the World
10
Spirit, Letter and Body
1 Two kinds of memory and history
2 A ‘first history’: The history of spirit
3 A return to the ‘second history’: Reading the letter
4 Spirit in letter
Notes
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Bibliography
Index of Scripture
Index of Names

Citation preview

The Spirit and the Letter

The Spirit and the Letter A Tradition and a Reversal Edited by Paul S. Fiddes with Günter Bader

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 USA

www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Paul S. Fiddes with Günter Bader and contributors, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Paul S. Fiddes, Günter Bader and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-0-567-27289-8 ePDF: 978-0-567-25219-7 epub: 978-0-567-21885-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Spirit and the Letter/Paul S. Fiddes with Günter Bader p.cm Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 978-0-567-27289-8 (hardcover)

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents Preface Acknowledgements Contributors

vii viii ix

Part 1  The Project 1

Whatever Happened to a Pauline Text? 2 Cor. 3.6 and its Afterlife  Paul Fiddes and Günter Bader

3

Part 2  Spirit and Letter: A Tradition 2

‘Spirit’ and ‘Letter’ in the New Testament  Michael Wolter

31

3

Spirit and Letter: Mapping Modern Biblical Interpretation  Robert Morgan

47

From the Letter to the Spirit to the Letter: The Faith as Written Creed  Wolfram Kinzig

74

Spirit and Letter in Origen and Augustine  Morwenna Ludlow

87

4 5

Part 3  Letter and Spirit: A Reversal 6 7 8 9

The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film  Paul S. Fiddes

105

Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ‘On Religion’  Günter Bader

131

Inspired Reading, Speaking and Listening: Letter and Spirit in Preaching  Michael Meyer-Blanck

154

Letter and Spirit Adrift: Kafka, Scholem and the Late-modern Crisis of Hermeneutics  Jochen Schmidt

166

vi

Contents

Part 4  Conclusion: Spirit in the World 10 Spirit, Letter and Body  Oliver Davies

179

Notes Bibliography Index of Scripture Index of Names

195 245 259 263

Preface The chapters in this book originate in papers given at a research seminar, extending over 3  years, bringing together present and past members of the theology faculty of the University of Oxford and of the Protestant faculty of theology in the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn. In regular meetings in Oxford and Bonn, papers were discussed, modified through debate with others and then re-offered in revised form, sometimes in many versions. The following chapters are therefore not free-standing essays collected around a general theme, but are contributions towards a joint project of exploring the tradition of ‘Spirit and Letter’ and what might be called a ‘reversal’ of the tradition in the late-modern period. At the stage of publication, there remain, naturally, some differences of perspective, but the chapters are intended to develop an argument throughout the book and the opening chapter explains how they fit together. Among the participants, one scholar missing from the book is John Barton, whose paper on ‘Critical Scholarship and the Spirituality of the Literal Sense’ played a significant part in the discussions, but which has been published separately as part of his book, The Nature of Biblical Criticism (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). A major paper given by Günter Bader, ‘Three Models for Interpreting 2 Cor. 3’ also does not appear in the book, but its ideas and substantial sections from it have been incorporated into the first chapter. As this study makes clear, the term ‘spirit’ evokes multiple resonances – divine, human, individual, social, mundane and cosmic. In English a typographical problem immediately presents itself here, since it is conventional to print ‘Spirit’ with an uppercase initial letter when reference to the divine is intended and ‘spirit’ with a lower-case initial letter when human or other created life is meant. To attempt such a distinction consistently would suppress the polyvalent echoes and ambiguities prompted by the term ‘spirit’, and would encourage theological judgements based on mere typography. No such problem arises in German, in which half of the chapters were originally written, since in the modern German language all nouns are endowed with an uppercase initial (thus: Geist). Nor is there such a distinction possible in the most ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, written in uncials. The editorial decision has thus been taken to print ‘spirit’ with a lower-case ‘s’ generally throughout the discussion, except where there is an unambiguous reference to the Spirit of God or the Holy Spirit or where other English texts or translations directly cited use an uppercase initial letter (including the New Revised Standard Version of the New Testament). The reader should not therefore draw any theological conclusions from the printing of the word ‘spirit’ itself, and should attend instead to the discussion and argument in which the word is placed. Though it may seem counter-intuitive to the English eye, ‘spirit’ (lower-case ‘s’) may have divine as well as human associations. Indeed, to explore the mingling of these associations is the very point of this book.

Acknowledgements A version of Chapter 7 by Günter Bader has already appeared in German as ‘Geist und Buchstabe – Buchstabe und Geist, ausgehend von Schleiermachers Reden “Über die Religion”’ in the Internationales Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik, edited by Günter Figal, Volume 5 (2006). Permission to translate and print this paper, which was written in the first place for the Oxford-Bonn Seminar, has kindly been given by the publishers, Mohr Siebeck. Quotations from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). ©1989 by Division of Christian Education of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America are referenced as NRSV and used by kind permission. The editors wish to offer their grateful thanks to those who helped them with the translation of papers from German. As well as the work of the participants themselves (especially Michael Wolter, Wolfram Kinzig, Robert Morgan and Jochen Schmidt), we gladly acknowledge the skills of Gerd Maeggi and Leonie Stein. Particular gratitude is due to Jochen Schmidt for translating the chapter written by Michael Meyer-Blanck as well as his own. Wherever possible, English editions of German writings are cited.

Contributors Günter Bader is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology in the EvangelischTheologischen Fakultät of the Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn. Oliver Davies is Professor of Christian Doctrine in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London, and Director of the Centre for Social Transformation at King’s College. Paul Fiddes is Professor of Systematic Theology in the University of Oxford and Director of Research, Regent’s Park College, Oxford. Wolfram Kinzig is Professor of Church History in the Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultät of the Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn. Morwenna Ludlow is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religion in the University of Exeter. Michael Meyer-Blanck is Professor of Religious Pedagogy in the EvangelischTheologischen Fakultät of the Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn. Robert Morgan was formerly Reader in New Testament Studies in the University of Oxford. Jochen Schmidt is Professor of Systematic Theology and Ecumenical Studies in the Kulturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät of the Universität der Informationsgesellschaft in Paderborn. Michael Wolter is Professor of New Testament in the Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultät of the Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn.

Part One

The Project

1

Whatever Happened to a Pauline Text? 2 Cor. 3.6 and its Afterlife Paul Fiddes and Günter Bader

The opposition between spirit and letter – ‘the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life’ (2  Cor. 3.6)1 – can be found in the oldest strata of the New Testament. There is no doubt that it belongs there, although it has a gnomic or even a puzzling feel to it. Since that early time, it has been one of the most important points for reflection within the Christian faith and it has even been affirmed by canonical statements. And it is not merely one idea among others. Rather, the opposition between spirit and letter has been sharpened into a fundamental distinction, which has become the distinguishing mark of theology, an issue by which theology itself stands or falls. As time has gone by, the claim has been made that the ability to distinguish between spirit and letter is what makes a theologian a theologian in the first place. It has been asserted that the distinction between spirit and letter is precisely what turns any speaking or writing into a speaking and writing about God. As the discussion of this distinction has taken new and different forms in the history of Christian thought, it has continually served as a way of defining what theology is and does.

1  Two traditional models of interpretation For all its centrality, as the Pauline pair of terms was employed by Christian writers from early on, two aspects came together in a rather startling mixture. On the one hand, the antithesis of letter and spirit sounds like a proposition, which belongs at the core of Christian faith. It concerns nothing less than salvation. It deals with an interaction between written scripture and spirit, between law and gospel, between death and life, in a way that is unmistakably Christian and which brings to mind the connection to Judaism at the very origins of the Christian movement. It affirms that living by the demands of the law (‘letter’) brings only death, while receiving the grace offered in Christ (‘Spirit’) is life giving. On the other hand, however, this antithesis suggests that there is a meaning (‘spirit’) which exceeds the surface sense of a text and so it prompts the beginnings of hermeneutical reflection, opening up universal principles about the way that we interact with the ‘classic’ texts that emerge within any literary culture.

4

The Spirit and the Letter

The antithesis of letter and spirit thus reveals two contrary aspects. On the one hand, the antithesis is a narrow one and it leads towards an ever-increasing narrowness, up to a point that is decisive for Christian theology; it conducts us into the inner rooms of theology itself. On the other hand, the antithesis is so broad that it leads to a wide field of  philosophy and to an ever-increasing breadth; we are used to speaking, for instance, of ‘the spirit of the law’, or ‘the spirit of capitalism’, or even ‘the spirit of Christianity’. Both narrowness and breadth are qualities of this antithesis, and both have to be reckoned with. There is a divergence of meaning here, which we may label as soteriological and hermeneutical and which is fundamental to the very structure of the saying. Originating from Paul’s sayings in 2 Cor. 3.6, Rom. 2.29 and 7.6, the antithesis has thus developed in two different ways, marked by two emphases. We have to face the fact that we have no immediate access to the original Pauline distinction between letter and spirit; the Pauline phrase never reaches us without refraction and the two traditional models of interpretation are associated with the names of Origen and Augustine, respectively. While the contrast between the two theologians has been overstated, Origen understands letter and spirit primarily in a hermeneutical sense and Augustine understands spirit and letter primarily as a matter of the history of salvation. It is the hermeneutical interpretation that takes historical priority in the story of Christian interpretation. Origen comes before Augustine and the hermeneutical understanding of 2 Cor. 3.6 marks an earlier stage within Augustine’s work than the understanding which relates to the economy of salvation, which the later Augustine discovered. The genesis of the ‘theological’ understanding occurs during the Pelagian controversy in conjunction with the formation of the Augustinian doctrine of grace. The moment of its evolution can be detected by comparing the earlier and the later parts of On Christian Doctrine. Within the section of the work that was composed in 396/7 CE, Augustine refers to 2 Cor. 3.6 in the sense of a spiritual understanding of Holy Scripture and thus in the sense of a hermeneutical rule.2 In the conclusion of On Christian Doctrine, completed 30  years later, Augustine refers to spiritus and littera (spirit and letter) as equivalents to promissio and lex (promise and law), gratia and mandatum (grace and command) and he does so as a means of confronting the Pelagians without even mentioning the hermeneutical aspect.3 The contrast is obvious. The evolution of the theological interpretation is documented clearly in Augustine’s On the Spirit and Letter from 412 CE onwards. Augustine champions the thesis that human beings are able to refrain from sin in principal, though in reality, they never do live without sin. In order to be able to do the good, a restoration of the will by God’s merciful help is required, which is experienced in a threefold kind of way: the creature is supplied with free will; he receives an extrinsic instruction to do the good; but then, he also receives the Holy Spirit intrinsically.4 Augustine introduces 2 Cor. 3.6 into this structure. He insists that the second element, the extrinsic instruction, remains dead letter unless the life-giving Spirit intercedes from within. Thus, the Pauline text is taken in a sense that pertains to the theology of grace.5 Augustine does not want to exclude the hermeneutical sense completely, but the theological sense is, in his view, more justified,6 and he presents this as his discovery.

Whatever Happened to a Pauline Text? 2 Cor. 3.6 and its Afterlife

5

The same kind of development can be observed in Luther’s writings. He begins his work with a hermeneutical recourse to 2 Cor. 3.6 – memorably on his first handwritten page. Yet, the actual implementation of his thought is a reinterpretation of the hermeneutical model by the model that relates to the theology of salvation. As Gerhard Ebeling has shown, in addressing the quest for the essential quality of the theologian, the early Luther declares that it is the ability to distinguish between letter and spirit,7 while, by contrast, the later Luther declares it to be the distinction between law (that which makes demands) and gospel (that which promises and grants).8 This linguistic alteration, being implemented gently, does not amount to a substantial disruption in his thought, but rather to a maturing and strengthening of what had been initiated by the early Luther.9 The earlier formulation was, Luther evidently felt, subject to a Platonic misunderstanding that the distinction between letter and spirit was tantamount to the difference between the outer and the inner, the visible and the invisible or the sensuous and the intelligible. A concept of such kind was not a sufficient basis for countering the various countercurrents of the Reformation – the legalism of the outer word (verbum externum) on the one hand or an overenthusiasm for the inner word (verbum internum) on the other hand. Luther had to stamp the unequivocally Pauline profile of law and gospel, drawn from the general direction of his thought, on the distinction between letter and spirit. The direction of motion seems then to be irreversible. It is the movement from the hermeneutical to the theological meaning of the antithesis. But no sooner has the theological meaning been established, than we find a need for the hermeneutical meaning that it has supposedly replaced. The theological model drives itself to a point where fracture lines begin to be exposed. In the case of Luther, for instance, there is a distinct ambiguity in his use of the antithesis ‘law’ and ‘gospel’. As Ebeling points out,10 the distinction between ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ refers to two states or effects of the same words. This means that any one cache of text must be double-edged in meaning. By contrast, Luther wants ‘law’ and ‘gospel’ to distinguish two kinds of word, which presupposes that two texts are given, each of which must be unequivocally for itself: totally law or totally gospel. He writes, for instance, that ‘The Law is that word by which God teaches what we shall do, as for instance, the Ten Commandments’.11 On the other hand: ‘The other word of God’ is the gospel, ‘the divine promise of God’s grace and his forgiveness of sin’.12 He urges: Therefore, hold to this distinction and no matter what books you have before you, be they of the Old or of the New Testament, read them with a discrimination so as to observe that when promises are made in a book, it is a Gospelbook; when commandments are given, it is a law-book. But because in the New Testament the promises are found so abundantly and in the Old Testament so many laws, the former is called the Gospel and the latter the Book of the Law.13

Yet, Luther is also aware that every book in the Bible contains both law and gospel, writing that ‘There is no book in the Bible in which both are not found. God has always placed side by side both law and promise’.14 We are therefore bound to ask in what kind of way law and gospel share one and the same biblical book. How deeply into the text can the division be driven? Is the distinction to be made

6

The Spirit and the Letter

between individual chapters? Or between literary genres? Or are there unequivocal sentences of law here, sentences of gospel there, to be distinguished with respect to the grammatical form, imperatives and indicatives? Or if this should fail, would we at least be able to find words that can be allocated to the one side or to the other side unequivocally? Or do we even need to progress to smaller units than words, to morphemes and phonemes, which we could finally identify as unequivocally law or gospel? The suggested procedure prompts its own crisis. At the end, there can be no textual or linguistic entity that could be unequivocally allocated to the one or to the other. The attempt to distinguish law and gospel as two allegedly distinguishable, unequivocal quanta of text decidedly shipwrecks. If both can be both, then the distinction between law and gospel can only be established by other means. We will need to distinguish between two states of the same text, learning to read the same text as either law or gospel, command or promise and this is precisely what the hermeneutical sense of ‘letter and spirit’ offers to do. Theology needs hermeneutics. The simple identification of letter with law and spirit with gospel, perishes in the shared medium of the word. There is also another reason why the theological model demands the hermeneutical. There is a lack of reflection in the theological model on the conditions and possibilities for language (what may be called, in Kantian terms, the ‘transcendental’). Hermeneutics knows, for instance, the qualitative differences between ‘language’ and ‘writing’. Or, returning to Origen, his hermeneutics (though he does not use the word) knows the difference between reading (anagnōsis) and understanding (mostly noēsis, sporadically gnōsis) with respect to the Holy Scripture. According to Origen’s hermeneutical treatise De Principiis IV.1-3, the topic of his theory of reading is: ‘How divine scripture should be read and interpreted’ (Pōs anagnōsteon kai noēteon tēn theian graphēn).15 This difference implies that those who merely read are limited to mere aisthēsis (perception); as they carry out their sensual perception, they meet the mere letter (psilon gramma) and the mere wording (lexis). If those who read should become those who understand, then the sensual density of the perceived data must be  cleared up in one spot; as Origen expresses it in a vivid image, what is required is the gap or the hatch (opē) in the sensual appearance of the text.16 A hatch is a gap in the sensual sense, through which non-sensual sensibility evolves. Thus, those who read become those who understand, though they need the appearance to the senses and so need to keep reading. Although he expresses it in the form of Platonism, Origen has unearthed a key feature of writing. The medium of writing has both a sensualaesthetic facet and a noetic facet to it. Reading, in the framework of hermeneutics, is reviving the glow in the ashes or transforming that which is alien into that which is our own (Schleiermacher)17 or interpreting the vestiges of human life contained in writing (Dilthey).18 It is the transformation of mere letter into spirit, a dynamic movement from the merely aesthetic to the noetic. For the sake of this discovery, Origen’s Platonism is utterly indispensable to him. This difference between mere reading and understanding, as a contrast between letter and spirit, must not, however, be confused with Origen’s theory of the threefold sense of scripture, constructed with reference to Prov. 22.20ff., according to which there  is a hierarchy of body, soul and spirit with corresponding levels of meaning

Whatever Happened to a Pauline Text? 2 Cor. 3.6 and its Afterlife

7

suitable for the simple, the advanced and the perfect. With regard to the theory of the multiple sense of scripture, the literal sense (sensus literalis) is not at all the same as the sensual perception (aesthēsis) of the letter in the theory of reading. The result of identifying them is to ascribe a kind of Platonism to the threefold sense that diverts us far from Paul’s thinking. It must, nevertheless, be admitted that the hermeneutical interpretation of ‘spirit and letter’ drifts further from Paul in 2 Cor. 3.6 than the theological does. The theological model replaces the wording of ‘letter and spirit’ with ‘law and gospel’, but belongs in the context of Paul’s theology in general. While the hermeneutical model remembers the wording of Paul’s sentence, it quotes it less and less accurately, introducing ‘dead’ instead of ‘killing’ as an epithet for ‘letter’, and ‘alive’ instead of ‘giving life’ for the Spirit. The model also tends towards bondage to a limited metaphysic that is alien to Paul. In Christian history, the models have thus been interdependent, the deficits of one model calling for the supplement of other models and we shall shortly see that there is at least one other candidate than the two we have reviewed. This development of Paul’s text has affected every period within the intellectual history of the Old Europe. The divergent movements that come into play are thus made clear. When the antithesis is understood in the sense of the process of salvation, it leads out of everything else and into the essence of the Christian faith – a faith that is supposedly incomparable in every respect, due to its relation to ‘spirit’ as a reality that gives life in contrast to ‘letter’ as something that kills. However, when the antithesis is understood in a hermeneutical sense, it leads into everything else, everything that can be vaguely connected with the fact that we experience writing or ‘the letter’ as something that is dead, while we find oral communication to be something that is alive. The antithesis, understood in a hermeneutical way, collects and integrates a whole range of further pairs of terms that do not originate from intrinsically Christian sources, including the distinction between what is said and what is meant, between what is written and what is conceptualized, between what is read and what is understood. Thus, while the antithesis of letter and spirit in the first sense is turned into a distinguishing mark, which increasingly excludes everything that is not Christian, the antithesis in the second sense becomes a distinction, which proposes to include any hermeneutical experience, regardless of where it might appear and in whatever cultural context it may occur. Moreover, while the first sense understands ‘Spirit’ in the sense of divine self-gift, the second embraces ideas of the human subject and consciousness within the notion of ‘spirit’. Hence, the antithesis of letter and spirit carries within itself an extraordinary intrinsic tension. How can it be that, by virtue of one and the same pair of terms, the most specific particularity and the most general universality can both be actualized? The history of reception of these Pauline texts consists, at its heart, of an enactment of this tension. By this tension, the history of thought is shaped in its different periods and its changing movements. Yet, on the whole, this is a tension that has proved to be quite stable. The Christian age has been one in which the contrast between spirit and letter has been the regulating factor. However, signs of a shift away from this situation have increased most recently and this shift threatens the existing stability.

8

The Spirit and the Letter

2  The challenge to tradition In the first place, a new external perspective has emerged on the relation between spirit and letter. While the history of reception of the Pauline antithesis in the ‘Old Europe’ was conducted more or less as an internal matter within the Christian tradition, in the ‘New Europe’ it is now being increasingly observed from the outside. Up to now, it has been possible to present the history of reception in a rather grandiose way, by minutely inspecting the use of the theme in various periods (as can be seen in any bibliographies of the subject). But now the whole history of the idea has become a mere passing epoch in itself, and its time-limited nature has started to become obvious. Theology is thus forced to step out of itself and to discern the contrast of letter with spirit not only in relation to its own inner life but also in relation to those outside it. The hermeneutical sense of the antithesis may have seemed universal to those holding an interior perspective, but there are now external observers who appear to feel that they are excluded rather than included by the antithesis. They resist a hermeneutic based on the notion that a written text ‘kills’ while another reality called ‘spirit’ gives life. Seen from the outside, the supposed universality of the hermeneutical model presents itself instead as a concealed means by which someone is manipulated into becoming Christian. The latest discussion, triggered for example by Jacques Derrida (but certainly not only by him), takes its stand on this kind of external viewpoint: the traditional antithesis between spirit and letter does not encompass the whole world, but only a part of it and that part has in fact become more and more questionable. While the antithesis boasts that it never excludes anything or anyone, there now arise those who protest that they are indeed excluded by it. They unmask the hermeneutical universality of the antithesis as simply bogus, and reveal the dynamic of exclusion that is at work within it. In this situation, a new antithesis of ‘letter and spirit’ – understood in that order of value – competes against the old antithesis of ‘spirit and letter’. According to Paul, it is the spirit that gives life and the letter that kills. Now, seen from the outside, it is the very same spirit that kills and it is the letter that gives life. This is what Geoffrey Hartman proposed, writing ‘the roles of letter and spirit are reversed: the letter of the text lives on and undoes idealizations that seek to get rid of the letter’.19 Others such as Aleida Assmann have followed Hartman enthusiastically here, proclaiming: ‘the spirit is dead: there lives the letter!’20 There are only passing references in Derrida’s texts to the opposition of ‘spirit and letter’,21 and no passage, to our knowledge, explicitly refers to 2 Cor. 3.6. It is the readers of Derrida who have made this relationship prominent, albeit so fast that it began to circulate almost simultaneously with Derrida’s texts; consequentially, Derrida is always being read in the light of it. However, Derrida is certainly contesting the Western cultural tradition that has been shaped by the afterlife of the Pauline text, opposing ‘grammatology’, the study of writing and letter, to the European choir of – philosophical and theological – pneumatologies.22 His aim is to liberate writing from its ‘logocentric’ bondage, understood as captivity to any supposedly transcendent ‘word’ or principle that is not embedded in textuality. His complaint is that the true nature of writing has been conceived to be ‘not grammatological but pneumatological’, a ‘divine inscription

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in the heart and the soul’, while writing is regarded as perverse when it is ‘exiled in the exteriority of the body’.23 With words like these, Derrida is inevitably drawn into the force field of 2 Cor. 3.6. Hitherto we have thought of Paul as someone who does not hesitate to withstand his opponents to their face. In this late-modern reversal of his saying, we see Paul as someone who is being opposed to his own face. This disruption of the old-European stability of signs in the Pauline antithesis of spirit and letter is the point of departure for the following studies. In so far as theology makes recourse to this pair of terms, its reflection upon itself ought to be set in a completely new context because of the changes outlined above. As far as hermeneutics is concerned, the Pauline antithesis of ‘spirit and letter’ has been reversed into ‘letter and spirit’; it is now the spirit that ‘kills’, the letter that ‘gives life’. From the theological perspective on spirit and letter, this might lead us in one of two directions. We could completely withdraw our theological concern for salvation from its centuries-old coalition with hermeneutics, now that hermeneutics seems to have become hostile to salvation; we could, as it were, sever the two models from each other. Or we could seek for a way of relating the traditional opposition of ‘spirit and letter’ on the one hand to the new dialectic of ‘letter and spirit’ on the other. It is the latter option that we are taking with the studies in this book. Correspondingly, after this opening chapter the volume diverges into two main parts. The first (Part II), called Spirit and Letter: A Tradition, operates within the horizon of the established old-European synthesis of soteriology and hermeneutics. To some extent, it surveys the tradition, but it also identifies the limits of the synthesis and it aims to open up some new ways of approach to the stress on life-giving spirit by noting the challenge to a dualism between letter and spirit, which exists within the tradition itself. The next main part (Part III), Letter and Spirit: A Reversal, follows the opposite route. It traces the reversal of spirit and letter in the late-modern period and explores theologically the life-giving nature of text and signs, especially in the context of embodiment. In doing so, it hopes to show that the dialectic between spirit and letter can be restated in a way that does justice to Paul’s intention, while offering inclusion to those who currently feel excluded by the traditional developments of Paul’s saying. The astute reader may nevertheless ask whether the ‘spirit’ referred to in Part II of the book is the same as the ‘spirit’ of Part III. In the former part, the ‘spirit which gives life’ in the soteriological model is, of course, the divine breath of God, transforming human existence. In the latter part, the ‘spirit which kills’ seems to relate entirely to hermeneutics. The target here is the interpreting human mind, the thematizing, hegemonic human subject who tries to comprehend the whole world within the sameness of the self; it foists its own interpretative activity on the body and thereby violates it or kills it. The ‘inversion’ of spirit and letter in the contemporary world is thus a post-structuralist critique of the kind of phenomenology that prioritizes spirit or mind and minimizes the body or ‘letter’. However, the modern antithesis can quite properly be seen as a ‘reversal’ of the older tradition of spirit and letter, and as holding continuity with earlier, theological uses of ‘spirit’. In the traditional hermeneutical model, which occupies most of our attention in Part I, there was room in the concept of ‘spirit’ for the activity of the human mind in interpretation. Moreover, those who make the late-modern reversal also have as their target the concept (illusory, in their view) of

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a transcendental dominating subject, which is invoked to authenticate and justify the human self. Part of the theological aim of our project in this book is, in fact, to bring the human subject or spirit and the divine Spirit into one focus without confusion or simple identification, working towards a conclusion in which the the Spirit of God manifests both in the human mind (spirit) and in the human body, generating and consolidating the material world without domination.

3  A third model: Change of media We cannot, however, understand either the intellectual afterlife of 2 Cor. 3.6 or the dynamic behind the late-modern reversal, without identifying a third model of interpretation. The interplay between models, in which the deficiencies of one lead us to balance it with another, is not simply twofold (soteriological and hermeneutical) but threefold. A form of the third model makes its appearance in the first chapter of Part II of this book, in Michael Wolter’s examination of the antithesis of spirit and letter in the New Testament. He demonstrates that the word-pair ‘spirit and letter’ is a personal formulation of the Apostle Paul, and cannot be found anywhere else either in early Christianity or outside it. In 2 Cor. 3.6, where Paul first coins the expression, argues Wolter, ‘letter’ refers neither to the law in a theological sense, nor to the ‘literal meaning’ of a text, as was assumed, respectively, in the two traditions of interpretation we have been reviewing. Neither the soteriological nor the hermeneutical model is in view here at all. ‘Letter’ simply means ‘a written thing’, and so refers to two kinds of physical objects – the letters of recommendation that Paul’s opponents in Corinth were presenting to the community, and the stone tablets given to Israel on Sinai. By contrast, ‘spirit’ refers to the divine Spirit, which, as a result of Paul’s ministry, has been poured out in the heart of Christians. This spirit is not a ‘written thing’ (gramma), although it can be envisaged metaphorically as an invisible writing (engraphein) on the hearts of Christian believers (3.3), so that the community itself is a kind of ‘letter’ (epistolē, not gramma) with the spirit as God’s ink. This is the letter that Paul offers to those who question his ministry, not a mere written document. Paul is thus urging that his ministry, mediating eternal life, is superior to that of his opponents with their letters of recommendation and that it even surpasses the authority of Moses with his stone tablets. In the new creation, the hearts of Christian people become true letters of the spirit, bearing witness to Christ and to the love of fellow-disciples. So written objects (letters of recommendation and stone tablets) ‘kill’, but the Spirit gives life. This meticulous piece of New Testament exegesis acknowledges the priority that Paul gives to spirit, which is at the foundation of the ‘old-European’ use of the antithesis. It also highlights a contrast between the invisible (the spirit) and the visible (a written object) in Paul’s thought, and it must be frankly admitted that this kind of contrast led in time to a dualism between the immaterial and the material which was increasingly imposed on the antithesis of spirit and letter, though in non-Pauline ways. However, Wolter’s emphasis on the actual situation of Paul in Corinth out of which the antithesis was coined has the potential within it for the undermining of dualism.

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Paul’s image of the community itself as a letter of the spirit opens up a vision of the embodiment of the divine Spirit in the world, ‘written’ upon human minds and bodies. The Spirit that ‘brings life’ is a spirit immersed into worldly reality, offering a clue that is to be picked up by Oliver Davies in the final part of the book, in the last chapter that returns to the first. This third model of interpretation is what we might call a ‘media model’, or what David Martyn calls a ‘medial model’.24 Wolter proposes, from the viewpoint of contemporary New Testament scholarship, that the maxim of 2 Cor. 3.6 is to be best understood as describing a change of medium, a movement from one kind of writing to another: written documents bring only death, but the ‘writing’ of the spirit on the human heart brings life. As a New Testament scholar, he claims that this best represents Paul’s intent, but he has been gracious in discussion in recognizing that his colleagues who are systematic theologians will inevitably place this model in relation to the other traditional models, the soteriological/theological and the hermeneutical, rather than thinking it supplants them. If we judge that we can only ever access the text or find its full significance, through the refracting lens of interpretations that have emerged in the history of the church, then there will be an irreducible multiplicity of interpretations, each requiring and modifying the other. We may say that the power of this third model is to expose two self-delusions of the second, hermeneutical model, showing that it fails to achieve what it sets out to do. In the first place, the hermeneutical model itself claims to be making a transition from one medium to another, from a dead medium to a living one, from the merely literal to a deeper, spiritual meaning. The media model points out the implications of this: it emphasizes that the new medium is ‘the writing of the spirit in the heart’, and so it is not a medium at all in the usual sense. It runs the danger of being ‘a medium without medium’. Here we may return to the challenge from Jacques Derrida, who vigorously opposes the concept of ‘spirit’ as a transcendent reality, which floats free from the physicality of signs in the world. While Derrida himself does not comment directly on 2 Cor. 3.6, David Martyn makes an extensive study of the text with continual reference to Derrida’s Grammatology and comes to this conclusion: if Derrida were reacting against 2 Cor. 3.6, then it would be the text understood in a hermeneutical way that he would be opposing. According to a Derridean critique, Paul is moving from a medium to no medium at all (spirit) and thus to an immediacy in which some transcendent presence is being imposed on the world. Letter and spirit have become ciphers for mediality and immediacy.25 In the light of the media model, we can thus see that all hermeneutical models of spirit and letter tend to topple over into their opposite: affirming the priority of spirit over letter, they provoke a reaction in which this very priority is reversed. Indeed, they may even show the traces of this reversal within themselves. The third model also brings to light a basic contradiction or paradox in the Pauline text, which is endemic within both other models but is most obvious in the hermeneutical. Paul is using writing to condemn writing. Written documents apparently bring death, yet the media model, with its reflection on the different kinds of writing going on in this situation, draws our attention to the fact that Paul

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is himself writing a physical letter to which he wants his hearers to attend. They are to follow his letter, which speaks of the death-dealing letter instead of the letters of his opponents. We seem to have arrived at a ‘performative contradiction’ in which both of the other models are caught, and which the third model exposes. We ask ourselves whether there is any way out of this paradox? And can we develop an understanding of the writing of God’s Spirit on the heart, which is not subject to Derrida’s critique of immediacy of presence, loss of signs and ‘logocentrism’? It will take not just the  remainder of this chapter, but also the remainder of the book to develop a response to these questions. As an opening response to Derrida’s critique, it has to be admitted that there has been a tendency to denigrate physical signs in the Christian history of ‘spirit and letter’, under the influence of Platonism. However, intellectual history also shows many instances of resistance to dualism, of remaining within the horizon of the ‘old Western’ tradition of spirit and giving proper weight to the letter. That this is possible is demonstrated by Robert Morgan in his chapter. Exploring the nature of biblical criticism, especially New Testament theology, Morgan suggests that ‘the letter which kills’ is not letter itself, but letter which is not interested in spirit, open to spirit or intending spirit. His analysis of the ‘openness’ of a text also, we shall see, begins to tackle the challenge of a performative contradiction.

4  A text open to spirit Robert Morgan’s chapter operates within the traditional antithesis of spirit and letter, in conversation with Paul, Origen, Augustine and Luther. His concern, however, is a contemporary one: how to make a relation between Christian and non-Christian interpretations of the Bible in a largely post-Christian culture. His aim is to ask how the text of scripture can be read by scholars of Christian belief within a secular culture, a venture that he finds to be in sympathy with Paul’s own task of reading scripture from a Christological perspective within the ‘old covenant’ of Judaism. Morgan thus claims a genuine continuity with Paul’s own original context for what otherwise seems a novel proposal: to reuse the old antithesis of ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ as an opposition between two poles of biblical study, which can be called ‘letter-interpretation’ and ‘spiritinterpretation’, and between which lies a whole spectrum of critical approaches. He thus applies the term ‘letter’ to the clarifications provided and meanings suggested by modern, critical biblical scholarship. These ‘letter-interpretations’ in themselves, he claims, do not speak directly of God; they do not presuppose any religious belief on the part of the scholars, but they attempt to illuminate authors’ contexts in order to grasp their original meanings, whether as part of a project of historical reconstruction, social description, literary appreciation, ideological criticism or a mixture of these normal and legitimate scholarly aims. It is obvious to any competent reader that the New Testament authors intended to speak of God in Christ, and of the consequences that follow from this faith. ‘Letter-interpretation’ thus contains reference to spiritual realities, but the scholars doing the biblical study are not speaking of spirit for themselves; they can clarify those beliefs and hopes (and so contribute to their dissemination) whether or

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not they understand or actually share them. By contrast, ‘spirit’ in this proposal is reserved for the kind of explicit theological interpretation in which some theologians (who are also biblical scholars) unfold the meanings of these authors and texts on the assumption that the divine reality of which they speak is that which is worshipped in the church. That is, they write from a Christian standpoint, speaking with the biblical authors and developing the Christian tradition, regardless of how strong, weak or defective the theologian’s own participation in the Christian community’s faith and life may be. This labelling distinguishes between non-Christian and Christian interpretations of the Bible, but it also enables a definition for the ‘New Testament theology’, which developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Unlike the discipline of biblical studies, Morgan suggests that New Testament theology is a genre of ‘letter open to spirit’; it might also be called ‘letter intending spirit’. Unlike full-blown spirit interpretation, this is a rational biblical scholarship, which does not explicitly speak of God but where interpreters and their readers share a Christian standpoint and expect their exegesis, constructions and interpretations to be compatible with expressions of Christianity and to provide authoritative guidance for the contemporary church. A whole spectrum of such interpretations can be identified, in which some are closer to the spirit and some to the letter. Within biblical scholarship today there are signs of an inevitable ‘culture war’ between interpretations of the biblical texts which serve religious interests and those which aim to subvert these. Morgan suggests that the use of Paul’s antithesis proposed here would bring that out into the open, as well as clarifying the disputed terrain of biblical and New Testament theology. Morgan’s proposal illustrates the inevitable interaction between models. He concentrates on the hermeneutical model, reflecting on Paul’s use of the spirit–letter antithesis in the three passages where it occurs and suggesting that the hermeneutical application of the phrase by Origen and his successors has more merit than modern exegetes have generally allowed. He does not claim scriptural authority for his own  application of Paul’s phrase, but argues for the plausibility of finding a new application for our time, which nevertheless takes the original meaning and context seriously. Yet, while he is employing a hermeneutical model for the letter–spirit antithesis, it also contains a strong flavour of the theological or soteriological antithesis (law and grace) that he believes absorbed Paul. His argument is that letter isolated from spirit is not salvific and is religiously enervating. At the same time, this second piece in the book by a New Testament scholar shows that in exploring the expansive meaning of the text, all three models of interpretation identified can find a place. Any attempt to resolve the performative paradox presented by Paul’s text will have to proceed by distinguishing between different kinds of reading and writing, somehow exempting Paul’s own writing from his strictures on writing in general. Our attention is drawn to the different ways of reading by Paul’s words about the reading of the Old Covenant (2 Cor. 3.12-18), which follows his statement of the antithesis. In one kind of reading, not open to spirit, a veil lies over both the Old Testament text (Moses) and the hearts of the readers: the text becomes a dense ‘texture’, a blockage to understanding. But when the text is read with openness to Christ and the Spirit, the text and the readers’ own faces are unveiled and reflect the glory of God. It is as if the text itself is

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unclosed to become a face open to the Spirit of God (understanding the ‘face’ of Moses to be a metonymy for the whole text of Moses). It appears that the general critique of 3.3-4, that letters written on tablets of stone (vv. 3, 7) must kill, is moderated when they are read as open to spirit, taken out of their old context. While this applies in the first place to the words of the Old Covenant, Morgan has ventured to draw a parallel with the writings of modern biblical scholarship, extending the argument, as it were, from stone to ink (v. 3). Perhaps then, Paul can have confidence in his own letters written in ink because – unlike those of the Pseudo-apostles – he thinks of them as being open to spirit and so lending themselves to a different kind of reading. The apostle may be claiming that his own letter is not mere gramma, but a spiritual letter (epistolē) like the hearts of his hearers, manifesting the divine glory. The apparent self-contradiction of a text, which urges the deadly properties of text, thus leads us to discern a movement from one kind of text to another, from text as veil to text as open face and to look for a new event of reading, which is characterized by the life-giving spirit. Whether this resolution of the paradox only leaves us within the ‘old Western’ paradigm of letter and spirit and still makes us vulnerable to the Derridean critique that spirit is being privileged above text is, however, a question that will take longer to answer. If Paul’s own writing presents us with a ‘performative paradox’ that prompts thought (and which the third model of interpretation exposes), the same is true of the development of another kind of post-scriptural text in the church, that of the Creed. Just as Morgan uses the antithesis of spirit and letter in a new way, in order to track the varieties of New Testament theology, so Wolfram Kinzig in his chapter reuses the antithesis in seeking to clarify the development of early Christian creeds. He begins by observing the paradox. Paul had dispensed with the law as a normative text, divinely given, that had to be served in order to bring salvation (i.e. ‘letter’ in the theological sense), believing that we have been released to serve ‘in the newness of the spirit’ (Rom. 7.6). But Christian believers soon produced new written texts, which they claimed to be normative and requisite to attaining salvation. Some of these texts were collected into the canon of the New Testament, but there were others which were summaries of the Christian faith and which ultimately developed into ‘creeds’. The ‘performative paradox’ was exemplified in a Nicene Creed, which attempted to enshrine the Christian freedom from law in a formula, which it was obligatory to sign. Without letter there could be no faith. In this situation, Kinzig asks two questions. First, if according to Rom. 7.6, Christians ‘serve in newness of the Spirit’, why do they again need normative texts describing and defining the basic tenets of the Christian faith? Second, why was it impossible for Christians to agree on a basic canon of norms and rules without having them enshrined in fixed documents? In searching for an answer to these questions, Kinzig describes the various stages of composition from occasional, brief confessional sentences (‘homologies’) to rules of faith and from there to fixed creeds and he explores the motives for these developments. Finally, he returns to the antithesis of letter and spirit, showing that faith did not lose its dynamics by being turned into a fixed formula, but that faith unfolded through doctrinal and liturgical usage. Although the wording of the creeds was fixed, their use was not, and we can see the freedom of the Spirit exhibited as the creeds perpetually took on new meanings in ever-changing historical circumstances. Though Kinzig does not explicitly appeal to the idea of a text ‘open to

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spirit’, his compelling historical account illustrates the way that the church, especially in its liturgical practice, treated texts as places where there is a continual movement ‘from spirit to letter to spirit’.

5  The significance of the sign In his chapter, Morgan stresses that the ‘letter’ only kills when it is ‘mere letter’, not open to spirit, intending spirit or bearing the spirit. This both affirms the significance of the letter and also relativizes it with regard to spirit. He finds a contrast here with the long-established tradition of interpretation based on Origen, in which the salvific nature of the letter in itself has to be maintained as part of a threefold sense of scripture. In this theory of hermeneutics, each mode of reading has to be salvation bearing and so the Pauline antithesis between ‘killing’ and ‘making alive’ is lost. While this theory has assumed it can appeal to Origen for authority, Morwenna Ludlow now makes a new proposal in her chapter. Origen, she argues, takes basically the point of view that Morgan ascribes to Paul: it is reading according to the ‘mere letter’ or ‘the bare letter’, not open to the spiritual sense, which is deadly. While, as we have seen so far, Augustine and Origen have usually been associated with the soteriological and hermeneutical aspects of our antithesis, respectively (the first two models), Ludlow directs our attention to the approach of both theologians to hermeneutics, drawing in this case on Augustine’s earlier work. Moreover, she shows that both theologians seek to integrate letter and spirit rather than dismissing one in favour of the other. Her chapter challenges the assumption that Augustine, being concerned as he is with the history of salvation, must be primarily interested in the literal and historical sense of a text, while Origen is concerned only with its spiritual meaning. She argues that both theologians insist on the need for spirit and letter to be held together, but that they do this in distinctive and different ways. While Origen, she argues, finds levels of meaning in a text, relating to the body, mind and spirit, he also thinks that the ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ levels are accessed only through attention to the ‘bodily’ meaning of passages. The spiritual meaning is the higher one, the meaning for the ‘perfect’ Christian, but for Origen most of the bodily (or historical) meaning of scripture is also true. Where, however, it leads to a logically contradictory or immoral idea, the reader must certainly move on to the higher, allegorical meaning. It is essential to understand, urges Ludlow, that the antithesis between ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ does not usually refer to the difference between bodily and spiritual meanings of a text, but to ways of reading the text. The reader who fails to read ‘according to the spirit’, only reads literally (‘according to the bare letter’) and therefore stops at the bodily meaning of the text. Commentators have, Ludlow judges, wrongly confused the spirit–letter opposition with the threefold division of meaning in the text and thereby portrayed Origen as spiritualizing the Old Testament and ridding it of concrete, historical meaning. Augustine, Ludlow points out, prefers not to think in terms of hierarchical levels of meaning, but still celebrates the profound depths of scripture and acknowledges the possibility of multiple meanings. When he acknowledges that there can be more than one true interpretation of a text, he does not arrange them in an order of superiority,

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with the spiritual at a higher level than the bodily or literal; rather, he implies that there can be different meanings for different readers. For Augustine, the crucial distinction is that between the meaning of a text and the signs used to convey that meaning. The signs must not be confused with the things they signify, though in figurative speech the thing can, in turn, become a sign (e.g. the word ‘ox’ signifies an animal, which, in turn, signifies an evangelist). His concern is to teach the reader the correct way of reading those signs: in some cases, it will be appropriate to read literally, in others, metaphorically or spiritually. To read according to ‘the letter that kills’ is either to interpret something literally when it is meant figuratively or to interpret a literal passage as if it were figurative. Focusing on the hermeneutical interpretation of 2 Cor. 3.6, Ludlow thus demonstrates that this model need not denigrate the literal sense or the place of the material body, as has often been suggested by those who overstress the influence of Platonism in the Church Fathers. Origen and Augustine both seek a spiritual sense, but take the literal seriously. Bringing the second part of this book to a conclusion, this chapter like the others stands under the perspective of the traditional Western paradigm of letter and spirit, in which there is a movement from letter to spirit, awarding priority to the spirit without neglecting the letter. The way the antithesis is used shows that there is a continual resistance to a polarization of the two elements, and an avoidance of a dualism between disembodied spirit and matter. It should be admitted that our discussion in these chapters is partial in its review of the history of Christian ideas, since it concentrates on the hermeneutical model of interpreting the Pauline text at some expense of the soteriological. While all three models of interpretation are reviewed, there is much about the relation between law and grace that is left unsaid, especially with regard to the period of the Reformation. However, there is a decision to focus on the hermeneutical model because it is this that has prompted the great reversal of recent times, in which letter now attains a priority over spirit. To this the book now turns in the third part, and in the first two chapters the two editors of this book reflect further on the reasons for this reversal and its nature.

6  Derrida, reversal and antipolarization The first piece by one of the editors, Paul Fiddes, marks the change of mood with a quotation from Geoffrey Hartman (already referred to above) that: ‘The roles of letter and spirit are reversed: the letter of the text lives on and undoes idealizations that seek to get rid of the letter’. Fiddes explores this mood of reversal, appealing largely to the playful intellectual work of Jacques Derrida, but also to more popular versions in the culture of the movies. His explorations lead him to some Christian doctrinal reflection on the relation between the triune God and a world that is characterized by physical signs. Fiddes points out that in this apparent reversal of the Pauline text, there is a particular concept of spirit that is being opposed. ‘Spirit’ here refers to any principle or reality that is thought to exist independently of ‘letter’, supposing that it can float free

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of the signs that indicate it, escaping the text and the internal differentiation of signs from each other. This late-modern critique of spirit operates within a semiotic view of the world as a network of signs. Not only inscriptions of every kind, but all persons and objects are understood to be signs, pointing beyond themselves, representing and communicating themselves and emptying themselves out in the direction of others. From this perspective, there can be no flight from the world of time and space into some area of ‘spirit’. Especially, there can be no ‘transcendental signified’, a supreme subject (God) who is non-temporal and independent of all signifiers and who supposedly validates a human self that stands behind and over signs and merely uses them for its own purposes. Such is the spirit that ‘kills’. By contrast, the letter ‘gives life’. That is, the letters of physical signs, with their mutual distinctions, multiple significances and capacity for postponing meaning, are endlessly life giving. There is always surplus or excess. Reversing the usual ascriptions of spirit and letter thus makes a rhetorical point: if spirit is regarded as a ‘transcendental signified’, which is independent of the letter or physical sign in the world, then it is deadly. Using the work of Jacques Derrida and the popular culture of recent films, Fiddes explores in detail three forms of this ‘deadly spirit’. These are the dominating subject, the transcendent book and the imposing voice. They are the subject that dominates a world of objects, an eternal book that supposedly validates all physical texts and a voice that insists on the direct presence of the speaker. In view of the exegesis of Augustine by Ludlow in her chapter in Part I, it is of interest that Derrida engages in an ambiguous dialogue with Augustine. He is attracted by the value that Augustine gives to the embodiment and materiality of human writing, through the highly psychosomatic metaphors he uses for the ‘writing of God’ on the heart. He might also have approved of the way that Augustine shows (as Ludlow demonstrates) that what is signified in the world becomes a signifier in its turn. On the other hand, Derrida is clearly opposing Augustine’s elevation of a transcendent book, which is to be read ‘without temporal syllables’, and Augustine’s concept of God as signified by human speech but alone among signified things in not becoming a sign pointing to anything else. However, Fiddes argues that Derrida’s apparent reversal of the Pauline theme is, in fact, an opposition to the polarization or dualism of spirit and letter. Holding spirit and letter apart increases the split between subject and object. That the real target is polarization and not spirit itself is shown by two variations on the apparent reversal. On the one hand, Derrida shows that the text is not simply life giving; there is death in the text. ‘Death strolls between the letters’, in being the final disruptive Other to which the text witnesses and in symbolizing the fact that writing does violence to the author: what is written in the very skin of the author is torn off, as it is distanced from the author in being set down in material signs. On the other hand, Derrida does not simply dismiss spirit as something that kills; he does think that the idea of spirit has a part to play in our situation in the world. In his reflections on Heidegger, who is himself commenting on two German poets (Hölderlin and Trakl), he develops a positive sense of spirit. Despite his critique of Heidegger, he tentatively adopts Heidegger’s view that spirit is an originary event, a primary

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movement which can be imaged as a ‘coming’ or a ‘burning’ which is ecstatic love, going out from itself on a journey which creates human mission in history. This is a non-objectifiable rhythm of promise, always opening language up to new possibilities, giving life to the letter. It cannot be reduced to a transcendent subject, eternal book or dominating voice. Despite Derrida’s reluctance to do so, Fiddes argues that we can name this originary movement of burning fire as God – or rather, we can discern a whole network of movements, which are the relations within the triune God. So, finally, Fiddes proposes that we can overcome the polarization between spirit and letter by envisaging the world as a network of physical signs held within the perichoresis of the Trinity. We can then affirm spirit as a kind of transcendental signified, but one that is never without the letter, the text of the physical world in which it is always embodied. Spirit always implies commitment to the body of the world.

7  The Romantic reversal The following chapter, by the other editor of this volume, Günter Bader, discerns a change of mood about spirit and letter earlier than Derrida. While the prior chapter explores the reversal of spirit and letter in one thinker of late-modernity, Bader traces the reversal further back, to the Romantic movement and especially to Schlegel with his programme that ‘the letter must be active and alive, agile and progressive’. Surprisingly, he also finds traces of the reversal in Schleiermacher, despite that thinker’s overt insistence on the priority of the spirit over ‘dead letter’. He thus begins by recalling our observation (see Section 3) that the hermeneutical use of the antithesis spirit and letter – or the process of finding the spirit of the letter – tends towards a critical point where the pairing of terms reverses itself. The hermeneutical model topples over into its opposite. Schleiermacher, he proposes, is an excellent case study for watching this happen. The reversal is not just prompted by a reaction against the traditional antithesis, but by an inner dynamic within the antithesis itself. The context for this event is the Romantic reversal, the assertion that spirit speaks through matter in  all art forms and so there is a ‘speaking’ within what is ‘spoken’. Based upon Kant’s perception that the productive power of the imagination works on ‘matter which is given by reality’ and that the arts speak through ‘language as mere letter’, Schlegel referred to the ‘language in language’, the enlivening principle of the spirit in the arts which is never there without language – whether this is spoken or written. Thus, the letter transcends itself and ‘Romanticism is transcendental poetry’. On the face of it, Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion seem to assert the opposite. They insist on the superiority of the spirit to the letter. While the spirit is alive, the letter is dead, a formulation that echoes 1 Cor. 3.6 even if the letter there is not so much dead as death-dealing (‘the letter kills’). In sympathy with Plato’s rejection of writing in favour of the living voice of the speaker, Schleiermacher exalts ‘speeches’ over the written text. He maintains that ‘the strongest historical arguments in the critique of writing come from Plato and Paul’. Moreover, when true religion is understood to be a living spirit

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of feeling and intuition, as distinct from the ‘dead letter’ of theology, then the proper medium for religion to express itself is the spoken word. Even the sacred text is only a ‘mausoleum of religion, a memorial of the past presence of a Great Spirit which has now departed’. Here, Schleiermacher reflects the distinction made towards the end of the eighteenth century between theology and religion. Theology was understood to be the objective science of exegesis, affiliated to linguistics and historical research, while religion was understood to exist in the area of faith, experience, revelation and pious self-consciousness. This was nothing other than a distinction and a separation between letter and spirit. The Speeches then seem to be in conflict with Romanticism and especially with Schlegel, affirming as they do the Spirit speaking in the text or the ‘language of language’. However, Bader demonstrates how the Speeches actually show the inevitable reversal of the principle ‘spirit and letter’ into ‘letter and spirit’; the more the hermeneutic meaning of the text is emphasized, the more it tips into an ‘antihermeneutic’, countering the movement out of text towards spirit. Three indications of this reversal can be discerned. In the first place, like Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church, these speeches that condemn writing are themselves contained in a written document, a performative paradox, which Bader considers to be the largest blind spot in Schleiermacher’s eye. Moreover, the contradiction is deepened because a polemic against letters on behalf of the immediate feelings of ‘religion’ passes inevitably into a critique of language itself as a medium in which the spirit ‘evaporates’, which must include the spoken word. Thus, the speaker about religion is caught in the same contradiction as the writer. Second, in his Speeches, Schleiermacher moves from considering the essence of religion as such, to affirming positive religion or to religions in their particularities, which relate to religion ‘just like so many letters to spirit’. In the fifth speech, Schleiermacher stresses that not everything that appears to be ‘dead letter’ in religion should be so dismissed. Third, Schleiermacher accepts that forms of art – including written texts such as poetry – can act vicariously for each other and this must mean that written text can stand in when the rhetoric of the inspired speaker fails. Bader returns then to Schlegel’s observation that ‘the letter must be active and alive, agile and progressive’, and concludes that a programme for postmodern Protestantism has been awaited since Schegel. The programmatic elements, he suggests, should be centred on ‘the divine breath of irony’. The very reversal of spirit and letter, the movement from dead letter to living letter is an ironic one and he suggests that it is irony with its component parts of allegory and wit that can release the transcendality of language (i.e. the spirit in the letter). Admittedly, there is no irony in the intentions of the speaker in Schleiermacher’s Speeches, but the reversal is still there. In the next chapter, Michael Meyer-Blanck considers the lingering effect in the life of the church of the attack made by Schleiermacher on the letter in the name of the spirit, which may also be understood as an attack on theology (‘dead’) in the name of religion (‘living’). In particular, he considers the influence of Schleiermacher’s viewpoint on the theory and practice of preaching. As he makes clear, this is an appropriate area of investigation, since ‘practical theology’ was actually devised as an academic discipline in the late eighteenth century with the aim of inducting

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scientific theology into vital religion or of breathing spirit into letter. While he does not observe, as Bader does, the inherent reversal within Schleiermacher’s attack on the letter, he suggests that any theory of preaching that relies on Schleiermacher’s priority of religious experience (spirit) over religious text is bound to fail and as a matter of fact will be replaced in contemporary thought by homiletical theories that give a proper place to textuality. Within homiletics, a kind of reversal is taking place that this chapter brings to light. Meyer-Blanck’s target is a popular ‘two-term’ theory of homiletics that follows Schleiermacher in downgrading letter in favour of spirit. The two terms referred to are the experience that lies behind the writing of the text, and the interpretation being made in the experience of the listener; the text then is merely regarded as the medium of the experience that is conveyed from subject to subject. Spirit is speaking to spirit and the text or letter as used by the preacher, is simply a vehicle for immediate communication on the level of spirit. According to this theory, the experience of faith and the experience of revelation of biblical writers has to be ‘distilled out of the letter’ by the preacher so that there can be an encounter between the spirit of the author and the spirit of the reader. In this two-term approach to preaching, ‘one forgets about the materiality of the form of the sign due to the dominance of the ideal of the “live discourse”’. As with Schleiermacher (and Plato), the speaking voice has priority over the written text. What is lost is the otherness of the text, witnessing to the alien experience of the biblical witness that appears in the text and must be taken seriously. We are thus alerted, once again, to the danger of cultivating a devotion to spirit, which floats free of the letter. From the standpoint of preaching, Meyer-Blanck illustrates the futility of trying to get behind the signs of the text. By contrast, he urges a three-term model of preaching, which has learnt from the modern discipline of signs and which reflects Derrida’s concern that the written text should resist and challenge the perspective in which the subject is primordial and primary. His programme for preaching thus echoes the late-modern critique of the dominance of spirit. In this ‘semiotic triangle’, the three terms are the text, the historical experience behind the text and the interpretation in the mind of the listener. ‘Experience is mediated by signs and not accessible in any direct kind of way’, and ‘this applies to present experience and to past experience alike’. According to this semiotic model, sign and experience are mutually bound to each other. We can never dispense with the sign, while signs for their part always need interpretation. The text as sign (the letter) is ambiguous, but not arbitrary; it is life giving because it opens up meaning by virtue of its form. There is room here for all the diversity of readings that come from the response of the reader, and to neglect them may result in ‘the worst heresy of all – boredom’. There is also room for exploring the original historical experience, offering a healthy resistance by its strangeness to the modern subject. But neither dimension of experience is accessible without the textual sign. Preaching means to open up the play between text, history and interpretation and to trust the impact of the performed text. Meyer-Blanck is urging that spirit and letter should be distinguished, but neither given priority over the other, as is the case with the two-term model of preaching. This

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leads him to reflect that it is too restrictive to identify ‘spirit’ with religious experience, as if it were a property of the interpreting subject. Neither, conversely, should it be limited to the life-giving properties of the text. Rather, it should be seen as a dimension of the whole semiotic process, generating significance that is not contained in the text as mere letter. ‘The field of letter and spirit is action in motion’, he writes.

8  Living with the wounds of discourse In exploring the reaction of the modern and late-modern period against the priority of spirit over material signs, we have in these three chapters been focusing on those responses that have taken the form of reversal, those that have affirmed ‘the letter that gives life’. However, in his chapter, Jochen Schmidt reminds us that there can be another kind of response. Taking his cue from Adorno’s observation that symbol and meaning have fallen apart, he identifies a contemporary feeling that spirit has come adrift from the letter and finds the proper response to be a willingness to live ‘in the gap’. In face of the situation that spirit can no longer reanimate letter, the solution is neither to try to recelebrate the spirit (as in Heidegger), nor to replace the spirit with the letter (as in Mark Taylor). We must simply live with ‘the wounds of discourse’. Schmidt takes Kafka as an example of someone who protests against the domination of the material letter by the spirit, as illustrated in his short story, ‘the Penal Colony’, but who then does not attempt to assert the priority of the letter. Exploring the disagreement between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem over the matter of Kafka’s ‘failure’, Schmidt underlines the view of Scholem that Kafka simply accepts the decay of meaning in the text, its present inability to bear spirit. Scripture is not lost, but is unreadable: the key to penetrate to its meaning is lacking. Understanding the text of the Torah to be a revelation, Scholem finds Kafka asserting the ‘nothingness of revelation’. Text and revelation are present, but meaning is absent. This accords with Scholem’s wider conviction that tradition decays: there is bound to be a conflict between the values of tradition, as expressed in texts of the community and the actualities of history and so there comes a point when tradition has no content but still has to be transmitted. It is this decay that gives rise to heresy and so Scholem takes another example from the Jewish sect of the Sabbatians, with whom he associates Kafka himself. In the decay of tradition, religious symbolism loses its meaning, whether the symbol of the Messiah or the text of the Torah itself. In the heretical movement of the Sabbatians, born out of a clash between tradition and actual situation, the Messiah apostasizes and even the text of the Torah loses meaning as it is subverted (for instance, in the sect’s changing days of fast into days of festival). But, affirms Scholem, the very catastrophe of meaning still testifies to the meaning that is lost. Brokenness is a sign of the perfection that is irretrievably gone. So, concludes Schmidt, when letter and spirit go adrift, the solution is neither to prioritize spirit nor letter. Meaning and hope for the future can be found in the very gap that opens up. This contribution might seem to run counter to the general argument of this book that the late-modern period shows a reversal of spirit and letter. But, we should also notice that, as Schmidt himself shows, Kafka’s writings

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make sense of the situation of loss by ‘turning it into language’. So there is still an element of reversal in this crisis of meaning, though certainly not a total replacement of spirit by letter.

9  Spirit in the world In moments of extreme crisis, as a coping mechanism we may just have to live with a disruption between spirit and letter which is never healed, as Jochen proposes, but in the final contribution Oliver Davies suggests that we might, nevertheless, find a way of coexistence between spirit and letter in inexhaustible difference and unity. By way of conclusion, he returns full circle to the exegesis of 2 Cor. 3.6 offered by Michael Wolter at the beginning of Part I, according to which ‘letter’ simply means ‘a written thing’, or a material object. He asks us to notice that ‘spirit’ can be read in this text as signifying both divine Spirit (Creator) and human spirit (created). If we confuse the two with each other, as has tended to happen in the Western intellectual tradition, then the result is one of the deepest polarities in our culture, in which spirit as the immaterial, the reflective, the self-authenticating and the non-temporal has been set in perpetual opposition to the material, the opaque, the conditioned and the temporal. Spirit alone, in this radical polarity, is supposed to afford the possibility of freedom. The result has been the reversal exemplified by Derrida and noted many times in this book – that is, the assertion that it is the letter that gives life and not the spirit. Davies now examines two instances in the history of Western thought in which spirit and letter or at least spirit and matter, have been radically polarized. The first is the polemic between Zwingli and Luther on the nature of the Eucharistic presence, and the second is the debate on the ‘task of the scholar’ initiated by Fichte at the time of the foundation of the University of Berlin. In the first, Zwingli denies the presence of Christ in the material sign of the Eucharist because he does not consider that the material body can be penetrated and changed by divine life from within. In his view, the Spirit does not transform materiality into sacramental reality, but offers access to God by a path that does not lead through the material world. The only sphere of action of the Spirit is the human spirit, a conviction that also becomes apparent in the very different cultural situation at the end of the eighteenth century. According to Fichte, the knowledge cultivated in the Wissenschaften of the University was to be a practical knowledge, shaping the reality of the world in a creative way, and issuing from a human spirit that was an agent of creation in the image of God. The human spirit could change the material world, bringing it into conformity with the divine image, but the creative Spirit of God itself was not operating on the ‘dull and static world of bodies’ but only on the ‘free Life that eternally springs forth’ as the subjectivity of the human spirit. In Fichte’s academic programme, then, Davies finds the same kind of dominance of spirit over the material world as Bader has detected in both Fichte and one mood of Schleiermacher’s Speeches. The problem, as Davies diagnoses it, lies in the confusion between uncreated and created spirit, widening the polarity between spirit and letter. The correction is to be found in the proper exegesis of 2 Cor. 3.6 as previously set out by Michael Wolter, but

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with a variation suggested by Davies. As Wolter insists, letter (gramma) here means a ‘written thing’, and the critical point is Paul’s distinction between the literal letters of recommendation brought by the false apostles and the metaphorical letter (epistolē) written on the heart of believers. Laying stress on Paul’s words that the second kind of letter is one that ‘can be read by all’, Davies suggests that Paul is not distinguishing between visible and invisible letters, but between two kinds of writings that are both visible. Indeed, the metaphorical letter written by the Spirit on the heart is even more visible than the literal letters, since ‘heart’ has a distinctively physical resonance and the life-giving activity of the Spirit must be manifest in the human body. The key difference is one of causality; in the literal letter there is only human agency, whereas the Spirit of God is the agency in the metaphorical, spiritual letter. This issue of causality, Davies urges, resolves what would otherwise be an irony in Paul’s presentation, that he is criticizing the written letters of his opponents in his own letter, which is also gramma. We have previously identified this as a ‘performative paradox’, which is also present in Schleiermacher’s critique of the dead letter and which can prompt a reversal of priority between letter and spirit. We have already suggested that Paul may be regarding his own written letter as more than mere gramma, as text open to the spirit. Davies articulates this in terms of causality, suggesting that the apostle is laying claim to a divine agency in his writing, raising it from mere gramma to being a metaphorical, spiritual letter, which manifests the divine glory. In the very act of his writing, the human causality of the letter writer (human spirit) has merged with the divine causality (Spirit of the living God). This claim enables us to see both an overcoming of the confusion between divine and human spirit, and a bridging of the gap between spirit and letter. The Spirit manifests both in the human mind (spirit) and in the human body, working together with the mind without being confused with it and generating and consolidating the material world. The Spirit thus establishes the deep unity of mind and matter, of subjective and objective, within an encompassing world that the Spirit sustains, creating an environment in which there can be difference within an underlying relation. In the third part of the book, the contributions all acknowledge the need to learn from the late-modern reversal of spirit and letter, by affirming the vital polyvalency of the sign (‘the letter gives life’) and by taking care not to downgrade the materiality of the sign in the name of spirit; they all recognize that, detached from sign or letter, spirit is a deadly concept. In his concluding piece, Davies proposes that the clue to giving proper significance to both spirit and letter is a vision of divine Spirit that is truly immersed in the material world without separation or confusion.

10  Spirit and letter: Overcoming polarization Readers of this book might have different reactions to its structure. Some might feel that they are still comfortable within the kind of perspective set out in Part II. They understand what has happened to the antithesis of spirit and letter in a late-modern period and take some interest in it – enough, perhaps, to read the contributions contained in Part III. But they conclude that they can go on talking about God perfectly

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well by taking the well-trodden path from letter to spirit. Other readers, however, will want to see how far the reversal of spirit and letter in recent times may help to form the task of theological interpretation. To a large extent, the antithesis ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ is transposed during the course of this study into the pairing ‘sign and meaning’, and it will seem to some readers that there is an outstanding issue about whether theology can ever give full value to physical signs within the antithesis. For them, this last section of the opening chapter attempts to assess how seriously the contributions have, in fact, taken on the challenge that the reversal poses. The project might, we suggest, be seen as a response to Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s critique that Protestantism has lost any true sense of aesthetics by emphasizing divine glory at the expense of form in the world. Von Balthasar’s point is that Reformation thought resisted any easy harmonization between divine Spirit and nature, stressing the breaking in of grace to the altogether unsuitable medium of the finite and sinful world as a sheer gift of God, so that the divine glory remains veiled in humility within a world that remains the sphere of the sinner’s rejection of God. This could easily result in the loss of any genuine relationship between the beauty of divine revelation and the beauty of the world:26 [There are] two elements in the beautiful which have traditionally controlled every aesthetic and which, with Thomas Aquinas, we could term species (or forma) and lumen (or splendor) – form (Gestalt) and splendour (Glanz). As form, the beautiful can be materially grasped . . . Protestant aesthetics has wholly misunderstood this dimension and even denounced it as heretical, locating then the total essence of beauty in the event in which light irrupts.27

Here, we may find the roots of the elevation of ‘religion’, written invisibly on the heart, above the dead letter, as developed in the late eighteenth century and recalled in the chapters by Bader and Meyer-Blanck. Von Balthasar himself tries to take form seriously, while resisting any confusion between God and the world, by distinguishing between the light of common being that breaks forth from the particular form of every individual being on the one hand and the manifestation in the world of the glory of the triune God on the other. There is a spirit of ‘being’ which is marked by generous self-giving and attention to what is other, and there is the Holy Spirit of God. The first reality is created and the second uncreated, but both realities are marked by movement towards the other, are held together by analogy and unite perfectly in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. As Von Balthasar writes, ‘There exists an analogy between God’s work of formation and the shaping forces of nature and of humanity as they generate and give birth’. In the incarnation, God ‘perfects the whole ontology and aesthetics of created being’.28 Von Balthasar thus aims to speak of the spirit in the world while giving full weight to the embodied nature and the earthly beauty of signs. This account of theological aesthetics brings a challenge to the contributions in Part III of this book. Are they, in fact, learning from the late-modern reversal of spirit and letter and taking the material signs of the world with due seriousness? All the contributions are concerned to identify the working of spirit in the signs of the world, while taking sign or letter with complete seriousness. Spirit may then be envisaged as offering a primal movement which opens all signs to the promise of something

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always to come (Fiddes, echoing Derrida) or breathing through human words with divine irony, opening up what is said to an infinity of saying (Bader, echoing Schlegel) or unifying mind and matter, subject and object in the world (Davies, building on the Apostle Paul) or producing ever-increasing significances in the text through preaching, while not neglecting the historical experience to which text bears witness (Meyer-Blanck, developing the semiotic model of Charles Pierce). The contributors in Part II have already shown that Christian tradition, from the Church Fathers onwards, has resisted a dualism between spirit and letter or spirit and material sign. While the direction of thought in the old-European tradition was from letter to spirit in which spirit retained a priority, it was clear that letter was necessary to find the spiritual dimension. The sentence from Schlegel quoted by Bader, ‘no spirit without letter’ could equally well, as Ludlow shows, have been spoken by Origen or Augustine. There have been moments of radical polarization, as Davies describes them, especially in the Platonist synthesis of human soul with pure being, but there have also always been voices counselling a withdrawal from this dangerous limit. Even in Derrida there is a rejection of total polarization, as Fiddes shows. While Schmidt’s contribution proposes a crisis strategy for some situations – living in the gap between sign and meaning – he is not suggesting a dualism, since neither element excludes the other; his diagnosis of loss of meaning in the tradition is actually strongly anti-dualistic. In the late-modern situation of the New Europe, dualism thus continues to be resisted, but it does take a new form in the ‘reversal’ of thinking. The direction of thought changes and instead of letter pointing the reader towards a higher realm of spirit, experiences that we want to name as ‘spirit’ lead us to give attention to letter. As Bader puts it, we move from seeking the ‘spirit of the letter’ to looking for the ‘letter of the spirit’. Now, in this situation, the ‘spirit’ being envisaged is more than the human spirit. It is this factor, as we suggested earlier, that makes for continuity between Parts II and III of this book, between the ‘old Western’ perspective and some adoption of the latemodern mood. ‘Spirit’ is there before the individual subjectivity of the human spirit, filling the signs of the world with both promise and irony and drawing the human self into the fullness of life. Bader describes it like this: ‘the infinity of saying is nothing other than the speaking word itself, which was in the beginning, while the said is that which was only ever produced by human speech’. This gives rise to irony, or a ‘speaking as if one didn’t speak at all’. While this idea has its source in the Romantic movement and especially in Schlegel, Bader urges us to consider it a vital element of a programme for late-modern Protestantism. Irony itself, suggests Bader, contains both allegory and wit. Where the otherness of speaking opens up the human ‘said’ into the infinite other, then signs become allegories. Where the speaking announces itself in the said, affirming it without being absorbed by it, making what is said ‘transparent in radiant beauty’, there is what we recognize as wit. This infinite ‘speaking’ and ‘saying’ that may be called spirit does, however, pose a question. It must be more than human subjectivity, but when the theologian identifies it with the Spirit of God, this may well be open to the criticism that we are returning to the dominance of spirit or to a logocentrism, which the ‘reversal’ was supposed to be undermining. Are we, in fact, paying due attention to the signs in the world? Is it possible to speak of spirit in the world without swamping the ‘letter’ with divine glory?

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Perhaps it is enough, as Fiddes suggests in his chapter, to emphasize that the Spirit of God is characterized by humble self-giving rather than coercion and that the triune God is committed eternally to the body of material signs through a desire for creation and incarnation. We should add the perception of Davies that in the divine economy there is a cooperation in the world, though not a confusion, between the uncreated Spirit of God and the created human spirit and it is this that overcomes polarization between spirit and matter. Nevertheless, the image of a prevenient ‘speaking’ which fills signs with a divine breath of irony might fall under the critique of Derrida about the imposing of presence through voice. In his essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, he recalls the Platonic giving of priority to the living voice over the written text and aligns this with the idea that the spoken word is the ‘son’ of the speaker: the speaking subject is the ‘father’ of his own speech and the ‘son’ always requires the presence and validation of the father. This, suggests Derrida, is reflected in the metaphysics of an omnipotent and always-present father, Plato’s Form of the Good as the ‘Father and Maker of all’, so that Plato’s attack on writing is, in fact, the origin of the whole Western tradition of ‘logocentrism’.29 This pattern of speaking and spoken word can be traced in the Platonizing Logos doctrine often evoked within the Christian tradition, where the expressed word of the divine mind is the divine Son, who has been envisaged as a mediator between two totally opposite realms of being and becoming. In this context, the world might be seen as a deposit of signs created by the voice of God, within which the divine voice is encoded. Such a model has all the features of domination by voice and imposing of presence to which Derrida objects. It would merely contradict the late-modern reversal of spirit and letter, rather than gaining anything from it. However (as in the chapter by Fiddes), we might think of the world as text, not because it is a deposit of a word spoken outwards from God, but because it is in God. The whole created world may be envisaged as existing in the space which God makes for it within the divine life, sharing in the pattern of relations which are like those between a Father and a Son, always opened up to new depths and a new future by a Spirit of promise. The network of signs would thus be formed and impressed by the movement of these relations. In this understanding of creation, soteriology meets hermeneutics, as the human activity of interpreting texts (or preaching from them) is always held within the larger semiotic circle of God’s interpretation of God’s self in the life of the Trinity. ‘The field of letter and spirit is’, as Meyer-Blanck expresses it, ‘action in motion’. Metaphors will be required to express the experience of this participation and ‘voicing’ is certainly one appropriate image, as the movement between the divine Persons may be understood as being like a pattern of speech. We can then speak of the text or letter in the world as being revoiced by the divine Spirit, filled with the breath of divine irony and promise. But if we are to avoid the critique of imposing a voice on the text, we must supplement it by other metaphors for being shaped by the movements of the triune life of God. We may say that we also find ourselves in movements like those of self-giving, birthing, sending, coming and suffering. Images of water flowing, fire burning and music playing will also be appropriate to our experience of the way that signs are filled with the Spirit or taken into the flow of the Spirit and so are ‘simultaneously language and the language of language’ (Bader, echoing Schlegel).

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Images from ‘the assembly of all the arts’ will be appropriate, but also images that come from other areas of life. Nor is this merely accidental or arbitrary; material signs in the world can express the movement of Spirit because the triune God has created them and is sustaining them. To speak of the spirit in this way will be to overcome polarization between spirit and letter, and lay a foundation for a late-modern theological aesthetics. It will also be faithful to the text of Paul, who found spirit inscribed on the hearts and in the behaviour of the Christian community.

Part Two

Spirit and Letter: A Tradition

2

‘Spirit’ and ‘Letter’ in the New Testament Michael Wolter

1  Tracking the words The title of this chapter could just as well have been ‘spirit and letter in the Bible’, or even ‘spirit and letter in early non-Christian Greek literature’. For even if we extended the scope of the following exploration outside the New Testament, we would not find more than the four references to the antithesis of ‘spirit’ (pneuma) and ‘letter’ (gramma), which are already known to us from the Epistles of Paul: 2 Cor. 3.6 (twice); Rom. 2.29 and 7.6. Instances can be found where one of the two terms stands in antithesis to a different term altogether: in opposition to ‘spirit’ (pneuma) we find the anthropological terms ‘flesh’ (sarx) and ‘body’ (sōma),1 and in opposition to ‘letter’ (gramma, with the meaning of ‘what is written’) we find the term ‘Logos’ as a designation for the unwritten and merely spoken word.2 But there are no other examples of opposition between ‘spirit’ and ‘letter’ other than the four instances in Paul’s letters. When we look in concordances3 for the usage in Greek literature outside the New Testament, we find that the invariable translation of gramma by ‘letter’ (or in German, Buchstabe) is a narrowing of the range of its meaning. Like all forms that end with the syllable -ma, the Greek word gramma is a verbal noun which denotes the result of an action.4 On this basis, gramma is the result of the verb graphein (‘write’), and so bears the quite general meaning ‘what is written’. The spectrum of meanings, which this lexical meaning gains when it is spoken or written is thus very broad.5 As a useful background for any discussion about Paul’s use of gramma, the following meanings among this wide range are important.6

a. Gramma denotes an individual letter of the alphabet, as in 2 Cor. 3.7, where Paul

refers to ‘the ministry of death, chiselled in letters on stone tablets’. With this we may compare Plato’s phrase ‘letters and syllables’ (grammata kai syllabai) in Cratylus 390e. Philo, referring to Adam’s naming of the animals in Gen. 2.9, writes that ‘in giving names Adam did not assign or change parts of names or syllables or single letters (grammata), only vowels and mute consonants’ (De Mutatione Nominum 64).7 b. Gramma designates a writing – whether a book, document, certificate of debt or letter. So in 1 Maccabees we read: ‘and they sent letters (grammata) to Judas and

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his brethren’ (5.10), and in Polybius ‘just at this time a dispatch (grammatōn) came from Teuta, ordering them to return home by the quickest route’ (2.6.4).8 c. Gramma is understood as a particular writing, namely the Torah or the Jewish Books of the Law. Philo writes (Quaestiones in Exodum 2.19) about ‘a prize to those who keep the divine writing of the Law (to hieron gramma tou nomou)’. d. Gramma designates a quotation from scripture or another writing. Philo offers examples of gramma as quotations from the Torah: he remarks that ‘The first commandment (prōton gramma) in the second table is: “Thou shalt not commit adultery”’ (De Specialibus Legibus 3.8), and he introduces the citation of Num. 28.2 with the phrase ‘According to the most sacred ordinance (gramma) of Moses’ (Quod Deus Sit Immutabilis 6).9 Philo also uses gramma for a quotation from Homer’s Odyssey, introducing it with the words ‘as the phrase (gramma) of the poet puts it’ (De Migratione Abrahami 195),10 and similarly for a quotation from the Delphic Oracle, writing ‘He did not read well the Delphic motto (to Delphikon gramma) “Know thyself ”’ (Legatio ad Gaium 69). e. Gramma can be employed to interpret a historical event as God’s sign. Referring to Aaron’s rod which could transform dust into gnats, Philo states (De Migratione 85) that The acknowledgement is made that these events are the Finger of God (Exod. 8.19) and the word “Finger” is equivalent to a divine edict (gramma), declaring that sophistry is ever defeated by wisdom; for holy writ (ho hieros logos), speaking of the tables on which the oracles (hoi chrēsmoi) were engraved, says that they were written by the Finger of God (Exod. 32.16).

While gramma in the singular thus occurs in many places outside the New Testament, there is only one further example in the New Testament – Rom. 2.27 – to be added to the four occurrences we have listed above. Unlike the previous four, it does not place gramma in antithesis with pneuma (spirit), although it occurs in one and the same literary context as Rom. 2.29. The verse in question reads as follows: 27a: The uncircumcision by nature who fulfills the law will pass judgement 27b: on you, who through letter (gramma) and circumcision are a transgressor of the law.

Here, Paul contrasts the non-Jew, whom he designates metonymically as ‘uncircumcision by nature’11 and about whom it is said that he keeps the law (v. 27a), with the Jew who transgresses the law (v. 27b). It is possible to determine the meaning of gramma accurately in this verse, because the antithetical analogy between the two lines is carried out very precisely. The oppositions are clear: ‘uncircumcision’ is placed against ‘circumcision’, and ‘fulfill the law’ against ‘transgressor of the law’. All that remains as the antithesis of ‘through letter’ (dia grammatos) is ‘by nature’. So here the semantic opposition to gramma is not ‘spirit’ (pneuma) but ‘nature’ (physis). Paul here relates the opposition of physis and gramma in a specific way to the opposition of ‘uncircumcision’ and ‘circumcision’: it is clear that uncircumcision can only ever exist ‘by nature’, never ‘through letter’, and circumcision can only ever exist ‘through letter’. This relationship can also be reversed: ‘by nature’ only exists as uncircumcision, never as circumcision and ‘through letter’ only exists as circumcision,

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never as uncircumcision. In brief, just as ‘by nature’ in v. 27a relates to ‘uncircumcision’, so in v. 27b ‘through letter’ relates to ‘circumcision’.12 Within this semantic structure of nature and letter, we can easily identify the old antithesis of ‘nature’ (physis) and ‘law’ (nomos).13 Corresponding to this, v. 29c ends up in the antithesis of ‘God’ and ‘human being’ (‘Such a person receives praise not from human beings but from God’), and it is obvious that in this opposition the antithesis of ‘nature’ and ‘law’ is reappearing: ‘nature’ is understood as God’s creation, and ‘law’ is made by human beings. Diodorus Siculus gives exemplary expression to this sentiment: ‘Nature (physis) is a work of God, while law (nomos) is an ordinance of humanity’.14 Within the context of Paul’s argumentation, the result of this cross-referencing of semantic oppositions is clear: ‘circumcision’ belongs to gramma and is created by human beings and not by God. The plural form of gramma (ta grammata) occurs more frequently in the New Testament than the singular form does. In 2 Cor. 3.7, as we have already noted, we read: ‘chiselled in letters on stone tablets’ (en grammasin entetypōmenē lithois). Here, this form is used as an attribute of the ‘ministry of death’, and the expression designates the single ‘characters’.15 The same meaning is probably to be assumed in Gal. 6.11: ‘See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand!’ By contrast, Jn 5.47 mentions the ‘writings’ (grammata) of Moses, referring to the Torah. The same is the case in Jn 7.15, where the Jews ask themselves: ‘How is it that this person (i.e. Jesus) knows the scriptures (grammata) although being uneducated?’ On the other hand, 2 Tim. 3.15 (‘You have known the sacred writings [ta hiera grammata] since you were a child’), has the entire Old Testament canon in view.16 This usage is documented at least indirectly in Acts 26.24, where the Roman governor Festus – with the usual stupidity of Gentiles in Acts – comments on Paul’s reference to the prophets and Moses in v. 22 with the words: ‘Paul, you are mad! Those many writings (polla . . . grammata) are leading you into madness’.17 In Lk. 16.6-7, grammata refers to written certificates of debt, and in Acts 28.21 (‘grammata about you [sc. Paul] from Judea’) to written documents in general, such as letters. We may now draw some provisional conclusions from our survey about the use of the key words. Within the New Testament not only the antithetical dualism of gramma (letter) and pneuma (spirit), but also the singular use of gramma in general, is specific to Paul. This opposition occurs for the first time within the so-called ‘apology’ of 2 Corinthians and it is resumed in Romans. Neither in the Deutero-Pauline Epistles nor in Luke-Acts has it left any trace. From this we can conclude with some confidence that the opposition of gramma and pneuma was not known to Pauline Christianity other than in the few Pauline texts mentioned at the outset. From this it is possible to deduce that this antithesis is a theological figuration which Paul developed ad hoc, for a particular purpose in a particular situation.

2  Current readings of the antithesis between letter and spirit Current exegetical discussion of the antithesis between gramma and pneuma18 indicates wide agreement. In the words of Gerhard Ebeling, whose article ‘Geist und Buchstabe’

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from the third edition of Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart has become almost canonical, the antithesis gramma–pneuma is: a Pauline formulation in which not only the concept “spirit” but also the designation of the Mosaic law (or the OT as a whole) as “(holy) letters” already existed (almost always in the plural, whereas Paul switches to the singular to match “spirit”).19

Corresponding to this, the semantic extension of gramma is assumed to be the stone tablets of Moses. As one recent commentary puts it: ‘gramma picks up the image of stone tablets metonymically. For their part the tablets of stone are metonyms for the Mosaic covenant, for the law’.20 ‘Letter’ stands for the stone tablets, and they stand for the whole law of Moses. Below this surface agreement there is an interesting difference in the way the antithesis is understood. Here, modern commentators tend to be influenced by one of the two ways in which the antithesis has been understood in the history of the Christian church, the ‘hermeneutical’ (as for instance in Origen) and the ‘theological’ (as for instance in Augustine and Luther). The first contrasts the literal text with its spiritual meaning, and the second contrasts law with gospel. In modern commentaries, the old conflict between the ‘hermeneutical’ and the ‘theological’ understandings recurs on another level and with a different content.

a. The Augustine-Luther side of the argument is given a short and clear

formulation by Gerhard Ebeling: ‘gramma should not be translated . . . formally as “letter” [i.e. in the sense of a literal understanding of the scriptures], but as “law”, with respect to its “being established”, its impotence (Rom 8.3), even its deadly effect (Rom 7.7ff; 2 Cor 3.6), whereas “Spirit” is the life-giving “principle” itself ’.21 According to this argument, the fact that Paul calls the law gramma does not have any theological significance, but can be explained linguistically. Paul is simply repeating the Jewish use of the plural word grammata (‘writings’) to denote the Holy Scriptures, and changes it into the singular (gramma) for the sake of the antithesis with pneuma. Similarly, Otfried Hofius urges that gramma in 2 Cor. 3.6, Rom. 2.29 and 7.6 means ‘not “the letter”, but “what is written”’.22 The term refers to the Torah from Sinai, which ‘as written and prescribed . . . attacks the sinner on his sin and . . . pronounces a death sentence’.23 And when Paul characterizes the old covenant as ‘the letter that kills’, he is speaking at a fundamental level about the essence, commission, and function of the Torah from Sinai . . .; its very essence is gramma and only gramma; it can do nothing but kill, because it is given by God for no other purpose than to pronounce God’s judgment on the sinner.24

Interpretations of gramma, which do not refer this term to the Torah as a whole, but only to a certain ‘aspect’ of it, are explicitly rejected.25

b. The other position, influenced by the historic ‘hermeneutical’ approach to the text, refers gramma not to the ‘written’ Torah as such, but to a certain reading of the

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Torah or rather a definite Torah-hermeneutic. This view is most clearly stated by Ernst Käsemann: The letter is what Jewish interpretation and tradition have made out of the divine will in its different intention. It is, that is to say, the law, which in its demand for “works” perverts the relation between God and the devout Jew, which drives men into transgression and hybris, which causes sin and death – the law, that is, which we have in codified form in the Mosaic Torah, with the sum of its individual demands.26

Similarly, Erhard Kamlah declared earlier that letter (gramma) ‘is not quite synonymous with “law (nomos)”’, because it ‘only takes up the negative side of the nomos; it refers to the wilful use of the law which seeks to establish its own righteousness’.27 This interpretation has been taken over more recently by Hans-Josef Klauck, among others: “letter” for Paul means the written form of the Torah only under one particular aspect. From this it concludes (as is clearest at Rom 7.5f) that the letter kills. letter is the unredeemed law that contrary to divine intention provokes sin and pronounces the death sentence on the sinner.28

And the spirit? It too, at least according to Ernst Käsemann, is a particular reading and a particular hermeneutic – not however simply of the Torah, but of scripture as a whole. For the development of this aspect, he takes a detour around 2 Cor. 3.16-17: ‘when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom’. For Käsemann, the ‘hermeneutical function’ of the spirit consists accordingly in understanding the Old Testament as saying that the Torah, when ‘misunderstood . . . as a demand for good works’, is cancelled ‘through Christ’; this is understanding the Old Testament ‘from the angle of the message of justification’. The spirit is consequently nothing other than the Christological reading of the scriptures, which leads to the law losing its character as gramma and regaining ‘its original divine intention’.29 What Käsemann provides here is, in my opinion, nothing different from a reformed interpretation of Origen’s account of the opposition of letter and spirit: instead of the opposition of literal and allegorical readings of scripture, we now have the opposition of a reading shaped by ‘righteousness that comes from the law’ (ek tou nomou: Rom. 10.5) and a reading shaped by ‘righteousness that comes from faith’ (ek pisteōs; Rom. 10.6), which Käsemann then elaborates in an exegesis of Rom. 10.5-13 as a test case.30 Traces of Käsemann’s interpretation can also be found in Dietrich-Alex Koch, among others, urging that ‘the antithesis of gramma and pneuma thus marks the fundamental difference in Christian understanding of scripture’.31 With the help of this interpretation, Peter Stuhlmacher changes the gramma–pneuma antithesis into an antithesis between gramma and graphē (letter and scripture): Since the appearance of Jesus Christ (there are) at least two ways of understanding scripture . . . One can read scripture as a stimulus and call to ever new law piety. Then scripture . . . (appears) as letter (Greek: gramma) leading away from Christ

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The Spirit and the Letter and leading to death. Or one can break out on a basis of encountering Christ and recognise that all God’s promises have been affirmed in Christ. . . . The documents read in this way are called by Paul graphē, i.e. “scripture”. . . . Since Paul . . . Christians distinguish between gramma and graphē, between the letter that kills and the life-giving Spirit . . .32

3  2 Cor. 3.6 God has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter (gramma) but of spirit (pneuma); for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.33

At the beginning of this section I want to quote Origen’s interpretation of 2 Cor. 3.6b, as a good way in to the whole discussion. Origen comments on the Pauline phrase ‘not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life’ in his Contra Celsum (6.70)34 as follows: ‘He calls the sensible interpretation of the divine Scriptures, “the letter” (gramma) and the intelligible interpretation “the spirit” (pneuma)’. By this, Origen refers the antithesis of gramma and pneuma to a difference in the perception of reality, a difference between the ‘sensible’ and the ‘intelligible’. This is based on an ontology, formulated first by Plato who distinguishes between two kinds of being, a visible and an invisible.35 To these two kinds of being Plato then assigns two kinds of knowing: through the physical senses (aisthēsis) and through reason (nomos). Now, if this background is taken into consideration, three things in the explanation of Origen are worthy of being mentioned. First, Origen not only makes a hermeneutical differentiation, but also presupposes a certain ontology. Second, the antithetic dualism of gramma and pneuma, which finds expression in the antithesis of ‘kill’ and ‘make alive’, is changed by Origen into a complementary dualism.36 Third, the Pauline antithesis of gramma and pneuma gets removed from its literary context and is considered in isolation. Because of the loss of their context, the two terms become words which now – because they are no longer protected by the surrounding text – can be transported like slaves without their own will into different usages and there they have to perform other jobs. We should therefore remember in the first place that the antithesis of gramma and pneuma first occurs not in a Platonic, but in a Pauline text. So, it should be integrated into its literary context and questioned about its theological status within the argumentation of 2 Corinthians 3. Let me proceed ‘top down’ from the larger context. The antithesis of gramma and pneuma occurs for the first time in the Second Letter to the Corinthians,37 in a section which extends from v. 2.14 to v. 7.4.38 This section deals with the nature of an apostle of Jesus Christ. Paul is competing against a group of Christian missionaries (‘apostles’), whose character and appearance evidently differ strongly from his. This background becomes perceptible in some texts which portray the conflict, although through Paul’s polemical distortion. Nevertheless, it becomes clear what these missionaries are saying about themselves and about Paul:

3.1 They come with ‘letters of recommendation’ from other Christian communities; cf. Acts 18.27.

5.12 ‘They boast in outward appearance and not the heart’.

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10.2 They think we are those who ‘are acting according to human standards (hōs kata sarka)’.

10.10 They say that ‘his letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak and his speech contemptible’.

11.5; 12.11 They regard themselves as ‘Super-apostles’. 11.13 They are pseudo-apostles, ‘disguising themselves as apostles of Christ’. 11.22f They are ‘Hebrews’ – ‘Israelites’ – ‘descendants of Abraham’ – ‘ministers of Christ’.

In Paul’s view, the controversy is about what is characteristic of an apostle of Jesus Christ. For Paul the answer is simple: It is the content of the message which decides whether one who calls himself ‘apostle’ is an ‘apostle of Jesus Christ’; and that is in Paul’s view nothing different from the ‘Gospel’ of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 2.12; 4.3-4; 8.18; 9.13; 10.14; 11.4, 7). In contrast to this – according to Paul – the opponents make themselves, the messengers, the object of their message and not anything that has its origin and object outside themselves. So, the message characterizes the messenger, and Paul raises this relation to a higher level and describes it with the noun39 diakonia (‘ministry’, ‘task’, ‘function’):40 2 Cor. 3.7-9; 4.1; 5.18; 6.3; 8.4; 9.1, 12-13; 11.8. The verb, ‘to minister’ also occurs in  3.8; 8.19-20. In this sense, the Pauline diakonia (Paul’s ‘ministry’ or ‘task’) is legitimated through what it mediates, through what its content is. It has no value in itself, i.e. no value which is based on a special quality of the diakonos (e.g. his appearance or even his call), but it gets its authority or – in theological terms – its divine signature (in 2 Cor. 3.7-11, 18, Paul calls it doxa, ‘glory’) solely through its bringing the salvation of God. The origin (God and Christ) as well as the effect (the salvation of the people who accept the message) make up the ‘glory’ of the Pauline diakonia. The text of 2 Corinthians 3 has to be interpreted in this context. If we enquire first about the coherence of the whole chapter, we can discern a number of terms that we can call coherence factors. On the morphological level, the term pneuma (vv. 3b, 6bc, 8, 17ab, 18b) is dominant. On the semantic level, we have terms taken from the semantic field ‘written’. There is the fact that one writes: eggegrammenē (‘written’ 2b, 3b), gramma (6bc, 7a) and entypoō (‘chiselled’, 7a). There is what one writes: epistolē (‘a letter’, 1b, 2a, 3a), what one writes with (‘ink’, 3b), what one writes on (‘tablets’, 3c; ‘stones’, 7a) and the fact that one ‘reads’ what is written (2c, 14b, 15a). We can also add ‘Moses’ as a metonym for a particular written text (15a), and this extension opens a further semantic space within which the text gets coherence: that is, the reference to the Torah given to the Children of Israel through Moses on Sinai. To this semantic field refer: ‘stone tablets’ (3c); ‘chiselled on stones’ (7a); ‘Moses’ (7b, 13a, 15a); ‘the glory of his face’ (7c); ‘veil’ and ‘unveiled’ (13a, 14b, 15b, 16b, 18a); ‘transformed’ (18b41). Below this level, the argumentation of this chapter can be divided into three or rather four parts of the text. First, vv. 1–3 deal with two different letters (epistolai), letters of recommendation and letters written on the heart. This keyword then disappears. Second, in v. 4, Paul makes a fresh start with ‘such is the confidence that we have’, and the section really goes on until v. 11. Conceptually, this section is marked by the morpheme diakon- , relating to ‘ministry’ (vv. 6, 7, 8, 9, 11). But this section

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can be divided into two parts, because vv. 7–11 bring the commission of Moses into confrontation with that of Paul to prove the greater authority (doxa) of the latter in three parallel a fortiori arguments (‘if . . . . much more!’). So we have two major parts in this section on ministry: vv. 4–6 and vv. 7–11. Finally, in v. 12, Paul starts again, with ‘since, then, we have such a hope’, a phrase that is parallel to the one in v. 4 and discusses the episode in Exod. 34.29-30, which has already been touched on in v. 7. Let us look at each of the first two sections of the chapter in turn.

(a)  Verses 1–3 Paul starts out from the practice of the itinerant missionaries who legitimate themselves through ‘letters of recommendation’ from other Christian communities. Latching on to this, he makes the term epistolē (letter) his leading lexeme, distinguishing between two kinds of epistolai. On the one hand there are the epistolai in the conventional sense of the letters which the opponents bring with them to legitimate themselves. Over and above that, Paul uses the term epistolē as a metaphorical term for those to whom he is addressing his own letter: ‘Our letter is you yourselves’ (hē epistolē hemōn hymeis este, v. 2a). In this sentence, hē epistolē hēmōn (‘our letter’) is the subject or the topic and hymeis (‘you yourselves’) is a predicative noun or the comment. Since Paul introduces a non-conventional use of epistolē (letter), he has to further define its characteristics. He does this with the help of the participles in v. 2bc: it is about a letter which is ‘written on the heart’ and can be recognized and read by all. In v. 3 the relationship is reversed: ‘You show that you are a letter of Christ’. Those being addressed (hymeis has to be added to este) become the subject or the topic, and ‘letter of Christ’ (epistolē Christou) functions as a predicative noun or the comment. Here an instructive change of the attribute of epistolē occurs: ‘our letter’, epistolē hēmōn (v. 2a) becomes ‘letter of Christ’, epistolē Christou (v. 3a). ‘Letter of Christ’ is described as ‘cared for by us’ (v. 3a), which makes clear how the two different attributes can be related: ‘Christ’ is regarded as the author of the letter, and ‘we’, that is Paul, are its bringer. So ‘cared for by us’ explains the genitive hēmōn (‘our’) in v. 2a. Of course, this letter does not mean a letter which someone like the opponents can hold in their hands; it can only be carried ‘on hearts’ (v. 2b), because this is a letter which cannot be seen. This limitation is formulated in v. 3b: ‘not written with ink but with the Spirit of the living God’. ‘Written with ink’ means the medium in which the letters of recommendation of the opponents are written, while ‘(written) with the Spirit of the living God’ refers to the ink with which God writes.42 The semantic coherence at the metaphorical level is strengthened, because for Paul ‘Spirit’ (v. 3b) and ‘heart’ (v. 2b) go together; for the heart of the baptized is the place in which God has given his Spirit (Rom. 5.5; 2 Cor. 1.22; Gal. 4.6). This semantic unity is broken open in v. 3c (‘not on tablets of stone but on tablets of fleshly hearts’ [en plaxìn kardiais sarkinais]). The ‘hearts’ from vv. 1–3b are taken over, but they are put into a new semantic context. Here, there is clearly a break in the previous meaning, which is perceptible also in the fact that the ‘heart’ is qualified as ‘fleshly’ (sarkinos), which is normally in Paul the irreconcilable enemy

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of the spirit.43 By contrast, sarkinos is here connected to kardia (hearts) in antithesis to the ‘tablets of stone’, and that, of course, points to a completely new semantic field: to the event of handing over the Torah at Sinai, already mentioned above. The semantic context of the antithesis in v. 3c is constituted by several Old Testament texts, which Paul undoubtedly alludes to here. The basis of this antithesis are two texts from Ezekiel: I will give them one heart and put a new spirit within them; I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, so that they may follow my statutes and keep my ordinances and obey them. Then they shall be my people, and I will be their God. (Ezek. 11.19-20 NRSV) A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. (Ezek. 36.26-27 NRSV)

From these texts, Paul has taken the opposition ‘made of stone’ versus ‘made of flesh’ in 2 Cor. 3.3c as well as the expression ‘heart of flesh’ (kardia sarkinē); there is also the possibility of a link between ‘heart of flesh’ and the gift of the Spirit (3b), in so far as here as in Ezekiel ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ are treated not as enemies, but as friends. They are made friends by what is ‘made of stone’ being their common opponent: in Ezek. 19.19 and 36.26 it is a ‘heart of stone’ and in 2 Cor. 3.3c it is ‘tablets of stone’. Nevertheless, these two texts cannot explain everything; several questions remain open. First, how do the ‘tablets of stone’ get into the Pauline text, i.e. how does the ‘heart of stone’ in the Ezekiel texts become ‘tablets of stone’ in 2 Cor. 3.3? Second, how does Paul get to his linguistically strange expression ‘on tablets of fleshly hearts’ (en plaxin kardiais sarkinais)? Both questions can be easily answered. It can be shown that Paul has carried out an associative conflation of several Old Testament texts: When God finished speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the covenant, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God. (Exod. 31.18 NRSV) Then Moses turned and went down from the mountain, carrying the two tablets of the covenant in his hands, tablets made from stone, that were written on both sides, on the front side and on the back side they were written on. The tablets were the work of God and the writing was the writing of God, engraved upon the tablets. (Exod. 32.15-16 [Septuagint] NRSV) The Lord said to Moses, Cut two tablets of stone like the former ones and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the former tablets, which you broke. (Exod. 34.1 NRSV)

These three texts explain where the ‘tablets of stone’ in 2 Cor. 3.3c come from. Here we have an associative adjective (‘of stone’), taken further by reference to Ezek. 11.19f and 36.26f, which makes a link with the Sinai scene.44 This affects the language of the Ezekiel texts, introducing a contrast into the renewal of the heart through the Spirit which is not there in Ezekiel. That is, in terms of salvation history, the Sinai covenant

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is replaced by an act of God within human hearts as described in Jer. 31.31-33. The keyword ‘new covenant’ which Paul uses in 2 Cor. 3.6a makes clear that Paul has used this text as well. The connection to v. 3c is that Jer. 31.33, also, is about God who will ‘write on the heart’: The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt – a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after  those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them (eis tēn dianoia autōn), and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (Jer. 31.31-33 NRSV)

There is a link between these texts in 1 Kgs 8.9: ‘There was nothing in the ark except the two tablets of stone that Moses had placed there’ (NRSV). This is not far from the metaphor of writing on the ‘tablets of the heart’ as two additional texts will make clear: Bind them [i.e. my commandments] on your fingers, write them on the tablet of your heart. (Prov. 7.3) And you shall write them [i.e. the words of the sages] down for you thrice, for admonition and knowledge on the tablets of your heart. (Prov. 22.20 Septuagint)

So, with the help of an associative conflation of different Old Testament texts, Paul reaches a different level of meaning, a level which makes the readers who are familiar with the Bible immediately associate ‘Sinai, Moses and Law’.

(b)  Verses 4–11 (4–6 and 7–11) Surprisingly, Paul does not follow up this association any further, but disrupts his line of thought. Not until the third part of his argumentation, in vv. 7–10 will he return to this context, as can be deduced from his resumption of the semantic field of v. 3bc by opposing ‘in letters (en grammasin) written on stone’ (v. 7a) to pneuma (v. 8). This break is, however, important, since Paul does not actually refer to the Torah or ‘the law’. What is important is not the content, which was written on stone and handed over to Moses. The focus is, in fact, on the event behind this text. The goal of his argumentation is clear: in the controversy about the authority of his diakonia, which is challenged by his opponents (for the reasons, see above), he is anxious to demonstrate his authority by depicting it as an authority which surpasses the authority of Moses. In the centre of Paul’s argument is the term doxa (glory), and the reason for this is simply that Paul has adopted this term from Exod. 34.29-35. The claim that Paul’s authority surpasses Moses’ is illustrated by the three comparisons in vv. 7–11. Among them the first (vv. 7a, 8) is of some interest to us, since the terms of v. 3 are again taken up, but the contrast has changed: the opposition

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is not now between ‘ink’ and ‘Spirit’ but ‘death’ and ‘Spirit’ (v. 7a: ‘ministry of death’; v. 8: ‘ministry of the Spirit’): ‘Now if the ministry of death, chiselled in letters on stone tablets, came glory . . . how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory?’ Whereas in v. 3b, the Spirit was still something like writing material (‘written with the Spirit’, eggegrammenē . . . pneumati), when the ‘ministry of death’ is said to be ‘chiselled in letters on stone tablets’ (engrammasin entetypōmenē litois: v. 7a) that makes the Spirit into something unwritten, which precisely for that reason makes Paul’s ‘ministry’ far superior to that of Moses. It is clear that this shift is prepared by v. 6 where Paul not only antithetically contrasts gramma and pneuma twice, but also prepares for the antithesis between ‘ministry of death’ and ‘ministry of the Spirit’ by making the gramma kill and the pneuma give life. Our main task will now be to show how this antithesis is embedded into the overall line of argumentation. That Paul has not forgotten the starting point of his argumentation – the proof of his apostolic authority – can be shown from the chiastic structure of the argumentation in vv. 4–5: (a) the confidence . . . that we have . . . towards God (b) not that of ourselves (b’) as . . . from us, (a’) but our competence is from God.

Paul here picks up again the question of his hikanotēs (‘ability’) to act as an apostle. He has already raised this question in 2.16, but there he has not answered it. He is giving the answer now: ‘such’ in 3.4 is anaphoric and refers to what Paul has said in vv. 2–3. He has the ‘confidence’ that he was right in claiming that it was God who had authorized him as an apostle. After Paul has finished this line of thought, he binds the two arguments together in v. 6a: ‘[God] has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant’. Verse 6a, that is, has a resumptive function in picking up the catchword hikanōsen (‘competence’) from the chiastic argumentation in vv. 4–5, in picking up the diakon- (‘ministry’) terminology from v. 3a. (v. 3a: diakonētheisa hyph’ hēmōn; cf. v. 6a: diakonoi), and also in picking up the catchword ‘new covenant’ (Jer. 31.31) out of the semantic field that is shaped by the Old Testament texts, quoted above. This also shows clearly that Paul is pointing beyond the law, or is looking through the law to the events behind the text. Likewise, we must not forget that Paul is still occupied with the legitimation of his apostolic authority. That is again the case in v. 7, and we must assume that it shapes the interpretation of v. 6bc too. In the phrase ‘ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of Spirit’, the antithesis between letter and Spirit (ou grammatos alla pneumatos) may depend syntactically on ‘ministers’ (diakonous)45 or on ‘new covenant’ (kainēs diathēkēs).46 This ambiguity has no consequences for the interpretation of the antithesis, because either way it characterizes Paul’s ‘ministry’. To repeat: this antithesis seems to go beyond vv. 2–3 since there too the ‘Spirit’ was considered to be something written. The decisive question is therefore: what is the difference which now makes it possible to contrast letter and spirit, gramma and pneuma, without disclaiming what is said in vv. 2–3?

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In my opinion the answer is not difficult: Paul makes a distinction between eggraphein (‘writing’) and gramma (‘letter’), since eggraphein is used metaphorically and can also be said, for example, about pneuma, whereas gramma always indicates what is made visible by ‘writing’ (eggraphein) with ink and on papyri or on parchments (2 Tim. 4.13) or even on stone (vv. 3c, 7a). To put it differently: gramma is what is recognized by the physical senses (aisthēsis) and it is this that Paul will, in v. 11, call ‘what is being annulled’.47 We are now at the point when we can answer the question at the storm centre of exegesis of 2 Cor. 3.6: to what does gramma refer? The answer, within the framework of 2 Corinthians 3, is that ‘the letter’ refers to the two editions of the stone tablets from Mount Sinai and the letters of recommendation of the pseudoapostles in Corinth, but it does not refer to the law (as the content of the tablets) and its theological claim. However, in what sense can Paul say about something which is written with ink or with a chisel that it ‘kills’ (v. 6c)? To answer this question, we have to refer again to the embedding of this explanation (which begins ‘for’, gar) within the overall argumentation. The main clause is to be found in v. 5b: (‘our competence is from God’). Then, in v. 6a, Paul begins a relative clause which depends on theos and ends with v. 6b (‘who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of Spirit’). Though the explanatory clause in v. 6c (‘for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life’) picks up the terms of the relative clause, it does not take it further, but picks up the main clause again: that fact that Paul’s ministry is ‘from God’ can be recognized from the very fact that it mediates eternal life (‘the Spirit gives life’). Neither the letters of recommendation, written with ink (gramma), nor the stone tablets from Mount Sinai with their engraved letters (also gramma) can do this. Only the ‘Spirit of our living God’ (v. 3b) has this ability. Here, Paul adopts the old theological tradition of the lifegiving Spirit.48 Precisely because the gramma cannot mediate eternal life, it leads to death. The reason Paul gives in v. 6c is the basis for Paul’s claim that his ‘competence’ and ‘ministry’ are neither ‘of ourselves’ nor ‘coming from us’ (v. 5): that would be a ministry and an ability based on gramma and unable to mediate life. Rather, they are ‘from God’, and therefore Paul can say all those things about himself that he has said in vv. 2–3. In summary then, in  2 Cor. 3.6 gramma is neither ‘the law’ (in any theological sense) nor ‘letter’ (in the sense of taking a text literally), but ‘a written thing’.49 The ‘written thing’ refers to the stone tablets of Moses and the letters of recommendation of Paul’s opponents. To understand the antithesis of gramma and pneuma in this verse it is crucial to recognize its embeddedness in the apology for Paul’s apostolic ministry, and that must provide the basis for its interpretation.

4  Rom. 2.29 (28) For a person is not a Jew who is one in a manifest way, nor is true circumcision something outward and in the flesh. (29) A person is a Jew who is one in a hidden way and real circumcision is a matter of the heart, in Spirit (pneuma) not in letter (gramma). Such a person receives praise not from human beings but from God50

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Here, Paul uses the opposition of gramma and pneuma as a part of a series of oppositions,51 which he generates by using the pattern ‘not . . . but’: en tō phanerō (“manifest”) – en tō kryptō (“hidden”) en sarki (“in flesh”) – kardias (“of heart”) en grammati (“in letter”) – en pneumati (“in Spirit”)

In v. 29c, Paul incorporates these oppositions into their theological master paradigm, the opposition of ‘God’ and ‘human being’: ex anthrōpōn (“from humans”) – ek tou theou (“from God”)

The grammatical predicate which rules these oppositions is one single ‘is’ (estin) in v. 28. The subject matter under discussion is the question, ‘Who is a Jew?’, i.e. ‘Who is a member of God’s chosen people?’ Paul’s argumentation rests on a venerable tradition which goes back to the Old Testament: that the reality of God is not what human beings take for real. A small selection of texts shows that even the wording of Paul’s argument comes from tradition: But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as human beings see. Human beings look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart”. (1 Sam. 16.7) Circumcise yourselves for the sake of the Lord, remove the foreskin of your hearts, O people of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem or else my wrath will go forth like fire, and burn with no one to quench it, because of the evil of your doings. (Jer. 4.4) The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will attend to all those who are circumcised only in the foreskin: Egypt, Judah, Edom, the Ammonites, Moab and all those with shaven temples who live in the desert. For all these gentiles are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel is uncircumcised in heart. (Jer. 9.25-26)

By picking up this tradition and combining it with the opposition between ‘inside’ and outside’, Paul explains it through the antithesis of gramma and pneuma and this is where Paul’s distinct theological accentuation can be seen. Further, the last text quoted touches Paul’s argumentation, since here (in Romans 2 from v. 25 onwards) just as there, he uses the opposition between visible (‘physical/ fleshly’) and invisible (‘a matter of the heart’) circumcision to level the distinction between Jews and Gentiles, using ‘circumcision’ and ‘uncircumcision’ as metonyms for Jews and Gentiles. It is specific to the relationship between these two expressions that Paul can use them on both sides of the two antithetical sequences.52 This makes the series of three expressions on each side (‘manifest’    en tō phanerō; ‘in the flesh’    en sarki; ‘in the letter’    en grammati; and ‘hidden’    en tō kryptō; ‘heart’    kardias; ‘in the Spirit’     en pneumati) interchangeable. They are semantically isotopic. The opposition of kryptos, kardia and pneuma on one side and phaneros, sarx and gramma on the other, refers to two realities which are antithetically opposed to each other and ‘circumcision’ and ‘uncircumcision’ can be found on either side. These three partial

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oppositions are finally swallowed up by the fundamental opposition ‘human being versus God’, and by this Paul makes clear that what is intended is a confrontation of two realities – the reality ‘from God’ (‘hidden’, ‘heart’ and ‘Spirit’) and the reality ‘from humans’ (‘manifest’, ‘flesh’ and ‘letter’). In summary, gramma in Rom. 2.29 is neither ‘letter’ nor ‘law’, since it describes something like ‘the manifest’ and ‘flesh’. The term gramma designates something that – on account of materiality – is recognizable for human eyes, but does not play any role with God. By the opposition of gramma and pneuma, Paul divests the distinction between Jews and Gentiles, which is based on the ethos of everyday life, of its theological significance. This distinction is gramma and not pneuma, and therefore it has nothing to do with God and God’s reality.

5  Rom. 7.6 But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves in the newness of the Spirit (pneuma) and not in the oldness of the letter (gramma).

Paul’s use of the gramma–pneuma antithesis in this verse sounds like a transfer to a relation to the law of what he has said in ch. 6 about the relation of those who are baptized in Christ Jesus to sin. Let us see the point of this in detail. In Romans 6 it was Paul’s concern to explain the meaning of baptism within the semantic framework of conversion. In his argumentation he binds two lines of thought together. First, in Rom. 5.12, Paul has demonstrated that sin has become a personal power that requires the death of the sinner. Second, in Rom. 6.3, he develops for the first time the argument that ‘being baptized into Christ Jesus’ means ‘being baptized into his death’. That means that everybody who has been baptized into Christ Jesus has died a death. In 6.5, Paul calls this baptismal death a homoiōma (‘likeness’) of Jesus’ own death. The syllogistic connection of these two arguments allows Paul to claim that everybody who has been baptized into Christ Jesus has died that very death that is required by sin according to 5.12. The result is that through baptism, sin has received what it demands from the sinner: his or her death. It is paid off and satisfied, and he or she who has been baptized ‘is freed from sin’ because he or she has died (Rom. 6.7). They are renewed in life (Rom. 6.4) and they live this life as people who have been rescued from the power of sin and are now on the side of God: ‘The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God’ (Rom. 6.10). In Rom. 6.4, 6, Paul explains the process and the result of baptism by using a terminology he picks up again in Rom. 7.6. 6.4: Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.53 6.6: We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.

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7.6: But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.

The overlaps between the terminologies of these texts (indicated in italics) are obvious. What was said about freedom from sin is transferred to freedom from the law. The picture becomes even more clearer, if we include the preceding verses from Romans 7. In 7.1, Paul mentions the ‘reign’ of the law after speaking about the ‘reign’ of death at 6.9 (see also 5.14, ‘death exercised dominion’) and the ‘reign of sin’ at 6.14. Just as he argues in 7.2-4 that death liberates from law, so he has already explained in 6.2-11 that the baptismal death liberates from sin (in both cases by using the same verb: katargeisthai).54 Already in ch. 6, Paul had unfolded his anthropological insight that it is an inseparable part of the human condition to be always enslaved and under the power of some master – be it ‘sin’ or ‘obedience’ (Rom. 6.16), ‘sin’ or ‘righteousness’ (Rom. 6.17-18), ‘impurity and lawlessness’ or ‘righteousness’ (Rom. 6.19) and ‘sin’ or ‘God’ (Rom. 6.22). In Rom. 7.1-6, Paul is reading the sin discourse of ch. 6 into his law discourse, and this transfer leads him consequently to the terrified question of 7.7: ‘What are we saying? That the law is sin?’ In this context, the theological intention of the antithesis of gramma and pneuma in Rom. 7.6 depends on their grammatical relationship to their guiding nouns ‘newness’ and ‘oldness’. There is ‘newness of Spirit’ and ‘oldness of letter’. If we take the expression ‘newness of life’ (Rom. 6.4) as a model,55 we have to interpret the two genitives pneumatos (‘of Spirit’) and grammatos (‘of letter’) as qualitative. Paul is then saying: ‘We no longer serve as slaves who are subject to the law, but we serve as slaves who are guided by the Spirit and it is this that is new, since this very difference marks the distinction between our former situation as Jews and our present situation as persons baptized into Christ Jesus’. It follows that the proposition behind the expression palaiotēs grammatos (‘oldness of letter’) is this: formerly we served as slaves ‘in the gramma’. ‘Formerly’ means: before our conversion to faith in Jesus Christ, and it is obvious that these ‘we’ are Jewish Christians, ‘those who know the law’ (v. 1). By this it has become evident that in contrast to Rom. 2.29 and 2 Cor. 3.6, in Rom. 7.6 gramma refers to the Jewish law. Paul establishes this reference by using the law’s being written as its identifying attribute. In terms of linguistics, Paul uses gramma in Rom. 7.6 as the metonymical equivalent for law. This allows him the possibility to downgrade the law by using the antithesis between gramma and pneuma which he himself has invented: Since gramma is a written thing it is not pneuma, and therefore it has nothing to do with God. However, the overlaps between Rom. 7.6 and 2 Cor. 3.6 are also obvious when Rom. 7.6 is understood in its literary context. It is especially the analogy between the expressions ‘newness of life’ (Rom. 6.4) and ‘newness of the Spirit’ (Rom. 7.6) that makes the link. Both expressions designate the new quality of the life of those who have been baptized into (the death of) Christ Jesus.56 Furthermore, we have already recognized that the linkage of ‘Spirit’ and ‘life’ is by no means selective and accidental, but it is deeply rooted within the theological encyclopaedia of early Christianity.57 No elaborate exegetical engineering is needed to ascribe ‘death’ also to Paul’s use of gramma in Rom. 7.6: from Rom. 5.12 (‘. . . death came through sin and so death spread

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to all because all have sinned’) and 6.23 (‘the wages of sin is death’) it is sufficiently clear that ‘death’ is the identifying signature of the ‘old’ and ‘pre-pneumatic’ life, for slaves to the ‘written thing’. Just as in 2 Cor. 3.6, death is thus associated with the ‘letter’, and life with the Spirit.

6  Conclusion The conclusion can be short. The antithesis gramma versus pneuma was coined by Paul. It is found for the first time in all Greek literature at 2 Cor. 3.6. Paul makes use of this antithesis here in the context of his debate with itinerant charismatic apostles who have arrived in the Corinthian community with letters of recommendation and who have cast doubt on Paul’s apostolic authority. In his counterargument, Paul bases the superiority of his apostolate on his communicating the Spirit of God and changing human hearts, so claiming that he does not write – like his opponents’ letters of commendation and the tablets of stone on Sinai – in a transient way on perishable material. Thus, gramma refers here not to the Torah but to the materiality of what is written – including the opponents’ letters of commendation and the Sinai tablets. Gramma here has no theological connotation as such. Paul must have thought this antithesis a good idea because a little later he applied it twice in Romans. In both these cases, gramma clearly has its own proper theological weight. In Rom. 2.29, gramma is again neither ‘letter’ nor ‘law’ but what can be seen by human eyes on account of its materiality, and so irrelevant to God. The antithesis gramma versus pneuma stands alongside a series of other antitheses which express the same difference. It has the function of marking the dualistic opposition of two realities: the ‘senses’ reality of the human and the ‘ideal’ reality of God. Paul uses the antithesis here to say that the distinction between Jews and Gentiles is man-made, and therefore has nothing to do with God. The use of gramma–pneuma in this context is thus not far from its application in 2 Cor. 3.6f. In both cases, materiality is selected from the semantic profile of gramma and set in opposition to the reality of God who is designated pneuma. Only in Rom. 7.6 does Paul apply gramma to the Torah by making its being written into a metonym for the law in its totality. This application of the antithesis is close to Rom. 2.29 in that freedom from the law includes liberation from any distinction between Jews and Gentiles. The application in this passage is also connected to 2 Cor. 3.6 (the letter kills, the Spirit makes alive) on the gramma side through Rom. 5.12-14 and 6.23, and on the Spirit side by Rom. 6.4. Paul, then, reapplies and extends his own creation, but this is no reason for us to read its later use back into its original appearance.

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Spirit and Letter: Mapping Modern Biblical Interpretation Robert Morgan

1  A new use for old terms: Introducing a proposal Origen’s hermeneutical application of Paul’s terms ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ to literal and allegorical interpretation of scripture informed patristic and medieval exegesis and so shaped Christian prayer, preaching and morality for 13 centuries and more. Allegorical interpretation is still taken for granted by many Eastern Christians and finds some support in Roman Catholic theology and spirituality,1 but has become marginal in modern Western theology. The Reformers’ criticism of church tradition in the light of scripture required more textual determinacy than any allegorical web of meanings could provide, and the Enlightenment turn to the human authors of scripture and their historical contexts discredited allegorical interpretation. The hermeneutical use of Paul’s terms to distinguish between literal and ‘spiritual’ meanings became superfluous as the latter disappeared from modern biblical scholarship. This eclipse was reinforced by Luther’s making central to his own theology Augustine’s ‘perhaps more important’ theological application of the letter–spirit antithesis to law and grace,2 and this could only be accentuated by the now general recognition that this application to the Old and New Covenants was based on a better exegesis of 2 Cor. 3.6 and Rom. 7.6, though perhaps not of Rom. 2.29. However, as a late medieval Catholic professor, Luther came to his Reformation understanding of Paul largely through his engagement with scholastic theology and monastic exegesis; his early hermeneutical application of Paul’s antithesis contained the nucleus of his later dialectic of law and gospel. When Gerhard Ebeling turned to the early Luther in the context of midtwentieth-century German Protestant pre-occupation with hermeneutics, he revived interest in Paul’s terms and their contribution to modern hermeneutical reflection.3 My contribution to our theme returns to that same workshop for a thread through the labyrinth of contemporary biblical interpretation. I am proposing a new hermeneutical application of Paul’s term ‘letter’ to non-religious (or religiously neutral) interpretations of the Bible and ‘spirit’ to explicitly religious (or confessional) interpretations, in the hope that this will make visible a concealed dimension of modern biblical studies which has again become for some a burning issue.4

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The intense hermeneutical debates of the 1920s, sparked by Karl Barth’s theological commentary The Epistle to the Romans,5 were fuelled after World War II by the demythologizing debate and the growing influence of Rudolf Bultmann. But 50 years of hermeneutical theology subsided after 1968, despite a flurry of English translations. The overripe fruits of the rediscovery of scripture in the 1920s gave way to more socially engaged theologies. A generation later, however, many disciplines are learning from the continental philosophy and literary theory of the 1920s as the cultural crises discerned there, are becoming more generally apparent. Theology has more reason than most to learn from its own tradition, and the efforts of German Protestant theology to come to terms with its Reformation and Enlightenment heritage remain suggestive in late modernity. Prior to the climate change of 1968, Ebeling’s advocacy of our theme was taken up by his Tübingen colleague Ernst Käsemann in lectures and an article, ‘The Spirit and the Letter’, finally published in 1969. Both these former pupils of Bultmann were interested in the contemporary theological relevance of their historical and exegetical studies, and Käsemann thought that Paul’s antithesis could again guide the interpretation of scripture. He agreed with Philipp Vielhauer of Bonn that Paul had ‘developed an approach to a theological hermeneutic’6 and thought that it could just as well be applied to Christian understanding of the New Testament as to Paul’s own scriptures. Käsemann’s intuition was not much pursued, partly because the 1920s neosReformation project of doing contemporary theology in and through a critical historical interpretation of the New Testament, especially Pauline theology, was running out of steam. New Testament theologians have continued to insist on the Gegenwartsbezug7 or ‘contemporary reference’ of their work, but the kerygmatic theological passion of the dialectical theology was yielding to a new historicism in biblical studies and a reluctance on both sides to forge too close a relationship between New Testament theology and systematic theology. That loss of enthusiasm for hermeneutically sophisticated New Testament theologies made Käsemann’s style of theological interpretation less attractive by 1969 than it had been earlier. Most New Testament scholars construct historically defensible accounts of Paul’s thought rather than theories about contemporary scriptural interpretation – even their own. Subsequent discussions of letter and spirit by New Testament theologians have followed Käsemann in attending to Paul’s ‘theological hermeneutic’ but even theologically committed exegetes have not found in the letter–spirit antithesis much of a model for contemporary biblical interpretation.8 Paul’s terms are still often echoed in modern hermeneutical discussion with scant interest in his meanings or intentions and so there should be no objection to doing so here, where there is no claim to be following Paul’s exact usage. Origen’s use of Paul’s terms ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ did not depend on the exegesis of the three passages in which they occurred either. If scriptural justification for allegorical interpretation were necessary, it could be found in Paul’s own (occasional) use of allegory, but Origen borrowed Paul’s terms because they provided apt labels for his contemporary church practices of scriptural interpretation. The same intention guides my new application of Paul’s terms. If it illuminates contemporary biblical interpretation, then that will be sufficient justification for using them.

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However, the word ‘apt’ is important. Some positive relationship between Paul and ancient or modern uses of his letter–spirit antithesis has generally been assumed. The borrowings are not arbitrary, or purely conventional. Origen assumed that his modes of biblical interpretation bore some relation to Paul’s language, as did Luther. Käsemann thought he was himself representing Paul’s hermeneutical instincts in a changed situation. They all thought they shared something of Paul’s approach to scripture, and their use of Paul’s terms letter and spirit was an expression of that. The claim of what follows will be that they were not mistaken and that it is worth uncovering these connections in order to make my new application of the phrase persuasive. There are other forms of a positive relationship to Paul’s terms than the exegetical faithfulness to 2 Cor. 3.6 and Rom. 2.29 and 7.6, which would be necessary if biblical warrant were being claimed, but a strict exegetical basis is not being claimed here. In any case, Paul himself uses the terms differently at Rom. 2.27-29 from the other two passages. The first step in our argument must be to show that Paul’s phrases are related to the issue of biblical interpretation despite their reference in 2 Cor. 3.6 and Rom. 7.6 to the two covenants. Richard Hays argues that Paul’s remarks on non-Christian (Jewish) and Christian interpretation of scripture at 2 Cor. 3.14-16 open a door to hermeneutical applications of 2 Cor. 3.6 (and so of Rom. 7.6). Responding to Stephen Westerholm’s claim that ‘the letter-spirit antithesis has nothing to do with Pauline hermeneutics’,9 he agrees that 2 Cor. 3 is ‘not an excursus on hermeneutical method’, but rightly asks ‘why does his contrast between the old and new covenants turn into a discussion of minds veiled and unveiled when Scripture is read?’.10 Paul did not apply letter and spirit to different types of interpretation or meanings to be found in scripture but he did relate them to non-Christian and Christian ways of reading the biblical texts, as we shall do. This further step from Paul’s hermeneutics to ours will depend on an analogy between Paul’s problem and ours, which is similar to the analogy between Paul’s problem and Origen’s. My modern proposal is, however, closer to Paul than Origen’s was. It avoids an apparent weakness in Origen’s proposal, namely, its rejection of the negative element in Paul’s antithetical formulation (‘the letter kills’).11 Christian theological interpretation of scripture which follows Origen has rightly felt itself obliged to be positive about his ‘letter’ (the literal sense), making it foundational in exegesis. To be sure, if ‘the letter’ is understood as ‘the literal sense’ then we all have to be positive about it and in this context Paul’s critique that ‘the letter kills’ becomes a problem. In my proposal, we should certainly be positive about the appeal to ‘the letter’ in biblical scholarship, but my argument is that a biblical scholarship marked by ‘letter’ that is closed in principle to theological meanings (‘spirit’) is problematic to Christians. In following this line, I believe I am in sympathy with Paul’s negative tone, though not out of sympathy with Origen.12 An exegesis that disallows attention to, or admits no interest in, God and salvation is at best a distraction. In practice, however, most biblical scholarship (‘letter’) is, in fact, open to ‘spirit’,13 as I will argue from some examples below. In  all three instances (Paul, Origen’s old application of Paul’s terms and my new one), the main problem being faced is that of different groups reading the same texts in different ways and some interpreters finding meanings which others find unacceptable.

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Origen’s allegorical interpretation, like Philo’s, dealt with intolerable literal readings which Paul apparently felt free to ignore and which modern theologians neutralize in different ways. The non-Christian character of much of the Old Testament posed (and still poses) insuperable problems for anyone whose misguided view of scripture demanded that it all be taken literally and acted on, but already Paul faced and now modern theological interpreters face, the problem of their scriptures being read by some in a non-Christian way – with integrity and sometimes with plain sense on their side, as Marcion noted. The proposal advanced here applies ‘letter’ to the operations of modern biblical scholarship which require no religious pre-suppositions, and ‘spirit’ to interpretations which relate the texts to the practices and beliefs of some contemporary faith community (love of God and neighbour, prayer and public worship or some system of religious belief). These latter theological interpretations (such as Barth’s) speak with the biblical authors about God whom typically the interpreter also acknowledges. However, this application of Paul’s terms is merely preparatory to my showing that much contemporary biblical interpretation can be adequately characterized only if both terms, letter and spirit, are used and their relationship defined. Just as allegorical interpretation or the spiritual senses of medieval exegesis is built on the literal meaning of the texts, so any responsible ‘spirit’ interpretation today (such as Barth’s) uses (to a greater or lesser extent) and builds on the historical exegesis which clarifies what the ancient language can mean. It need not and will not take up everything that modern biblical scholarship (‘letter’) has to say about a text, but it draws on this for its own quite different purposes and will take care to avoid conflict with anything in that technical scholarship which is demonstrably true or even probably or plausibly true. It will not be bullied by the speculative historical hypotheses of some biblical scholarship but it need not underestimate the contribution that this scholarship continues to make. Contemporary ‘spirit’ interpreters in the West are educated in the assumptions of their own culture and learn to discriminate between what is of value in their methods and conclusions, and what is a distraction from their own proper business. Whereas no ‘spirit’ interpretation today can afford to neglect ‘letter’, the converse is not the case. There is plenty of good biblical scholarship which has no interest in relating its insights to contemporary religious practice and belief – whether positively, with a view to confirming it or negatively to undermine it. However, much ‘letter’ scholarship is motivated and, to some extent, guided by religious interests and this is what stands most in need of clarification with the help of our new application of Paul’s terms. According to my proposal, we should identify some ‘letter’ work as ‘open to spirit’ or ‘intending spirit’, depending on whether the emphasis is upon the character of this modern theological writing or on the aims of the modern theological interpreter of scripture. This Christian Old Testament theology and New Testament theology (as also Jewish scriptural scholarship) can be distinguished as implicit theological interpretation from the explicit theological interpretation we are labelling ‘spirit’. Within this range of biblical interpretation located on a spectrum stretching from ‘letter’ (without spirit) to ‘spirit’ (building on letter), it will be possible to identify some New Testament theology which comes very close to ‘spirit’ interpretation. Here,

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historical or other modern critical procedures are combined with a theoretical account of history or literature, and this theory makes that ‘letter’ work bear transcendent meanings. This is more than ‘letter open to spirit’ and may be called ‘letter bearing spirit’. It may appear to some more like ‘letter confused with spirit’, but F. C. Baur was clear about the distinction between his ‘speculation’ and his ‘criticism’ even as he insisted on fusing them. Other proposals in New Testament theology are less easily defended against the charge of confusing ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’, as for example when rational historical arguments are supposed to yield theological conclusions such as demonstrating the truth of belief in miracles or mysteries. Paul and especially Luther14 were clear that letter and spirit ought not to be confused. In agreement with that, our new application of the terms yields a criterion for identifying such faulty theological interpretations as ‘spirit masquerading (or, more charitably, misunderstanding itself) as letter’. One feature of this spectrum of modern biblical interpretations is that it places more weight than has been usual on the aims of the interpreters, and less on their methods. When the new methods were in dispute in the nineteenth century, discussions of New Testament theology naturally centred on these, arguing in support of historical criticism. That argument has been won, at least where a modern rationality prevails. Whether the numerically significant phenomenon of fundamentalism is as intellectually insignificant as most critical scholars assume is a further question, but the more important division today is not between critical and uncritical, but between religious and non-religious interpretations, even though this division is often concealed by the chameleon character of New Testament theology. This discipline uses non-religious methods with often unstated religious aims. It is therefore often impossible to say for sure whether some of its interpretations are written with religious intent. They may be read in one of two ways: either they may be read as a piece of theology speaking of a God whom the reader, like the text (regardless of the intent of the scholarly author) acknowledges; or, while being a piece of ‘letter open to spirit’, they may be read as an account simply of ancient human religion and literature even if the scholarly author was a theologian, thinking about God whom he or she also worships, i.e. ‘intending spirit’. That happy ambiguity has allowed theological interpreters to work in contexts that do not presume religious allegiance on the part of either students or teachers. The invisibility of this line of demarcation means that it can be ignored by institutions without being unimportant for the interpreters themselves, or their readers. Because the theological interests and aims of New Testament theologians are usually implicit (unlike those of ‘spirit’ interpreters), it is neither clear nor (arguably) anyone else’s business whether they think they are referring to God (with all the implications this has for themselves personally) or simply describing some early Christian religion. Contributions to biblical scholarship are (arguably) theology when writers explicitly or implicitly relate their exegesis, history of religion or literary appreciation to contemporary religious practice, but just as something intended as theology may be read as history or literary criticism, so something intended as no more than history may be read as theology. The boundary between religious and non-religious interpretations of a text are constructed by the modern interpreters and their readers, not determined solely by the character of the text, much less by the methods used to interpret it. The

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work done on each side is scrutinized by the other side in the shared conversation about the meanings found in or sometimes imposed on, the texts under the banner ‘letter work’. Old and New Testament theology done as ‘letter open to spirit’ has usually welcomed this rational control and limited itself to writing what might in principle be agreed as possible interpretations by non-religious interpreters. ‘Spirit’ interpretation declines to be constrained in this way, but as it pre-supposes and builds on ‘letter’ work, it loses credibility if it contradicts that, as opposed to transcending it. The spectrum proposed here to map modern biblical interpretation does not depend on using Paul’s terms as he did, any more than Origen’s distinction between literal and allegorical interpretation depended on that for its usefulness in mapping a pre-modern interpretation of scripture. Nevertheless, Paul’s use of the terms letter and spirit is echoed in Origen’s applications, and more loudly in the early Luther’s, and is even more closely related to what is proposed here. That will strengthen its claim to be a legitimate application of Paul’s verses without claiming biblical warrant, as though it were what Paul intended. All four uses of the terms to be considered here (Paul’s, Origen’s, Luther’s and our present one) are concerned with authentic Christian interpretation of authoritative texts, which are also interpreted by some in ways that the Christian interpreter finds inadequate. All four uses are concerned with Christian identity. In the case of the Old Testament, the legitimacy of Christian theological interpretation is at stake and with it the justification for retaining the Jewish scripture as Christian scripture, even though this was not an issue for Paul or Luther. The status of the New Testament as Christian scripture has not been in much doubt since before Origen, but its interpretation has been disputed. Since the fourth century, the church’s hegemony enabled ‘orthodox’ interpretations to remain dominant. The divisions of the sixteenth century introduced greater diversity within Christian interpretation of scripture and the Enlightenment even more, but because the New Testament was written by Christians and its authors intended to serve religious aims, not even modern historical study opened up a visible gap between religious and non-religious interpretations of these first-century texts. The divisions that first appeared were between traditional and revisionary Christian interpretations. Both sides believed themselves to be Christian. However, the cracks that shocked late nineteenth-century theology in the secular stance of Franz Overbeck became accepted in the late twentieth-century division between religiously motivated and religiously neutral (as well as anti-Christian) interpretations of these texts. These divisions are often concealed by courtesy and mutual respect, and by both sides claiming and believing that they are engaged in disinterested scholarship. Insofar as that claim has been widely challenged in recent years and interpreters have become more self-conscious about their standpoints and aims, it seems important for theological interpreters to make their positions clear and publicly defend the different strategies by which they advance their aims. Without this clarification, the prevalence of non-religious interpretations in the secular academy (and media) is already undermining the churches’ confidence in their scripture. This will weaken its efficacy as some Christians see their scripture as no more than a religious ‘classic’. That actual or potential crisis for the church’s use of scripture is the underlying reason for my proposed new hermeneutical application of ‘letter’ and spirit’. It has

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implications for theological education, especially ministerial training, where biblical studies should consist mainly in ‘letter open to spirit’ and should also introduce ‘spirit based on letter’, but should never engage in ‘letter without spirit’. That irreligious activity must be made familiar for apologetic reasons, to identify the enemy of Christian interpretation and show how it is to be countered by better ‘letter’ work. If these texts’ own view of their subject matter is correct, a Christian perspective on them is well placed to generate sympathetic and accurate interpretations, even when restricted to the secular discourse of the wider culture. The use of Paul’s terms letter and spirit for clarifying what is at stake needs some further justification, however. It is based not on a simple exegesis of these texts, but on a broader understanding of Paul’s theology and hermeneutics and it stands in continuity with much patristic and some sixteenth-century and modern biblical interpretation.

2  From Paul, through Origen and Luther to modernity: The proposal defended The main objection to all hermeneutical applications of Paul’s statement that ‘the letter kills but the Spirit gives life’ is not the strict exegetical objection that they do not correspond to Paul’s intention, since no claim to exegetical precision is being made. It is the more general point that orthodox Christians must be more positive about the ‘letter’ than Paul is. Only Marcion could have applied ‘letter’ to the literal interpretation of the Old Testament and taken Paul’s antithesis seriously, and not even he could have applied it to the New Testament. An antithesis here is intolerable because any reasonable Christian use of scripture pre-supposes some ‘letter’ interpretation. Christian faith refers to certain historical facts, however few and however inaccurately remembered. This requires some ‘letter’ when the Bible is used as a source of faith and theology. Whether and how the New Testament can function as a norm can be questioned,15 but it certainly cannot so function if literal or grammatical meanings of scripture are ignored and now probably not if their original historical contexts are disregarded. Use of scripture as a norm requires stable meanings. It follows from any use of scripture that no theologian can say that the ‘letter’ (as literal sense or in my new application, critical biblical scholarship) kills (cf. 2 Cor. 3.6) or is superannuated as ‘old’ (cf. Rom. 7.6), however little on its own it can mediate salvation and however deadly its role in some theological education. The literal meaning remains foundational even though some mystical theologies and spiritual practices have been more interested in the spiritual. As Thomas Aquinas insisted, whatever the religious value of spiritual meanings, only literal meanings have probative force in theology.16 The main task in our investigation of Paul’s three texts is to show that this first objection to hermeneutical applications of his terms can now be answered by attending to his use of scripture rather than merely to the three verses in which the letter– spirit antithesis occurs. Paul is more negative about ‘letter’ than any hermeneutical application can allow, but his ‘letter’ is sufficiently close to the law and to scripture

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(in different ways at Rom. 2.27-29 from the other two passages) for his positive attitude to scripture and his ambivalent attitude to the law to justify our making more positive use of Paul’s word ‘letter’ than Paul himself intended in those three passages. A second objection to my present use of Paul’s terms letter and spirit would be that it does not correspond to Paul’s own usage. Our investigation of Paul’s texts must therefore establish sufficient common ground to make the application nevertheless reasonable. The point introduced in answer to the first objection will cover this second one too. Paul’s use of the word ‘letter’ is open to my extension of meaning because it is related to his view of scripture, especially the law. Paul’s use of ‘spirit’ in his pairing is even closer to my own referral of ‘spirit’ to Christian understandings of the New Testament than it is to Origen’s usage. All three uses are related to Christians’ theological account of the subject matter of scripture – the revelation of God in Jesus – but my new application of Paul’s terms is broadly true to his theology, as Origen’s was not. It addresses a problem historically very different from Paul’s, but the formal parallel is clear. Paul and modern Christian theologians share their scripture with non-Christians (whether observant Jews or secular readers) who understand it differently, i.e. in relation to a different frame of reference. Both ancient and modern Christians claim that what God is now doing in Christ, in the new age of the spirit, relativizes what the tradition (including scripture) testifies about what God had done in the far distant past. That is now no longer saving revelation but is essential tradition. It is the material whose continuing use in both Jewish and Christian faith communities identifies God and provides the foundational language in which God is acknowledged. For Christians it is thus the basis for speaking of God’s revelation in Christ. It is necessary tradition, but not in itself saving revelation. Unless related to the revelation in Christ, it fails to give life and studying it historically may even become a deadly distraction from that religious goal. When so related, this positive account of ‘letter’ as necessary scriptural tradition, studied rationally, corresponds to Paul’s understanding of the law and the prophets. The difference from his negative use of the word ‘letter’ is a matter of context, not content. A third objection to my proposal would be that using Paul’s terms differently from Origen in a new hermeneutical application is likely to cause confusion. But new problems need new solutions. All that is necessary is that the proposal is adequately explained and its difference from the old hermeneutical application of letter and spirit made plain. This can be signalled by placing both words in inverted commas when referring to our new application. My ‘letter’ is a new category necessitated by a cultural situation where Christian religious practices are no longer pre-supposed and Christian talk of God therefore no longer self-evidently meaningful. The old literal sense spoke of God with the text, and in a Christian cultural context. In my terms that is ‘spirit’ because it speaks of God, while it is perhaps only in religious contexts that talk of God is generally persuasive today. Outside these religious contexts, many readers now describe what the biblical texts say in terms of human religious history, regarding that as their subject matter. The old inner-Christian distinction between different ‘senses’ of scripture has thus been overtaken by a new one between confessional and religiously neutral readings of the Bible. This needs labels, and Paul’s terms are better suited to it than to making the old distinction established by Origen.

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A fourth objection to my use of ‘spirit’ to refer to theological interpretations or meanings related to religious practice and belief (in this case Christian ones) would be that both ‘Christian’ and ‘theological’ are ambiguous words. That is true and since what counts as ‘Christian’ is contested, it is sensible to begin by including everything that explicitly relates to Christian practice or expresses a contemporary Christian faith. Distinguishing between adequate and inadequate expressions of Christianity is a further task for theological argument, but initially all claims to be speaking of God revealed in Jesus should be included. Whether ‘spirit’ interpreters need to be themselves in some sense Christians (i.e. how far talk of God is necessarily self-involving) is also a further question. It can be set aside by defining ‘Christian’ here in the more verifiable terms of speaking or writing from a Christian ‘standpoint’, i.e. standing broadly within the Christian tradition rather than defining ‘Christian’ in more strictly confessional terms. ‘Faith’ is too elusive to be made the criterion for doing authentic theology. Like ‘Christian’, theology can also be defined broadly or narrowly, loosely or in a more strictly confessional way. The latter, ‘insider’ standpoint has seemed inevitable to many modern theologians since Schleiemacher, but it is still residually conventional to mean by ‘theology’ any academic study of a theistic religious tradition, regardless of the student’s standpoint. Pre-supposing the adjective ‘Christian’, the word theology will be used here more correctly to refer to Christians’ academic study of their religious tradition in contrast to their more popular devotional writing, but also in contrast to the ‘outsider’ standpoint of religious studies or the social sciences as adopted by some ‘letter’ work. This new distinction between ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ implies that, whatever the convictions of biblical critics might be, biblical criticism itself is not as such a religious activity. ‘Spirit’ interpretation is usually a religious activity, even though its stance of advocacy is usually less performative than preaching or prayer. The reflection that stands behind ‘spirit’ interpretation forges some new language for Christians in new social and intellectual contexts. ‘Letter’ interpretation does not speak normatively of God, but describes and clarifies the biblical writer’s beliefs. It may explain them – but explaining them away by interpreting and evaluating them within its own secular frame of reference would go beyond its descriptive brief and become anti-‘spirit’ interpretation, i.e. anti-religious polemic. ‘Letter’ work is a necessary pre-requisite of ‘spirit’ interpretation, and it can be oriented towards that – but it need not be so directed, and must in any case be clearly distinguished from it. My distinction aims to preserve the integrity of both, and to provide a criterion for identifying as poor theological interpretation any confusion between them. Fifthly, it may be objected that my proposal recycles much of the German debate in the 1920s about ‘spiritual exegesis’ which was ignited by Barth’s commentary but deprecated by both Barth and Bultmann.17 Or it may seem to echo Peter Stuhlmacher’s more recent defence of ‘spiritual interpretation’.18 These both picked up the hermeneutical application of Paul’s term and applied it afresh in the modern secular situation. My proposal is similarly motivated, but avoids Bultmann’s criticisms of the phrase ‘spiritual exegesis’,19 and unlike Stuhlmacher’s proposal it does not depend on a doctrine of biblical inspiration. Stuhlmacher regrets that this doctrine is not discussed in New Testament theologies, but the reason is that most New Testament

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theology is ‘letter’ (open to spirit), not ‘spirit’ interpretation. Whether even ‘spirit’ interpretation requires that doctrine is unclear, but my proposal aims only to elucidate modern biblical interpretation as it exists, not to provide a doctrinal basis for ‘spirit’ interpretation. ‘As it exists’ includes the different aims present in modern biblical interpretation, but having faced the objections we must justify positively our use of the Apostle Paul’s terms. At 2 Cor. 3.6 and Rom. 7.6, letter and spirit refer not to modes of biblical interpretation (whether Origen’s or that proposed here) but to the Old and New Covenants. However, this exegetically correct salvation-historical interpretation is related to the alternative hermeneutical application of the antithesis. Paul characterized the Old Covenant by reference to the written code and the new by reference to the Holy Spirit, but both involve the interpretation of texts. The apostle and minister of the New Covenant interprets scripture, perhaps as much as he did as a Pharisee, but from a different standpoint. Two contrasting stances in interpreting scripture, one non-Christian and the other Christian, are discussed in 2 Cor. 3.14-16 and are associated with the two covenants designated by the terms letter and spirit a few verses earlier. So although Paul does not himself apply his phrase as shorthand for nonChristian and Christian interpretation of the Bible, my proposed new hermeneutical application has some basis in what he argues in that chapter.20 If the connection can be justified here, that will embrace Rom. 7.6 too, where letter and spirit also refer to the Old and New Covenants. Rom. 2.29 is different but lends itself more readily to the tradition of hermeneutical applications, as we shall see from the early Luther. Paul’s argument in 2 Cor. 3 is not easy to follow, but the contrast between the two covenants stands out clearly and corresponds broadly to what Paul writes elsewhere, however distinctively it is presented here in reflection on Exodus 34. The phrase ‘new covenant’ (v. 6, cf. 1 Cor. 11.25) comes from Jer. 31.31-4, which promises that the law will be written on the people’s hearts (v. 33). This is there, too, contrasted with the Mosaic Covenant at the Exodus which they broke (v. 32). Jeremiah 31 does not speak of the spirit, but Ezek. 11.19 and 36.26f. speak of a new heart and new spirit being given them, and a heart of flesh being substituted for a heart of stone, and both Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel are surely in the background of both 2 Cor. 3 and Rom. 7.6. For neither Jeremiah, nor Ezekiel, nor Paul, does the law of Moses become invalid when the Old Covenant is superannuated. It is ‘holy’ and ‘spiritual’ (Rom. 7.12 and 14) and far from ‘annulling’ it, Paul ‘establishes’ it (Rom. 3.31). His gospel shows how and where its right requirement is fulfilled (Rom. 8.4). Parts of it never applied to Gentiles and so do not apply to Gentile converts now – they come into the New Covenant as Gentiles. But when they ‘turn to the Lord’ (2 Cor. 3.16), Jewish converts and Godfearers continue to read Moses and other pagan converts join them in doing so. Paul’s ambivalence about the law stems from his having to assert that it is still God’s law, God’s holy will and witness to the gospel, but also that observing it from within the Old Covenant is not now (according to Paul’s gospel) integral to God’s way of saving Jews (as once it was) or Gentiles (which it never was). Salvation was always God’s gift and the New Covenant like the Old requires obedience. The obedience of faith involves a life worthy of our calling, and that moral life can be epitomized in a summary of the law. Paul’s refusal to be negative about the law, apart from saying

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that now the righteousness of God is ‘apart from’ it,21 led him to speak of ‘the letter’ (rather than the Torah) at 2 Cor. 3.6 and Rom. 7.6. This word ‘letter’ (in these two passages, not at Rom. 2.27-9) speaks of the law in its role in the Old Covenant which is now superannuated, not of the law as such, which still has two or three22 ‘uses’. In the New Covenant, the just requirement of the law is fulfilled among those who walk not according to the flesh but according to the spirit (Rom. 8.4). Paul’s use of the word ‘letter’ to refer to the law or scripture being read in a way that does not (now) speak of God’s mediating salvation, provides some justification for our modern hermeneutical application of Paul’s word to refer to the Bible interpreted in terms which do not (in the modern world) speak of God or mediate salvation. It also licences our being more positive about ‘letter’ than Paul is. The literal, grammatical, historical-exegetical interpretation of scripture does not on its own mediate salvation, but neither does it necessarily kill, because it can be ‘open to spirit’, and like scripture itself for Paul it is foundational for ‘spirit’ or Christian interpretation. The law itself, for Paul, is ‘spiritual’, and Paul can talk of ‘the law of the Spirit of life’ (Rom. 8.2) and ‘the law of faith’ (Rom. 3.27)23, and ‘the law of Christ’ (Gal. 6.2) and of himself being ‘in-lawed of Christ’ (1 Cor. 9.21). The letter is not spiritual, not a matter of God or God in Christ. Paul’s terms can without too much difficulty be borrowed as a shorthand for distinguishing between interpretations of the Bible which aim to speak normatively of God and salvation (explicitly theological interpretations), and those which do not. The latter are those of modern historical scholarship, which speak descriptively of Israelite, Jewish and early Christian belief, worship and obedience to God. These do not speak normatively of God, but of human religion and literature. How Christian biblical scholars have combined their ‘letter’ work with their ‘spirit’ interest remains to be seen. The place where they have usually done it is in Old and New Testament theology. 2 Cor. 3.14-16 claims that outside the New (Spirit) Covenant, scripture is read in a blinkered or veiled way. Only when it is read pre-supposing the Spirit and the Lord, that is, in relation to God’s eschatological action in Christ, is it read in a way that now mediates salvation, according to Paul. Transposed to our modern situation: interpreted in relation to Christian belief and practice (whether explicitly in ‘spirit’ interpretation or implicitly in Old and New Testament theology), God through scripture ‘gives life’. Interpreted without reference (explicit or implicit) to God who is worshipped, the Bible does not mediate Christian salvation. Some kind of ecclesial context is necessary for a theological interpretation of the Bible. Paul is negative about the Mosaic Covenant, while still regarding scripture as Holy Scripture, and the law as God’s law. In 2 Cor. 3, his negativity is initially muted. His argument depends on saying that the Old Covenant was glorious, even though it is now being annulled. To call it a ministry of death (v. 7) and condemnation (v. 9) and to say that the letter kills, may seem hyperbolic – a rhetorical antithesis to what Paul really wants to say about the New Covenant and the Spirit which gives life. Our hermeneutical application does not have to match Paul’s rhetoric or dwell on his hyperbole in order to remain in the same ballpark. It is possible to explain Paul’s negations in 2 Cor. 3 by reference to the association of the law, sin and death in Rom. 5-8.10, but there is no need for this. Paul

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expresses himself antithetically. The alternative to life is death, and to salvation it is condemnation. Four times it is repeated that the old is passing away, being annulled or superannuated and the slightly obscure verse 2 Cor. 3.10 is saying that it no longer has its former glory. Paul’s theology is strictly either-or, leaving no room for a bothand. Paul’s ministry, like the gospel itself, mediates life to some and death to others (2 Cor. 2.15f., cf. 1 Cor. 1.18). Applying his terms to ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ interpretation of scripture softens his antithesis since both ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ have their place in Christian scriptural interpretation, but it accepts that ‘letter’ without explicit or implicit reference to ‘spirit’ does not mediate salvation. In 2 Cor. 3, Paul’s reading of the story in Exodus is guided by his present messianic conviction and missionary experience. The true meaning of the Jewish scriptures is (he claims) apparent now (eschatological ‘now’, cf. Rom. 3.21, 2 Cor. 6.1) only from a ‘Christian’ (not his word, but his meaning) perspective. That is not a historicalexegetical judgement about the Exodus story, though it attends closely to the text.24 As a basic belief, it does not need rational exegetical justification, though its consequences prompt moral reflection. It is axiomatic, part of what has generally been thought to be implied by confessing Jesus as Messiah and Lord. The same applies today. The perspective from which believers interpret their scripture is part of their Christian identity. Christians read Christian scripture from a Christian perspective (‘spirit’) – though they can produce good reasons for attending to other, non-Christian (‘letter’) perspectives also. Modern biblical scholarship is based on secular methods and assumptions, which now also fit and tend to encourage, non-Christian perspectives. These are prevalent today, despite most biblical scholars being Christian. The history of modern Old and New Testament theology is the story of how Christian theologians have managed this tension. For Paul the righteousness of God has now been (and is being) revealed apart from the law (Rom. 3.21 cf. 1.17). However, the New Covenant retains the old scripture. Paul therefore already faced the problem which allegorical interpretation was later intended to solve: that some of the obvious surface meanings of the Jewish (now also Christian) scriptures were no longer applicable. He himself faced it in his reflection on the law, concluding that the law (part of scripture) does not mediate salvation from God. His use of ‘letter’ to say this provides some justification for hermeneutical applications of the word. Paul and Origen (and even Marcion) would agree that Christians read the Septuagint differently from Jews, not primarily in respect of the methods used to interpret it, but in their expectations, based on their view of what it is about and how, if at all, it is about them. Those who (unlike Marcion) read the Septuagint as scripture in effect used the terms letter and spirit to distinguish their own religious standpoint from other possible ways of reading these shared texts. The point extends to how differently believers read their scriptures from non-believers today. They too need a vocabulary to identify their own religious standpoint and distinguish their religious understanding of the Bible from that of non-religious readers. They sometimes find it difficult to reconcile their theological pre-suppositions with the historical critical scholarship which they share with non-believers, and which proceeds etsi Deus non daretur (‘as if there were no God’)25 and leads to meanings at odds with their beliefs and practices. Christian

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pre-suppositions are part of what is involved in Christians reading the Bible as their scripture. Allegorical interpretation solved the problem by allowing interpreters to read the old scriptures in terms of their new religious system. How they have solved the problem when the critical, rationalist, biblical scholarship of the past 200 years discredited allegory is visible in those parts of modern theology called Old and New Testament theology. 2 Cor. 3.14-16 is unhelpful for interfaith dialogue, but correct to imply that Christians understand their scripture to bear witness to God in Jesus Christ. Others understand the Hebrew Bible and Septuagint differently, including Jews like Trypho who could reasonably argue that his faith community produced these texts in the first place and that its interpretations of them are historically and exegetically superior to Justin Martyr’s.26 Marcion agreed more with Trypho than with Justin, and the attack on Christianity by Celsus reminded Origen that Jews were not the only sensible people opposing Christian interpretation of the Bible. Modern scholars, including theologians, can agree with those three critics of early Catholic Christianity, preferring interpretations that can be shared by the whole culture over specifically Christian readings. Theologians relate the Old Testament to their Christianity less at the level of particular texts and more by a theological interpretation of the whole, but they still relate both Testaments to their modern understandings of Christianity. My new hermeneutical application of Paul’s terms will show the different ways this has been done, but the first step has been to argue that various hermeneutical applications have some basis in Paul’s own theology and hermeneutics. The argument has included the concession that Paul’s antithesis (which belongs within a larger salvation-historical continuity) must be softened into a dialectical relationship between two different ways of reading the Bible (whether Origen’s pair or my own). This actually corresponds to Paul’s view of the law, which is basically positive and only secondarily negative (it is God’s law and still has a place, but no longer mediates salvation in a New Covenant context). It is now different for him, and less central than it was to him as a Pharisee. The same scriptures are read in different ways and only one of them leads to salvation in Christ. The classical hermeneutical application had to contradict or at least qualify, Paul’s antithesis, containing as it does the assertion that the letter ‘kills’; after all, the literal meanings of scripture, especially the New Testament, are even more foundational to salvation in Christ than the allegorical. Our new application is also more positive than Paul’s ‘letter’, because it too insists on making the literal textual meaning foundational for theology. But it does not expect that meaning to mediate salvation on its own. It insists also on a relationship to ‘spirit’. The most un-Pauline aspect of the older hermeneutical model was its assumption that the literal meaning of scripture (what it calls ‘letter’, in a pre-modern context) speaks of God and mediates salvation, and for this it thought it had warrant from Origen. This assumption plays no part in our new model, where ‘letter’ indicates a biblical scholarship not open to talk of God, a modern phenomenon unknown to Paul or Origen. The traditional reading of Origen (which may not strictly be correct)27 is less close to Paul than my proposal, but the older tradition still carries some weight and a modern proposal that develops and improves it may have merit.

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My contrast between a religiously neutral mere ‘letter’ without reference to ‘spirit’, and the ‘letter intending spirit’ of New Testament theology, is not a paraphrase of 2 Cor. 3 or Romans 7, but unlike Origen’s use, as traditionally understood, it retains Paul’s denial that letter alone can mediate salvation. That mere ‘letter’ can be religiously deadly is a common experience famously articulated by Karl Barth.28 Scripture in Paul and ‘letter’ in my proposal, have the potential to mediate salvation (if related to or pointing towards ‘spirit’) or they can, if isolated from ‘spirit’, fail to contribute to the communication of the gospel and the eliciting of saving faith. To call that ‘deadly’ is brutal but realistic, from a Christian perspective. It would be instructive to trace the interpretation of Paul’s terms throughout Christian history and in modernity, but since Origen and Augustine are discussed elsewhere in this volume, we turn to Ebeling’s research on the young Catholic Luther29 to reinforce my new hermeneutical application. This supports my proposal in two ways. First, it draws Rom. 2.27-29 into the discussion, whereas my previous argument was based on Paul’s different (two-covenant) use of the terms at 2 Cor. 3.6 and Rom. 7.6. Secondly, Luther’s use of Paul’s terms comes closer to my proposal than Origen’s does, at least as Origen is traditionally understood. It bridges and so helps relate the old and the proposed new hermeneutical applications. Ironically, Origen’s hermeneutical use of Paul’s antithetical formulation risked denigrating the literal meaning (as something that ‘kills’), despite the place he gave to the literal sense, since it was connected to a mystical Platonic theology of spiritual ascent which has little contact with Paul and less with my modern application. Luther’s development of the tradition gives more weight to the literal sense and shows little interest in spiritual ascents. It anticipates aspects of my proposed further development of the hermeneutical tradition. Origen found better labels for his different kinds of meaning in scripture at 1 Thess. 5.23 (spirit, soul and body). He quotes the letter–spirit texts only rarely in the surviving material. The subsequent tradition preferred the latter to describe its interpretative practice and distinguished further between three kinds of spiritual meaning, but corrections were added to preserve the literal sense as foundational in scholastic theology, even though spiritual meanings remained more highly regarded in monastic practice. Allegorical interpretation had been plausible in  Alexandria where it had already been applied to Homer, and by Philo to the Septuagint, and it was imitated and transcribed for centuries despite the condemnations of some of Origen’s theology. But it was never so well suited to the New Testament as to the Old, and was always too subjective and potentially arbitrary to be much use in theological argument. According to Ebeling, even the Catholic Luther’s use of Paul’s antithesis soon moved away from the older association of ‘spirit’ with allegorical interpretation and was as applicable to Christian reading of the New Testament as to that of the Old. It was also (like ours) more negative about ‘letter’ than most medieval hermeneutical applications of Paul’s terms, and it drew on Rom. 2.27-9. This was before Luther had read Augustine and been persuaded that 2 Cor. 3.6 referred to law and gospel, as he held in his Reformation theology. Ebeling admitted that Luther’s early hermeneutical use of letter and spirit ‘goes far beyond what Paul had in mind in this antithesis’,30 but thought it basically true to the apostle. Rom. 2.27-9 distinguishes between an external or physical sign of religious

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identity (circumcision), and true religious identity which is inward: ‘real’ circumcision is a matter of the heart. ‘Spirit’ here means inward, though Paul may have had the connotations of Holy Spirit in mind and so the contrast with the Old Covenant and its law which required physical circumcision. Luther used Paul’s antithesis to contrast the mere outward hearing of the word with being taught inwardly. He thus distinguished authentic Christian interpretation of the Bible, which speaks rightly of God (what I am calling ‘spirit’ interpretation) from interpretations which do not penetrate beyond the surface, outer, human ‘letter’. He was critical of Lyra’s emphasis on the literal sense (which came closer than his own to my sense of ‘letter’), but did not deny the relative legitimacy of Lyra’s rabbinic-influenced exegesis of the Psalms or the genuine insights it yielded. However, he would not allow in Christian theology a non-Christian account of the Sache of scripture, and this led him to prefer a Christological interpretation of the Old Testament which insisted that Christ is the fundamental meaning of all Christian scripture. Theology and a rightly interpreted scripture bring him assurance, certainty and salvation. A biblical interpretation which is good scholarship, but does not mediate salvation seemed to Luther to miss the point. Luther’s Christological interpretation of the Old Testament is generally rejected in biblical theology along with other allegorical interpretation. Wilhelm Vischer’s revival of this31 impressed Barth but left Old Testament theologians unmoved. James Barr observed that Vischer shared Luther’s view that ‘everywhere the scripture is about Christ alone’.32 Barr thus excluded this ‘universal Christ-history’ from the bibliography to his book on the concept of biblical theology, rightly implying that it is not biblical theology in the normal sense, i.e. a subdivision of modern biblical scholarship. Vischer’s book is not ‘letter open to spirit’ but, like Luther’s Christological exegesis, it is ‘spirit’ exegesis – which is why it appealed to Barth. Others think that even ‘spirit’ exegesis should try to avoid conflict with historical-exegetical scholarship, precisely because it intends to read the Old Testament in relation to Christian belief and practice. Original historical contexts and meanings, even though often uncertain, cannot now be simply ignored in any interpretation of Christian scripture aiming to help shape that religious community today. We cannot unlearn our historical sense, and interpretations which try to turn the clock back are likely to appear arbitrary and fail to persuade. Despite this modern rejection of his Christian interpretation of the Old Testament, Luther’s use of Paul’s letter–spirit antithesis comes close to my present proposal. Rom. 2.27-29 lends itself to Luther’s early hermeneutical reflection (remote as this is from Paul’s intentions) as it contrasts the outer and the inner realities of what Paul considers true Jewish (in later terms, Christian) identity. That transfers fairly easily both to Luther’s and to my own contrast between (a) what Christians think scripture is really about, its inner matter (die Sache, in German parlance) and (b) what it is empirically or externally about, to the veiled eyes of non-Christian readers: in modern terms, the human phenomenon called religion. Ebeling explains how Luther, in his preparatory work for his first commentary on Psalms, . . . strove to understand the scripture in such a way that it did not remain merely the letter, that is something alien, remote and external, but became the Spirit, that is something alive in the heart, which takes possession of man (sic). For

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The Spirit and the Letter the question of the true spiritual understanding of the holy scripture, that is, an understanding through which the Spirit itself can take hold of man, is identical with the question which tormented Luther, that of the reality of grace and the certainty which brings assurance to the mind and the conscience. For what is grace, except the presence of the Holy Spirit?.33

I am not commenting here on the merits of Luther’s ‘Spirit’ interpretation, but must acknowledge that his concern with the reality of God and the certainty of faith are what (in my terms) ‘spirit’ interpretation tries to express and what ‘letter intending spirit’ is also interested in, even though it does not explicitly articulate it. The early Luther’s hermeneutical application of Paul’s phrase is thus surprisingly close to my own contrast between ‘spirit’ interpretation (‘something alive in the heart’) and the history of ancient religion which is ‘alien, remote and external’. What makes someone a theologian (said the early Luther) is the ability to distinguish between the spirit and the letter. Only so can anyone engage in what we too are calling ‘spirit’ interpretation. According to Luther, Christians should (in Ebeling’s words) not ‘be content with the letter and with the mere outward hearing of the word, but should make it our concern to listen to the Spirit itself. It is not by the word as it is uttered outwardly that we are really taught inwardly, for it is merely the tool and instrument of him who writes living words in the heart . . . the Spirit must be drawn out from the letter. The Spirit is concealed in the letter . . . ’.34 In our terms: Christians cannot be content with biblical scholarship or ‘letter’ alone because this does not speak of God. Their scriptural interpretation must be more self- and community-involving, whether by expressing or by being oriented to, ‘spirit’. They pre-suppose that its subject matter is God. Luther’s hermeneutical appeal to Rom. 2.27-9 thus provides a bridge between the patristic–medieval application of Paul’s terms and my own proposal. It strengthens the claim of the latter to stand in the tradition of Christian interpretation of scripture, and the claim that there are continuities between ancient and modern theological interpretation. But whether the proposal is thought worth adopting will depend on whether the problem it addresses is perceived as a problem. If it can offer a persuasive analysis of modern biblical interpretation, it should make that problem of scriptural interpretation in a secular culture more visible. In the limited space available we must restrict our analysis to Christian inter­ pretation of the New Testament and within this to the implicit theological interpretation called New Testament theology or ‘letter open to (and occasionally bearing) spirit’. All that can be done here is to make room for it on our map, in the hope of defusing the current hostility on both sides between explicit theological interpretation and the implicit theological interpretations in biblical theology, which work within the parameters of modern biblical studies. A purely secular biblical scholarship needs no elucidation today and a critique of it would take us too far afield.35 Again, placing it on our map is all that my taxonomy requires. Christian theological interpretation of the Old Testament is complicated by the fact that the intentions of the human authors of this scriptural text are more remote from the modern Christian readers’ primary theological interests than they are from the

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interests of the New Testament writers. It is also clear that the Old Testament functions in some respects differently for Christians than the New does, even though neither can be separated from the other in orthodox Christian theology. Both provide a source of faith and theology and the Old Testament is essential to the theological interpretation of the New, but it does not as such provide a norm. That is one reason (disciplinary specialism is another) why Old Testament theologies and New Testament theologies are usually treated in separate books, whatever the value of a Gesamtbiblische Theologie in relating the two Testaments. The Hebrew Bible is also Jewish scripture and our analysis could be applied to Jewish interpretation of the Tanak in relation to secular biblical scholarship, but this will not be attempted here.

3  Modern biblical interpretation: The proposal applied The spectrum of possible relationships between ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ as defined here provides a map which makes room for all forms of modern biblical interpretation, secular and sacred, Jewish and Christian. It stretches from a purely secular ‘letter without spirit’ to both Jewish and Christian ‘spirit’ interpretations of their respective scriptures. Rather than describing all the possibilities, the proposal will now be illustrated and tested by a brief consideration of some modern New Testament theology, a discipline which in my terms is normally ‘letter intending or open to spirit’, but on occasion has been ‘letter bearing spirit’. The other categories on our spectrum (‘letter without spirit’ and ‘spirit building on letter’) are relatively straightforward and explicit. Our map can best show its value by throwing light on the more ambiguous areas of modern biblical interpretation. As one form of ‘letter open to spirit’, New Testament theology properly so-called,36 or implicit theological interpretation of the New Testament, pursues its theological aim of interpreting these ancient texts in ways that are open to modern Christian practice and belief. It does this by using the rational methods and accepting the canons of truth prevalent in this wider culture. It thus mediates between the modern biblical scholarship of which it is a part and the contemporary church which, like most theology, it seeks to serve. The first New Testament theology, separated from its author’s Old Testament theology on account of the historical character of modern biblical theology, was that of G. L. Bauer in  1800–2, but discussions of the discipline rightly begin with J. P. Gabler’s inaugural lecture of 1787.37 Gabler distinguished between dogmatics on the one hand and biblical theology on the other. This lecture soon came to symbolize the changed relationship and growing gulf between a now independent historical critical study of the Bible and the older dogmatics, but Gabler’s intention was to clarify the relationship for the sake of providing a firm foundation for dogmatics, not to give biblical scholars the charter of independence from theology that many now take for granted. He proposed two kinds of biblical theology to be done successively: the first historical and descriptive, the second evaluative. He later called the first stage (historically) true and the second (theologically) pure – with all the time-conditioned dross removed. His two steps correspond to my use of ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’, and both the evident weaknesses and the less obvious merits in the way he related these factors in

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biblical theology recur in the subsequent history of biblical scholarship. Paul’s terms ‘letter’ and spirit’ can be reused in a shorthand way to clarify this. Like many thoughtful Christians today, Gabler wants to see what is there or what the Bible is saying, using whatever rational methods are available – my sense of ‘letter’ – and then to discard whatever seems untrue or incredible (or in the case of the Old Testament, immoral, irrelevant or sub-Christian) in these ancient writings. That is not so crude or arbitrary as it seems. The second, theological judgement is the defensible critical element in our ‘spirit’ interpretation, which relates the texts explicitly to the interpreters’ own beliefs and practice. But Gabler’s proposal gives these modern beliefs such weight that (as in  allegorical interpretation) the chances  of learning something new from the witness of scripture are minimal. In Gabler’s own case, the interpreter’s beliefs and practices, which were given such weight, were largely those of a modernity that had moved some distance from its Christian roots, not those of a biblically shaped Lutheran orthodoxy. The problem of modern reception of ancient authoritative texts arises in any theology, because no Christians accept every word of scripture as applying to themselves literally. Much gets ignored or reinterpreted to yield other, non-literal meanings. Everything then depends on the criterion by which material is accepted and learnt from or (in effect) rejected. The criterion for such ‘spirit’ interpretation always involves the interpreter’s own system of religious belief and practice. This is itself drawn partly from the scriptures but also persuades believers to criticize or ignore a part of the scriptures. For example, neither Christians nor Jews stone Sabbath-breakers. We all, therefore, reject the injunction of Num. 15.32-36, while perhaps allowing its intention and finding other ways of keeping holy the Sabbath. Gabler’s own modern theology and so his proposed ‘spirit’ interpretation as the second type of biblical theology he identifies, was so far removed from its biblical roots that making it the criterion of ‘spirit’ interpretation would result in the removal of much that orthodox Christians consider essential to the biblical witness and Christian gospel. To orthodox eyes, his pre-understanding of the theological subject matter of the Bible was inadequate, owing more to modern philosophy than to the biblical witness to God in Jesus. The modern interpreter thought he knew already what in the text was true, and was therefore insufficiently open to its challenge. The balance between respect for the tradition and attention to modern experience was weighted in favour of the latter, as in much liberal theology. Truth must always trump tradition, but ways must be found to hear and assess claims which challenge contemporary perceptions. In defence of Gabler’s model, it does not simply excise large parts of scripture. Stage 1 (‘letter’ scholarship) continues to attend to the whole Bible. Even though most of this is disregarded in making modern ethical and doctrinal decisions, it remains on the table and Gabler insisted on some relationship between his two stages, even though he did not clarify this. Krister Stendahl’s distinction between what the text meant in its original context and what it means today38 also failed to clarify the route from those results of biblical scholarship (‘letter’) to the modern appropriation of scripture (‘spirit’). There is clearly no straight line from Gabler’s stage 1 (‘letter’) to his stage 2 (‘spirit’) and the latter is, in any case, not the prerogative of biblical scholarship.39

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The old Interpreter’s Bible only highlighted the disjunction by having the two types of commentary carried out by different authors. It became common to demit the second (theological) task to systematic theologians. Most biblical scholars who are also clergy still distinguish sharply between their scholarship and their preaching, claiming that the former informs the latter, but without saying quite how – beyond protecting them from abusing the text as they apply it. Many have expected more positive help from biblical scholarship and this is a factor in recent renewals of ‘spirit’ interpretation. Most New Testament theology has followed Gabler’s prescription but has stopped at stage 1, leaving the latter to systematic and practical theology. What is often overlooked is that its agreement with Gabler goes beyond accepting two stages, or different tasks. Gabler intended to proceed to stage 2 and New Testament theology has similarly done its ‘letter’ work with an eye to its subsequent appropriation by believers, i.e. as ‘letter intending spirit’, or ‘letter’ with a pre-understanding of the text’s subject matter which assumes it speaks of God, addressing the hearer or reader existentially. This expectation can be submerged under a wealth of scholarship but where it is extinguished one cannot properly speak of New Testament theology. This assumption about the subject matter which relates the texts to modern Christianity is what distinguishes New Testament theology from a mere history of early Christian thought, not the use or disuse of doctrinal categories. Both these disciplines’ historical descriptions of early Christianity and their accounts of the witness of the New Testament texts, have made extensive use of doctrinal categories, because these have seemed more or less appropriate, despite Wrede’s dissent.40 After all, these categories were themselves developed to articulate the biblical witness in new intellectual contexts. But these categories fulfil a further function in New Testament theology: they remind students that what Christians believe the New Testament is about is also the substance of their own contemporary Christianity. Rejection of that basic interest of New Testament theology is what made William Wrede’s critique of the nineteenth-century discipline a foretaste of things to come. Wrede represents a high point in ‘purely historical’ criticism of the New Testament, being critical of the New Testament theology of his predecessors whose orientation towards dogmatics he thought prejudiced their historical objectivity. His contemporaries agreed with him in principle that New Testament theology was a ‘purely historical’ discipline, but Wrede went further in arguing that so long as this ‘retains a direct link with dogmatics as its goal and people expect from it material for dogmatics to work on – and this is a common view – it will be natural for biblical theology to have an eye to dogmatics’.41 The link was thus, in his view, to be cut. ‘Letter’ and ‘spirit’ are rightly distinguished by Wrede, but wrongly – so far as New Testament theology is concerned – uncoupled. It is certainly defensible to demit ‘spirit’ to systematic theology and right to make room for a ‘history of early Christian religion and theology’ which need bear no relation to modern theology. Wrede was also right to conclude that calling such a history ‘New Testament theology’ is wrong in both its terms. His mistake was to suppose that there was no room for a New Testament theology properly so-called in which ‘letter’ was distinguished from ‘spirit’, and which restricted itself to ‘letter’, but which did this with ‘an eye to dogmatics’ (Wrede’s phrase), as Gabler had proposed. Symptomatic is his harsh criticism of the attempts of B. Weiss

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and W.  Beyschlag to explain that their historical discipline pre-supposed their own religious standpoint without allowing that to prejudice their enquiry42 (in my terms that it was ‘letter intending spirit’). Wrede’s counterclaim that the historical discipline ‘is totally indifferent to all dogma and systematic theology’43 is at best true only of his own history, ‘wrongly called New Testament theology’, i.e. ‘letter’ divorced from ‘spirit’. As a devout liberal Protestant, he thought that the revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth was to be clarified only by historical research and did not take seriously the traditional Christian claim that it is truthfully interpreted by the theological witness of the New Testament texts. Wrede was surely right that such a New Testament theology (‘letter intending spirit’) would always be in danger of corrupting its ‘letter’ work. However, so long as its presentations are open to correction, that objection is not fatal. Wrede made room for a biblical scholarship that is not interested in theology, but failed to establish that such theological interests are illegitimate in biblical studies and that a properly theological New Testament theology is impossible. Modern historiography is less optimistic than Wrede was about the possibility (or even desirability) of total ‘objectivity’. Historians admit their interests and try to ensure that these do not distort their evaluation of the evidence. This allows even Wrede’s ‘letter’ to be more theologically interested than he allowed, i.e. to ‘intend spirit’. Those who adopt Wrede’s ideal today are taking one option in biblical interpretation, but can no longer claim the moral or intellectual high ground. They cannot even claim Wrede as their patron saint, since he was a theologian and maintained a liberal theological interpretation of the New Testament. While he did not integrate his historical understanding of Paul and John into his own religious system, he did relate that to his understanding of Jesus. The place of historical Jesus research in New Testament theology is a disputed topic, but even Martin Kähler allowed it some place.44 Wrede’s religious appropriation of some synoptic traditions shows that, despite his theory, his ‘letter’ did on occasion intend spirit. His ‘history of early Christian religion and theology’ overlaps with the intentions of New Testament theology.45 Wrede’s discussion of his predecessors contained many valuable ‘letter’ suggestions which were adopted in some twentieth-century New Testament theology. It convinced Bultmann that the older New Testament theologies were historically defective and needed to heed Wrede’s positive suggestions as well as his warnings about allowing theological interests to damage scholarly integrity. But Wrede’s criticisms of B. Weiss and W. Beyschlag for (in my terms) allowing the discipline to be interested in ‘spirit’ suggests that he rejected or failed to understand, Gabler’s ‘true’ to history model of ‘letter intending spirit’. Gabler’s proposal survives Wrede’s critique and needs only to be better instantiated, as the subsequent history of New Testament theology confirms. The subsequent history is, however, complicated by some of the best instantiations not quite following Gabler’s two-stage proposal or by Wrede’s excluding of the second stage from his task as a biblical scholar. Some theologians specializing in New Testament have been unwilling to demit the properly theological task of articulating Christian faith today to systematic theologians. As theologians themselves they have naturally wanted to perform both Gabler’s tasks, and if possible simultaneously. Some preachers do so, and New Testament theology (properly so-called) supports this

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Christian practice, if only implicitly. In  1957, Ernst Käsemann was scathing about ‘the thoroughly misplaced modesty’ of exegetes who ‘suppose that they merely do the historical donkey-work for the systematic theologian’,46 and in  1981, Nicholas Lash published a devastating critique of limiting New Testament interpretation to what I am calling ‘letter’.47 One might respond that Käsemann was free to go on and himself write systematic theology (or kirchliche Konflikte), so long as he distinguished this from the historical discipline of New Testament theology, as Schlatter did. But Schlatter insisted that this historical discipline was also theological as far as its intention and subject matter are concerned and Käsemann was following Bultmann who in the wake of Barth’s Romans wanted his historical exegesis (‘letter’) to ‘coincide’ with theological exegesis,48 i.e. with ‘spirit’. Bultmann saw ‘the final goal’ of his ‘historical work’ in its ‘meeting systematic theology which has travelled on another road’.49 Both reflected on human existence and saw this transformed through encounter with the Christian message. Bultmann’s proposals for a theological exegesis have more potential today than often realized. His appeal to Dilthey’s account of history has more in common with some recent historiography than the positivism of Wrede, which still dominates much biblical study. But it must be recognized that, in principle, Bultmann goes beyond ‘letter intending spirit’, even though most of his work can be read as that. He does not confuse ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ but his existential(ist) interpretation (like Baur’s metaphysics of history) makes them coincide in what may be called ‘letter bearing spirit’. This is achieved by Bultmann through his defining the historical task in terms of its disclosure of the possibilities for human existence50 and in his defining talk of God also in terms of human existence.51 Bultmann’s theological exegesis involves ‘spirit’ more intrinsically than normal New Testament theology, which is only oriented to or ‘intending spirit’; his insistence on the necessity of Sachkritik (‘content-criticism’) or understanding and assessing a text in the light of its subject matter (such as God or the gospel) means theological criticism which is usually a ‘spirit’ operation, like Gabler’s second step. In his important review of Bultmann’s classic New Testament theology, Nils Dahl asked (in the spirit of Wrede) whether Sachkritik ‘should not be a task of systematic theology rather than of New Testament scholarship? Does not Bultmann cross the boundary between biblical theology and systematic theology?’ He pointed out ‘that there is no sharp line for him . . . His interpretation sets forth the understanding of human existence implied in the theological statements of the New Testament. This is for him a scholarly task’.52 My use of Paul’s terms aims to clarify what is going on here. The scholarly task is always ‘letter’, but Bultmann allows ‘spirit’ into this by making historical and theological exegesis ‘coincide’,53 unlike most New Testament theology where the ‘spirit’ or ‘eye to dogmatics’ remains in the mind of the interpreters and is not included in their descriptions of the biblical writers’ thought. In both ‘letter bearing spirit’, and ‘letter intending (or open to) spirit’, the ‘spirit’ remains implicit in the ‘letter’ work, unlike in Barth’s explicit theological exegesis; but Bultmann designs his ‘letter’ to make it express what he claims are the conceptual expressions of the transcendent kerygma. His historical descriptions of Paul’s theological anthropology and soteriology coincide with his own anthropological theology or understanding of God, Christ and

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salvation. His descriptions of the real Johannine theology (distinct from that of the sources and of the ecclesiastical redactor) coincide with his own rather individualistic understanding of the saving revelation in Christ. Most of Bultmann’s exegesis is normal New Testament theology, or ‘letter open to spirit’. It contains very little Sachkritik in practice. But the structure of his presentations of Paul’s and the Johannine theology reflect a more ambitious undertaking which brings his New Testament theology closer than most to Barth’s exegesis, in which ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ coincide, however much they diverge over doctrinal content. Whether ‘letter bearing spirit’ is a better ideal for Christian biblical interpretation than ‘letter intending spirit’ is worth considering. Bultmann’s predecessor here is F. C. Baur who fused his historical criticism and reconstruction with his theological interpretation or ‘speculation’ through a different theory about history. This dovetailed with his Hegelian account of Godtalk which differed from Bultmann’s, but Baur’s ‘letter bearing spirit’ was akin to Bultmann’s in that it too hinged on a theory of human selfconsciousness or anthropology. However, its appeal to the real course of historical development made it far more vulnerable to falsification by subsequent historical research. So long as either synthesis seemed plausible, these fusions of faith and reason had some attraction, as is evident from conservative attempts to achieve a similar unity by confusing ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’, but both Baur’s and Bultmann’s syntheses were open to theological objections, in addition to doubts about their historical and exegetical supports. Their anthropological bias robs Christology of the centrality it has in orthodox Christianity. Current attempts to develop this model of ‘letter bearing spirit’ are drawing Christian practice into their accounts of what constitutes ‘spirit’. This is surely a welcome development. What Christians mean by God in Christ has more to do with the practice of discipleship than with philosophy. Liberation and feminist theologians have built their understandings of Christianity into their scholarly biblical interpretation. They have been criticized on both theological and critical grounds, but that has not discredited the model. Bultmann’s development of a New Testament theology, which went beyond the normal model of ‘letter intending spirit’, was inspired by Barth’s Romans and can be traced through his essays written in the 1920s. However, Barth’s exegesis is, in our terms, clearly ‘spirit’ exegesis, speaking explicitly of God, however conscientiously it builds on the ‘letter’ work of biblical scholarship. It articulates the meaning of the biblical text in terms which exceed the discourse of historical critical scholarship. Both forms of theological interpretation (explicit and implicit) nevertheless have their necessary place in theological education and the current dispute between them is misplaced, as was some of Barth’s polemic against the liberals’ scholarship. Barth combined his objections to the substantive (reductive anthropocentric) theologies of liberal Protestantism with his preferred (‘spirit’) form of theological exegesis. He implied, in effect, that the liberals’ New Testament theology was mere ‘letter’, because it restricted itself to the human subject matter of modern scholarship instead of struggling with the Sache and speaking of God as Luther and Calvin and ‘such modern writers as Hofmann, J. T. Beck, Godet, and Schlatter’ had done.54 The subsequent more secular history of New Testament scholarship suggests that his flagging Overbeck55 as a warning of where liberal Protestant (‘letter’) biblical

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interpretation might lead was timely. Overbeck disclaimed theological interests in the texts and wanted to write a ‘profane church history’ (‘letter without spirit’). This repudiation of New Testament theology (which Overbeck perceptively thought a modern form of allegorical interpretation) is now commonplace, but the ‘letter’ of Barth’s teachers was on the whole ‘letter intending and open to spirit’ not ‘letter divorced from spirit’. Their talk of ‘religion’, and ‘awe in the presence of history’ usually implied their own belief in God. The title of Paul Wernle’s history, The Beginnings of Our Religion,56 indicated that they themselves identified with the religion they were describing. They assumed that the New Testament spoke of God, even though as historians they could speak only of human religion. Their study of religion, unlike that of their contemporaries in the new social sciences, was part of a theological syllabus based on sound Schleiermacherian principles, even if sometimes yielding the subSchleiermacherian theology of a Harnack or a Troeltsch. Hans Lietzmann, for example, was clear that ‘the working out of the religious values [in the texts], answering the question of what all this means for ourselves and the needs of the present-day, must be fundamentally excluded from [his own kind of historical-critical] commentary’.57 He went on to insist that this ‘is not the business of exegetical science, but of personal religious experience. We can do that in lectures or wherever the theologian wants to act as a religious educator. And it is best done orally. The printed word is only a miserable surrogate’.58 He thus distinguished between ‘letter’, his scholarly commentary and his own rather attenuated version of ‘spirit’, which the theologian communicates indirectly as a teacher or directly as a preacher, but which he excluded from his scholarly commentary and was reticent about fixing in print. When a few years later Barth attended a lecture by Lietzmann on Romans, the great church historian could point out this difference between his Handbuch and his lectures and hint at how it belied the harsh things Barth had said about him and Jülicher. Barth had suggested that these commentators and even the conservatives Zahn and Kühl, had not asked what understanding and explaining the New Testament involves. He thought that they were so stuck in ‘letter’, or as Lietzmann later put it, echoing Barth, in ‘philological and historical interpretation of the original texts themselves’, as not to dare penetrate to the Sache,59 i.e. ‘spirit’. Lietzmann’s later brief reply in L. Fendt’s ‘spirit’ volume of the Handbuch (1931), like his original inclusion of pastor Niebergall’s volume on Praktische Auslegung (1909), confirms that he agreed about the need for ‘spirit’ in theological education. Scholarly commentaries like Lietzmann’s are ‘letter’, and they vary in how explicit they are (if at all) about being ‘open to spirit’. The New Testament theologian C. K. Barrett, for example, was explicit in the Preface to his commentary on Romans (1957) about his Christian standpoint and the impact of Barth, Luther and Calvin on him.60 At times, this coloured his historical critical exegesis.61 But despite this theological confession in the Preface and traces of its influence on the ‘letter’ commentary that follows, the latter is clearly ‘letter open to and intending spirit’, unlike Barth’s ‘spirit’ (explicitly theological) exegesis. Even ‘letter’ work usually draws on theological terminology to communicate the meaning of these ancient religious texts, though some prefer the alternative vocabularies offered by the social sciences. But it is the beliefs or standpoint of

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the  interpreters with respect to the subject matter of scripture which makes their ‘letter’ into New Testament theology, not their use of theological terms (though this is often symptomatic of their religious interests). Barth could legitimately criticize Lietzmann but his objection should not have been to this exegete’s restriction of his Handbuch to ‘letter’, only to the character of the theology he pre-supposed and intended. Barth thought Lietzmann’s theology was so different from Paul’s that he was unlikely to communicate Paul’s religious meaning, however exact his philological scholarship. How far does that apply to contemporary biblical scholarship? ‘Letter’ commentary can surely say what a text is saying regardless of the modern scholar’s standpoint, but where New Testament theology is genuinely theology, exegetes’ standpoints are likely to affect their implicit theological interpretations. Modern theologians must distinguish their own theology from St Paul’s. This may nevertheless affect how they read Paul. Their ‘letter intending spirit’ interpretations reflect their pre-understanding of what the text is saying, leading them to see it as truly gospel for today. Those who see it as merely the residue of some ancient religious controversy or the document of a religious culture now moribund, are similarly influenced by their pre-understanding of the text’s subject matter. Friedrich Niebergall’s 1909 description of ‘practical exegesis’ (corresponding to my sense of ‘spirit’) as ‘looking at a historical document to see what it yields for the religious and moral influencing of our generation’,62 seemed to Barth and Bultmann to imply a religious distance from the Apostle Paul that they found intolerable in theological exegesis. They disliked this second stage of Gabler’s two-stage model, but the fault was less with the model than with the theological pre-understanding those liberals brought to it. The theological weakness of the liberals’ New Testament theology could be corrected by substituting a more adequate modern theology as the ‘spirit’ which is intended in their ‘letter’ work. Gabler’s stage 1 (‘letter intending spirit’) did not have to be replaced by ‘spirit building on letter’, such as Barth’s exegesis, or ‘letter bearing spirit’ such as Bultmann’s. ‘Letter intending spirit’ (normal New Testament theology) remains the realistic option for biblical theologians, as spirit exegesis perhaps is for dogmaticians. It is not always easy to say whether a piece of biblical interpretation is New Testament theology, i.e. ‘letter intending spirit’, because the intention is in the mind of interpreters and often unstated. What is written is often indistinguishable from ‘letter without spirit’. Whether a modern author intended to write New Testament theology or pure history can usually be guessed from their biographies and from the (often religious) institutional contexts in which they work. Clues are also offered, such as in C. K. Barrett’s Preface to his Romans,63 or Ferdinand Hahn’s references to the Gegenwartsbezug of New Testament theology,64 or titles which hint at the author’s theological interests, such as The Beginnings of Our Religion,65 The Meaning of Paul for Today 66 or Who is Jesus?.67 But since readers can choose whether to read these books as New Testament theology or as merely history, the scholarly authors’ intentions are unimportant. C. H. Dodd aimed to ‘suggest Paul’s importance in the history of religion’68 through this ‘letter’ work of historical scholarship. It was the Apostle’s thought he wished

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to project, not (primarily) his own. But he adds that his ‘main concern has been to bring out what I conceive to be the permanent significance of the apostle’s thought, in modern terms and in relation to the general interests and problems which occupy the mind of our generation’.69 This is New Testament theology, which, like Barrett’s, is more explicit about its aims and standpoint in the Preface than in the actual text. The ‘religious philosophy’ which Dodd finds in Paul would no more satisfy Barth and Bultmann than Lietzmann’s or Niebergall’s liberal Protestant theology did, but again the problem lies with the particular theology or theological pre-understanding that these interpreters bring to the text. The dispute is about what ‘spirit’ is intended, not about the model of ‘letter intending spirit’. Leander Keck calls his Who is Jesus? ‘something of a hybrid, neither history nor christology proper but rather theological reflection on history – on those aspects of the Jesus of history that are central to his continuing significance’.70 This is clearly New Testament theology, like Bultmann’s Jesus (1926) and Bornkamm’s Jesus of Nazareth (1956, ET 1960), all of which show that historical Jesus research can be part of this discipline, though often it is not. But even where theologians are less explicit about their theological interests and their ‘letter’ work is more ambiguous, not everything is at stake since their readers can still choose to read it either as New Testament theology, i.e. as speaking of the God they themselves acknowledge or as not more than history of early Christian religion. The difference between Barth’s ‘spirit’ exegesis and normal New Testament theology or ‘letter intending spirit’ can be further illustrated by reference to Barth’s translator E. C. Hoskyns (1884–1937), the Anglican clergyman and baronet who lectured on ‘The Theology and Ethics of the New Testament’ in Cambridge. Hoskyns was ‘struggling back with great difficulty to a theological interpretation of the gospels’,71 and he appreciated Westcott and Scott Holland on John because unlike ‘many other much more competent historians . . . their critical and historical work . . . was not permitted to be detached in its technical historical learning and erudition’ from the theological truth which they, like the Evangelist, saw in this history. But he did not imitate Barth’s ‘spirit’ exegesis and his appeal to Jn 6.63 (‘the spirit is what gives life, the flesh is of no avail’) to epitomize Johannine Christology provides a parallel to our use of Paul’s letter–spirit antithesis to distinguish between this worldly, historical scholarship and the reference to a transcendent reality which believers find and theologians presuppose in the biblical witness. What everyone can see in Jesus and in New Testament theology is ‘flesh’ or ‘letter’, but this can be the bearer of (or can intend) the ‘spirit’ that gives life (cf. 1 Cor. 15.45). New Testament theologians may (like Hoskyns and Dodd, Barrett and C. F.  D. Moule) make their own convictions clear, but that the New Testament is about God is only how they (with the authors, and the rest of the Christian church) see it, truly, as they believe. Others see it differently – as no more than ancient religious history and literature. Most New Testament theology restricts itself to interpretations and descriptions that can be shared by secular historians, however convinced the theologians are that their descriptions of the biblical authors’ beliefs point to or even express their own modern Christianity and therefore refer to the one true God. Hoskyns’ ‘letter’ work is wide open to his own belief in God. His scholarship even

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presses him in this direction. At the end of The Riddle of the New Testament he (or his collaborator and editor Noel Davey) remarks that ‘the Fourth Gospel persuades and entices the reader to venture a judgment upon the history. . . . And precisely the same compelling provocation is found throughout that material in which it has seemed possible to see the Jesus of history himself. The historian, then, must state that the New Testament demands what he, as a historian, may not give, a judgment of the highest possible urgency for all men and women’.72 This judgement (unlike Bultmann’s) was not bound up with a philosophy of history (Dilthey’s) or an analysis of human existence. Like most English New Testament theology from J. B. Lightfoot to C. F. D. Moule and J. A. T. Robinson, it pre-supposed a basic confidence in the historical trustworthiness of the New Testament, which extended even to much of the Fourth Gospel. Whether this stands up in a more sceptical research climate may be doubted, but their emphasis on real history (not merely Geschichtlichkeit) and a real future for the world (not merely the individual’s openness to the future) leaves more room for social ethics and a positive reception of the Old Testament than Bultmann’s existential(ist) theology. However, both Hoskyns and Bultmann would agree that their biblical scholarship would not be New Testament theology without their ‘letter’ being somehow coordinated with their ‘spirit’ interest or pre-understanding of the Sache of scripture. Some New Testament theology is less careful to distinguish between ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ than Bultmann and Hoskyns were. Thus, their two types of the discipline (‘letter intending spirit’ and ‘letter bearing spirit’) need to be supplemented by a third, more problematic type: ‘letter confused with spirit’, or ‘spirit misunderstanding itself as letter’. This negative description of the type challenges its rejection of a ‘letter’ which conforms to the conventions of modern secular scholarship and so does not speak normatively of God, or pre-suppose any religious belief system. As a total view of ‘reality’, this is contested by most believers, and theologians who pre-suppose it in their historical and exegetical work do so with a mental reservation that this ‘letter’ work cannot disclose the whole truth to which these texts bear witness. But some biblical theologians press their own religious vision of reality (‘spirit’) into their scholarly work (‘letter’) and dissolve (as Baur and Bultmann did not) the distinction between our ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’. The classic instance of this is Schlatter, with his polemic against ‘atheistic methods in theology’.73 In its own terms, the argument is consistent, but it is adopted at the cost of breaking off the conversation about the New Testament between theologians and secular historical scholarship, which has its own canons of truth and meaning. That seems to allow insufficient validity to well-tried procedures. Normal New Testament theology, by contrast, maintains a conversation with the wider culture and seeks to persuade others that reading the evidence from a Christian perspective or standpoint offers the best interpretation of these shared texts. Schlatter was as clear and robust in his demand that our ‘letter’ category be expanded to include a Christian understanding of the world, as Barth was in advocating what we are calling ‘spirit’ exegesis. Others are less clear and think they can draw the prestige of modern critical scholarship into support for their own work, even when that bursts the banks of ‘letter’ as defined here. It is our aim to clarify rather than assess the relative merits of these different possibilities, but if we are rightly guided by Luther to

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distinguish between letter and spirit while dialectically coordinating them, a shadow is cast over any biblical interpretation which confuses them. The distinction offers a criterion by which to evaluate recent work in the field. My new hermeneutical application of Paul’s antithesis of letter and spirit to modern biblical interpretation has argued that in addition to being justified by reference to Paul’s theology and the echo of many centuries of hermeneutical reflection, it helps clarify the contemporary scene by identifying the different ways in which some Christians have related their biblical scholarship to their religious allegiance and others have declined to do so. This relationship is evidently important for Christian theology today and is part of the church’s engagement with its scripture. Clarifying it has been neglected because for two centuries after Gabler it could be simply taken for granted. If this is no longer the case in biblical scholarship, theologians need to be more explicit about their strategies in this area. The importance of distinguishing between Christian and non-Christian interpretations of the Bible was recognized by Karl Rahner who in 1954 wrote of a ‘general theological a priori for our investigation into the teaching of scripture’ in contrast to ‘simply the historical study of Biblical religion’.74 Schleiermacher made the same point in his Brief Outline on the Study of Theology: ‘Any extended occupation with the New Testament canon which is not motivated by a genuine interest in Christianity can only be directed against the canon’.75 Applying Paul’s letter–spirit antithesis to types of biblical interpretation has confirmed the suggestion that both poles are essential in Christian study of scripture, but has indicated that they can be related in different ways. Barth once famously referred to Kierkegaard’s ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between time and eternity, insisting that the theme of the Bible (and the sum total of philosophy) is the relation between this God (in heaven) and this humanity (on earth) and vice versa. That vital ‘distinction’, echoed (so far as is possible on our earthly terrain of texts and authors’ and readers’ intentions) is what is at stake in our use of Paul’s terms letter and spirit, and accounts for the theologian’s responsibility to distinguish between them.

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From the Letter to the Spirit to the Letter: The Faith as Written Creed Wolfram Kinzig

1  From the letter to the spirit to the letter Si christiani sumus, credamus; si non credimus, fratres, nemo se fingat christianum. Fides nos perducit. If we are Christians, let us believe: if we believe not, brothers, let none pretend to be a Christian. Faith brings us to the end. (Augustine)1

For Augustine, faith is the basis of being a Christian. Faith, however, has content and is laid down in the creed. When he was asked by a certain Laurentius what the actual foundation of the Catholic faith (proprium fidei catholicae fundamentum) consisted in, he duly answered that this was nothing else but Christ himself.2 But then he set out to lay down this faith by following the words of the creed (symbolum). For Augustine, faith is enshrined in texts: in the text of the Holy Scriptures and of the creed. Faith is not identical with these texts – Augustine does distinguish between the faith by which we believe (fides qua creditur) and the faith that we believe (fides quae creditur)3 – but without letter there is no faith.4 This scarcely seems to be what the Apostle Paul meant when he talked about the new freedom of Christians in Romans 7. As Christians, he says in 7.6, ‘we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the newness of the Spirit and no longer under the oldness of the letter’ (NRSV, altered). Whereas hitherto the law as a divine normative text had to be ‘served’, faith in Christ somehow liberates us from this text. This does not mean that we no longer ‘serve’, but the quality of this new service is such that the law is no longer required. So it seems that Paul gets rid of the law as a text, which is necessary for salvation. Yet the Christians soon produced new texts, which they claimed to be normative and requisite to attaining salvation. By the end of the second century, some of these texts were collected in the canon of the New Testament. But there were others that were understood to be summaries of the Christian faith, which ultimately developed into

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symbola or ‘creeds’. There seem to be at least two problems here, which I would like to address in this chapter:

1. If Christians serve in the ‘newness of the spirit’ and are thus rid of the law, why

do they need again normative texts describing and prescribing basic tenets of the Christian faith? How do these new normative texts relate to the ‘life of the spirit’? Are they explanatory and/or supplementary, or do they replace the ‘life of the spirit’? 2. Normative texts do not have to be fixed. However, creeds are, by definition, texts whose wording is fixed. Why was it impossible for Christians to agree on a basic canon of norms and rules without having it, as it were, enshrined in a single document? The group of texts called creeds is not easily defined. They form part of a larger body of texts by means of which a speaker confesses his or her faith. These texts do not yet have to be fixed formulae. But they affirm God or Christ or both to have a decisive, comprehensive and lasting influence on the life of the believer. Acceptance of this affirmation defines who is a Christian and who is not. For lack of a better word, I call them by the New Testament word ‘homologies’.5 Within the large body of texts that could be called homologies, creeds form a smaller subgroup.6 For the present purpose, I define creed as: a formal pledge of allegiance to a set of doctrinal statements concerning God and his relationship to his creation in general and to mankind in particular. Typically, a creed contains the words “I/we believe” or (in interrogatory form) “Do you believe?” to which the expected answer is: “I/we believe”. Whereas a creed’s Sitz im Leben may vary (catechesis, liturgy, doctrinal debate), its wording usually does not. This is mainly because either their use in the liturgy warranted a fixed formula or because they were composed and/or authorized by synods. The vast majority of creeds consists of three articles referring to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.7

Whereas homologies may express the personal belief of the individual believer in a given situation, creeds, by virtue of their being fixed formulae, are, in fact, normative texts that are enacted by a community of believers and are intended to safeguard the existence and stability of that community independent of time and historical circumstances. Modern research has made it abundantly clear that for over three centuries the early church (as most other ancient Mediterranean religions) managed without creeds requiring compliance from every Christian.8 To be sure, there were many texts that claimed to set out the truth and, by consequence, considered themselves normative. But none of these texts appears to have won general recognition. The history of the early Christian creeds is usually described as a process in four stages.

1. Initially, there was considerable confusion as to how to explain the person and work of Jesus and the events at Easter.

2. Gradually, certain theological propositions (‘homologies’) were formed that were perceived as defining one’s personal faith and were, therefore, more axiomatic

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and fundamental than others, but their role in the life of the individual believer and of the communities is difficult to determine. Also, there appears to have been considerable variation. 3. a. From the second half of the second century onwards there is firm evidence that certain confessional texts were called ‘rules of faith’. They resemble creeds quite closely, except that their overall structure is not fixed and their wording is fluent. Various versions of the rule of faith may be found in one and the same author. b. From the end of the second century onwards there is also evidence for the existence of baptismal interrogations. In North Africa, immediately before baptism, baptizands had to answer certain questions about their faith, mentioning not only the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, but also the church. In Rome, too, it became customary to interrogate the baptizands about their faith prior to baptism. The Roman interrogatory creed probably had a Trinitarian structure. At the same time, the use of interrogatory creeds is also attested in Palestine, Cappadocia and Alexandria. These questions appear, however, to have been fairly short and to have varied from region to region. 4. Finally, fixed formulae summing up basic tenets of the Christian faith in declaratory form are first found in the context of the Arian controversy. The most important creed, which was at the centre of the Trinitarian debate of the fourth century, is the creed passed by the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 (usually abbreviated N). The creed that ultimately won the widest recognition is the Creed of Constantinople of 381 (C or NC). In the West, the Apostles’ Creed (T  textus receptus) which was used in catechism and mission had a similar influence. Although the origin of the Apostles’ Creed is still a matter of considerable debate,9 today there appears to be a wide consensus that the four-stage model is basically correct. If this is the case, in order to answer our initial questions, I would like to study a little more closely the transitions from one stage to another. Why was it necessary to formulate theological propositions in the first place? Why did they gradually crystallize into ‘rules of faith’? Finally, why did these flexible rules turn into fixed formulae called symbola or creeds?

2  The origins of Christian confession At a very early stage, confessing Christ was one of the central identity markers of earliest Christianity. In Mt. 10.32f., Jesus is quoted as saying: So every one who confesses me before men, I also will confess before my Father who is in heaven; but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.

Confession to Christ has a salvific function. Conversely, denying Christ means excluding oneself from salvation and, by consequence, from the Christian community, which is why apostasy was always considered a mortal sin. Confession may be

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expressed by wearing a cross or some kind of badge. However, badges without text are equivocal or downright incomprehensible. A cross only takes on meaning when accompanied by some kind of text. A confession, therefore, pre-supposes or consists in some kind of text explaining what one is confessing. However, what does it mean when one confesses a person? And why and where would Christians do that? Scholars have pondered this problem for some time. Strategies to finding an answer have varied enormously. In New Testament research there is a tendency to declare a ‘confession’ everything that looks like a doctrinal statement of some sort. As a consequence, distinctions become blurred and, in the end, different people talk about different things.10 Patristic scholars, on the other hand, have tended to look for fixed formulae that could be understood as ‘germs’ of later creeds in a kind of ‘organic’ approach. This approach implied a ‘growth’ or ‘accretion’ of creeds from smaller to larger confessional units that ignored the plurality of early Christianity where the core of Christian confession was still very much a matter of debate. In his seminal article on ‘The confession of faith in primitive Christianity’, Hans von Campenhausen attempted to overcome the shortcomings of this organic model by pointing out that initially there were no formulae at all. He suggested that the requirement of confessing Christ ultimately went back to Christ himself and his saying as recorded in Mt. 10.32.11 Initially, the content of this confession was not defined; yet soon the name of Jesus was associated with certain Christological titles, the most important being (a) ‘Jesus is the Christ’ and (b) ‘Jesus is the Son of God’. Whereas the title of ‘Christ’ sees Jesus in continuity with Jewish eschatological expectation, the title of ‘Son of God’ takes on its proper significance against a Hellenistic-pagan background.12 The classical example for (a) is Peter’s confession in Mk 8.29. In its parallel in Mt. 16.16, this confession is extended by the addition of (b). Von Campenhausen rigorously denied that there was a generic link between these early confessional phrases and acclamations that used the title of ‘Lord’ (kyrios) and which in his view had their Sitz im Leben in communal worship.13 However, von Campenhausen also denied that their Sitz im Leben was baptism as scholars had hitherto assumed.14 He went so far as to claim that these phrases had no Sitz im Leben at all. Instead, they were, ‘as it were, everywhere at home’. They formed part of a ‘religious jargon’ that was used in ‘sermons, instructions, prayers, controversies and edifying conversations’.15 Whereas initially they had been ‘signs of a courageous decision’, they gradually turned into the ‘firm spiritual possession of the traditional belief of the community’.16 The technical use of the term ‘confession’ in the Letter to the Hebrews is a sign of this gradual solidification.17 Initially, the Christian communities had been able to settle the controversies internally. At the turn of the second century, however, the teaching of the Docetists threatened to tear the communities asunder. This is why the author of 1 John emphasized the humanity of Christ (4.1-3).18 Thus a ‘third, quite polemical confession’ was added to the previous two which emphasized ‘the reality and the essence’ of the person of Jesus. ‘From now on the further dogmatic development was geared almost exclusively to such “inner-Christian” oppositions’.19 At the same time, the right-minded rallied around the confession. As a consequence, it turned into a touchstone of orthodoxy. Those whose views diverged from it were condemned. This new use is found in I and II John, Polycarp of Smyrna and Ignatius of Antioch.20 Ignatius was the first to insert

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historical statements into the confession, which served to secure the new polemical intention. At the same time, he was the last theologian whose confession included Jesus Christ only. In their struggle against Gnosticism, later theologians composed the dyadic or tryadic ‘rule of faith’, which ultimately developed into the Apostles’ Creed and the synodal creeds of the fourth century.21 Despite some criticism,22 von Campenhausen’s article, which was supplemented by two further studies on the subject,23 has influenced the view on the origin of early Christian confession to a considerable degree, in particular in patristic research.24 However, in hindsight, its almost evolutionary view of the development of the creed in the New Testament period is too neat to be quite true, although it does contain important insights into the nature of Christian confession. For example, it seems difficult to imagine that the confession to Christ which turned someone into a Christian did not have a distinctive shape from the very beginning. (The only alternative would probably be wordless rejoicing.) In addition, von Campenhausen’s reluctance to accord the confession a distinct Sitz im Leben does not take sufficiently into account the difference between text and meaning. One and the same text (a ‘confession’) can take on different meanings depending on its use in different situations, i.e. Sitze im Leben. If it is true that early Christian homologies were used in various circumstances (and I think it is), it is then necessary to ask what they could have meant in each of these circumstances. Finally, there are texts such as John 1, Philippians 2 and Col. 1.15-20 that played a vital role in the formulation of creeds, but were not considered in any detail by von Campenhausen. It appears to me, however, that von Campenhausen slightly downplayed the significance of the confession of Christ as an act. Although it may be true that the ‘primordial word (Urwort) of Jesus had left the question totally unanswered as to how such a confession could be given in a concrete situation’,25 this answer was fairly obvious to his early followers. The confession Christianus sum, ‘I am a Christian’ distinguished those Jews who were followers of Jesus from those who were not; furthermore, it distinguished those pagans who were followers of Jesus from those who were not. Finally, it distinguished Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus from Jews and Gentiles who were not. This distinction became especially acute in terms of (a) cult, (b) mission, (c) conversion and (d) law. Finally, there were also (e) theological reasons why certain propositions had to be adhered to.26

(a)  Cult Since Jesus’ claim to the salvation of mankind was a religious claim, it affected worship. Affirmation to this claim had to be expressed in worship and this was no longer possible within the traditional framework, whatever this looked like. Although we know next to nothing about the origins of Christian worship, by the middle of the second century it was well developed. The worshippers felt that they belonged to Christ (whereas others, some of them close relatives, did not) and this feeling must have been expressed in these religious gatherings.27 Thus, there probably were various forms of hymnic homologies and/or prayers. Presumably, stories were told about Jesus and his followers. Letters of missionaries such as Paul were read out which also

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helped to inculcate some basic theological insights, such as the meaning of the passion and resurrection of Jesus and the nature of the Church. Concomitantly, there appear to have been attempts to exclude the Christians from traditional Jewish worship, although, again, details are unknown. The condemnation of the ‘heretics’ in the Eighteen Benedictions (birkat ha-minim), although probably not specifically directed against Jewish Christians, will also have affected them.28 At the same time, withdrawal of gentile Christians from the public cults did not go unnoticed. The revolt of the silversmiths at Ephesus (Acts 19.21-40) is one example where withdrawal from public worship even had economic repercussions. The old anti-Jewish slander of misanthropy (odium generis humani)29 was now turned against the Christians, because they did not ‘fit in’. However, in the framework of ancient Mediterranean society ‘fitting in’ always implied participation in some kind of cultic activity.

(b)  Mission Unlike the Jews, however, who also favoured monotheism, but very much kept to themselves, the Christians were a missionary religion whose adherents went out into the streets to convert people to their god. In doing so, they had to explain what Christianity stood for as opposed to traditional pagan cults and also to traditional Judaism. In the New Testament, the locus classicus for Christian mission is, of course, Paul’s speech at the Areopagus (Acts 17.16-34). For our purposes, it does not matter whether it is actually historical or not (I do not think it is). But the scene at Athens must have had some kind of plausibility to readers of the Acts of the Apostles. Paul, we are told, ‘argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons and also in the market place every day with those who happened to be there’ (17.17; NRSV). When he finally addressed the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, he spoke about God as creator and as judge and about the resurrection of the dead, themes that were to belong to the standard repertoire of early Christian creeds (except that here it is Christ who is the judge).

(c)  Conversion People who had become interested in the new religion received further instruction. Unfortunately, we know nothing about early Christian catechesis.30 But certainly, converts were told about Jesus, about his birth, his life, his death and resurrection in catechesis just as in worship (sometimes the two Sitze im Leben may have been identical).31 At some point, they will have been asked whether or not they actually wanted to belong to the Christian community. From the very beginning, this act of initiation was baptism. It would, therefore, be absolutely natural that baptizands were asked whether they agreed to some of the confessional statements they had heard about in catechesis. Although we have no evidence from the first century, it is quite plausible that credal interrogations prior to baptism or during the rite of baptism itself were introduced early on. The baptism of the wealthy Ethiopian in Acts 8.26-40 is certainly a fictitious account. The secondary addition of a baptismal question asking

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by implication whether the baptizand believed that Christ was the Son of God (8.37: ‘And Philip said, “If you believe with all your heart, you may.” And he replied, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”’ NRSV), however, reflects a reality that could be found early on. There is further evidence to suggest that in Rome in the second century these baptismal interrogations were triadic in a form similar to those found in the Old Gelasian Sacramentary.32 Although von Campenhausen mentions the institution of interrogating baptizands about their faith, he nevertheless dissociates the confession from baptism altogether. This seems unwarranted. Instead, it is much more plausible to assume that one of the Sitze im Leben of early Christian homology was precisely the preparation for baptism.

(d)  Law Belonging to the Christian community was no walk in the park. Christians tended to be marginalized. Depending on the circumstances, believers were even threatened with persecution and martyrdom. It is precisely in these difficult situations that Jesus’ call in Mt. 10.32f. became particularly relevant. There was no need to prescribe in detail what confessing Christ meant. Under interrogation the simple confession Christianus sum could and did result in execution. Even if we acknowledge that not all texts are as old as they claim to be, the sheer number of references in which the simple confession of being a Christian in front of the Roman magistrate decided one’s fate is surprising.33 ‘Confessing Christ’ in practice meant confessing him in court in which case one was forced to give an account of one’s beliefs. There is now a wide consensus in modern research into the legal basis of trials against the Christians that the name of ‘Christian’ (nomen Christianum) alone was sufficient grounds for the death penalty.34 Christian confession in its beginning is, therefore, intimately bound up with the status confessionis.35 How quickly normal life could turn into such a status is demonstrated by the fierce persecution following the burning of Rome in 64 CE.36 The simple confession of Christ later became a hallmark of the Christian martyr and was mentioned in a number of panegyrical homilies on the feasts of martyrs.37

(e)  Theology Finally, the development of homologies was necessary for theological reasons. I agree with von Campenhausen that the title of Kyrios indeed played little role in subsequent doctrinal development. It was too unspecific and could and did create various misunderstandings with the Roman authorities.38 Instead, theological debate appears to have been dominated by the titles of ‘Christ’ and ‘Son of God’. They put Jesus in a certain perspective: he is the Messiah as predicted by Jewish apocalyptic thought,39 yet he was no mere man, but rather stands in a special relationship with God. Given the development of messianic expectation by the time of the primitive church, this means that Jesus’ actions are basically about redemption. However, Jesus can act as a redeemer only if he is connected to God in a manner in which no other men have a share (Jn. 14.6; cf. Mt. 11.27 par. Lk. 10.22), if, in fact, he was God. But then, there was just one God, wasn’t there? That was what the Bible (i.e. the later so-called ‘Old Testament’)

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was all about and what the early Christians kept repeating. He was the creator and he suffered no other gods next to him (cf. Rom. 11.36; 1 Cor. 8.5f.). All subsequent Trinitarian and Christological debate was, to a large extent, an attempt to understand and describe this special relationship:40 exactly how did God redeem the world through Christ? And if Christ was divine, must he not have had an existence prior to incarnation? If he was divine, had he not participated in creation (cf.  Col. 1.12(15)-20)? The relation between God and Christ (Christ being God’s ‘son’ or ‘image’) is pondered in many passages in the New Testament, some of them later quoted in the Trinitarian debate of the fourth century and even alluded to in the creeds. It may help to imagine creeds as made up of homological ‘building blocks’ that were created during the first three centuries. Confession to Christ within these five Sitze im Leben produced a whole range of such ‘building blocks’ that were, at a later stage, assembled to form fully fledged creeds.41 One might ask, perhaps, why they did not include the norms of Christian ethics, although the writings of the first and second centuries are full of those norms. In my view, Christian belief is not primarily defined by ethics (which, in fact, in religious terms is quite equivocal), but by faith in one particular person, i.e. Jesus Christ. This does not mean that one’s behaviour did not matter. Rather, putting one’s trust in a human person who preached the love of one’s neighbour implied a certain lifestyle along a set of ethical norms guided by this love. But these norms were dependent on and, therefore, subordinate to the homological propositions outlined above.

3  The ‘rule of faith’ in anti-heretical polemics In the second half of the second century, Christian theologians began to assemble these homological building blocks into certain shapes. They were, as it were, not yet firmly cemented, but rather loosely put together. Homologies continued to be used in the five Sitze im Leben as defined above. But there was one context in which they took on a new importance: apologetics. However, this was not anti-pagan apologetics, but rather the defence against inner-Christian dissent (‘heresy’). By 150 CE, Christianity had become a rather mixed bag of various and even contradictory beliefs and opinions. One of the reasons for this divergence was that Christians had come to realize that what was meant by the affirmation ‘Christos Kyrios’ was not clear at all. If the risen Lord was close to God, if, as doubting Thomas claimed in Jn. 20.28, he was God, then how did he come to be man? Could God become human and if he could, could he also suffer? In terms of pagan philosophy, be it Platonist, Aristotelian or Stoic, it was plainly silly to think that the eternal, unchangeable and good God could somehow become involved in the contingencies of human history. There were, therefore, various groups, often lumped together under the somewhat misleading title of Docetists, who attempted to combine a philosophical concern for the integrity of God with a soteriological argument by distinguishing between the divine Christ and the earthly Jesus who, during the incarnation, had temporarily become associated in a mysterious manner.

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Apart from these Docetists, yet partly identical with them, there were Gnostics who denied that the world had been created by God. Instead, they explained the misery of the world by claiming that a malicious creator god had made the world an evil place from the start. The heterodox lay theologian Marcion argued similarly by saying that the creator god was the god of the Old Testament. He was just, but merciless and had later been superseded by the God of love in Jesus Christ and the New Testament. Against these groups, Irenaeus, Tertullian and others assembled some of those little homological pieces or ‘building blocks’ mentioned above and formed the famous ‘rules of faith’ or ‘rules of truth’.42 These ‘rules’ were not fixed formulae but were assembled ad hoc depending on the purpose of one’s writing and/or the opponent one was arguing against. If one argued against Gnostics, the unity of the God of the Old and the New Testament was emphasized. In the battle against Docetists, the reality of Christ’s incarnation and passion was stressed. Both these propositions were combined so that dyadic or even triadic structures emerged. They began with God, the creator of heaven and earth and went on to describe Christ as Logos and as ‘Son of God’, his participation in the creation, his manifestation through the prophets, his incarnation, passion and resurrection and his eschatological return. A third ‘article’ was sometimes added, mentioning the Holy Spirit, through whom the prophets prophesied and who guided the righteous and who was now renewing man towards God.43 It is important to remember that these texts, although they claimed to lay down the doctrine of the Church, very much reflect the ideas of the individual compilers. Thus, Irenaeus incorporated his doctrine of the ‘recapitulation of all things in Christ’ (anakephalaiosis). Tertullian also used the regula fidei in order to set out that, whereas the faith of the Church was unchangeable, its discipline was constantly being improved through the grace of God.44 He was thus able to justify his demand for the veiling of women.45

4  The emergence of the fixed creed All this does not yet mean that faith becomes a formula. For quite some time the rule of faith was not fixed. However, this changed when Christianity became a permitted religion (religio licita) in the fourth century. The Trinitarian debate of the first decades of the fourth century demonstrated that the pool of norms (the ‘box of building blocks’) that had developed in the pre-Constantinian Church was open to divergent interpretations. Once the bishops, summoned by the Emperor to Nicaea in 325 CE, had gathered to settle this controversy, it was inevitable that a document recording the agreement had to be drawn up. Although the Trinitarian debate of the fourth century is one of the most thoroughly explored areas of the Early Church, students of this debate have rarely asked why this agreement was drawn up in the form of a creed instead of a horos (canon or rule).46 At the Second Ecumenical Council in 381, this was different. Here we have not only a creed, but also a set of canons dealing with doctrinal and other issues. Probably in Nicaea, Constantine wanted to impress

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quite clearly on the minds of the bishops that what they were doing here was not just a law for their flock but it had to be pledged to by the bishops themselves. This is why they also individually had to sign the Nicene Creed, which, as is well known, caused Eusebius of Caesarea some distress.47 Paradoxically, the Nicene Creed was an attempt to enshrine the Christian freedom from the law in a formula defining that freedom. It was a contradiction in itself. Strangely enough, it largely worked. Although there were fierce debates subsequent to Nicaea, towards the end of the fourth century the Church was agreed that God had to be described along Trinitarian lines and that unity and diversity within the Godhead had to be defined by use of the terms ousia/substantia and hypostasis/persona, respectively. The ‘Nicene faith’ was seen as the standard by which this doctrine was defined. Yet affirming the normativity of the ‘Nicene faith’ still did not mean that one stuck to one particular formula. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to settle the Trinitarian debate in Constantinople in  381. So Christian theologians agreed that what the Creed of Constantinople (C) expressed was none other than the ‘Faith of Nicaea’. By the end of the fourth century, the ‘Nicene Creed’ thus defined had become the standard creed in the eastern part of the empire. By using the creed as a universally acknowledged point of reference, the ‘rule of faith’ had turned into a fixed dogmatic norm. A number of factors contributed towards this process:

1. The bishops felt a need to come to an agreement over a question that was seen as

vital for the identity of Christianity. Both the integrity of God and the effectiveness of salvation had to be safeguarded. This could only be achieved by developing a sophisticated terminology that allowed for little flexibility. 2. All through the fourth century, the emperors had a vital interest in settling the controversy, because they felt that a Church at strife jeopardized the welfare of the empire.48 Therefore, they exerted considerable pressure on the bishops, with various success. In this respect, the importance of the edict Cunctos populos, released by Theodosius I in February 380 immediately prior to the Council of Constantinople, can hardly be overestimated. In the textbooks it is usually quoted as the document introducing Christianity as state religion. But it appears to me more important as an attempt at unifying the Church by proclaiming the Trinitarian faith of the patriarchs of Rome and Alexandria ‘according to the apostolic teaching and the evangelical doctrine’ as content of what people were supposed to ‘believe’ (credamus). In its second part it did not oppose the pagan cults, but rather those heretics who called themselves Christians but did not accept this particular version of the Trinitarian dogma.49 3. In the fourth century, the council of bishops, summoned by the emperor, developed as an instrument of discussing and deciding issues that related to the Church as a whole. The more Fathers attended a council, the more authority was generally accorded its decisions. In this respect, the Synod of Constantinople in 381 was a splendid affair and was soon to be remembered as the ‘Council of the 150 Fathers’. Still, the Western churches had not been sufficiently represented

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The Spirit and the Letter in Constantinople. In Italy, there was also continuous resistance against the NeoNicene doctrine. This is why Ambrose of Milan helped to establish the authority of C in the West by holding the council of Aquileia in 381.50 Consequently, theological concerns and imperial pressure exerted through the councils brought about a confession that applied to the whole of the empire.

Because much of the argument had been about individual words (most of all about the homoousios) and because of its legal implications, the preservation of and attention to the exact wording of the creed became paramount. There continued to be slight differences in wording in the third article between the Latin and the Greek versions of the creed, which subsequently led to the famous filioque controversy.51 Meanwhile, however, in the West another creed had risen to considerable popularity. Although in its various manifestations it contained a core of doctrines that were identical, its wording was not yet fixed. This creed (usually called R  Roman) probably originated in Rome at a synod in 341 which dealt with the case of Marcellus of Ancyra. Perhaps Marcellus even formulated it himself, drawing back on baptismal interrogations used in Rome. From Rome, this creed quickly spread throughout the Western Empire, thereby developing considerable local variations.52 The main reasons for this continuous flexibility of R lie in the fact that (a) although R may have been in some way a synodal creed, the authority of the synod of 341 was rather limited; (b) there was no legal mechanism other than imperial decree by which the Western churches could have been forced to comply with Rome; (c) the emperors were not interested in R, since doctrinal unity had already been achieved on the basis of C; and (d) in most Western dioceses, too, there was a feeling that the controversial theological issues had been settled with the introduction of C.53 Yet C’s theological sophistication also prevented it from supplanting all other creeds. In particular, it was not very well suited for the purposes of mission, conversion and catechesis. Also, its liturgical use was limited. This is why in the West C and T (as it later developed from R) continued to exist side by side, whereas in the East C carried the day. Apart from its function as a proof of orthodoxy, the creed was also cited in liturgy, especially in the preparation for baptism and in the service of the Eucharist.54 In the West, since the middle of the fourth century, the Apostles’ Creed (T) formed part of the traditio and redditio symboli, i.e. the ‘handing over’ and ‘repetition’ of the creed. In the preparation for baptism, the bishop made the creed officially known to the catechumens and exhorted them about its contents. Later, the catechumens, in turn, had formally to repeat the confession. In the East, baptismal interrogations and declaratory creeds also played a role in baptismal liturgy, but the picture is blurred. C was probably inserted into the liturgy of the Eucharist sometime in the sixth century. In both the Liturgy of St Basil and the Liturgy of St Chrysostom it stood at the beginning of the Eucharistic service following the order to close the doors. It, therefore, introduced the Eucharistic part of the service from which catechumens were excluded. Its recitation was to make sure that only worshippers who were duly initiated took part in the Eucharist in order to avoid a desecration of the most sacred part of worship. Here, the creed had retained its old

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function as symbolum, i.e. as a sign of recognition, watchword or password. This means that its content was interesting only to the extent that it proved the knowledge of the worshippers regarding the inner mysteries of Christianity.

5  Epilogue: Back to the spirit? Reviewing the foregoing story, one could argue that in the Eastern liturgies the creed had hit rock bottom. What was meant to help a Christian to summarize and better understand his or her faith and what later had contributed to settling complex theological problems had degenerated to a formalized proof of membership. However, we must remember that almost from the beginning, one of the creed’s main functions was to demonstrate one’s knowledge of certain Christian truths and to ward off heresy. Is the creed, therefore, the end of ‘life in the Spirit’ by its intrinsic tendency towards formalization and legalization? By looking at the liturgical function of the creed in the Eucharistic service or, alternatively, at one of the numerous controversies over the creeds, such as the filioque controversy or the various debates about the Apostles’ Creed in the German Protestant churches of the nineteenth century, one might be inclined to think so. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that in the West today many Christians call for the abolishment or replacement of the traditional creeds. Here, I do not want to make a case for the preservation of these texts. Rather, by way of conclusion, I would like to point out that although the wording of the creeds was fixed, their use was not, which meant that, depending on the ever-changing historical circumstances, the creed perpetually took on new meanings. In this respect, one could even speak of a movement in opposite directions. Whereas the creed’s text became increasingly fixed, until by the late fourth (C) and eighth centuries (T) it had become virtually unalterable, its liturgical meaning and function became increasingly blurred. Initially, the confession to Christ was meant to demonstrate the faith of the individual and to ward off heresy. It had an affirmative and apologetic purpose. At that time, the creed was not yet fixed in any meaningful sense. There were baptismal interrogations, but they varied from region to region. On one level, the Trinitarian debate of the fourth century can be seen as a successful attempt to hammer out a core creed, which bore no more change. Reciting the creed in the preparation for baptism and at the beginning of the Eucharistic service now meant demonstrating not only one’s faith but also one’s orthodoxy in a very specific sense. By the end of the first millennium, there was no more need to do one or the other, since most inhabitants of Western Europe were orthodox members of the corpus Christianum. Where orthodoxy is a matter of course, there is no more need for texts proving that orthodoxy. But the creed did not cease to exist. It took on new meanings. The one text produced a multiplicity of uses.55 Most often, the creed was now seen as an answer of the congregation to the biblical readings. Sometimes it replaced the sermon. Often it was chanted. To this end, a choir could take over from the congregation. When polyphonic music developed, the creed even became the showpiece of the liturgy in abbeys, collegiate churches and cathedrals that could afford the expense.

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Also, the hegemony of the one text could not be maintained. The congregation no longer understood the Latin or even the Greek words. Translations into the vernacular created new variations in text. In a way, the translators subverted the creed.56 The claim to the normativity of one single text was maintained, but there was, at the same time, a multiplicity of ‘subtexts’ which existed alongside the main text. In the late Middle Ages, there were even attempts to shorten the creed in order to accord more space to the music. The aesthetic was superimposed on the faith. Was the gradual ‘literalization’ of faith perceived as a theological problem by the Fathers? Although a number of explanations of the creed have come down to us discussing the pneumatological article, the opposition of the letter and the spirit in Paul’s letters is hardly ever mentioned.57 Instead, the spirit congealed into the letter and faith coagulated into formulae. Paradoxically, however, this did not put an end to the plurality of faith. Rather, in the process of recitation and repetition the fixed formulae of faith released new meanings without the faith expressed in these formulae losing its identity. It seems that the continuity of faith is guaranteed not by the text of the creed alone, but by something ‘behind’ the text (the ‘spirit’) which also makes certain that faith does not get lost ‘in the creed’. Exploring this phenomenon would require further discussion, which goes beyond the scope of this chapter. What we can affirm here is that the return from the spirit to the letter, from freedom in Christ to unequivocal normativity was doomed to failure. The Gospel of Christ can be described in textual approximations, but it resists incarceration in texts, no matter how sophisticated.

5

Spirit and Letter in Origen and Augustine Morwenna Ludlow

Discussions of the reception of Paul’s opposed terms ‘spirit’ and ‘letter’ in 2 Corinthians 3 have tended to claim that Origen read the opposition in a hermeneutical sense, and specifically that he read it in a way which justified his alleged preference for ‘spiritual’ (or allegorical) interpretation over literal readings of scripture. Augustine is then presented as a counter to this tendency: he is claimed to have returned to a theological or a soteriological interpretation. The strong implication of many of these discussions is that Augustine thereby recovered a more faithful reading of the Pauline text. While there is some truth in these claims, they are, I suggest, exaggerated and when expressed very bluntly do not do justice to the subtleties of either Origen’s or Augustine’s writings. Nevertheless, the categories of ‘Origenistic’ and ‘Augustinian’ readings of 2 Corinthians certainly have considerable heuristic power when trying to examine the possible implications of Paul’s difficult text, and for this reason I have no desire to root them out of all current discussion. Rather, my intention is somewhat less radical. In this chapter, I hope to show from an examination of some of their hermeneutical writings that both Origen and Augustine (at times) treat the ‘spirit’ and ‘letter’ opposition in a hermeneutical sense. In particular, I will suggest that they both argue that ‘spirit’ and ‘letter’ need to be kept together in interpreting the Bible and, secondly, that their reasons for saying this are as much theological (and soteriological) as hermeneutical: they are to do with grace. In this way, I hope to disrupt the rather blunt opposition between ‘Origenistic’ and ‘Augustinian’ readings of Paul. In fact, the way in which the ‘hermeneutical’ reading proves to be impossible to isolate from the ‘theological’ reading (and vice versa) might be instructive for current debates. In my study of their hermeneutical readings, I will not look at the ‘spirit’ and ‘letter’ opposition in its more obviously theological use in, for example, Augustine’s treatise On the Letter and the Spirit. Nor will I look at Origen’s various reflections on human freedom and the law, which are also indebted to Paul’s writings to the churches at Corinth and Rome.

1  Origen and three kinds of meaning Origen sets out his theory of interpreting the Bible in the fourth book of On First Principles. Origen thinks that similar hermeneutical opportunities – and problems – are

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to be found in both parts of scripture. The whole of the Bible is inspired: ‘the sacred books are not the works of men, but . . . they were composed and have come down to us as a result of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit’.1 ‘Riddles and dark sayings’ are to be found in the prophets’ writings and also in the Gospels, Epistles and – especially – the Book of Revelation.2 Thus, Origen does not claim that the meaning of the books of the Old Testament is unclear, while that of the New Testament is clear; nor is he making a simplistic division between the ‘letter’ of the Old Testament and the ‘spirit’ of the New.3 Origen divides scripture into two broad literary genres, history or narrative (historia) and legislation or ethical prescription (nomothesia), which are found in both the Old and New Testaments.4 In opposition to thinkers like Marcion, Origen is arguing that both Testaments should be read not only together, but according to the same rules: i.e. the reading of the two together does not mean that the Old Testament should be read as if it were entirely an ahistorical allegory and that the New Testament should be read literally. Famously, Origen argues that ‘just as man consists of body, mind and spirit, so in the same way does the scripture’. Furthermore, each part has a distinctive purpose: . . . the simple man may be edified by what we may call the flesh of the scripture, this name being given to the obvious interpretation; while the man who has made some progress may be edified by its soul, as it were; and the man who is “perfect” and like those mentioned by the apostle . . . this man may be edified by the spiritual law, which has a “shadow of the good things to come”.5

Although the bodily meaning is useful and beneficial (a fact that is demonstrated by ‘the multitudes of sincere and simple believers’ who read or hear the Bible),6 Origen claims that in inspiring scripture the Holy Spirit has another main aim: that the man who is capable of being taught might by “searching out” and devoting himself to the “deep things” revealed in the spiritual meaning of the words become partaker of all the doctrines of the Spirit’s counsel.7

These ‘doctrines’ include knowledge of Christ’s nature and works, the origins of the world, including rational souls and the occurrence of the fall and evil – the knowledge is not restricted to immaterial things. It frequently seems that for Origen the ‘bodily’ meaning conveys what happened in the past (a historical event or law), the ‘soul’ meaning concerns the present application of the text to the believer’s life, while the third ‘spiritual’ meaning is concerned with the future – it is eschatological, forward looking or prophetic: The Scripture is constituted, as it were, of the visible body, the soul within which lends itself to conception and comprehension and the spirit which as it were involves the “types and shadows of things celestial”. So then, having called upon the one who has framed the body, soul and spirit in the Scripture, the body for those before us, the soul for us and the spirit for those who “shall inherit eternal life in the age to come” . . . we shall discover not the letter but the soul in the present instance.8

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For example, in his exegesis of the Passover feast, Origen assumes that the ‘bodily’ meaning of the text refers to the following of the instructions in the past.9 Although Origen seems to acknowledge that Jews continue to celebrate the feast of Passover, he tacitly assumes that the validity of the feast remains in the past: the law was true [alēthē], but its purpose lay in leading people to Christ. Here, Origen borrows Paul’s metaphor of the paidagōgos, the slave who accompanied children to school, not only protecting them and being a moral exemplar, but also exercising firm discipline on those who were unruly.10 The ‘soul’ meaning concerns the extension and application of the prescription to Christians’ present lives (the ‘second Passover’): they should read the Bible whole, just as the Passover lamb remained unbroken. Finally, Origen concludes: ‘it is not necessary that our discourse should now ascend to that third Passover which is to be celebrated with myriads of angels in the most perfect and most blessed exodus; we have already spoken of these things to a greater extent than the passage demands’.11 A common perception of Origen’s three levels of meaning is that they refer, respectively, to embodied realities, matters concerned with the soul (such as piety and ethics) and to spiritual (i.e. immaterial) realities. This is true to a certain extent: Origen’s own language sometimes seems to refer to a broad distinction between realities which can be perceived by the senses (to which the bodily meaning refers) and realities which cannot (to which the other two levels of meaning refer): ‘[Paul] calls the sensible interpretation of the divine scriptures “the letter” and the intelligible interpretation “the spirit”’.12 As we will see, however, this kind of ‘spirit/letter’ distinction refers more to different attitudes to scripture and less to two (or three) different levels of meaning. It would be a mistake to interpret this locus classicus to mean that Origen thinks that the soul and spiritual meanings can be ‘disembodied’ or abstracted from their historical and material context. Origen’s ‘soul’ meanings advise the believer on how to behave: the advice is directed at the soul, which Origen and his contemporaries believed had the function of ‘the exercise of liberty in a reasoned course of life’.13 But this liberty can only be exercised through the body as an instrument. Origen himself sometimes describes the soul sense as the ‘ecclesiastical sense’, which Mark Edwards glosses as ‘not so much the meaning with respect to the Church as the meaning in the Church’, ‘the reader . . . as a member of that body’.14 The spiritual meaning speaks of God’s plan for the believer, particularly his eschatological plan; but again, this eschatological consummation is envisaged by Origen as the transformation of embodiment, not its complete extinction. It can also refer to God’s embodied action: as Edwards remarks, the ‘spiritual sense’ in Origen’s commentaries and homilies ‘embraces everything that that was done or instituted through the earthly mission of the eternal Christ’.15 Sometimes Origen’s exegesis apparently draws only two levels of meaning from a text. This might reveal a weakness in his method; on the other hand, if the supposition that the soul level of meaning conveys the present application for the reader and the spirit level conveys a future eschatological meaning, one would expect Origen to focus on the elucidation of different meanings in different kinds of exegesis according to the occasion. Exposition of the soul meaning would suit homilies, for example; a focus on eschatology would be more appropriate to doctrinal works.16

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There is a clear sense in Origen’s writings that the spiritual meaning is the higher, or perhaps more accurately, the ‘deeper’ meaning – it is the meaning for the ‘perfect’ believer. For this reason, many critics have accused Origen of so subjecting the bodily to the spiritual meaning, that it virtually disappears. However, Origen insists that the bodily sense of scripture must be kept together with the soul and spiritual senses. For example, Origen implies that the spiritual meaning can only be accessed through the bodily meaning. The Spirit of God has arranged ‘stumbling blocks’ in the narrative of the text which alert readers that they should search for a deeper meaning: these stumbling blocks take the form of impossibilities or immoralities.17 Although this idea might seem to denigrate the bodily meaning, it is clear that if the bodily or plain sense of the text were not attended to carefully, its impossibilities or immoralities would not become evident and thus would not point to the deeper spiritual meaning. Furthermore, there are other elements of the Biblical text which, when read literally (kata tēn lexin or pros to rhēton), render a bodily meaning which is not only true but which guides the reader in his or her allegorical reading of the rest: When. . . the passage as a connected whole is literally [pros to rhēton] impossible, whereas the guiding [proēgoumenos] part of it is not impossible but true, the reader must endeavour to grasp the entire meaning, connecting by an intellectual process the account of what is literally [kata tēn lexin] impossible with the parts that not impossible but are historically true, these [the latter] being interpreted allegorically in common with the [former] parts which, so far as the letter goes [epi tēi lexei], did not happen at all. For our contention with regard to the whole of divine scripture is, that is all has a spiritual meaning, but not all bodily meaning, for the bodily meaning is often proved to be an impossibility.18

A second indication that body, soul and spirit meanings should be kept together is Origen’s assertion that the bodily meaning is usually true and edifying even for those who cannot reach to the deeper meaning: ‘That it is possible to derive benefit from the first and to this extent helpful meaning, is witnessed by the multitudes of sincere and simple believers’.19 Indeed, he claims more forcefully: ‘the passages which are historically true are far more numerous than those which are composed with purely spiritual meanings’.20 Thirdly, the quote above, which distinguishes simple, progressing and perfect believers, should be reassessed. This text is often interpreted to mean that Origen has in mind three categories of readers who read scripture in different ways.21 However, Origen’s writing elsewhere suggests that these are not three permanently discrete groups, but rather that the individual Christian moves from one category to another. (Origen is fond, for example, of applying in a hermeneutical direction Paul’s metaphor about weaning infants from milk and on to meat.22) Furthermore, Origen suggests that some books in the scriptures (most famously, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs) were arranged to assist this ascent.23 Thus, the three groups represent three stages of Christian development. In some places, Origen even suggests that the earlier stages are never fully left behind: ‘one must therefore portray the meaning of the sacred writings in a threefold way upon one’s own soul’.24 The ‘three men’ – the

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‘simple man’, the ‘man who has made some progress’ and ‘the man who is perfect’ – are therefore not three classes of Christian believer, but three ways in which scripture can operate upon each person’s soul.25

2  Origen and two ways of reading Origen’s dominant metaphor for the meanings in scripture – body, soul and spirit – reinforces the idea that they belong together, for in Origen’s theology body, soul and spirit do belong together, even eschatologically.26 Other metaphors that Origen uses for the levels of meaning in the scriptural text have the same emphasis. Thus, Origen writes of the bodily meaning containing the soul and spirit meanings, as water pots contain water or as earthen vessels contain treasure.27 The message is clear: were there no container, there would be no contents. Or the deeper meanings are like treasure hidden under the surface of a field, like a myriad of things obscured from view behind a narrow window, like a face behind a veil.28 The things that obscure the prize from view were deliberately put there by the Holy Spirit: without the veil or window, scripture would lose its plainer, but none the less vital, parts. Finally, the bodily meaning of scripture (not the physical text in the sense of the paper or the marks on the page) finds an analogue in the body of Jesus Christ: in the most powerful way, this analogue expresses the way in which the bodily both expresses and hides the divine/spiritual within.29 Origen does not usually describe the ‘bodily’ and the ‘spiritual’ meanings as ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’, respectively – perhaps precisely because the latter pair tends to imply a contrast or an opposition. To associate the bodily meaning too much with the letter would be to equate the bodily meaning with Paul’s ‘letter that kills’. For this reason, on the rare occasions when Origen does use the spirit/letter pairing to indicate different levels of meaning in a text, he insists on their fruitful coexistence (or even codependence). For example, he writes of the Genesis creation narrative: This account may well enshrine certain deeper truths than the historical narrative (historiae narratio) seems to reveal and may contain a spiritual meaning (spiritalem. . .intellectum) in many passages, using the letter (litterae utatur) as a kind of veil for profound and mystical doctrines; nevertheless the language of the narrator (sermo narrantis) certainly indicates this, that all visible things were created at a definite time.30

While Origen uses the body, soul and spirit image to indicate three levels of meaning in a text, he usually uses the spirit/letter contrast to indicate two ways of reading a text, one of which (that according to the letter) must be rejected in favour of the other (that according to the spirit). In these readings, it is not so much literal reading (as opposed to reading allegorically) which is the problem, as reading according to the ‘bare letter’ (to psilon gramma) – i.e. ‘the letter alone’, reading ‘only with regard for the letter’. Note, too, that there is a verbal distinction in Greek (which is obscured in English) between a ‘literal reading’, i.e. a reading ‘according to the letter’ (kata tēn lexin, or pros to

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rhēton; De Principiis IV.3.5) and a reading ‘according to the mere letter’ (kata to psilon gramma; De Principiis IV.2.2). Paul’s famous dictum that it is the ‘letter which kills’ (2 Cor. 3.6) uses the term gramma. When Origen’s text was translated into Latin by Rufinus, however, the terms lexis, rhēton and gramma were all rendered by the single Latin term ‘littera’. (The English word ‘literal’ translates the Latin ad litteram.) What, then, does Origen mean by reading according to the ‘bare letter’? Like many Christian writers, Origen accuses Jews of reading their scriptures in this way. He alleges that they expected the Messiah to be fulfilling the Messianic prophecies in a material fashion (releasing captives or building a city) and thus did not identify Jesus as the Messiah. However, Origen also thinks that some Christians are guilty of interpretation according to the ‘bare/mere letter’ (to psilon gramma).31 In the case of heretical Christians, it leads Gnostics to assume that, for example, the Old Testament refers to an anthropomorphic god, which they reject as the true God.32 Other Christians – within the church – are misled or distracted by the bodily meaning of a text and assume, for example, that the Song of Songs is only a marriage hymn.33 Origen implies that interpretations of the Bible that stop at the bare letter are ‘legalistic’, but the method is not identical with the Jewish interpretation of the Bible alone.34 As we have seen, he insists that there is legislation (nomothesia) in both parts of the scriptures, which is useful and should be obeyed, as well as legislation in both parts, which needs to be explored for its soul or spiritual meaning. This should warn against any easy association of ‘the law’ in Origen with the letter, or with readings that stop at the bare letter. It must be admitted that Origen’s hermeneutical language is confusing: in these texts ‘letter’ (gramma) appears not to be reducible to, but is closely associated with bodily meaning: it denotes a kind of reading which stops at the body.35 Origen’s use of the motif of a veil (also from 2 Cor. 3) might help to elucidate the meanings of gramma or lexis, respectively. Sometimes (as in the text about Genesis above), the veil means an initial level of meaning to be understood and passed through: Origen seems to be thinking here of the veil of the Holy of Holies through which only those granted special access are allowed to pass, but which is not in any sense discarded and which serves a useful purpose in protecting the Holy of Holies from the uninitiated. Here, the veil seems to represent a reading kata tēn lexin, which renders a bodily meaning, but one which must be built on by grasping deeper meanings. At other times, a ‘veil’ seems to indicate a perverse way of reading which obscures the truth in a negative sense and which must be removed. This is reading according to the gramma. Thus, according to Origen, the bride in the Song of Songs can see the Groom (i.e. Christ) in the words of the Old Testament only once he has removed her veil.36 Here, Origen seems to be influenced by his own hermeneutical reading of Paul’s idea that a veil is removed from the readers of the law when they turn to the Lord (2 Cor. 3.15-16).37 In sum, there are various distinctions at play in Origen’s hermeneutics. First, Origen makes a distinction between the ‘body’, ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ of a scriptural text (sarx, psuchē and pneuma). These terms represent three kinds (usually three levels) of meaning in the text. Usually, the bodily meaning conveys a historical account (historia) of events that really happened or legislation (nomothesia) which was historically binding. Origen does not usually call the bodily meaning of the text ‘the letter’ – the

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passage from On First Principles III.5.1 quoted above is an exception.38 But a reading according to the bare letter (gramma) stops at the bodily meaning. Secondly, Origen contrasts two techniques of reading: reading according to the letter (kata tēn lexin/pros to rhēton) and reading allegorically (allegorikōs).39 Both of these are technical terms from literary criticism. While ‘letter’ is not usually used by Origen to refer to the bodily meaning of a text, Origen seems to assume that the bodily meaning of a text is accessed by reading it literally or not allegorically. A literal reading of a text is always possible: but it may access a bodily meaning, which is impossible. Thirdly, and in addition to these two literary techniques (literal and allegorical reading), Origen also distinguishes two ways of reading the text which demonstrate two different attitudes to the text: reading ‘according to the bare letter’ (to psilon gramma) and ‘reading according to the spirit’. They take on a theological quality, in that reading according to the bare letter is a definite spiritual or moral error to be jettisoned in favour of reading according to the spirit. This is the only point at which ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ function as an either/or binary in Origen’s hermeneutics.

3  Origen and reading as transformative practice Several questions about Origen’s use of the ‘spirit and letter’ theme arise from this overview. First, Origen contrasts the crime of those who read according to the ‘bare letter’ with those ‘simple’ folk who are nourished by the bodily meaning alone. If a reading ‘according to the bare letter’ accesses the bodily meaning, it is not immediately clear why simple Christians are better off than Jews or Valentinians. This suggests that Origen thinks that simple Christians are also nurtured by something else – i.e. their basic faith in the gospel, as expressed in the rule of faith. Thus, a reading according to the spirit need not initially involve the use of allegorical exegesis (although Origen assumes that it will progress to that), but it does necessarily involve reading scripture according to a norm formally external to it. Conversely, reading according to the ‘bare letter (gramma)’ seems to indicate reading without or in contradiction to, that norm.40 Thus, although the category of ‘reading according to the letter (gramma)’ is partly a hermeneutical one for Origen (it is an incorrect reading of scripture), it is also irreducibly theological and soteriological (it is reading scripture from outside the new norms set by Jesus Christ). Secondly, some of the radically differing interpretations of Origen can be attributed to the confusion of the three distinctions set out above. Daniel Boyarin, for example, places Origen (among others) firmly in a particular kind of Christian tradition of exegesis that stems from Paul.41 This tradition sets ‘letter’/literal reading against ‘spirit’/allegorical reading in a simple binary opposition. The problem with allegorical reading, according to Boyarin, is that it replaces one meaning with another. This claim is added to a variation on the common theme that Origen’s hermeneutics are Platonic and systematically prioritize the spiritual (alleged to be universal, non-material and abstract) over the material. Thus, he alleges that Origen’s allegorical interpretation replaces a specific historical meaning with an abstract, general meaning. His claim is that this tradition of Christian exegesis is supercessionist, not just in the sense that

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it claims that Christ fulfilled the law thereby rendering the law empty of any future meaning, but also in the sense that Christian exegesis systematically allegorizes and thus spiritualizes the Old Testament, ridding it of concrete historical meaning. This is claimed to do damage to the body of the text, the personal human body and the body of Israel as a people: ‘This dissolution of Jewish identity by spiritualizing and allegorizing it is a familiar move of European culture until today’.42 Regardless of the force of Boyarin’s wider claims, he does not do justice to Origen’s particular method: Origen is concerned with the body, both the body of the text and with human bodies. The question of his attitude to the body of the people of Israel is admittedly more complex and doubtful, yet even there he clearly treats the history of Israel precisely as that: a concrete material history of a specific people.43 Boyarin’s mistake seems to be to confuse the letter/spirit opposition in Origen, with the threefold division of body-soul-spirit: Boyarin assumes that an allegorical reading replaces the body meaning with a soul or spiritual meaning, whereas, in fact, a spiritual reading keeps them together. For Origen, reading according to the bare letter (to psilon gramma) is at fault precisely because it resists the dynamic that moves from body through soul to spirit, without leaving body behind. (Whereas a literal reading – kata tēn lexin – does not resist it.) As David Dawson comments in his insightful critique of Boyarin: Origen associates spirituality not with abstraction but with transformation. Moreover, while it is clear that spiritual transformation does entail a change from a materiality devoid of spirit to an increasingly spiritualized materiality, the goal of Origen’s allegorical reading is to show the connection between these two qualities of personhood, not to allow one to annihilate the other.44

Of course, it is a moot point whether Origen always succeeds in  allowing the body enough space in his theology. Furthermore, the question remains as to what extent a radically transformed spiritual body is still a body. The question becomes particularly potent when it is applied not to the individual but to the broader body of humanity and here Boyarin’s critique has force: to what extent is the transformed body of Israel still identifiably Israel, in Origen’s theology? Dawson is, however, right that Origen’s aim is theological as well as hermeneutical and that he intends the process of interpretation to be not an intellectual task (abstraction) but one that involves the transformation of the whole reader, body, soul and spirit. Another feature of Boyarin’s account is the implicit assumption that allegorical reading is exactly the same thing as accessing the spiritual meaning. But for Origen, although the spiritual meaning is not accessed through a literal reading alone, a literal reading is a necessary instrument to the uncovering of spiritual meaning. Secondly, it is conceivable that there might be other means of accessing that meaning – through typological reading, for example, which is a method Origen uses alongside allegory. The elision of allegorical reading with spiritual reading has encouraged some critics of Origen to associate his reading ‘according to the spirit’ with all kinds of allegorical composition and reading, some of which are patently much more fanciful and uncontrolled than his own and others of which (such as political allegory) obviously have no spiritual aim. This confusion is most unhelpful. On the other hand, keeping a clear distinction between the aim of discovering spiritual truth in scripture and the

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techniques of reading used to discover it, has allowed some commentators to argue that some reading techniques are better than others (usually because they are viewed as more faithful to the text). In particular, several commentators have suggested that Origen’s use of typological or figural readings can be recovered, while his use of allegory cannot.45 In this, they are tacitly sharing his aim of finding spiritual truth in scripture, while distinguishing that aim from the allegorical technique he uses to find it. Unfortunately, in the work of writers like Boyarin, both aim and technique get subsumed under the label ‘spirit’ which is then alleged to kill the letter of the text. Readings according to the bare gramma and readings according to the lexin get similarly elided, perhaps because readers are more familiar with the Latin translation and reception of Origen’s text. Finally, Boyarin’s claims rest on an assumption that Origen has turned Paul’s’ spirit/letter contrast in a thoroughly hermeneutical direction. The Jews evaporate in the accounts of Origen and other early Christians, because they are reduced to meanings rather than an embodied historical people. Boyarin’s accusations do have force, because Origen is a very text-minded writer: the complex connections he forges between text, world, Christ’s body and human bodies make him open to deconstructing interpretation and especially vulnerable to the claim that there is nothing but the text. However, Dawson is right that Origen’s exegesis depends on the assumption that the text is transformative – or rather that reading the text is a transformative practice. In other words, Origen’s hermeneutical theory depends on a theology of transformation, which speaks of the transformation of individuals and of peoples. For Origen, the text both describes and is part of God’s saving history for the world. Consequently, Origen puts constant and enormous emphasis not only on the Holy Spirit’s inspiration of every syllable and every aspect of the scriptural text but also on the Spirit’s guidance of the reader.46 This means that for Origen all reading of scripture is theological (for even those who fail to read it in this way are thereby committing a theological error). Consequently, the idea that Origen took Paul’s spirit/letter distinction only in a hermeneutical direction needs to be nuanced. It is Origen’s readers who have taken it this way, paying too little attention to his theology of the Holy Spirit and to the (admittedly subtle) distinction between lexis and gramma. Origen’s exegesis makes sense when viewed on its own terms, according to which the letter (lexis) of the text is preserved and protected by the wisest of all spirits; once his theology of inspiration is rejected however, the text is indeed vulnerable to the wanderings of overenthusiastic hermeneutical spirits.

4  Augustine and the meaning of the author Augustine presents On Christian Teaching specifically as a work designed to teach how Christians should be taught.47 Specifically, it discusses the interpretation of scripture. The first words of the preface read: There are certain rules for interpreting the Scriptures which, as I am well aware, can usefully be passed on to those with an appetite for such study

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The Spirit and the Letter to enable them to progress not just by reading the work of others who have illuminated the obscurities of divine literature, but also by finding illumination themselves.48

In this respect, Augustine compares himself to a teacher who teaches children the alphabet, instead of reading them a story: On Christian Teaching should prepare Christians for their own self-education through the reading of scripture.49 Augustine then proceeds to arrange his text according to a series of distinctions: between the discovery of what needs to be learnt (Books I–III) and the presentation of what is learnt (Book IV); between a ‘thing’ (Book I) and a ‘sign’ (Books II–III); between unknown signs (Book II) and ambiguous signs (Book III); between literal signs and ambiguous signs (Books II–III). It is the category of ambiguous signs that most directly involves the concept of the letter and the spirit, although Augustine’s discussion in this work is very compact and closely interwoven. Throughout Books II and III, Augustine’s aim is to enable the readers of scripture ‘to find out the thoughts and wishes of those by whom it was written down and, through them, the will of God, which we believed these men followed as they spoke’.50 Augustine, then, speaks of the human writers as the authors of the text, whereas Origen’s quest for the ‘authorial intention’, if we can put it that way, tends to focus on the intentions of (or the meaning imposed by) the Holy Spirit.51 Even when, in the Confessions, Augustine acknowledges that there can be a true meaning of a biblical text other than that which the human author intended, he still insists that the meaning intended by the author is true. Indeed, he argues that it is that particular meaning which the reader should pursue, because it is ‘superior to all other [meanings]’.52 ‘If I have said what your minister [i.e. Moses] meant’, writes Augustine, ‘that is correct and the best interpretation’.53 A second contrast with Origen is more subtle. Although Origen thinks the bodily meaning of a text is important and useful, he often treats it as the instrument used by the Holy Spirit to express a deeper spiritual truth. (Hence, his own exegesis can sometimes appear to fail to live up to his own demand to treat the bodily meaning with absolute integrity.) For Augustine, on the other hand, there is no immediately obvious distinction between different levels of meaning in a text: he often seems to assume one unified meaning intended by the author. When he acknowledges that there can be more than one true interpretation of a text, he is seemingly reluctant to choose between them. Although he grants that cases where ambiguity cannot be resolved by these methods are very rare, he does, interestingly, seem to admit the possibility that either of the ambiguous meanings is acceptable.54 Hence in the Confessions, Augustine argues that one must assume that the text of scripture expresses a truth – but if several interpretations which all could be true are posited, who is to know which one Moses intended or not?55 Indeed, ‘why not believe that Moses discerned all these things? For through him, God has tempered the sacred books to the interpretations of many, who could come to see a diversity of minds’.56 So, although Augustine is here allowing the possibility of multiple meanings, they are all true – and he seems to imply that each meaning is equally true for each reader. While asserting that the author’s intended meaning is the best one, his reluctance to state categorically which that meaning is

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and his claim that the author could have intended them all seems to signal a marked reluctance to establish a hierarchy of meaning in the text in the way that Origen appears to do. Even when Augustine draws a contrast between the surface of a text and its hidden depths, his language does not seem to indicate levels of meaning or deeper levels of truth. His key metaphor is that of a body of water, whose surface shines to attract the ‘simple’ person, but whose depths attract the more thoughtful reader.57 Although Augustine acknowledges that the words of scripture irrigate different readers in different ways, the water is still basically unified and there is no apparent hierarchy between the different streams. Commenting on Moses’ account of creation in Genesis, Augustine writes: A spring confined in a small space rise with more power and distributes its flow through more channels over a wider expanse than a single stream rising from the same spring even if it flows down over many places. So also the account given by your minister [Moses], which was to benefit many expositions, uses a small measure of words to pour out a spate of clear truth. From this each commentator, to the best of his ability in these things, may draw what is true, one this way, another that, using longer and more complex channels of discourse.58

Augustine implies that there are different meanings (perhaps different applications of the same meaning) for different readers. By contrast, Origen’s comments on the creation narrative (quoted above) imply that there are different levels of meaning for the same reader.

5  Augustine and reading the signs properly While Origen often works with the distinction between bodily meaning and soul or spiritual meanings, Augustine draws a different kind of distinction: between things and the signs used by the author to express those things. The language of scripture can be literal or figurative. In both cases, it is the use of signs to express meaning, but in the case of figurative language the thing signified is also a signifier. Thus, the word/sign ‘ox’ signifies the animal (the literal application of a sign); the animal itself, when used as a sign, signifies the Evangelist (figurative application of a sign).59 Two important things follow from this theory of signs. First, technically speaking, even figurative language in scripture relies on or, as it were, contains literal signification (the signifying of the Evangelist by the animal ox depends on the prior signifying of the animal by the word ‘ox’). Thus, as Markus points out, ‘a theory of language as a system of signs must have been tempting’ to Augustine because it allowed him to treat literal and figurative language in scripture together as part of one system of signs.60 This has the useful effect of a refusal to demote one below the other, either placing the literal below the figurative (as Origen appeared to do) or placing the figurative below the literal (as some later hermeneutical practices have done – particularly in the Protestant tradition). Second, Augustine stresses that the ox as a thing (not just the word ‘ox’) signifies the Evangelist:

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‘in this mode of figurative understanding, signifying power is so generated from the qualities of an already existing thing that sign and reality intimately meet in a relation which [Augustine] increasingly reserved for the idea of “sacrament”’.61 Consequently, it is much harder for a critic to complain that in Augustine’s hermeneutics a type (tupos) loses its historical and material particularity as a consequence of it signifying its archetype (e.g. Christ). For Augustine, problems in reading the Bible arise not because of the inherently obscure nature of figurative language, nor because of the failure of literal language, but because of failures on the part of the reader – failures which, as we shall see, often derive from the inability to treat signs properly. Crucial to Augustine’s discussion is the fact that ambiguity does not necessarily arise from metaphorical or figurative language per se. Both literal and figurative language can be clear, ambiguous or ‘unknown’. In Book II, Augustine deals with ways of solving the problem of unknown signs: these mostly revolve around linguistic solutions (such as learning foreign languages or comparing the use of the word in one passage with its use in another) or learning more about a subject (e.g. learning about music in order to grasp a musical metaphor). In Book III, Augustine’s attention shifts to resolving problems arising from ambiguous signs. When a literal usage is ambiguous, Augustine recommends testing it by the rule of faith: if there is a meaning which makes grammatical sense, but which is incompatible with the rule of faith, it should be ruled out. If two or more meanings are compatible with the rule of faith, special attention should be paid to the context of the passage.62 Ultimately, as we have seen, multiple meanings are possible. This reference to the application of the rule of faith is not dissimilar to Origen’s appeal to the rule of faith as a norm of interpretation – although Augustine’s use of it is perhaps more explicit. With regard to ambiguities in figurative expressions, Augustine admits there is greater difficulty, although, in fact, he recommends the same basic solutions: to pay careful attention to the context of the passage and to judge its apparent meaning according to the rule of faith (or here, more specifically, the double command to love God and love neighbour).63 It is in this context that Augustine brings in the concept of the letter and the spirit from 2 Corinthians 3: To begin with, one must take care not to interpret a figurative expression literally [ne figuratam locutionem ad litteram accipias]. What the apostle says is relevant here: “the letter [littera] kills but the spirit gives life”. For when something meant figuratively [figurate] is interpreted as if it were meant literally [proprie dictum64], it is understood in a carnal way. No “death of the soul” is more aptly given that name than the situation in which the intelligence, which is what raises the soul above the level of animals, is subjected to the flesh by following the letter. A person who follows the letter [litteram] understands metaphorical [translata] words as literal [propria], and does not relate what the literal word signifies to any other meaning. On hearing the word “Sabbath”, for example, he interprets it simply as one of the seven days which repeat themselves in a continuous cycle; and on hearing the word “sacrifice” his thoughts do not pass beyond the rituals performed with sacrificial beasts or fruits of the earth. It is then, a miserable kind of spiritual slavery to interpret signs as things, and to be incapable of raising the mind’s eye above the physical creation so as to absorb the eternal light.65

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The reference to slavery and two concepts from Jewish law – the Sabbath and sacrifice – indicate that Augustine has the extended passage from 2 Corinthians 3 in mind, not v. 6 alone. However, while Paul attributes the alleged error of the Jews to the hardening of their hearts (v. 14), Augustine puts it down to a basic categorymistake: the Jews were ‘devoted to signs as if they were things’, i.e. devoted to things as if they were only things and not also things which also signify other things: a signifying signified.66 Augustine portrays this as an intellectual error, albeit one connected to moral or spiritual failure. This category-mistake had two opposite effects in two groups of people. Some ‘who resolutely held fast to these signs were unable, when the time had come for them to be explained, to tolerate the Lord [Jesus Christ] who disregarded them’; others, on the other hand, who did believe in Christ, ‘were very close to being spiritual’ and very ‘receptive to the Holy Spirit’, precisely because of their adherence to signs: ‘although they did not know how to interpret them spiritually, the vows and signs concerned with the world and the flesh has at least taught them to worship the one eternal God’.67 In the latter case, these people recognized that their ‘vows and signs concerned with the world and the flesh’ signified something else beyond themselves, even though they were unsure what that something else was. This can be connected to Augustine’s ‘sacramental’ understanding of signs: the thing which is also a sign can incarnate meaning, even before that meaning is understood.68 Augustine does not explain what caused some Jews to believe and others to disbelieve; he does, however, use the analogy of a paidagōgos to explain the gripping power of signs.69 As noted earlier, a paidagōgos was originally a slave who took young boys to school, protected them and was also generally in charge of their welfare and upbringing. It was important that the paidagōgos set a good moral example, but the paidagōgos was also a byword for stern discipline in the ancient world: this is the sense of the word paidagōgos in Gal. 3.24. Like Paul and Origen, Augustine uses the paidagōgos to represent the law, not God: the law is both a disciplinarian (following both Gal. 3.24 and the implications of 2 Corinthians 3) and a protector (following the implications of Gal. 4.2).70 So, Augustine seems to suggest that the paidagōgos (law) under the command of the master of the household (God) led his charges (the Jews) to somewhere where they could learn, both protecting them and holding over them the threat of punishment if they disobeyed. Some pupils, it seems to be implied, were very reluctant to leave the protective care of the pedagogue, while others were eager to move on. Thus, in line with the overarching theme of On Christian Teaching, Augustine’s interpretation of 2 Corinthians 3 adds the metaphor of the education of children to the Pauline metaphor of slavery and obedience/ disobedience. The Jews are criticized for their childish reluctance to move away from what is familiar and protective (as well as being something that enslaves them by the use of harsh discipline). All this imagery serves to deepen and emphasize Augustine’s main point: that the Jews confused signs with things: they ‘observed the signs of spiritual things in place of the things themselves’; that is, they could not move beyond the things required by the law to the things (Christ and the gospel) to which it pointed.71 This is a fundamental error that lies deeper than an exegetical mistake. For Origen, on the other hand, the failure of Jews (and others) lies in their inability to move beyond the bodily meaning

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of the text. As I have argued, this too is, in fact, a basic theological error, but Origen’s complex system of different levels of meaning, in which the soul and spiritual meanings are accessed by allegorical interpretation, often makes Origen sound as if the failure to move beyond the bodily meaning is a hermeneutical mistake. Origen and Augustine also differ on the question of simple Christians. Because for Augustine the text of scripture has only one level of meaning, simple Christians can grasp it, even though they may only understand its main outlines. Although there may be many things they cannot understand, this is not because of a general inability to move from a basic to a deeper level of meaning in the text as in Origen (a failure due to their spiritual immaturity); it is rather because of a particular inability to understand the meaning of specific words, phrases or passages. This is why Augustine’s On Christian Teaching concentrates on giving such Christians the techniques to enable them to grasp more of the meaning of scripture. Furthermore, when Augustine writes about the depths of scripture (as in the water metaphor examined above), he is not implying that there are different levels to it, rather he is expressing his wonder at the richness and fecundity of the truth within it. However, Origen and Augustine seem to be in agreement that simple Christians can grasp the broad outlines of the Bible message, provided that they read it within the parameters set by the rule of faith  – that is, provided they read it ‘in Christ’.72 This is for the two theologians, partly a hermeneutical, but mainly a theological point. Having argued that one should not read a figurative passage literally, Augustine then proceeds to argue that one should also take care not to interpret a literal passage as if it were figurative.73 Naturally, this raises the question of how one can tell whether a passage is literal or figurative, and here Augustine’s answer is not so far away from that of Origen’s dependence on the rule of faith: ‘anything in the divine discourse that cannot be related either to do with good morals or the true faith should be taken as figurative’.74 Unlike Origen, however, Augustine puts great weight specifically on Jesus’ command to love God and one’s neighbour and he construes the true faith as one’s understanding of God and one’s neighbour: these topics were the subject of Book I. When it comes to those actions of the prophets which might be considered morally questionable, Augustine suggests that they should be interpreted literally (i.e. historically – they did happen) and prophetically (they point towards something else which is instructive): So all or nearly all, of the deeds contained in the books of the Old Testament are to be interpreted not only literally [proprie] but also figuratively [figurate]; but (in the case of those which the reader interprets literally) if agents are praised, but their actions do not agree with the practices of the good men who since the Lord’s coming in the flesh have been the guardians of the divine precepts, one should take up the figurative meaning into one’s understanding, but not take over the deed into one’s own behaviour. Many things were done in those times out of duty which cannot be done now except out of lust.75

Augustine can be seen in On Christian Teaching to be attempting to steer a moderate path between a hermeneutic that overstresses literal interpretation and one that overstresses the figurative interpretation. The letter without the spirit kills, because this

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involves taking signs only as things of value in themselves. But the spirit without the letter is also dangerous. Augustine is very careful to recommend that a literal reading be used if at all possible, even to the extent of, for example, emphasizing the historical truth of the patriarchs’ polygamy alongside its figurative spiritual significance. This seems to deny the Origenistic principle that some aspects of the bodily meaning can be rejected because they are (morally) impossible. For Augustine, the words describing the patriarchs’ polygamy, for example, must refer to events that actually happened; the important question is what those events themselves signify. Origen, by contrast, emphasizes a spiritual interpretation of the patriarchs’ polygamy and he seems doubtful as to its historical reality.76 A review of other such examples leads one to the conclusion that Augustine is more rigorous in his application of the principle that letter and spirit must stay together than Origen is in his insistence that the body, soul and spirit of the text should remain intact. Augustine may well have found Origen’s terminology of body, soul and spirit worrying, given the view of most Latin theologians that Origen did not have a doctrine of a properly bodily resurrection. From Augustine’s perspective, Origen’s hermeneutics could all too easily be read to imply that the bodily meaning dissolves into a spiritual meaning, just as Origen allegedly thought that the physical body dissolved into a spiritual body at its resurrection.77 Instead, Augustine uses the concept of signs: from his perspective the whole biblical text is composed of signs, so there is a very real sense in which signs are utterly indispensable. An overly literal reading is one which in some sense lets the sign get in the way of the meaning: it is then that the ‘letter kills’. A spiritual reading is one that recognizes the sign for what it is. This is in some ways similar to Origen’s concept of spiritual reading as opposed to reading according to the bare letter (gramma): the letter kills when one stops at the sign, or stops at the bodily meaning. But while Origen systematically connected this with a failure to move beyond literal interpretation towards allegorical interpretation, Augustine recognizes that there is a more complex relationship between erroneous readings and the techniques of interpretation used. For, much more explicitly than Origen, Augustine adds the view that a reading which does not give enough weight to literal interpretation is also very flawed. This may explain why ultimately Augustine is more cautious than Origen about the question of multiple meanings. He agrees with Origen that the simple reader can be edified by his or her reading of the text; he agrees that belief in Christ (as expressed in the rule of faith) is key to the comprehension of scripture; he agrees that the reading of scripture is a transformative process; he even agrees that the obscurities in scripture usefully drive the reader on to new discoveries ‘by exertion’, ‘to exercise and somehow refine their readers’ minds or to overcome the reluctance and whet the enthusiasm of those seeking to learn’.78 However, there is strong evidence – particularly later in Augustine’s career – that he did not want this to give licence to an abundance of interpretations as Origen’s method appeared to him to have done. Thus, in the fourth book of On Christian Teaching (added some 30  years later), Augustine writes that the purpose of exegesis is above all clarity. He remarks that the useful obscurity of scripture’s authors should not be imitated by the exegete: ‘Their expositors should not speak in such a way that they set themselves up as similar authorities, themselves

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in need of exposition, but should endeavour first and foremost in all their sermons to make themselves understood and to ensure, by means of the greatest possible clarity, that only the very slow fail to understand . . . ’.79 There is, in fact, considerable disagreement among Augustine’s readers as to how much polyvalence in the text he permits.80 The progression from a relatively relaxed approach to polyvalence to an emphasis on constraint (e.g. from On Christian Teaching Books I–III and the contemporary Confessions to On Christian Teaching Book IV and the City of God) does, however, appear to be reflected in Augustine’s actual exegesis. This can also be traced in his successive commentaries on the creation narrative in Genesis. There is also a further difference: by working with the concept of sign and meaning, rather than with three levels of meaning in the scriptural text, Augustine signals more clearly than Origen that the scope of the discussion stretches beyond biblical interpretation (without leaving the realm of hermeneutics, broadly conceived).81 By asserting that some pagans and Jews err in treating several kinds of signs as things (statues, laws, rituals) and that others fail to identify what the sign is a sign of, Augustine extends his criticism of them beyond a criticism of their reading of the Bible to a much broader criticism of their whole religious approach. Origen’s approach is theological (not just hermeneutical), but his theology is much more focused on the text of scripture. There is a sense in which, for him, scripture contains all of salvation-history and that beyond it there is nothing else that needs to be said. In Augustine, on the other hand, the signs of which scripture is composed are potent examples among others that exist outside the text. On Christian Teaching carefully sets out the place of signs and things and prefaces this with the uti/frui distinction, which teaches humans how to ‘enjoy’ some things (the persons of the Holy Trinity) and ‘love’ others. Everything to which humans relate then, should be ordered in a particular way: signs point to things, and some things can only be loved in a sense which leads on to the love of their creator. There is only one ‘thing’ which is to be loved utterly for itself; there is only one ‘thing’ which is not a sign signifying another: this is God.82 Ultimately then, Augustine seems to argue that a failure to distinguish between signs and things endangers one’s ability to distinguish between different kinds of thing, and consequently impairs the crucial loving relationship between oneself and God.

Part Three

Letter and Spirit: A Reversal

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The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film Paul S. Fiddes

‘The roles of letter and spirit are reversed: the letter of the text lives on and undoes idealizations that seek to get rid of the letter’.1 This pithy comment by Geoffrey Hartman sets the scene for a late-modern mood that poses a challenge to the Pauline dictum: ‘The letter kills but the spirit gives life’ (2 Cor. 3.6). In this chapter, I want to explore that mood and some surprising variations within it, appealing not only to the playful intellectual work of Jacques Derrida, but also to more popular versions of it in the culture of the movies. In particular, I want to consider the illumination that may be thrown on the polarity of ‘letter and spirit’ by bringing it into conjunction with the related pairing of ‘text and voice’. I will begin with three interlinked variations on the theme that ‘the spirit kills’, understanding spirit as subject, book and voice; these will be followed by two more surprising variations on the theme and this will lead to some Christian doctrinal reflection on the relation between the triune God and a world of signs.

1  The deadly dominance of the subject Hartman’s association of ‘idealizations’ with ‘spirit’ gives the clue to his apparent reversal of Paul. The term ‘spirit’ here indicates any principle or reality that is thought to exist independently of the ‘letter’, that can float free of the signs that indicate it, that can escape the text and the internal differentiation of signs from each other. Hartman reinforces this critique by reference to Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘White Mythology’, which he summarizes as ‘the meaning cannot displace the medium’.2 Within the realm of ‘spirit’ that comes under suspicion are to be included timeless ideas that are envisaged as having a structural unity regardless of reference to particularities of space and time, such as ‘pure and simple’ concepts free from any contingent or empirical properties (as in the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus)3 or ‘pure experiences’ (Husserl) which are a direct and unmediated awareness of the present moment.4 This late-modern critique of spirit operates within a semiotic view of the world as a network of signs. All persons and objects are understood to be signs, pointing beyond

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themselves, representing and communicating themselves and emptying themselves out in the direction of others; while these signifiers can themselves be inscribed in written signs as words, symbols or other marks on a surface, text is not to be limited to what is written down. The whole physical world, human and natural, is sign bearing.5 From this perspective, signs can only point to other signs and to nothing outside the network of signs. There can be no flight from the world of time and space. The meaning of a sign is established, moreover, by its ‘difference’ from others: as Saussure demonstrated, a sign draws its meaning from what it is not.6 The signifier ‘snow-flake’ takes its meaning from not being either a flower petal or a leaf, and the fact that it can be named metaphorically as both in a poem7 underlines the difference between signs rather than dissolving it. Further, if we accept Derrida’s insight that the signifier, having done its work, becomes itself something to be signified in its turn, then we are held within a neverending chain of signifying and final meaning is always being postponed.8 The primordial condition for all signs is différance, playing on the double sense of the French verb différer – to distinguish and to defer.9 Difference is the pre-condition for all language, both because it is the difference between signs that makes them possible and because this difference can be repeated in different times and circumstances. It is then an illusion to try and escape from the sign, to postulate a realm of idealizations that are signified by signs in time and space but which are not entangled in the difference of the world of signs: in technical terms, it seems that there can be no ‘transcendental signified’.10 Now, such a realm of pure concepts has, in Western thought, been envisaged as contained within the mind of the conscious subject, a cogito which underlies all experience and knowledge. In his introduction to Being and Time, Martin Heidegger calls for a Destruktion of this subjectum of Western metaphysics, whether it be named the soul, the consciousness or the spirit, since concentration on the self as thinking subject diverts attention from the fundamental question of Being itself.11 In this Western intellectual tradition, spirit is the explorer and the master of the spiritual world of transcendent concepts and is the supreme ‘transcendent signified’. Spirit uses signs while being independent of them. The world and other persons are treated as objects over against the subjective self, and instead of being recognized as truly ‘other’ in their own right, are simply regarded as extensions of the controlling consciousness or ‘more of the same thing’ (as Emmanuel Levinas complains).12 A ‘spirit’ that supposedly exists prior to, and outside, the letter thus ‘kills’. Appeal to ‘spirit’ forecloses on the richness of the textuality of the world, and seeks to set up systems to oppress others. The problem with ‘spirit’ is that of domination and anthropocentrism. Above all, in Western metaphysics, God as Spirit, as a supreme Self or super-rational Subject has been invoked to validate human subjectivity. As the ultimate ‘transcendental signified’, God has been envisaged as existing outside time and space, independent of all signifiers and sanctioning a hierarchy of domination. In a metaphysics of spirit, being is understood as presence. To ‘be’ anything is to be present and presentable to others; the more fully present something is the more ‘being-full’ it is, and the greater the potential it has for control of other

The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film 107 beings.13 The human consciousness is directly present to itself (self-conscious) and to the phenomena of the world, which have being because they ‘present’ themselves to the mind as sense-impressions.14 This, in turn, leads to a view of time in which only the present is real. When this ontology has been placed within a traditionally Christian framework, God has been conceived as supreme Being because God is absolutely present, existing in an eternal simultaneity and grounding and validating the presence of the individual human consciousness. In the mood that is critical of this perspective, while the spirit kills, the letter by contrast ‘gives life’. The letters of physical signs, with their mutual distinctions and capacity for postponing meaning, are endlessly life giving. There is always surplus or excess.15 Reversing the usual ascriptions of spirit and letter thus makes a rhetorical point: if spirit is regarded as a ‘transcendental signified’, independent of the letter or physical sign in the world, then it is deadly. Of course, the deeper point is that spirit and letter should not be held apart in this way at all; the contrast of spirit with letter only increases the split between subject and object. In his book Of Spirit, Derrida records with approval Heidegger’s attack on the subject as transcendent spirit. However, he also notes that Heidegger uses the word Geist positively in many of his writings from Being and Time onwards, and concludes that it does no good simply to avoid discourses on spirit because spirit will return to haunt discourse nevertheless.16 While Derrida inclines to conjure spirit up in order to exorcise it, like Heidegger he also ends by reinterpreting it. The point Derrida recognizes is that some concept of a responsible human self is necessary to maintain human freedom in the face of totalitarian onslaughts such as Nazism, and to maintain common human identity in the face of racism; ‘spirit’ seems an indispensible way of expressing this.17 He notes that Heidegger begins in Being and Time by equating spirit – in quotation marks – with the human action of questioning Being, so that spirit is deconstructed as virtually equivalent to human ‘being-there’ (Dasein).18 In his Rectorship Address (1933), Heidegger erases the quotation marks and uses spirit as the deliberate will to question or as a kind of resolute openness towards the essence of Being;19 this, repeated in his Introduction to Metaphysics, Derrida judges to have an existential tone of subjectivity and voluntarism. However, in later lectures on poetry, first in a study of Hölderlin (1942) and then of Trakl (1953), Heidegger envisages spirit more in terms of a movement in the soul, imaged as a ‘coming’ and a ‘burning’. Significantly, Derrida himself hints that this last concept of spirit as an archi-originary movement, symbolized as ‘flame’, might have some potential for thinking about the nature of the human self and for unifying different religions and to this I want to return later in the chapter. Derrida is less sure that Heidegger has avoided the pitfalls of human dominance and anthropocentrism with his earlier talk of the spirit as a willed openness to Being, especially since Heidegger uses this concept to deepen the opposition between human and animal forms of life.20 His study of ‘spirit’ in Heidegger leaves us, nevertheless, with a challenging question: if we adopt a semiotic analysis of the world, how shall we establish the identity of the human self or subject, without resigning ourselves to the polarity of subject and object? If we stress the life-giving character of the letter, there is always the danger that the self may vanish in face

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of the text. In a world where signs precede and shape the self, there is an activity of reading and interpreting, but there seems to be no clear identity of a centred subject that is doing the reading and the seeing. The human self can become a mere constellation of signs, in which it appears to evacuate itself and disappear. The death of the author, the death of the self and the death of God as creator – all seem to be bound together. The question that confronts us is this: how can we restore the human self in an elusive world?

2  The deadly dominance of the book Associated with the transcendent subject is the transcendent text. The ‘system of signified truth’21 transcending time and space which the term spirit denotes is here understood metaphorically in the Western intellectual tradition as a kind of book; this is preceding and superior to the text written in the physical marks of the world, whether these be ink, stone or flesh. There is a deep taproot for this way of thinking in Augustine’s appropriation for hermeneutical purposes of the Pauline dictum about flesh and spirit. In his Confessions (which we shall see have a special significance for Derrida), he records that: I was pleased that when the old writings of the Law and Prophets came before me, they were no longer read with an eye to which they had previously looked absurd . . . I was delighted to hear Ambrose in his sermons to the people saying, as if he were most carefully enunciating a principle of exegesis: “The letter kills, the spirit gives life”. Those texts which, taken literally, seemed to contain perverse teaching he would expound spiritually, removing the mystical veil.22

Augustine thinks that what is exposed to the view when the veil is removed is an eternal book, the word of God to which the two books of scripture and the natural world (‘the firmament’) bear witness; this divine writing is finally inseparable from the supreme Subject, the being of God himself, an open book which the angels read non-temporally and without end: They have no need to look up to this firmament and to read so as to know your word. They ever “see your face” and there, without syllables requiring time to pronounce, they read what your eternal will intends. They read, they choose, they love. . . . their codex is never closed, nor is their book ever folded shut. For you yourself are a book to them and you are “for eternity”.23

For Augustine, of course, the eternal word has become flesh in the incarnation of the Logos. In his Grammatology, Derrida identifies this whole scheme of thinking as ‘logocentrism’, characterizing the ‘epoch of the book’ in the Western intellectual tradition, which he believes is only now coming to a close. His diagnosis is that writing has been thought of (as in Augustine) in unified form as a ‘book’, held between single covers. The multiple signifiers of writing are thus considered to be held together in a ‘transcendental signifier’ which is immune to the particularities of time and space,

The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film 109 and which is validated by the ideality of the ‘transcendental signified’, ultimately God himself: The “good” writing24 has therefore always been comprehended. Compre­ hended . . . within a natural law, created or not, but first thought within an eternal presence. Comprehended, therefore, within a totality and enveloped in a volume of a book. The idea of the book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier; this totality of the signifier cannot be a totality, unless a totality constituted by the signified pre-exists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs and is independent of it in its ideality. The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the [i.e. Derrida’s own] sense of writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the disruption of writing . . . against difference in general. If I distinguish the text from the book, I shall say that the destruction of the book, as it is now underway in all domains, denudes the surface of the text. That necessary violence responds to a violence that was no less necessary.25

For Augustine, the book of nature was a witness to the eternal word alongside scripture, like two firmaments stretched over the readers or (playing on the association of parchment with skin) like two skins covering them.26 Derrida, however, suggests that in the development of natural theology and deism, the book of nature itself became the transcendent or spiritual text or at least a place of more reliable accessibility to the divine wisdom than the written text of scripture. A ‘natural law’, or a law written in the heart, was thus set over against a writing located in the body, which was to be dismissed as merely material. Returning to the image of spirit, he considers that ‘natural writing’ like this ‘is not grammatological but pneumatological’.27 In his view, the contrast between spirit and letter has reinforced this disparagement of empirical inscription. The Hollywood film Bee Season (2005)28 reflects the persistence and pervasiveness of such ‘logocentrism’ in our culture. The film centres on a remarkable facility for spelling possessed by the young Eliza Neumann and moves towards the climax of her performance at the national spelling competition for schoolchildren in Washington DC. Around her, all the members of her family are on a spiritual quest; but their relations with each other are falling apart through their failure to understand one other as well as through the dominating and controlling behaviour of the father, Saul. Saul Neumann is a Jewish religious studies professor, and has long been fascinated by the Kabbalistic concept of the world as a text giving access to communion with God. Created by the divine word, the universe can be read with the aid of the Torah and Neumann is obsessed by the idea that spiritual exercises focusing upon the letters of the Torah can lead to a spiritual breakthrough in ‘hearing God speak’ and so to ‘repairing’ the torn and fragmented manuscript of the world. Eliza’s facility with spelling is based on a mysterious ability to visualize in her mind the object in the world to which the word points. Saul becomes convinced that her gift can be turned in a mystical direction and begins to train her in the techniques of reading the Torah, which involve repetition and dissociation. At the same time, he has a driving ambition for her to win the national

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competition, perhaps finding in her achievement the success that has eluded him professionally. On the night before the great event, Eliza, upset by the broken relations in her family, attempts on her own to achieve the state of ‘hearing God speak’ through an exercise on the word ‘light’; she wants guidance on how to repair the broken pieces of her family, just as on a larger scale the word can repair the world (reference is made to the Kabbalistic concept of tikkum olam). We see her fall into a trance and suffer violent convulsions, but this state is left ambiguous. Next day, she is on the verge of winning the competition and is asked to spell a word she knows well; indeed, she visualizes it in her mind as being spellt out through physical objects. Deliberately, however, she mistakes the very last letter. Her father, sitting in the audience, is desolated, but seeing his distress his estranged son moves forward to embrace him for the first time in several years. The audience of the film is left asking whether she did indeed hear God speak, and whether her selfless act will achieve the desired healing of her family. Bee Season is an example of a whole cluster of recent films which have reflected the desire in our culture for some secret text that will provide a key to everything (The Da Vinci Code is another striking example here, as is Stigmata). While influenced by a contemporary fascination with the hermetic and the occult, it also demonstrates at the level of popular culture a ‘logocentric’ heritage in which there is a quest for a transcendent book, existing independently of actual circumstances in time and space and so potentially able to provide some transformation of them. The film perhaps subtly undermines this pre-supposition: the contingency of the relations between the family members seems finally to take priority over spiritual knowledge. But no clear message is given; the film simply traverses the area of world, text and spirit. Derrida begins his survey of the ‘epoch of the book’ in Grammatology by quoting Rabbi Eliezer to the effect that the whole written text of the world (envisaging earth and sky as parchments) cannot exhaust the Torah, and by setting alongside this the reference of Descartes to ‘the great book of Nature’.29 Elsewhere, he appeals to the Rabbinic and Kabbalistic tradition of the Torah as the foundation of the world, not in order to approve the idea of a transcendent book, nor to urge a ‘spiritual writing’ opposed to the material letter, but to stress the need to recover the bodiliness and materiality of writing.30 In Grammatology, as Mark Vessey has pointed out,31 it is curious that he does not cite Augustine as a key exponent of the ‘logocentric’ tradition, but he makes up for this by the dialogue he holds with the saint in a book written with Geoffrey Bennington entitled Jacques Derrida. The text of the philosopher Bennington occupies the top half of each page, entitled ‘Derridabase’ and aims to set out Derrida’s thought in a systematic way suitable for the computer age (cf. ‘database’). Derrida adds a running commentary on the bottom half in the form of a stream of consciousness, aiming to show that all systems must remain open and be constantly deconstructed or ‘surprised’.32 The book exemplifies the impossibility of finding an ‘ideality’ or system of concepts which can be separated from the contingencies of signifiers, since Derrida’s contribution takes the form of a detailed reflection on the circumstances of his own life, in dialogue with Augustine’s similar enterprise in his Confessions. Derrida calls his part ‘Circumfession’, a play on ‘confession’, ‘circumscription’ and ‘circumcision’, and merges copious quotations from Augustine with entries from his own as yet unpublished spiritual journal.

The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film 111 Augustine is an ambiguous companion for the critique of a transcendent book, since (as we have seen) he affirms a book to be read ‘without temporal syllables’; yet at the same time he opens the way for new value to be given to the embodiment and materiality of human writing, through the highly psychosomatic metaphors he uses for the writing of God. He gives a kind of bodily aura to ‘spiritual’ writing, by speaking of a writing in flesh and a circumcision of the lips. Derrida takes up these clues with zest. While Augustine calls for God to circumcise his lips inwardly and outwardly and so enable him to write about ‘dark secrets’ of the creation in the book of Genesis, Derrida determines to circumcise (deconstruct) the written text itself, including Augustine’s own text.33 If the Confessions are circumscribed (‘written around’) or circumcised (‘cut into’), then many other histories, books and truths are enabled to appear. Thus, he addresses himself: ‘you are waiting for an order from God who . . . finally allows you to speak, one evening you’ll open the envelope, you’ll break the seals like skins, the staples of the scar, unreadable for you and for the others and which is still bleeding. . .’34 The metaphors of circumcision and ‘breaking’ are violent ones, but this is a forcefulness in ‘denuding the surface of the text’ that matches the violence with which a logocentric theory of the book has imposed itself upon writing with a ‘supervisory totality of the theological signified’. As Derrida expressed himself earlier, ‘that necessary violence responds to a violence’.35 A central part of what might be thought to be a violent act upon the Confessions is Derrida’s rewriting of Augustine’s argument for the polysemy of scripture. To understand this requires some exploration of Derrida’s appropriation of Augustine. Augustine, in employing the hermeneutical principle of finding a ‘spiritual’ exegesis beneath the literal surface of scripture, believes that it is God’s intention for different readers to find different meanings in the text. Others might disagree with his own exegesis of Genesis, but ‘through [Moses] God has tempered the sacred books to the interpretation of many, who could come to see a diversity of truths’.36 Derrida, as might be expected, delights in this argument for an openness of meaning in the signifiers of the text:37 you try to calculate the itinerary of texts which do not explode immediately, being basically nothing but fuse, intermittently you see the flame running without knowing where nor when the explosion will come, whence the trance, anguish and desire of the reader, quick let’s be done with it, I beheld the Angel who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire and he was consumed and rose as Elijah. This Angel, who is now become a devil, is my particular friend [Blake],38 but I give up neither water nor blood, et eum texendi sermonis modum, ut neque illi . . . dicta recusarent . . . Sicut enim fons in paruo loco uberior est pluribusque riuis in ampliora spatia fluxum ministrat quam quilibet eorum riuorum, qui per multa locorum ab eodem fonte deducitur, ita narratio dispensatoris tui sermocinaturis pluribus profutura paruo sermonis modulo scatet fluenta liquidae ueritatis, unde sibi quisque uerum, quod de his rebus potest, hic illud, ille illud, per longiores loquellarum anfractus trahat [Augustine],39* “always the question of the continuum, I write in Latin because the unum mimes the fluid and slowly stretched substance, the one that I desire to keep, desire as what is kept, keeping not being the object but the continuum

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of desire, a writing without interruption, which has been looking for itself for ever, looking for me across the cut. . .” [Book of Elijah] *. . .and such a method of fashioning my speech that those . . . would not reject my statements . . . Just as a spring, within its small space, supplies a more abundant flow over wider areas by virtue of the many streams which it feeds than do any one of these streams which lead away from this spring through many regions, so, too, does the story told by the original dispenser of Thine, which was to supply many who would speak of it in the future, cause to bubble forth, by the tiny flow of Thy word, floods of clear truth, from which each man may draw the truth that he is able to get concerning these things – one man one truth, another man another – through the longer windings of their discussions.

Here, Derrida echoes Augustine’s own language about the text as a source of an endlessly flowing water of life, and aligns himself with Augustine’s wish that his own speech might share in the liquidity of the words of Moses about creation. A quotation from William Blake associates this fluid movement of truth with the flaming of fire, which recalls Derrida’s earlier naming of the spirit as flame;40 the reference to Augustine is then followed by a quotation from his yet-to-be-published journal (significantly, in the light of the Blake citation, called ‘The Book of Elijah’),41 in which he explains that he quotes so much in Latin because the Latin ‘mimes the fluid and slowly stretched substance’ of writing that he desires. Derrida’s use of Augustine, however, goes against his predecessor’s intention in two  ways. First, Augustine does not apparently intend to apply the principle of polysemy of truth in texts to his own writing (and so to all writings, including that of Derrida in the future), but sees it as a unique characteristic of scripture. When Augustine writes, ‘were I writing something at this supreme level of authority, I should prefer to write in a such a way that each man could take whatever truth about these things my words suggested’,42 he is thinking himself imaginatively into the shoes of Moses, not supposing that he will write in this way. Derrida, however, writing in imitation of Augustine (‘I do not have the other under my skin . . . but I write to death on a skin bigger than I’),43 claims that ‘it’s God weeping in me, turning around me, reappropriating my languages, dispersing their meaning in all directions’.44 Second, Augustine bases the openness of meaning of scripture in the unity of the divine will that lies behind it; the written book can give rise to a multiplicity of interpretations because it witnesses to a single divine book, inspired by a single Spirit. Derrida recognizes his difference from Augustine on the matter of the spirit here; for Derrida there cannot be a single spirit and a ‘simple’ love of God45 behind the multiplicity of meaning that is generated by the difference between signs. Indeed, the view that there is a univocity of truth which is transcendent to all human writing is the theological principle that Derrida has been contesting:46 I am, I think, I gather my spirits, for there are more than one of them sharing my body, only by multiplying in me the counterexamples and the countertruths that I am . . . and I stand against SA [or: I falsely inscribe my name in place of Augustine] when he believes and indeed says multipliciter significari per corpus, quod uno modo mente intellegitur . . . ecce simplex dilectio dei et proximi* . . . 

The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film 113 *that what is understood but in one way by the mind may be expressed in many ways through the body. . . . Notice the simple love of God and neighbour. . .47

Yet, Derrida turns to his own use the perception of Augustine about the polysemy of truth in scripture. This violence that Derrida does on the text of the Confessions is no less than he does on himself as writer. The symbol of circumcision is pervasive here: he cuts into the text like cutting into skin. Indeed, the parchment is a skin, as Augustine makes clear in reading the verse ‘the Lord God clothed them with skins’ (Gen. 3.21) as referring to the gift of scripture.48 Derrida desires a fluidity of writing ‘across the cut’, a liquid writing like blood flowing from a wound in the skin or from circumcision. True spirit is not a transcendent subjectivity or a transcendent set of principles in the divine mind, but a writing which is open to the other, a liquid style which will overcome the split between subject and object or between spirit and letter, that has been created by ‘onto-theological metaphysic’. This is the style that will cancel out the original, handwritten death sentence of a divine text: ‘And the handwriting was cancelled, which was against us’.49 It is an ‘an easy, offered, readable, relaxed writing’,50 but it can only be achieved by cutting deeply: Let us enter the cellar opened in the flank of the crucified Christ, (where we shall find this blood) while weeping with anguish and pain over God’s wound.” [Catherine of Siena] . . . I unmask and de-skin myself while sagely reading others like an angel, I dig down in myself to the blood . . . “how to circumscribe, the edge of the text. . .” I do not know SA, less than ever, I like to read right on the skin of his language . . . and like an angel, but unlike angels, is this possible, I read only the time of his syllables, et ibi legunt sine syllabis temporum, quid uelit aeterna voluntas tua.51* *They read there, without temporal syllables, what thy eternal will desires. . .

While Augustine thinks that the angels read the eternal book of book ‘without temporal syllables’, Derrida only reads signifiers which occupy time and space. This statement prompts a number of questions for Christian theology. If we agree that there can be no meaning or truth without spatio-temporal signs, then is it possible to conceive of the signs of the world as signifying a creator God? If signs only point to other signs, then can the world point to an uncreated and transcendent reality? Must this reality be an oppressive presence, violently imposing itself on fallible human texts? And how does the world come to be sign bearing in the first place? These are questions to be added to the one I posed in the first section: how can we establish the elusive self in a world of signs? Derrida’s appeal to the ‘liquid’ movement of writing, flowing like blood and water or flaming like fire,52 is a clue that I want to pick up later in thinking about the true presence of spirit within the letter of the world.

3  The deadly dominance of the voice The critique of spirit as a transcendent subject and as an eternal book is interwoven in the thought of Derrida by the critique of the concept of voice. The polarity of spirit

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and letter is brought into conjunction with another pairing – that of voice and text. I have already mentioned the suspicions harboured by late-modern thinkers towards the pretensions of the thinking subject in imposing an immediate presence upon the world. Now, this self-presence is typified by the voice (phōnē) or at least by a particular view of the voice. There is a tendency, as Derrida puts it, for an ‘unfailing complicity between idealization and voice’:53 The “apparent transcendence” of the voice results from the fact that the signified, which is always ideal by essence, the “expressed” Bedeutung, is immediately present in the act of expression.54

When we speak, observes Derrida, we hear ourselves at the same time as we speak; so the signifier, animated by our breath, seems to be in ‘absolute proximity’ to us. The speaking subject hears himself or herself in the present and so the process of speech presents itself as a pure phenomenon, suspended from the existential details of the world. The unity of voice and sound appears to be the sole case of escaping the distinction between what is worldly and what is transcendental. For these reasons, it seems that the subject can present itself to itself and to the world without being mediated through signs. Through voice it can impose itself on a world of objects, and exercise a ‘mastery or limitless power over the signifier’. Derrida enters an interesting dispute with Levinas here. For Levinas, the space between the self and the other, between the self and the world, can only be filled with language and especially the spoken word. The questioning glance of the other, the ‘face’ of the other, is calling for a response that must be made in words. ‘I’ must be ready to put my own world into words and to give it to the other in an act of sheer generosity. Even the sacrifice of self to an all-inclusive system can offer no escape from egotism, or from a domineering subjectivity. But in conversation with others there is room for growth through the dynamics of question and answer. In speaking to others we pay attention to them, and become aware both of the ultimate ethical demand they make upon us and our own inner egocentric attitudes.55 This was a philosophy, we note, that Levinas developed in the context of the European Holocaust, when people were not open to the demand made on them by the Jewish ‘other’, and when this other was subjected to an objective rational system or ‘final solution’. Derrida, however, points out that ‘speaking’ can be tyrannical. People can use their voice to command or cajole us into conformity to a system. They may try to get behind the signs or text of the world, beyond the messages given out by myriad things in their differences from each other – whether these signs are in body language or actual words. The ‘voice’ may be a symptom of the fact that they are trying to impose themselves upon us, asserting an immediate presence, which ignores a world of difference that is shaping them.56 This dominance of voice is associated with ideality, absolute subject and transcendent text, all instances of an illusory spirit. In considering the tradition of divine ‘writing’, for instance, Derrida makes the point that its nature is pneumatological, since it is ‘immediately united to the voice and to breath’. Such writing takes the form, Derrida suggests, of an interior holy voice, a ‘full and truthful presence of the divine voice to our inner sense’.57 In Circumfession, Derrida offers three visual images that summarize this ‘spiritual voice’, depicted as a speaker at the shoulder of the writer. The first

The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film 115 image is one that had already appeared in his book The Post Card and portrays an image from a postcard purchased in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Reproducing the frontispiece of the thirteenth-century manuscript Prognostica Socratis Basilei, it appears to show Socrates sitting at a writing desk and taking dictation from Plato, standing behind his shoulder.58 In The Post Card, Derrida hails this as expressing aptly his own theory of grammatology, the Western tradition that human writing is supervised by a transcendent signified and is marginalized by a privilege granted to the immediate presence of speech. The image deconstructs itself, however, since no writings of Socrates have been left to us and it was Plato who wrote, stimulated by the thought of Socrates. There is a hint here that what Socrates is writing is what Plato is actually sending himself as a postcard; ‘he has sent it back to himself from himself or he has even sent himself ’.59 The image thus expresses something about the distancing of the writer from his own text, a point to which I wish to return in the next section. When a specialist in the history of art writes to Derrida to explain that the image does not depict Plato giving dictation, but depicts a tableau vivant in which Plato is exhibiting Socrates to an invisible audience (‘voilà le grand homme!’), Derrida does not necessarily accept this as the final meaning; it simply shows that Derrida’s own meaning has to be deferred by the opinion of another. The second image is a staged photograph, parodying the image of the postcard. Geoffrey Bennington, writer of the “Derridabase”, stands behind Derrida as he is typing at his computer, in the pose of Plato behind Socrates; it is, the inscription runs, a ‘Post card or tableau vivant’.60 A framed copy of the Bodleian postcard sits on the desk, facing the camera and the caption also quotes from the ‘Envoi’ to the book: ‘a hidden pre-text for writing in my own signature behind his back’. It is as if Bennington is ‘dictating’ to Derrida, attempting to convince him of the value of this systematic commentary on his own work, a set of ideas which are entirely Bennington’s own voice (he never quotes directly from Derrida’s texts), but finally he is sending a postcard to himself. A third image echoes the first two: a sixteenth-century frontispiece for The City of God shows Augustine writing at his desk with an angel behind him. The caption confirms Augustine’s place within the ‘epoch of the book’, reading: ‘With copyist’s instruments in his hand, like the Socrates in the Post Card, Saint Augustine seems to be writing to the dictation of the angel behind him’.61 Augustine is colluding in a subjection of human writing to the divine writing of the book as Logos, and the reference to dictation associates this supervising transcendence with voice. There is a classical parallel to this scene in which the author is shown accompanied by a Muse, and sometimes also by his finished book scroll. Other medieval examples significantly show the writer (whether Gospel writer or Church Father) with an image neither of Muse nor angel but the Holy Spirit.62 These images of ‘a voice behind the author’ reinforce a scheme in which ideas in the mind of a subject find their expression first in voice, and only subsequently in a collection of signs in a written text. The thinking subject, independent of a world of signs, imposes self-presence through the voice. There is what Derrida calls a ‘complicity between ideality and voice’, which presumes to bypass the differences of textuality. We may observe that such a scheme shaped (or was shaped by) the ‘Logos doctrine’ of the early Christian theologians, in which God the Father eternally has a

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thought in his mind (logos endiathetos) which at creation is emitted as a spoken word (logos prophorikos).63 Two phases are envisaged in the life of a word: it begins in the mind as a silent thought or reason, and is then spoken out aloud. A motif from Stoic human psychology is thus applied to a Middle-Platonist view of the cosmos, since the projection of the spoken word is envisaged as bridging a gap between two orders of reality, the realm of pure being and ideas in which the absolutely transcendent God exists and the world of becoming which is characterized by time, space and change. By the time of Augustine, Christian theologians had become uneasy about the contrast between the ‘word immanent’ and the ‘word expressed’, as the indistinguishability of thought from mind seemed to underline a Monarchian view of an eternal state of God without Trinitarian differentiation. Augustine, however, reinstated the image by referring it only to the incarnation of the word. His point was that there can be no communication without audible voice, and so in the incarnation the voice of God must sound out in creation.64 When the world is understood to be a network of signs, a theological scheme might be devised in which the Logos doctrine is revived in a more evidently Trinitarian form. When we ask how the world, as created, comes to be a text which points to the Creator, one answer might be the extension of the divine word as voice. One might say that the whole world order is a kind of text, which is deposited from the spoken word of God, just as any text is an extension of an author’s mind and voice. When a piece of writing is seen as the precipitation of a human voice, the text of the world can be envisaged as the crystallizing of the divine voice. The inner conversation of God within the Trinity is expressed outwards in an emitted word or voice. According to this model, the world refers to God as its creator because the voice of the author is embedded or encoded in the text. Any author, it might be said, is absent from his or her writing, while also present within it in the form of his or her intentions. The incarnation of God in Jesus Christ would then be the entrance of the author himself or herself into the text as a speaking subject. As Augustine suggests, the voice that was beyond the text and inside it only indirectly as an author’s intention, enters it directly to address created beings.65 God becomes a human speech agent, since the voice of Christ is identical with that of God the Father. The text is revoiced; the world resonates with the voice of the Creator, as the body of Christ unites with the body of the world in human flesh and Eucharist. The incarnate Word thus mediates between the the voice of God and the text of God. This is an imaginative vision, and can still grip the Christian mind with its poetic as well as intellectual power.66 But there are problems with this way of thinking from a Christian perspective. First, it reinforces a dualistic view of reality in which an intermediary is needed to close an ontological gap between the uncreated creator and the creation. The rich concept of the ‘mediatorship’ of Christ is reduced to bridging a gulf between two worlds. Second, it fails to do justice to the Christian symbol of the Trinity. The symbol directs us towards an eternal speaking within a communion of three persons; so how does this complex, responsive conversation relate to the extrapolation of a single person – the Logos – as a spoken and speaking word? The problem seems to remain even if this agent gives us entrance into a Trinitarian communion, and is at the centre of a Trinitarian conversation. There is a basic weakness in the model of the

The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film 117 projected word, which depends on a single speech agent mediating between God and the created world. The world as a network of signs (‘letter’) needs to be placed in the context of the whole Trinitarian event of God as Spirit, and I intend to say more about this towards the end of the chapter. Third, the scheme depends on a privileging of the spoken voice over writing, and exalts the speaking self in ‘the here and now’ as the controller of the signs of the world. As Derrida has shown in his critique of Husserl, this can end with a kind of domination of others through a voice of command, immediate and inescapable. The voice or breath, of course, plays a key part in language, as Derrida makes clear. There need be no conflict between the voice and writing, since both are ultimately dependent on différance. What makes it possible to transcribe spoken language into writing is the pattern of vocalizations, the phonemics of the language. According to structuralist phonology, the sounds that are ultimately differentiated linguistically are phonemes. But Derrida insists that there is a deeper, originary difference that underlies the play of difference between phonemes and which, while it lets the difference be heard, is inaudible itself: this is différance whose final ‘a’ is silent, in that it could be heard simply as the ‘e’ in différence. Derrida’s neologism ‘différance’ recalls the active participle différant and so underlines ‘difference’ as an event of differing, spatializing and temporalizing.67 This originary event ‘belongs neither to the voice nor to writing in the ordinary sense and it takes place between speech and writing’.68 While Derrida declines several times to identify différance with God, it has a ‘quasi-transcendence’, which places it both outside and inside the text at the same time.69 I want to return later to the way that we might, despite Derrida, relate différance to God as Spirit. For the moment, I want to observe that, theologically, the point is not to dispense with the concept of ‘hearing the voice’ of God in and through the signs of the world or ‘revoicing’ the signs of the world through speech directed towards God – for instance in the liturgy. What should be resisted, in my view, is the privileging of voice over text, understanding text in the widest sense as the textuality of a world, which is sign bearing. The ‘voice’ of God should be understood as one metaphor among others for the apprehension of God by created beings, and for God’s action of self-giving and self-expression in a created world. In finding a reason for the character of the world as sign bearing, we should not be dependent on the concept of voice and so be bound to a logocentric scheme which implies a dualism of orders of being. In the popular culture of the movie, we can detect both a presentation and a critique of the dominating voice, and notably in Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books (1991).70 We notice in Bee Season that Eliza is portrayed as being able to spell words because she first speaks them out aloud. This is more forcibly expressed in Prospero’s Books, a version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where Prospero speaks the lines of all the characters out loud and so summons them into being. While Shakespeare portrays Prospero as controlling and manipulating his world through his magic arts, behind which we can glimpse the theatrical arts of the dramatist, Greenaway portrays him as ‘prime originator’.71 Shakespeare’s Prospero only creates the storm and other illusions that befall the inhabitants and travellers on the island, but Greenaway more evidently merges the roles of magus and dramatist/Shakespeare: with the possible exceptions of

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Miranda, Ariel and Caliban, the world of the island and its people is actually created by Prospero. In the intention of Greenaway: Prospero plans a drama to right the wrongs done to him. He invents characters to flesh out his imaginary fantasy to steer his enemies into his power, writes their dialogue and having written it, he speaks the lines aloud, shaping the characters so powerfully through the words that they are conjured before us.72

The first part of the film thus vividly portrays the Western tradition of logocentrism. The Creator (Prospero) has a kind of transcendent book or 24 wonder-working books which contain the epitome of all knowledge in an ideal state (the ‘Book of Water’, the ‘Book of Mirrors’, the ‘Bestiary’, the ‘Anatomy of Birth’ and so on), unified in one very large book, the ‘Book of Mythology’ which Greenaway describes as the ‘example book, the template for Prospero’s imaginings to people the island’. These books and the book of dialogues which Prospero writes himself in a beautiful italic hand, are the pattern from which Prospero speaks and so makes creatures in a particular time and place. The dominance and mastery exercised by the voice is underlined by the fact that until Prospero accepts rebuke from Ariel and turns from revenge to compassion and forgiveness, none of the characters speak themselves. Prospero voices their words for them. The film works towards making them truly human, which happens at the point when they speak in their own voices, recognized as truly ‘other’ and no longer an extension of Prospero’s own subjectivity. At the moment when Prospero declares that ‘the rarer action is/In virtue than in vengeance’,73 Prospero breaks his quill in two, all 24 books are snapped shut and are thrown, one by one, into Prospero’s great Roman bath, accompanied by fireworks and explosions. This corresponds to Prospero’s declared intent, in Shakespeare’s play, ‘I’ll break my staff . . . I’ll drown my book’.74 In Greenaway’s version, the post-structuralist overthrow of the transcendent text is underlined by the survival of a human text. Caliban saves two books from the conflagration – the plays of Shakespeare and the thin volume that Prospero has been writing. As Ferdinand and Miranda are joined together just before the the final shots of the film, the text of the Tempest – which is not the manuscript Prospero has been seen writing – bound into the first Folio Plays as the first section, unscrolls as an overlay on the screen, in large gilt letters. One critic, Peter Donaldson, maintains that the film thus ends with a powerful image that ‘remystifies the book as the inscription of an originating discourse’,75 but it seems significant to me that the book presented at the end is not the transcendent text from which Prospero has been voicing creation, but the material text made by human artifice. For Shakespeare himself, the breaking of the staff and the drowning of the book seems to be far more about the limitation of human dramatic arts than the destruction of a transcendental signified. Poignantly, the playwright seems to recognize the limits of human art in the face of the unknown future and the depth of evil in the human heart, as Prospero sets sail for Milan. We have noticed that Antonio remains silent in the face of Prospero’s forgiveness, and it seems that all Prospero’s arts cannot compel the response of reconciliation. In his last speech, in which he asks for the prayer of the audience (‘Now my charms are all o’erthrown’), he continues surprisingly to speak still in the persona of Prospero, where we might expect the convention to operate in which

The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film 119 the actor steps forward in his own identity to ask for applause. The effect of this device is to break down the barriers between the drama and life, the theatre and the world outside. Greenaway, it seems, has the same intention in mind, noting that ‘Prospero/ Shakespeare breaks the filmic illusion by appealing directly to his audience’.76 Perhaps the combination of Shakespeare and Greenaway leaves us with the sense that while human beings may break free from the dominant voice of a transcendent authority, they remain finite and fragile creatures, their own textual productions remaining vulnerable in the face of evil and death. This lends itself to a theological view of the textuality of the world, as we shall see. Prospero’s Books is an extraordinary reflection of what might be called a contemporary ‘technoculture’.77 As Donaldson demonstrates, it contains aspects of ‘technoporn’, ‘technophilia’ and theories of artificial intelligence and virtual reality.78 It and Derrida’s three postcard images leave us with the theological question: how can we envisage the creative voice of God in a way that does not reduce the sign-bearing bodies of the world to a technical product of a controlling Logos?

4  Life-giving death in the text So far, we have been exploring the reversal – both explicit and implicit – of the Pauline dictum that ‘the letter kills and the spirit gives life’. Jacques Derrida has been our spokesman for at least one trend in our culture which has envisaged a transcendent spirit as death dealing, and the material letter as full of life. I have already suggested, however, that the real target of this critical thinking is the polarization of spirit and letter. One indication of this is the way that the life-giving text, in the never-ending play of its signifiers, also brings us face-to-face with death. In the first place, there is Derrida’s insight that an endless life of expansive meaning in a text can only come from a kind of death of the author. Returning to the visual image of Plato and Socrates, Derrida reflects that writing a book is like sending a postcard to the one whom one loves; the ‘letter’ represents a ‘death sentence’, since ‘within every sign already, every mark, there is distancing’. The postal system implies the absence of the writer, so that the writer of the letter ‘does not arrive’ and there is always ‘destination without [personal] address’. Yet, as the writer empties himself out in the direction of the other who is ‘quite alive outside of me’, the other ‘sends him back’ so the writer has sent the text ‘back to himself from himself ’.79 Writing is always in view of another, and so ‘I write to death on a skin bigger than I’. Writing, as we have seen, is a ‘cutting’ into the skin of the author and the text at the same time. ‘Death strolls between letters’80 in another sense as well; death is the final ‘otherness’ that we try to suppress but which always emerges from writing. Structuralist critics had found a pattern of myths and images in written texts by identifying alternatives and polarities – good or evil, higher or lower, inside or outside, male or female, presence or absence. Post-structuralists such as Derrida point out that the alternative, the disruptive other which is excluded, will always re-emerge. It just cannot be suppressed. Some kind of untidiness, some impasse will occur in the narrative, which upsets the closure so that the end is ruptured. Like the pod of a plant bursting open and scattering

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its seeds, the end of a text bursts and spreads its words.81 There is always ‘surplus’ of meaning, and so always new life. Derrida suggests that a major otherness which we try to exclude is death; joining letters together to form lines, the book closes the gaps and attempts ‘to fill the hole . . . the dangerous hole’ of death.82 While the concords of fiction console us in the face of death, Derrida stresses that the other remains. In completing itself, the book actually reveals that it includes the other it struggles to exclude. Death, for Derrida, is thus a ‘gift’ in the sense that all gifts stand outside the processes of exchange and subvert the closed structures of commerce.83 Accepting death means accepting the temporality of life, and perhaps (as Heidegger maintained) being able to unify the fragments of time in the face of this boundary. Derrida finds his piece called Circumfession to be a project on facing death – ‘dying is a word I discover at the age of 59’84 and ‘je me donne la mort’85 – and he associates this with his experience of writing at a computer: my own skin thus torn off . . . along the crural artery where my books find their inspiration, they are written first in skin, they read the death sentence held in reserve on the other side of the screen for in the end (enfin) since the computer I have my memory like a sky in front of me, all the succor, all the  threats of the sky, the pelliculated  simulacrum of another absolute subjectivity, a transcendence. . . . the sublime scission . . . to learn how to love . . . open again the wound of circumcision. . .86

What is written in the very skin of the author is torn off, or distanced from him in the process of setting it down in material signs. In the first place, it is set down in the computer memory, on the other side of the computer screen which rises in front of him like a sky or like Augustine’s ‘firmament’ of scripture (Augustine, we recall, had associated the ‘skin’ of the parchment with the book of the heavens). This is an ‘unmasking’ and ‘desquamating’ of the self, a compulsive self-flaying. The machine that provides him with his sky-skin ironically also confronts him with an artificial memory of all his writings, which is a kind of transcendent or absolute subjectivity. We recall that Derrida’s partner in this project, Geoffrey Bennington, had set out to provide a systematic account of Derrida’s thought: ‘the guiding idea of the exposition’, he writes in the preface, ‘comes from computers: G. B. would have liked to systematize J. D.’s thought to the point of turning it into an interactive programme’. Derrida’s comment on the ‘Derridabase’, or Derrida database, is that this is a ‘theologic programme elaborated by Geoffrey who remains very close to God’. Such an attempt at ‘absolute knowledge’ is effectively part of the Western tradition of logocentrism: the letters ‘SA’ stand both for ‘savoir absolu’ and for ‘Saint Augustin’. Derrida’s computer thus simulates the absolute subjectivity of a divine sky-writing, and thanks to this high-tech simulacrum he is able to ‘reconstitute the partitioned and transcendant structure of religion . . . in the internal circumcision of “my life”’.87 Returning to the image of the angel dictating to St Augustine, he remarks, ‘the angel that last night took hold of my computer, dooming once more invention to dispossession’ was ‘scarcely my own voice’.88 Writing then, is a kind of death in that it does violence to the author, here Derrida, in tearing his skin from him and opening the possibility that it will be reduced to a

The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film 121 systematic database which is a mere imitation (simulacrum) of the idealities of the spirit. At the same time, putting Derrida’s works in a digital store is a reminder of his own death; it is a death sentence held in the computer’s memory, since (as Mark Vessey suggests) it constitutes ‘the complete works of Jacques Derrida’ to be published posthumously.89

5  The spirit that gives life If the life-giving letter is marked by death, both Heidegger and Derrida also think that ‘spirit’, if interpreted correctly, can give life. I have already mentioned that Derrida is not convinced by Heidegger’s attempts to reinterpret spirit as a voluntary openness to Being, while still hoping to undermine the opposition between subject and object. However, in his book Of Spirit, he looks more more favourably on two further attempts by Heidegger to use spirit positively – as a movement of ‘returning’ and (even more) as a movement of fire or flame – these two approaches to spirit being developed in Heidegger’s commentaries on German poetry. Here, then, we have the intertextual complexity of Derrida commenting on Heidegger commenting on Hölderlin and Trakl. First, in his lectures on ‘The Essence of the Poet as Demigod’ (delivered in 1942),90 Heidegger aims to speak of the ‘spirit which grounds historically’ (der geschichtlich gründende Geist),91 and he focuses upon some lines from Friedrich Hölderlin: nemlich zu Hauss ist der Geist nicht im Anfang, nicht an der Quell. Ihn zehret die Heimath.92 [‘For the spirit is at home/[but] not in the beginning nor at the source. The homeland lacerates it’.]

Heidegger here, Derrida says, recognizes that Hölderlin is borrowing from Hegel in thinking of Geist as that which ‘returns’ and ‘unifies’; the notion of the ‘gathering spirit’ belongs to a metaphysic of Absolute Spirit as self-thinking thought, which comes to be ‘at home’ in returning to itself.93 This assumes a metaphysic that, as we have seen, both Heidegger and Derrida are opposing. For Hegel, time and history are subordinate to a timeless movement of spirit and Heidegger has already defined spirit against Hegel as ‘the primordial temporalizing of temporality’;94 spirit has not fallen into time, but is the primordial, unfragmented time out of which our existence has fallen. However, Derrida speaks for Heidegger as well as himself in claiming that, as a poet, Hölderlin is not trapped in this metaphysical system. He is using the words in a way that is true to his own experience as a poet. What is fundamental to this experience of spirit is simply ‘a movement, a trajectory’.95 We are always dealing, the poet witnesses, with a movement of turning and returning which has a restlessness of never being at home. This is a movement that can be symbolized for Hölderlin as the ‘infinite desire’ of God and even the ‘sighing and suffering’ of divine love.96 Spirit as pneuma is to be understood as the ‘breathing’ of sighing and longing, not the breath of a self-imposing voice. In Heidegger’s formulation, this is a movement that ‘assigns to every entity the sending and the

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mission of its being’; this is the ‘historicity’ of the human being, its Geschick or Schiksal.97 Above all, this is a movement of ‘returning home’ which is ‘still to come’. The Hegelian return has been transformed poetically into a journey, which is always to come. It is not a timeless reality into which all earthly objects are always being gathered up, but (as Derrida expresses it) ‘the sending remains for man a future [avenir] or the to-come [à-venir] of a coming’. Derrida proposes that ‘Returning itself remains to come . . . of coming in its very coming’.98 At this point, Derrida seems less to be exegeting Heidegger than expressing his own pre-occupations. Elsewhere he finds the appeal to ‘come’ to be ‘the apocalyptic tone newly adopted in philosophy’. As echoing throughout the Apocalypse of St John, for instance, the invitation ‘come’ evokes a final unveiling of meaning which is always postponed; ‘come’ resists any assimilation to ideology because one cannot deduce its origin and the issuing authority; it cannot be made into an object to be categorized and it points to a place that cannot be described.99 The apocalyptic tone of every text, Derrida suggests, is the appeal to ‘come’ and find more within its superabundant store of meaning generated by the movement of différance behind and within it. The appropriate symbol for this ‘coming which is always to come’ is, thinks Heidegger, given by Hölderlin in the phrase Fast wäre der Beseeler verbrandt (‘The one who animates the soul would be almost consumed’).100 Elsewhere, Hölderlin cries, Jetzt komme, Feuer (‘Now come, O fire’).101 The poet who gives a place for the ‘coming’ or movement of the spirit will be almost burnt up, almost reduced to ashes. Here, suggests Derrida, Heidegger has found the definition of the true subject he was looking for in Being and Time, the subiectum or hypokeimenon which underlies the conscious and thinking ‘I-ness’;102 it is not a centre of will but that which gives space for the spirit which is always to come and which is always fire. This is the spirit that gives life, comments Derrida: spirit ‘gives psyche: it does not only give it up in death’.103 In Heidegger’s later essay ‘Language in the Poem’ (1953), a ‘conversation’ (Gespräch) with the poet Georg Trakl,104 Derrida suggests that Heidegger broadens and elaborates his conviction that spirit is fire. ‘Doch was ist der Geist?’ asks Heidegger, ‘What is spirit?’, and answers: ‘der Geist ist das Flammende’, and further on, ‘Der Geist is Flamme’.105 Derrida construes this as meaning that spirit-in-flames indicates both that spirit catches fire or is affected by fire and that it gives fire or inflames. This is a moving out of the self towards the other and a receiving from the other (and it was for this reason, we might observe, that early Christian thinkers used the image of fire or one torch lit from another, for the Trinity106). Derrida quotes with approval from Heidegger in his commentary on Trakl, adding his own comments in brackets: Spirit is what flares up, and it is perhaps only as such that it blows [that it is a breath, ein Wehendes]. Trakl does not understand spirit primarily as pneuma, not spiritually . . . but as the flame which flames [or inflames itself, entflammt: what is proper to spirit is this auto-affective spontaneity which has need of no exteriority to catch fire or set fire, to pass ecstatically outside itself; it gives itself Being outside itself, as we shall see: spirit in flames – gives and catches fire all by itself, for better and for worse, since it also affects itself with evil and is the passage outside itself] . . . it displaces [or deposes or frightens, transports or transposes, deports. . .].107

The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film 123 In these last comments of Derrida there is the warning that such Geist is ambiguous. The movement outwards, giving itself outside itself, can easily become an impulse to go beyond itself in order to return to itself. Thus ‘evil is spiritual’ (geistlich).108 Spirit as flame stresses the duplicity of spirit – it can give light and warmth or it can destroy. Here perhaps Heidegger himself is making deliberate reference to the evils of the Nazi era. Derrida, in fact, thinks that, while Heidegger has generally opposed these in the name of spirit, he edges uncomfortably towards them when he thinks that the idea of spirit as ‘flame’ rather than breath can only be expressed in German and so is unique to German culture: Geist, argues Heidegger, is associated with Old German gheis, meaning ‘to be thrown, transported outside oneself ’. Derrida describes this as a lapse about ‘spirit in its spirit and in its letter’,109 and so we might say that, used like this, both the spirit and the letter bring death. Derrida presents Heidegger as thinking that this movement of spirit as flame is an originary movement, a primordial movement of Being to which the attentive human mind can be attuned in a pre-conceptual state, and which makes the Christian and Hegelian concepts of ‘the return of the spirit’ possible. Flame in this sense is prior to ‘breath’ (pneuma), so that it also lies at the origin of ‘voice’; it is not voice that is originary in language. ‘Soul’ indicates a giving of space for this movement and when this happens the soul shares the journey of spirit and can be presented poetically as a stranger, not in Platonic exile on the earth, but on the way to inhabit the earth: Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden. ‘Yes, the soul is a stranger upon the earth’, writes Trakl.110 Derrida doubts whether Heidegger has succeeded in establishing a terminological difference in Trakl between geistlich (spirit-as-flame) and geistig, the latter representing the supposed Christian-Platonic opposition of spirit (as breath) and body.111 He points out that Heidegger is himself quite inconsistent in his use of this terminology. But he does think that there is a difference of concept, and seems to be attracted by the ‘archioriginary’ movement of spirit as burning. In a significant passage, he deliberately departs from the exegesis of Heidegger and gives his own account, whether or not Heidegger would agree. Writing about the ‘promise’ there is in all language, he comments:112 It remains to find out whether this Versprechen is not the promise which, opening every speaking, makes possible the very question and therefore precedes it without belonging to it: the dissymmetry of an affirmation, of a yes before all opposition of yes and no. The call of Being – every question already responds to it, the promise has already taken place wherever language comes. Language always . . . comes down to [revient à] the promise. This would also be the promise of spirit.

The inflaming movement of spirit is a promise, a promise of always coming, a ‘yes’ which lies behind all signs in the world and all signifiers of language. It is an openended desire that cannot be confined within the network of linguistic signs; it is open beyond the web of language, reaching after a ‘primordial yes’ which Derrida finds reflected in the final ‘yes’ of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses.113 This is not – we may say – a subject, self-presence or voice, but an ‘event’: that is, as Derrida puts it, ‘a coming of the event, Ereignis or Geschehen, which we must think in order to approach the spiritual, the Geistliche hidden under the Christian or Platonic representation’.114 Rather as Heidegger uses quotation marks for positive appeals to

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‘spirit’ in his earlier work, Derrida stages a dialogue between Christian theologians and Heidegger at the end of his book Of Spirit and puts into the mouth of the theologian the suggestion that this ‘archi-originary’ movement of spirit might have the potential to unite all Abrahamic religions.115 From this dense inter-textual discussion emerges, I suggest, Derrida’s own identification of spirit as the event of promise, aptly symbolized as flame; this should be placed alongside his other attempts to speak of what is truly originary in all signs – that is, différance and khora. These are not to be systematized, but are complementary approaches to the ‘wholly other’ that is inside and outside language at the same time. Derrida’s use of the concept of khora follows Heidegger’s borrowing of the term from Plato’s Timaeus where it denotes the ‘space’ which is neither being nor non-being, but a kind of ‘interval’ between.116 According to Derrida, it is impossible to speak about this ‘place’, but it ‘dictates an obligation by its very impossibility; it is necessary to speak of it’.117 Like spirit and différance, it points to ‘an unstable, mysterious, ungrounding origin’.118 It indicates an ‘otherness’ that disturbs all attempts to establish either full presence or full absence; it is a critique of immanence as well as transcendence, constantly breaking open boundaries and upsetting rigid ideas as to what is ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the reality established by language. It is necessary to speak about this ‘place’ of the Other in order to keep the chain of verbal signifiers open to the promise and the desire which is at the heart of difference. Feminist postmodern thinkers such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have further developed the concept of khora to stress the element of non-violent desire (against the will to power of Nietszche) and the effect of the traces of the khora in opening language towards the transcendent. Particularly significant here, in the light of Derrida’s discussion of spirit, is the idea of originary movements. In Kristeva’s thought, the khora is a place of primordial rhythms; it is a womb-like, nurturing place of origin, a space that contains the archetypal impressions of love and relationships, which precede language and sexual experience.119 Traces of the khora in the consciousness can break through verbal signifiers, subverting the usual order of symbols and reaching towards something altogether ‘other’.

6  Trinity, spirit and life It is time to draw together some of the threads from this exploration of concepts of ‘spirit’ and its relation to ‘letter’ or sign in our present culture. It is time also to begin, from the perspective of Christian theology, to answer the questions that I have scattered throughout this chapter. We might begin with the question as to how and why the material bodies of the world are sign bearing, pointing (in a Christian view) towards their creator. Put another way, why does the letter lead us to spirit? I have been critical of the notion of a ‘deposit’ of signs from the voice of God, rooted in the early Logos doctrine of the Church Fathers and I suggest an alternative model which is more participative. We may think of the world as text, not because it is a deposit of a word spoken outwards from God, but because it is in God. The whole created world exists in the space which God makes for it within the divine life, sharing

The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film 125 in the pattern of relations which are like those between a father and a son, always opened up to new depths and a new future by a spirit of promise. The network of signs is thus formed and impressed by the movement of these relations. When matter is held within the interweaving self-communication of God, it takes the form of signs. Its power to signify comes from being embraced within the inner flow of divine movements of love, not from being the result of an outflow from God. This means that the voice of God is not ‘encoded’ in matter. Unlike the relation of a human author to a book, in which the author is personally absent from his or her writing and present only in the form of authorial intentions (in the kind of ‘scission’ from the text that Derrida describes), if the creation exists in God then the creator must always be present in the creation as a hidden or veiled presence. Where it is appropriate to speak of the ‘voice’ of God, the world is always the place where address happens, where God is actually speaking the word. It will be readily seen that there is some affinity here with Derrida’s concept of spirit (adopted and adapted from Heidegger) as an originary movement like that of ‘coming’ or ‘burning’ which is ecstatic love, going out from itself on a journey which creates human mission in history. This is a non-objectifiable rhythm of promise, always opening language up to new possibilities, giving life to the letter. It cannot be reduced to a transcendent subject, eternal book or dominating voice. Despite Derrida’s reluctance to do so, we can name this originary movement of burning fire as God – or rather we can discern a whole network of movements, which are the relations within the Trinity. If we are to meet Derrida’s objection to a ‘transcendental signified’ conceived as an ‘absolute subjectivity’, then it is essential not to conceive of the triune persons as subjects or selves which would validate human subjects and here we might recall the (often rather playful) concept of ‘subsistent relations’ within the Christian tradition,120 in identifying the persons as no more or less than movements of relationship. Taking a clue from Karl Barth’s insistence that ‘with regard to the being of God, the word “event” or “act” is final’,121 we may speak of God as an ‘event of relationships’. There is, I suggest, a resonance here with Derrida’s speaking about the spirit as ‘event’ or ‘happening’. It may seem odd to refer to the hypostases or ‘distinct identities’ conceived by the Church Fathers as relations rather than persons who have relations. But talk about God as ‘an event of relationships’ is not the objectifying language of a spectator, but the language of a participant. It only makes sense in terms of our involvement in the complex network of relationships in which God happens, and so has an apophatic quality to it. It is both ‘saying’ and ‘unsaying’ at the same time. Metaphors will therefore be required to express the experience of this participation, and ‘voicing’ is certainly one appropriate image. When the New Testament portrays prayer as being ‘to’ the Father, ‘through’ the Son and ‘in’ the Spirit, it reflects the Christian experience that when we pray to God as Father, we find our address fitting into a movement like that of speech between a son and father, our response of ‘yes’ (‘Amen’) leaning upon a childlike ‘yes’ of humble obedience that is already there, glorifying a father.122 At the same time, we find ourselves involved in a movement of self-giving like that of a father sending forth a son, a movement which the early theologians called ‘eternal generation’ and which we experience in the mission of God in history. Thus, further metaphors needed to indicate this participation are birthing and sending, the latter recalling Heidegger’s reference to Geschick and Schickungen.123

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These movements of response and mission are interwoven by a third, as the participants find that they are continually being opened up to new depths of relationship and to new possibilities of the future by a movement that can only be called ‘Spirit’; for this third movement, the scriptures offer a whole series of impressionistic images – a wind blowing, breath stirring, oil trickling, wings beating, water flowing and fire burning – evoking an activity which disturbs, opens, deepens and provokes. The traditional formulation that the Spirit ‘proceeds from the Father through the Son’ points to movement, which renews all relations ‘from’ and ‘to’ the Other. Thus, through our participation, we can identify three distinct movements of ecstatic, outward-going love.124 While I have used the traditional male terms ‘father and son’, the movements I have described cannot be gender specific and we can also express the experience of participation as being like a relationship from a mother to a daughter or any combination of these metaphors. Such participation is a form of knowing which bridges the gap between subject and object. If God is related to the world, then the world must be participating in God, immersed into the movement, the interweaving dance of these relations. This God is not a kind of remote mind, which stands beyond the signs in the world and their differences from each other, a complexity such as semiotics uncovers. The triune God enjoys a richness of life which results precisely from the infinite difference between Father, Son and Spirit. Indeed, we might perceive an affinity here between the event of ‘differing’ (différant) which Derrida finds as originary to all voice and writing, and the differential relating which constitutes the life of the Trinity.125 This difference is the origin of all material signs, and the triune God is committed unconditionally to the world of signs for which room is made within the fellowship of the divine life. God is thus never without textuality, spirit never without letter, although God as Spirit is more than text, since the relations which are God are uncreated and self-existent. This is a true transcendence, not an exclusion from the materiality of the world but an inexhaustibility of love, imagination and creativity. The space in which created beings exist is opened up between movements of divine relationship. The relationships do not exist in a space, but create the space within them. So this space is not one between subjects, speech agents or speakers of the word; it is between movements of relation that can, from one aspect only, be described as speech. Among the other myriad dimensions of this relationship, we must mention the movement of suffering, which is like a father relating to a son as one who has lost his beloved child and like a son relating to a father whose nearness and intimacy he has – for the moment – lost. Other metaphors which have appeared in the Christian tradition emphasize movement, such as the flowing of water, the patterns of a dance (with a wordplay on the term perichoresis)126 and the rhythms of music. It is in these uncreated relationships that created beings are embraced, as a child in the womb of its mother and in them they become sign bearing. Signs in the world indicate God, not by objective reference or description, but by prompting us to participate in God, drawing us into the swirling flow of the divine life. The Christian affirmation of the incarnation of the Logos in Christ need not, then, be seen as the validation of a ‘logocentrism’. To speak of the embodying of the divine

The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film 127 Word is not to suppose that a divine subject has become a human speech agent. Rather, all the speech of Christ, all the ways he sees the world, all his acts fit exactly into the movement in the Trinity that we recognize as being like a son relating to a father. The relation of the human person Christ to the one whom he calls his heavenly father can be mapped exactly onto the relation in God which is like that between a son (or daughter) and a father (or mother). His prayer, saying ‘Abba, Father’, and his hearing of a Father’s speech to him at the baptism and transfiguration, saying ‘this is my beloved son’; his cry of desolation, ‘My God why have you forsaken me’; his offering a welcome to the outcasts of society; all these fit into the movements of the Trinity which are like speech, suffering and generous love. Derrida’s use of both ‘coming’ and ‘burning’ for the event of the spirit prompts us to distinguish God as spirit and the person of the Holy Spirit. We may use the metaphor of ‘spirit’ for the whole dynamic being of God, not as indicating immateriality or lack of body (for God always uses created bodies to communicate) but as indicating dynamic movement. This is not spirit set over against letter as spirit against matter, but a ‘fluidity’ (to use a Derridean metaphor for writing) of life and love which is embodied in the letter. Within this network of relations, however, we can distinguish directions of movement and one ‘flow’ is characterized by promise or by the opening up of relations to a new depth and a new future. This we may call ‘Holy Spirit’, and such a movement makes clear that God is not a ‘transcendental signified’ in the sense of being immune from temporality, as a self-presence in an ‘eternal present’. Rather, this movement of promise indicates that there is, in Heideggerian terms, a ‘primordial temporalizing of temporality’ in God. Some metaphors, such as breath and fire, may be more appropriate to such a movement than to others in God. While Derrida, of course, has no concern to make such distinctions, we might say that the movement of ‘coming’ he identifies is appropriate for the whole dance of relations in which the world is held. Another question which I asked early on was how we might preserve the notion of the human self when the conscious subject is itself shaped by the signs of language and – as a constellation of signs – empties itself out in the direction of others. We may now see that, held within movements of self-giving in God, the human self can leave itself behind without fear of losing its being. The ecstatic movements of love in God always enhance personal identity; to reuse an image of Derrida, to write a postcard to a lover is to send oneself out of oneself and receive oneself back at the same time. To deny that the persons of the Trinity are individual subjects does not have the implication that human persons have no individual subjectivity, though this, of course, can never be conceived except in terms of relations with others. The human subject must not seek to dominate the world around it like a mere collection of objects (as if it is prior to the signifiers it uses), but it remains a subject, with finite boundaries. As both Derrida and Heidegger admit, it is hard to conceive of a responsible self and to withstand totalitarianism without some concept of a human subject. But this is precisely the difference between uncreated and created, between spirit and the place in the world that makes room for spirit. The created person will be a subject that has relations; the uncreated ‘person’ is pure relation. The analogy required in talking about God hence does not lie between human and divine persons,

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but between human and divine relations.127 What is analogous to God is not a human person, but the personal relationships that flow between people – in the family, in the church, in society. This chapter began by observing an overlap between the pairing of spirit and letter (which, it should now be clear, is not a polarity) and voice and text. We may end by considering a Hollywood film which plays on the relation between voice and text in our contemporary cyberculture. The romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail (1998)128 demonstrates the capacity of cybertext to create relations, when it is often accused of depersonalizing them.129 It thus forms an interesting counterpart to Prospero’s Books, where the filmic technique of cyber-generation is a cipher for a dehumanizing control by a transcendent text and voice. This comedy portrays two residents of New York who own bookshops of very different characters. Kathleen Kelly owns ‘The Shop Around the Corner’, a small neighbourhood children’s bookshop, while Joe Fox is joint-owner of the family business, a giant chain of book superstores, which offers huge stocks, heavily discounted prices and espresso coffee bars. When the film opens, Kathleen and Joe do not know each other under their real names, but have, in fact, been conducting an anonymous email correspondence under concealed identities. Through the internet they believe they have come to know each other at a deep level and to understand each other. Before long, a crisis comes for Kathleen: Fox Books opens a new superstore close by her shop on the West Side of Manhattan, and her business – with all that it stands for in human relationships – is threatened. With all that she cares for about to be destroyed, she confides in the one friend that she has come to trust, her internet correspondent. But when she meets Joe Fox in the flesh, not realizing that she has already met him on the internet, she takes an instant dislike to someone she regards as interested in books only as a commercial product ‘like cans of olive-oil’. He finds her to be moralistic, hopelessly sentimental and unbusinesslike. As they talk at a party and in coffee shops and as she takes the fight to survive to the media, they seem to bring out the worst in each other. With their words, during the day they hurt and wound each other, while at night they resort to the internet to pour out their regret to each other for the way they are behaving. Ironically, he gives her the strength to believe in herself and to resist the threat, while she puts him in touch with a more sensitive side of himself that he tends to suppress. This story of communication on two levels stands as a paradigm for the relation between the concepts of ‘text’, ‘voice’ and ‘presence’. Written text is placed alongside the spoken word. One kind of communication seems to open up possibilities, while the other closes the relationship down. Where the voice kills, the letter gives life. Both characters attempt to dominate the other through their voice, wanting the other to be an extension of themselves (‘more of the same’), not recognizing the other for what he or she really is. At the same time, the film itself is a distinct text, a network of visual and auditory signs, which comes into encounter with the text of the viewers’ own lives. If it is good art, there will be a healthy and life-giving intertextuality. If it is poor art, it will remain a mere fantasy of desire. The positive view given of the email relation suggests that written texts, even cybertexts, can help to open us up to a sense of difference and otherness. Perhaps this

The Late-modern Reversal of Spirit and Letter: Derrida, Augustine and Film 129 is the attraction of the email in our age; in the sphere of cyberspace the participants are often released from the restrictions and inhibitions that face-to-face encounters can bring, they can take on new identities and try out new experiences. The danger is that, while the ‘cyber-letter’ can give life, this world of the text can also become self-enclosed, a self-referencing web in which the users are trapped, unable to make connections between the text on the screen and the ‘text’ of their everyday lives. What is important to establish is not an exact correspondence between one system of signs and another, as if one can be a mirror image of another, but the integration of the two in a genuine ‘intertextuality’. On the other hand, the film demonstrates that there is a temptation to think that in using the voice to communicate directly with others, in a bodily meeting, we are avoiding the ambiguous and complicated medium of signs. The characters imagine that they are achieving a direct presence to the other, that the voice somehow makes an immediate link between their consciousnesses and we see all too clearly that this fails to happen for a large part of the film. They exemplify what Derrida calls the illusion of ‘that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism: absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning’.130 Critics of the film are divided as to whether written word and voiced encounter are finally brought together in a convincing way, or whether the outcome is simply a sentimental ending. When the truth of their identity is revealed, despite the fact that Joe’s firm has closed down her shop, Kathleen has sufficiently come to know Joe in the flesh as to avow: ‘I wanted it to be you’. Whatever the critical judgement of plot and character,131 the interest of the film remains the exploration of the relation between written text and voice, a dramatic motif which is much older than the film itself.132 In the deep structure of the film, there is a call for some more originary impulse that will resolve the tension between voice and text and which will also overcome the problems that lie in each mode of language. Voice tends towards domination, where written text tends towards self-enclosure and the dangers of fantasy. Both modes show, moreover, a danger of lapsing into legalism and ideology; in both forms, for instance, Joe constantly relies on a mantra picked up from another text, the film The Godfather: ‘It’s not personal, it’s business’. The Apostle Paul’s statement that ‘the letter kills’ seems to mean that it becomes deadly when a legalistic principle which merely protects the self is applied within any network of signs, whether a religious text or the life of a community which uses age-old images and symbols. We can equally add that ‘the voice kills’ in these circumstances too. There is a sense that what is needed is the forward movement of a spirit that lies behind and beyond text and voice, a non-objectifiable spirit of promise opening up the future, issuing the invitation ‘come’. This is a spirit that is not to be merely identified with voice, as Derrida urges. Since the film is a romantic comedy, we are not surprised that the spirit here takes the form of love. This is not a trivial perception, despite critical denigration of the genre of romantic comedy. After all, in considering spirit, Heidegger had quoted Schelling to the effect that ‘spirit . . . is the breath of love. But it is love which is the Most High. It is what was present before ground and existence were (in their separation)’.133 To say that the triune God is, in self-differencing, this movement of love is not to demote the art form of the film

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to a mere illustration of theology. It is to find this movement in the story itself and in all the actual situations in the world that the story echoes, or into which the story is told. God, we may say, is not a stifling transcendental signified, because God has committed God’s own self to the text of the world and this commitment is itself the movement of spirit.

7

Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ‘On Religion’ Günter Bader

If the diversity of its uses is reduced to its most fundamental level, the Pauline antithesis ‘The letter kills, but the Spirit makes alive’ oscillates between a hermeneutical and a theological pole. As has been argued in the first chapter of this volume, throughout the history of the interpretation and reception of 2 Cor. 3.6 the positions adopted have been situated between these two poles. As is always the case with polarities, even when one pole is maintained at a maximum, the other is nevertheless minimally preserved. There is no hermeneutical understanding of spirit and letter, however strong, without there also being an implicit degree, however minimal, of the theological understanding and vice versa. This distinction between a hermeneutical and a theological level remains fundamental to any scholarly engagement with 2 Cor. 3.6 therefore, whether from the perspective of exegesis, systematic theology or history of interpretation. In  the history of theology, the hermeneutical level was originally associated with the figure of Origen, and the theological with Augustine. For all their continuing interdependence  – so the conventional explanation goes – Origen comes into play with a strong Platonic element, identifiable by its exegetical methods and by allegory; Augustine, it is proposed, in contrast succeeded in drawing out the specifically Pauline sense of antithesis, which has to do, not with the difference between signifier and signified, but with that between law and grace, old and new covenant. Once it is understood that the force field within which the possible interpretations of Spirit and letter are positioned is in its essentials outlined by the binaries hermeneutical-theological (and correspondingly) either signifier-signified or lawgrace, the criterion presents itself for determining the best possible interpretation of 2 Cor. 3.6. Obviously, the best interpretation would be the one that shows, against the natural trend of exegesis, that the maximally theological interpretation is at the same time the maximally hermeneutical interpretation and vice versa. Whether or not we already have good arguments for this can for the moment remain undecided, as the foundations of the interpretation of 2 Cor. 3.6, previously viewed as valid, are being undermined in our age. They are not only being undermined, they are being reversed.

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If it went uncontested for centuries in the (‘Western’) consensus that in the sense of 2 Cor. 3.6 the spirit is always to be preferred over the letter and if there existed even in this unambiguous judgement in favour of the spirit a harmonious interplay between theology and hermeneutics, then it is clear that this pre-supposition is currently rapidly disappearing. To be sure, it was always necessary to check and when necessary to cut back, any possible enthusiastic (in Luther’s terminology ‘schwärmerisch’) misuse of the priority of the spirit, but then this always involved the fundamental recognition of the antithesis in its conventional, Pauline form. The idea that it is not only some disagreeable consequences of the antithesis, but the antithesis itself, which stand in need of correction, appears as a novum of our times. The current revision of the Pauline antithesis takes the form of a reversal. Out of the conventional formula ‘spirit and letter’ comes ‘letter and spirit’. Now the interest turns from ‘the spirit of the letter’ to ‘the letter of the spirit’. Now, without it being a particularly bold move to make, the first hurdle is jumped with the claim, directly reversing Paul, that it is the letter which makes alive.1 And even the second hurdle, which if anything stands even higher, to the effect that it must correspondingly be the spirit which kills, no longer puts up serious resistance.2 Ultimately, the conventional Pauline statement that ‘the letter kills, but the Spirit makes alive’ has transformed itself into its opposite: that the letter makes alive but the spirit kills. And what is so astounding about this is that it takes place not only before our eyes, but also with our spontaneous approval. It thus takes place necessarily with the certain expectation that everyone will agree. If it was the case previously that the Pauline statement was variously interpreted, in a more Origenistic hermeneutical way on the one hand and a more Augustinian theological way on the other, then it was also clear that all the possible interpretations moved within the range of the Pauline wording (apart from the conspicuous sliding from the letter as ‘killing’ to being a ‘dead’ letter and from the spirit as ‘making alive’ to being ‘living’, which is not supported by the text). One and the same statement covers the whole spectrum of interpretations. Now, however, the previously unquestioned wording of the Pauline antithesis is itself called into question. The process is basic, if not simple. In respect of the same verbal material the antithesis is simply reversed. More precisely, it is not reversed (which can always be understood as an act of mischief or ill will), but rather it reverses itself. The more hermeneutical the Pauline hypothesis becomes, the more it starts of itself to tip.3 This works a fundamental change on spirit and letter with respect to tradition. The Pauline antithesis was obviously set up with the purpose of standing firm. Now it begins to tip over. This is the new situation. The best possible theological understanding can now no longer be the best possible hermeneutical understanding. The hermeneutical tips over while the theological stays firm. Staying firm must, however, be the purpose of the reception of the Pauline antithesis. If we name as ‘hermeneutical’ the thesis of the priority of the spirit over the letter, insofar as it necessarily tips over into a reversal, then we could presumably characterize the result of its tipping as anti-hermeneutical. In the event, it is the emergence of the anti-hermeneutical which disturbs the conventional harmony between hermeneutics and theology under the auspices of 2 Cor. 3.6. It is here that our investigation takes

Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ‘On Religion’ 133 its starting point. It does not forgo the intention of setting forth the comprehensive meaning of the Pauline antithesis. This is the ultimate aim, however difficult it is to arrive at. It is disguised by the ambivalence between hermeneutics and antihermeneutics. Our intention is limited to the questions in the foreground. What happens if the  conventional interaction between theology and hermeneutics is displaced by anti-hermeneutics? Why is it unavoidable that hermeneutics should tip over into anti-hermeneutics? Correspondingly, our investigation has to do with a layer of 2 Cor. 3.6 in which the Pauline statement, far from staying still, reverses itself – not by chance or misfortune, but from the inside out. The programmatic text of modern Protestantism, Schleiermacher’s speeches On Religion (1799), is by no means lacking in emphatic and empathetic reference to the Pauline antithesis. It is a beacon of the polemic against the ‘dead letter’ on the one hand, and an acclamation of the spirit and life on the other hand. Over and above the individual references to the antithesis, which can be found in the Speeches, it is not difficult to show that the Speeches as a whole are composed out of it. And not only the Speeches. Schleiermacher’s pre-occupation with the antithesis between spirit and letter both in part precedes the Speeches and in part extends beyond them to the complete works. Schleiermacher’s complete works are composed with the antithesis between spirit and letter in mind. He reveals himself to be motivated by it in all the various areas of his production. Not only as preacher does he make its unmistakeable Reformation pathos his own, but it also empowers him as teacher of the faith in his day-to-day preoccupation with dogmatics. It runs easily from his pen as correspondent and writer of circular letters. And obviously it does not remain limited to theology. Both as the translator of Plato and as hermeneutical thinker he makes recognizable use of it. To the last, Schleiermacher holds to the Neo-Protestant creed: ‘I have never hung on dead letters . . . ’.4 It is possible to claim that Schleiermacher’s theology, like his ‘spiritual world’ as a whole, has arisen out of a particular interpretation of the Pauline antithesis between spirit and letter. It is here that our question arises: which interpretation of the antithesis is at stake? Above all, does it stand firm or does it tip over? We will limit ourselves for our purposes almost entirely to the Speeches. They are commonly accepted as a work of the early Romantic Schleiermacher, which in its wider sense is indeed appropriate. But, in practice, the orator Friedrich Schleiermacher and the early Romantics Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) followed different or more precisely, opposing paths, even at the time of the Speeches. We will pursue the supposition that the difference between Schleiermacher and the early Romantics can in the first instance be captured in the difference between ‘spirit and letter’ on the one hand and ‘letter and spirit’ on the other. ‘Spirit and letter’: this is the slogan with which Schleiermacher as Church Father of ‘modern’ theology is associated. By contrast, in the early Romantics the forces predominate which cause the ‘spirit and letter’ to begin to reverse. Literary studies have, for a long time, already surmised connections between the early Romantics and ‘postmodernism’. In a series of ten extracts, which follow the motifs of the Speeches, it will be shown that Schleiermacher’s adaptation of ‘spirit and letter’ echoes, if not cites, the early Romantic reversal of ‘letter and spirit’. With respect to the Speeches – though the Speeches are not of the kind that one can remain with

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them – the event takes place which must take place: ‘spirit and letter’ tips over into ‘letter and spirit’. The individual sections develop a tension in their progression like that of a taut bow which extends as far as a peripeteia before springing back, though no longer to the same point. If this argument should turn out to be correct, then it has consequences for the situation of theology in our time. Theology has emerged, in so far as it has been inspired by Schleiermacher, one-sidedly from the symbiosis of the hermeneutical ‘spirit of the letter’. Whether, and how, the anti-hermeneutical ‘letter of the spirit’ has to make its mark on theology is not as yet the issue that concerns us. But we are concerned with tasks that must be worked through as a preparation for our enquiry into the meaning of the Pauline antithesis.

1  Dead letter Schleiermacher speaks in the Speeches – with one exception5 – of letters always as ‘dead’ letters.6 Other adjectives like ‘dead’, ‘cut off ’, which suggest wider associations of the letter with ‘yoke’, ‘slavery’ or ‘bondage’ can easily be added from other works. Where does the talk of the dead letter or dead letters come from? Certainly not from 2 Cor. 3.6. There, to put it pointedly, the letter is so alive that it can even be said to kill. Thus, there is no relation to 2 Cor. 3.6 on the level of the meaning of the words, and at most on the level of their sound. Certainly, judging from German words such as Buchstaber, Buchstabilist, Buchstabenmensch and Buchstabenklauber, all suggesting overly literal and hair-splitting ways of reading a text, enthusiasm for the letter has always been kept within narrow boundaries. But these are no grounds for considering it to be dead. It is true that gilded letters have become rare since Gutenberg and the invention of printing, no longer flowing from the hand onto parchment; but are they, black as they are, already dead? One commentator suggests that it is ‘only from around 1800’ that talk of the dead letter becomes ‘epidemic’, the dead letter being opposed from then on by the living nature of oral speech.7 At least for the Speeches this is exactly right. With dead letters at his back, the task of the religious speaker turns out to be all the more vital. In fact, according to the distinction of Schleiermacher’s elegantly classicizing climate theory between ‘proud island-dwellers’ and fortunate ‘mainland-dwelling’ Germans, the dead letter signals the direct counter-world to the Speeches. Letter and ‘schools’, letter and ‘instruction’, even letter and ‘academy’ belong together. While the letter may be suitable for the exigencies of domestic life (oeconomia) and occupation (politia), it is not suitable for free sociality, which even now constitutes the forerunner of a modern ‘society’, into which the Speeches are spoken. Compared with this, the letter appears to be the epitome of the world of Old Europe, from which the New Europe is beginning to free itself. The religion of the new world is ‘spirit’ and ‘life’ in direct opposition to the letter. Spirit is ‘living spirit’. We have already seen that there is a disjunction between the expression ‘dead letter’ and the Pauline ‘letter that kills’. This is now repeated on the side of spirit. The link between spirit and life with the living spirit does not exactly match the Pauline expression of ‘the Spirit which gives life’. But, of course, the distinction between ‘living’ and ‘life giving’ is less than that between ‘dead’ and ‘death-dealing’.

Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ‘On Religion’ 135 In the broader context of the Speeches, the opposition between dead letter and living spirit is joined by a whole series of variations. In some places they are composed of two elements, and in other places just one, which nevertheless implies a second. If we take ‘spirit’ to begin with, then we find the duality of ‘spirit’ and ‘husk’, ‘spirit’ and ‘mask’. Then we also find ‘fire’ and ‘cinders’, ‘diamond’ and the ‘casing’ in which it is set. Abstractly, there is the duality of ‘essence’ and ‘husk’, and more abstractly again ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Single metaphors such as those of covering or of the ‘husk’ easily suggest their opposites: in the first case ‘essence’ or ‘form’, in the second ‘kernel’ or ‘nut’. The more the variants of spirit and letter appear, the more the allegorical tradition is evoked, with its accompanying lack of specificity. So far we have seen how the Speeches are the result of a struggle for emancipation, which deploys the motifs of spirit and letter and their variations to produce evidence for the liberation from the enslavements of the letter and for the entry into the new world of the living spirit. To this extent, the Speeches were in Germany the ‘confirmation gift’ for the whole of the nineteenth century and, after the passing of the last century, they are preparing to become the ‘confirmation gift’ for the next. But now the fundamental opposition with which we have seen the Speeches operate has little impact: while it offers something new by way of expression, it is describing something that has always been used to bring about the continuation of the old world and its consolidation. The opposition is only interesting if there appear to be hairline fractures in its foundation. This is the case in three ways. First, the opposition between spirit and letter does not show the same simple and fundamental character throughout the Speeches. It is stronger towards the beginning and loses its force as the end approaches. The third Speech maintains that not only a state of being ‘without spirit’ denotes a lack of culture, but also one of being ‘without letters’. And the fifth Speech reverses the judgement so that not everything that appears to be a ‘dead letter’ in a religion should be taken as such. It is well known that, during the course of the Speeches, Schleiermacher moved from religion as such to positive religion. It is therefore inevitable that we should sympathize with Goethe’s experience of reading him, who reported that ‘after the first eager reading of two or three speeches, this effect turned into its opposite’, so that ‘the complete experience ended in a robust and cheerful rejection’.8 Secondly, it is not only ‘letters’ that are dead in the Speeches, but also ‘script’, ‘husk’, ‘cinders’, ‘casing’ and ‘matter’; purely mechanical things such as ‘impulse’, ‘force’, ‘obedience’ and ‘being busy’ are also ‘dead’. Thus, death in the text expands, moving out from dead letters and their immediate expected associations. But in no way is it to be expected that the property of ‘being dead’ will pass over to the side of the spirit. Schleiermacher speaks nevertheless of a ‘dead religion’,9 which is a contradiction in itself. That Schleiermacher should name Judaism as the sole case of a dead religion is something to which we shall return. Thirdly, the hairline fractures now open up and become complete disintegration, as soon as the internal aporia is perceived. This feature links Schleiermacher’s Speeches most directly with 2 Cor. 3.6. The paradox of the dead or death-dealing letter is that it is in written form. With respect to Paul the question arises, ‘How should we follow a letter which at the same time urges us not to follow the letter that kills, but rather the

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Spirit which gives life?’10 With respect to Schleiermacher, should we regard the fact that this text against ‘dead letters’ was actually printed in the new Unger Gothic type, which could be understood to be an enlivening of the conventional type, as grounds for a paradox which is an exception to the surface of the argument? Schleiermacher’s talk about the dead letter reveals a blind spot, which he himself does not discern.

2  Theology Theology is not a term to which Schleiermacher pays particular respect. In the Speeches, he uses it only once and then polemically.11 Theology itself belongs to the ‘dead letter’. It represents the world from which, and against which, the spirit of religion arises. Schleiermacher calls members of the theological guild ‘theologians of the letter’.12 This neologism is typical of the times: we can recall the polemic that the ‘systematic programme of German Idealism’ waged against ‘our philosophers of the letter’.13 But still there is something about the concept of a ‘theologian of letters’ which cannot be brushed aside as polemical gesturing. According to Schleiermacher, the ‘theologian of letters’ should be a zero, which prompts no thought at all. But it does make us think. The following is certainly the case: if, as Luther writes, the task of a theologian consists in discerning spirit and letter in the Holy Scriptures,14 then ‘theologian of the letter’ is and remains a non-word. The ‘theologian of the letter’ turns out to be someone who cannot make distinctions; he is an undistinguished person. Perhaps the widespread theme of ‘literal theology’ (theologia grammatica) goes back to Luther. The emergence of the term theologia was the result of a particular rationalization of the culture of reading, this term having been effectively outlawed by Augustine in favour of the older designations divina lectio (‘divine reading’) and sacra pagina (‘sacred written page’). In the scholastic notion of theologia – our usage goes back to this and not to the antique, muse-poetical theologia – there remains the memory of ‘pretheological’ practices such as divina lectio and sacra pagina. As a highly rationalized form of reading, theologia never strayed far from book and letters. ‘Theologian of letters’ was an indirect way of saying what ‘theologian’ alone had already said. Theology exists as long as sacrae litterae exist. Not sacrae litterae of course but litterae as such have been carefully cultivated in West European languages. We know the French lettres and the English letters as title and honour. In Germany, however, the Science of Books and Letters (Buch[staben]wissenschaft) had to give way to the ‘Humanities’ or ‘Science of Spirit’ (Geisteswissenschaft). This is the context in which Schleiermacher came to speak to the ‘educated’, who were not however content to be literati, which causes us some regret on their behalf. Theology’s association with letters is well deserved from the perspective of its origins. That Schleiermacher should take issue with this, is a consequence of the fundamental reversal of the relation between theology and religion, which has taken place since the Reformation. The concept of theology was not universally welcomed in early Protestantism; Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin preferred other terms. But as soon as the idea of theology began to establish itself with Johann Gerhard’s Loci theologici, it

Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ‘On Religion’ 137 started to encompass the whole of doctrine. In the Baroque period, theology is ‘God’s learning’: the habitus theosdotos (‘God-given way of life’) as Gerhard described it.15 Every Christian, whether learnt or not, is ‘taught by God’ according to the meaning of this habitus. The concept of theology reaches its zenith in Protestantism as soon as theologos combines with the theodidaktos of Isa. 54.13 and Jn 6.45. The theodidaktos is ‘taught by God’ not primarily by means of text in its literal sense but by textual metaphors such as ‘writing on the heart’. In short, the theodidaktos was reputed to have been taught by God directly. Early Protestant theology leaves only a marginal role for religion. Gerhard thematizes it in locus 24: De magistrate politico. That is the ancient Roman meaning of religion: as practice and public cult. If theology and religion are already opposed in early Protestantism, then this is repeated in the critique of theology of Enlightenment and Pietism, though in inverse form. The more theology turned into theological pedantry, which was practised only in schools, universities and academies, the more ‘religion’ gained ground. If David Hollaz gave an avant-garde ordering to his Prolegomena in 1707: (1) Theology, (2) Religion,16 then this is already reversed by Johann Franz Buddeus in 1724: De religione et theologia.17 It is this reversal which is supported by the neologists and Schleiermacher with the authority of 2 Cor. 3.6. Just as it was right to hold to the spirit and not to the letter, so it was right to further the living spirit of religion and to take leave of the letter of theology. The great writings on religion before 1800, by Fichte,18 Kant19 and Herder20 – though not Spalding – and subsequently also by Schleiermacher, are unthinkable without their connection to 2 Cor. 3.6.

3  Written text But before we get entirely carried away by the unstoppable advance of religion, let us turn to the comments of the Speeches on the theme of ‘written text’. Schleiermacher extends criticism of the letter to the written text. The letter is dead; the text is dead. How far does ‘text’ go? It would be the non plus ultra without doubt to extend criticism of text to text as such and thus to provoke the paradox, of which we have spoken. Let us note first of all that Schleiermacher does not take his criticism that far. Certainly as the polemic against text develops, this begins to call into question the writing of a text ‘On Religion’, but it also serves to prevent the necessity of fully confronting the paradox. The blind spot remains. Schleiermacher only refers to ‘text’ once, at the end of the Speeches, when he puts text forward as one of the secret languages of the spirit, together with ‘speech’, ‘act’ and ‘imitation’. But secondly we should note that the criticism of the ‘dead letter’ does not extend to written text as such, but only to specific elements in texts. The resolution of self-referential paradoxes occurs through separating out sections of texts. When the separation is allowed, then the dimension of self-contradiction decreases. Schleiermacher names a series of such elements. They are images that require text for their possibility, which is to say literary images. These include, in ascending order of importance, ‘elements’, ‘concepts’, ‘theorems’, ‘commentaries’, ‘plagiarisms’, ‘compilations’, ‘chrestomathies’ and ‘systems’. In Schleiermacher’s eyes, these are always outgrowths of dead textuality,

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worth mentioning only to be dismissed out of hand. His reflection does not engage with them; they are just amplifications of his criticism of texts. Holy Scripture is the central object of Schleiermacher’s critique of texts.21 It is this above all which stands at an angle to religion. Its form as a completed series of texts, as ‘codex’, which it shares with secular legal bodies of texts, must be called into doubt. And when it appears in the form of ‘documents’ or ‘religious autographs’, the hostility between written text and the essence of religion is undiminished. For ‘religious communication is not to be sought in books’.22 I shall resist the temptation to confront the author of the Speeches once again with the paradox in which he is ensnared. Where does the polemic against Holy Scripture come from? Schleiermacher stands, as we have shown, at the beginning of modern Protestantism, when the early Protestant relation between theology and religion was being reversed. By virtue of its origins, theology is related to the written medium; it is orientated to reading. Religion, on the other hand, inclines to all kinds of ‘writing on the heart’. Early Protestant dogmatics begins with locations in scripture, the locus de sacra scriptura. It attempts to translate into pedagogical form Luther’s passing remark about scripture as the primum principium of theological knowledge. Luther’s expectation that scripture will be perspicuous (claritas scripturae) lasts until the seventeenth century. Now it becomes clear that the perspicuity of scripture does not come so much from itself but that it stands in ever greater need of the application of clarity. Even when the witness of the Holy Spirit to this effect is claimed, the change of self-clarity into the need for clarity means that scripture could no longer be seen as a principium (beginning, origin) so much as a principiatum (principle),23 which is to say something which had itself been subject to the application of principles in order that it could then itself serve as a principle. In The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher summarizes the doctrine of Holy Scripture according to its position and content: §128. The authority of Holy Scripture cannot be the foundation of faith in Christ; rather must the latter be pre-supposed before a peculiar authority can be granted to Holy Scripture.24

In part, the critique of texts that we find in the Speeches also takes this line, but in part it goes far beyond it: Every holy writing is merely a mausoleum of religion, a monument that a great spirit was there that no longer exists; for if it still lived and were active, why would it attach such great importance to the dead letter that can only be a weak reproduction of it? It is not the person who believes in a holy writing who has religion, but only the one who needs none and probably could make one for himself.25

Now the text appears neither as principium nor as principiatum; it does not appear at all as a product, but rather as something that produces. Schleiermacher refers to the ‘Bible project’, which was under discussion by Schlegel and Novalis in 1798–99. Only when the appearance is created that the last remnant of positivism has been removed from

Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ‘On Religion’ 139 the text and that this has become nothing other than a wholly tractable entity, does it take on interest for religion: The holy writings have become Scripture by their own power, but they prohibit no other book from also being or becoming Scripture and whatever had been written with equal power they would gladly have associated with themselves.26

4  An excursus on Plato and Paul Our assertion that Schleiermacher’s use of ‘spirit and letter’ looks back to 2 Cor. 3.6 cannot be supported by any direct quotation. Paul is neither mentioned by name nor is he quoted. On the other hand, the proximity of the ‘divine Plato’ is everywhere evident.27 A good number of passages, especially in the First Speech, can be read as more or less direct blueprints of Platonic texts. But it is not a question of such details here. Rather, Schleiermacher’s work as a whole, which – paradigmatically in the Speeches – must be taken as a definite laying claim to the Pauline antithesis of spirit and letter, actually possesses a direct affinity in its critique of writing with Plato’s work which, according to Schleiermacher, begins with the Phaedrus and is to be explained on the basis of the Platonic antithesis of writing and speech, of textuality and orality. The thesis proves true that ‘The strongest historical arguments in the critique of writing come from Plato and Paul’.28 Thus, there can be no engagement with Paul’s text in 2 Cor. 3.6 without a parallel engagement with Plato’s Phaedrus. Accordingly, there can be no engagement with Schleiermacher’s Speeches without a parallel engagement with Schleiermacher’s project of undertaking a translation of Plato’s work, which begins at the same time. We are reading the Speeches as a text from the perspective of the ‘spirit and letter’ opposition, with the intention of subsequently making visible the contrary way of reading which is characteristic of religion, as this is to be supposed from Schlegel’s opposition ‘letter and spirit’, and are concerned to give greater or at least equal force to the latter. But it must now be our goal to conceive of the alienation between Schleiermacher and Schlegel, which rapidly became more pronounced during the course of the Plato translation, as a further example of the distinction between ‘spirit and letter’ and ‘letter and spirit’. It is to be expected that Schleiermacher’s engagement with Plato’s critique of writing casts light on his engagement with Paul’s critique of writing, in which tradition the Speeches can be said to stand. At the end of the Phaedrus, Plato opposes praise of the written word (ta grammata) with – overwhelmingly – its critique.29 Praise is deserved on account of its usefulness to humanity; it is medicine for the memory (mnēmēs pharmakon).30 Therefore, it is counted among the gifts of the gods, on which all human culture depends. The critique stands against this. It accuses the one who praises of affirming the opposite of what letters actually achieve, for the sake of politeness. They cause harm. They draw our attention to what comes from without (exothen) instead of what comes from within (endothen). And so they lead to the neglect of memory and to forgetfulness (lēthē). But Plato does not go so far as to suggest that the written text is a medicine that brings forgetfulness (lēthēs pharmakon).31 He remains with the more modest claim that

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the written text is a medicine not for the transcendental memory but rather for the empirical memory (oukoun mnēmēs, alla hypomnēseōs pharmakon). The insufficiency of the text with respect to the former is supported by the following arguments: (a) it is as silent as a picture; (b) its contents never change; (c) it does not know to whom it speaks; and (d) it cannot come to its own aid.32 In the Seventh Letter – which according to Schleiermacher’s hypothesis represents a shift from the earliest of Plato’s works to one of the last – Plato returns to this theme and remarks laconically: ‘I certainly have composed no work in regard to it,33 nor shall I ever do so in future’.34 In the Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter, the criticisms of the written text are framed within the distinction between seriousness (spoudē) and play (paidia). Accordingly, there has been nothing written about seriousness, and any written text could not itself be taken seriously.35 Written texts are only play. The spectrum of the interpretation of Plato is no less extensive than the spectrum of the paradox of the critique of written texts. As we have seen: the indissoluble and ever more tightly knotted paradox is lessened by the number of texts which are admitted. The possible interpretations of Plato are entirely dependent upon the leading strings of this paradox. They are most closely dependent upon it when the observations of the Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter, being written and just when they are being taken seriously, become mere play. It is here precisely that the infinity which so fascinated the Romantics appears. The paradox most internal to the criticism of writing is that it is itself written, generated by the unceasing praxis of negativity and self-reference and by the radical ‘taking literally’ of what is said. ‘Written text’ is written text. Plato departs from the critique of writing in the Phaedrus with the words: ‘now enough of play’ (ēdē pepaisthō metriōs).36 The paradox begins to loosen a little when – according to the so-called Tübingen ‘esoteric hypothesis’ – Plato’s ‘unwritten teachings’ cannot be read directly from his dialogues but only reconstructed from other texts or when a distinction is made between ‘official’ publications and unauthoritative texts for internal use. If that is the case, then Plato’s published work, the dialogues, must lead to an indirect way of reading which through ‘blank spaces’ or techniques of polyvalence point to a meaning which remains elusive. Then it is not, in principle, impossible that Plato’s unwritten teachings were in fact written, even if what can be termed esoteric teaching can have a discouraging effect. ‘Unwritten reading’ is a challenge that is not without its charm: that is, unwritten at one point but written at another. Schleiermacher’s interpretation of Plato must lie at the exact opposite end of the spectrum of interpretations. It so seeks to avoid the offence which arises from the written nature of the critique of writing, that it can no longer be perceived as a disagreement. This occurs in the ‘Introductions’ to Schleiermacher’s first volume on Plato, with the following arguments. (a) The radical criticism of writing in the Phaedrus stems from the figure of Socrates and not from Plato himself. Plato takes this as ‘Socrates’ justification of his refusal to write’; he repeatedly shrugged off his own initial despair at not reproducing Socrates’ oral mode of teaching ‘in written texts’ since he ‘did later learn it’.37 (b) The Socratic method of teaching through conversation, the ‘oral teaching’ and the ‘present and living interaction’ between teacher and pupil, is reproduced partly through the literary genre, the dialogue and partly through

Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ‘On Religion’ 141 techniques of aporetics, bafflement, concealment and suggestion: that is, through indirectness. Finally, (c) there is no esoteric orality that can be distinguished from the exoteric and written form of Plato’s work; any possible difference is overcome in the reader. In Schleiermacher’s view, Plato teaches a unique literary technique which disables criticism of writing to such an extent that it can now be ignored. Paul Friedländer, a follower of Schleiermacher, puts it this way: ‘The dialogue is the only form of the book which appears to nullify the book itself ’.38 Accordingly, there are ways of writing which are so spirited that they nullify having been written. No complaint arises against the literary dialogue of Plato on the ground of dead letters, and Schleiermacher makes the same claim for literary speeches. But no sooner have dead letters been neutralized than resistance arises again: as language.

5  Critique of writing and critique of language We can presume the following: a strong concept of the critique of writing can be identified on the grounds that it confines its criticism to the written text and not at all to language as such. As the opposite of dead text, language as living speech was sought out everywhere. Only by making a strict distinction between text and language can the primacy of the art of speaking, or rhetoric, which speech claims for itself in the Phaedrus and Speeches, be vindicated. But neither Plato nor Schleiermacher are quick to make this strict distinction which is required. Plato glides between criticism of text and criticism of language with a regularity that precludes chance. This is evident not only in the way that the very same arguments which he brings against the written text in the Phaedrus also appear in other dialogues with spoken language as their target, but it is apparent also in that he moves easily between written and spoken language in both the Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter.39 The thesis concerning text as pure play is transferred to language as such. No one will entrust the highest things, the just, beautiful or good, to either text or language, unless it ‘is truly written in the soul’ (tō onto graphomenois en psychē);40 writing in the soul is here a Platonic counterpart to the writing on the heart of Jeremiah and Paul. But if it is the case that the highest idea of the text cannot be written, just as that of speech cannot be accessed, then the critique of text declines as an independent theme – and the Tübingen interpretation of Plato diverges from the spirit of that critique. The agrapha41 or the ‘unwritten teaching’ is overtaken by the arrēta (the unsaid) which takes on – in the nature of things – a higher meaning. The same process can be observed in Schleiermacher. He passes indiscriminately from polemic against letters to polemic against the spoken word, which is inadmissible if the former critique is to have any force. Why is the letter dead? Strangely, because the spirit ‘evaporates on the way from the first mouth to the first ear’.42 Critique of writing passes without hesitation into critique of language. It is above all with respect to religion that we become aware of our ‘complete inability’ to write and to speak. It is not only the fact that text is fixed and frozen, while language is ‘fluid and mobile’, which produces this inability but, whatever it may be, its character as medium is already in itself unsettling. Any ‘medium’, whatever it may be, is essentially ‘alien’; the ‘original

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impression’ is ‘absorbed’ and then ‘lost’. The textual medium constrains immediate feeling into uniform signs and it is expected to re-emerge from them; the spoken medium on the other hand, the sole instrument of the rhetorical speaker, undermines his arrogant self-confidence. In general, there are two aspects to be named in this account, and we observe that the second strengthens the first. First, only the one who has been inspired by ‘the spirit of religion’ can speak about religion.43 The mystagogical claim ‘to call forth a rare spirit’ and to look upon the ‘essence of religion’ from within,44 the intense expectation to grasp religion as it exists ‘of itself ’ and ‘only for itself ’, ‘from itself ’ and ‘through itself ’ is, however, immediately undermined by the fact that ‘religion never appears in its pure form’; it always contains something alien. ‘Religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling’.45 After the initial development of this thesis, Schleiermacher the speaker pauses and asks for permission for a moment to ‘mourn the fact that I cannot speak of both other than separately. The finest spirit of religion is thereby lost for my speech, and I can disclose its innermost secret only unsteadily and uncertainly’.46 And, thus bound, he draws attention to ‘that first mysterious moment [in which religion is born], . . . before intuition and feeling have separated, where sense and its object have, as it were, flowed into one another and become one, before both turn back to their original position’.47 That moment he must acknowledge to be just as ‘indescribable’ as it is ‘unutterable’. The hoped for moment in which religion was ‘originally one and undivided’, withdraws behind the moment of sorrow provoked by the fact of speech. The speaker can no longer postpone insight into the ‘unavoidable separation’, which appears as soon as the simplest matter ‘separates itself into two opposing elements’.48 All writing, all speech is performed – ‘unfortunately’ – after the appearance of a distinction which can no longer be removed from that about which we write or speak. Secondly, the speaker must recognize that the moment of his sorrow does not remain episodic, as he believed, but becomes continuous. The business of speaking about religion battles with a ‘contradiction that cannot be eliminated from the words’.49 Words are only ‘shadows of our intuitions and feelings’.50 A system failure that inheres in the tool can only worsen as the work proceeds. In short, the speaker about religion finds himself in the situation of a performative contradiction. The Speeches bear in text and language the same systemic confusion and perpetuate it.

6  Peripeteia: Kant’s spirit and Kant’s letter The critique of language is as old and as widespread as language itself. Which particular kind of critique of language is operative in Schleiermacher? Here, we must pursue a further point, which will not however take us away from our theme at all. The critique of language in Schleiermacher’s generation originated in the dispute over Kant’s spirit and Kant’s ‘letter’. We shall now only consider the difference between Idealism and Romanticism, which actually require ‘infinite approximation’51 of course, in so far as they make their appearance through the lens ‘spirit and letter’. Also, the distinctions within the two tendencies, now to be outlined, are not important for our aim.

Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ‘On Religion’ 143 On the one hand, Kant’s spirit emphatically takes precedence, as is fitting for spirit, over Kant’s letter. Under the assumption that it was not Karl L. Reinhold who initiated this,52 then we can say that it was Fichte who first engaged with Kant’s spirit without regard for his letter. ‘He does Kant little honour who has not noticed in the whole contour and execution of his writings that he would impart to us not his letter but rather his spirit; and still less does he thank him’.53 From 1793, observations of a similar kind sound throughout Fichte’s work and correspondence. But not only in relation to Kant. Fichte goes so far as to recognize in this antithesis his own philosophical programme and he takes it up enthusiastically in On the Spirit and Letter in Philosophy (1794/1800).54 The occasion of this turn to the Pauline antithesis – somewhat noteworthy in the light of his otherwise notoriously anti-Pauline predisposition – is the knowledge that the Wissenschaftslehre (epistemology), which is the core of his philosophy, is only communicated – and had actually shown itself to be only communicated – through the spirit of the creative imagination, not through letters. Schelling agreed straightforwardly with Fichte’s solemn pronouncement.55 Hegel closed this decade of engagement with Kant’s spirit and Kant’s letter with the archivistic remark: ‘The Kantian philosophy needed to have its spirit distinguished from its letter, and to have its purely speculative principle lifted out of the remainder’.56 When Schleiermacher speaks of spirit in the Speeches, which has left the dead letter behind, he places himself in the context of ‘enthusiastic’ Kantianism. On the other hand, in 1799, Kant, whose work here is being discussed, returns to the debate, demanding that ‘criticism is to be understood according to the letter’.57 Friedrich Schlegel, for whom the intention of an ‘apology for the letter’58 was not alien, finally resolved, after some initial hesitation, to join those who held that Kant’s letter had to be prioritized over his spirit; he says Kant’s letter was of greater value than his spirit.59 In his essay ‘On Incomprehensibility’ (Über die Unverständlichkeit) which is the anti-hermeneutical coda to the Athenaeum, Schlegel maintains that ‘words often understand themselves better than do those who use them’.60 Schlegel’s ‘letter and spirit’ opens up a perspective which, while it does not lead out of the morass of the performative contradiction, does nevertheless shape the way we relate to it so that we no longer have no choice but to suffer it, as was the case for Schleiermacher. We are now encountering in Friedrich Schlegel, for the first time in this study, the trace of an explicit revaluation of ‘spirit and letter’. Thereby the peripeteia from ‘spirit and letter’ to ‘letter and spirit’ is signalled. But what of Kant’s ‘spirit’? In the view of all enthusiastic readers of Kant, this is the unification of all three Critiques into a single systematic ground, which can be named as the productive power of the imagination, at least in Fichte’s view (and it was he who promoted talk about Kant’s spirit and Kant’s letter). And what of Kant’s ‘letter’? This is similarly Kant’s own attempt to arrive at a unifying principle as he progressed, provisionally, from one Critique to the next. In the Critique of Pure Reason it was the transcendental unity of consciousness which was chosen to serve as the ‘highest point’ and ‘the supreme principle’,61 while in the Critique of Practical Reason it was the apodictic reality of freedom which constituted ‘the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason’.62 In the Critique of Judgement, reflective judgement was

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called upon to stand between these two and to overcome the gulf between nature and freedom. But in the Third Critique, it emerges that Kant’s letter does not altogether lack spirit. Spirit now becomes a key concept in aesthetic judgement. In §49 of the Critique of Judgement, we read: ‘Spirit in its aesthetic significance, means the animating principle in the mind’. And Kant continues, in an anti-enthusiastic vein: That, however, by which this principle animates the soul, the material which it uses for this purpose, is that which purposively sets the mental powers into motion, i.e., into a play that is self-maintaining and even strengthens the powers to that end.63

Why does the aesthetic spirit have need of matter? Matter, in its aesthetic contexts, is that which is given to mind, causing it ‘to think more’,64 ‘to think much’.65 And it is this which Kant calls the productive power of the imagination, in contradistinction to Fichte, which is to say a faculty which is ‘very creatively generative like another nature, from the matter which is given by reality’.66 The Kantian spirit would be quite lost without matter and could not develop its characteristic definite indefiniteness, which eludes all concepts and language. Now it is appropriate for the spirit, as a faculty of aesthetic ideas to bring itself to expression in the various arts, ‘not only in painting or sculpture’67 and in the underplayed music of §49, ‘but also poetry and oratory’68 which follow this principle. In Kant’s view, it is ‘really in the poetic arts that the faculty of aesthetic ideas can show itself most fully’.69 This begs the question: how does spirit show itself in the poetic arts? According to §49, this takes place ‘when there is much that is unnameable which attaches itself to a concept whose feeling enlivens the faculty of knowledge and links spirit with language as mere letter’.70 But that is in the first place no more than an assertion. The question returns again in the form: where and when does spirit combine with language as mere letter? In order to answer this question, we must for a moment distance ourselves from the claim of the poetic arts to priority and go by way of the detours of §51 and §53, which means to return by way of the visual arts (painting and sculpture) and the art of the play of sensations (music, colour) to the arts of speech (rhetoric, poetics). We ask first: when do the visual arts and the art of the play of sensations manifest spirit? Kant’s answer is the following: in the case of the visual arts when the ‘spirit of the artist . . . makes the thing itself speak as it were in mime: a very common game of our fantasy, which attributes to lifeless things, in accordance with their form, a spirit that speaks from them’.71 And in the art of the play of sensations spirit is manifest when, as is pre-eminently the case in the musical arts, ‘it speaks through mere sensations without concepts’.72 Music is ‘a language of sensations’73 and ‘a language of the emotions’,74 a language without concepts, which provokes one to much thought. Now spirit, as the enlivening principle in the mind, speaks through the visual arts to the eyes, through music to the ears. We can now grasp what spirit is and what it does. Spirit is language; spirit speaks through matter, as soon as the latter shows itself to be ‘not lacking in spirit’,75 which means to say as meaningful. Only by way of the knowledge that spirit speaks through optical or acoustic matter do the rhetorical arts, rhetoric and poetics, come more clearly into view. Given that they

Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ‘On Religion’ 145 are already known as the rhetorical or ‘speaking’ arts (redende Künste), they have for a long time not spoken. Only by way of the language of images and the language of music does the aesthetic and also pneumatologically fundamental dimension become clear, demonstrating that only a language which itself speaks is capable of giving life. The rhetorical arts only possess spirit when they show themselves to be eloquent in  all their speech, in other words: when their speaking and holding silent both become forms of speech. Or, to return to Kant’s fitting formulation, this is when the rhetorical arts – like the visual arts through gestures and the arts of sound and colour through sensations – speak through words, which means to say through ‘language as mere letter’.76 There is little question that Kant himself failed to express this view in his Critique of Judgement with all necessary clarity. On the contrary, to the extent that he interrogated the visual arts and the arts of the play of sensation as to what was language-like about them, since they are used for the representation of aesthetic ideas and thus belong to spirit, he can also be said to have neglected to inquire about the language-like aspects of the rhetorical arts, presumably because their language-like aspect always seems straightforward, even though this is not the case. It took the reflections of the early Romantics to give clear expression to this aspect. This was Schelling’s achievement when he proposed a distinction between ‘spoken’ and ‘speaking’ word.77 He dispelled the illusion of bourgeois reasonableness, which held that the word already speaks just because it has been spoken. Spirit, as the life-giving principle in the mind, only becomes active in the rhetorical arts, poetry and rhetoric, when the quality of ‘speaking’ appears over and above the quality of ‘having been spoken’. And Friedrich Schlegel grasped very accurately the retroactive effect of ‘the language of images’ and ‘the language of music’ upon language itself, when he coined the expression ‘language in language’.78 Indeed, spirit can only become the enlivening principle in the rhetorical arts when ‘the language of language’ begins to speak. This is the point at which perhaps we can attempt a definition of ‘Romanticism’. Making a distinction between Idealism and Romanticism has always been rendered more difficult by Romanticism’s reputation, following Hegel, for being a more or less failed, even ultimately shipwrecked Idealism. From this perspective, Romanticism lacks ‘something’ which Idealism possesses. Now we have seen that Romanticism is, in fact, capable of possessing this thing. We speak of Romanticism in distinction from Idealism, therefore, when the double meaning of ‘language’ appears on the basis of reflection on the language of language. All Romanticism has this double meaning of language. Idealism is transcendental philosophy while Romanticism is transcendental poetry. But if the romantic reflection on the language of language is to take place, then the given language – or as Kant has it ‘language as mere letter’ – must be even more firmly held to, for the sake of making the distinction ever more clearly.

7  The art of language and the art of music Against the background of a completed peripeteia, let us return to Schleiermacher’s Speeches in order to inquire about the rhetorical arts at work there, their proximity or

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otherwise to Romanticism. First, the following is the case: religion mediates nothing other than itself; it signifies speaking. Once again, ‘all communication of religion cannot be other than rhetorical’;79 ‘it is impossible to express and communicate religion other than verbally with all the effort and artistry of language’,80 that is, by rhetorical means. A heavy burden of expectation therefore rests upon the one who speaks. His pathos makes use of certain elements from Platonic and Pauline, though not Socratic, rhetoric. The imperative of speech towers over everything else. The speaker must be penetrated by, wholly permeated by, religion.81 That is his ‘nature’ and ‘divine calling’. He speaks of necessity, for he is subject to divine power. Thus, there arise inspired speeches.82 Such a relation between religion and speech creates the expectation that religion will be a widespread phenomenon. But the opposite is the case. In every age there are individuals who become enthused. These function as ‘interpreters’, ‘mediators’, ‘heroes’ and ‘emissaries’. All of them, ‘as poets or visionaries, as speakers or artists’, are ‘priests of the most high’.83 The rhetor, once lonely, now finds himself in company. Rhetoric appears in the guise of other inspired art forms: mantics, poetics, iconics and music. But where is the public? Despite the numerous addresses, it remains vague, conditioned by speech as ‘one-sided communication’.84 It lies hidden behind a fundamental ambivalence. On the one hand, there predominates the orphic expectation that the divine nature of the speaker naturally ‘provides hearers for him’.85 On the other hand, the prophetic certainty consoles us that the obligation to speak holds even if there were no one to hear it. But scarcely has the splendidly equipped speaker – who may be conceived of most appropriately as a type of Gorgias – stepped into action, than an anti-rhetoricism appears which attends rhetoric. It does not emerge as if it were something which inheres within rhetoric, though this might be the case, but only on the ground of the resistance which this kind of speaking engenders. And the divine mediator hopes ‘that this office of mediator should cease’, while the priest pleads that ‘no one will need a teacher’,86 and the rhetor, exhausted by the destiny of his vocation, imagines how it will be when instead of a one-sided speech there appears a ‘mutual communication’87 together with the relief which this brings for the speaker. Religious speech enters a paradoxical situation since, if necessary, it is not actually possible and if possible, it is not really necessary any more. Although nowhere grounded in the temporality of the Speeches, there now appears the distinction between ‘now’ and ‘then’, between ‘church militant and church triumphant’, and we can hear the tones of Spener’s transformation of early Protestant eschatology into hope ‘for better times’.88 The antithesis between spirit and letter is now transposed into time. Now the letter holds sway, but the time approaches when spirit will predominate. The criticism of text and language offered under given conditions (‘now’) awaits the linguistic excess which (‘then’) descends upon language ‘in a grander style’ in the ‘fullness and magnificence of human speech’. Schleiermacher crosses the boundary into vision. First, in support of the ‘artistry of language’ he summons ‘the service of all skills’; the linguistic fullness of spirit emerges as soon as the art of

Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ‘On Religion’ 147 language enters the circle of the arts, which are related one with another.89 Then he calls the spirits of the brothers and sisters with whom he communicates as speaker; the linguistic abundance of spirit comes about through the assembly of the community. That is affirmative, if not hyperaffirmative, liturgy. The heavenly panegyris (Heb. 12.22-23) underlies Schleiermacher’s ‘assembly’ of ‘all the arts’ and of the ‘rank and file’, made concrete through elements of the Herrnhut Church Hall. The ‘picture of the rich, luxuriant life in this city of God when its citizens assemble’ depicts both a speaker who effuses without resistance and a rank and file who absorb without impediment, the former as praecentor and the latter like ‘a higher choir’, who belong to each other in a responsorial relation.90 Is not this a complete art work (Gesamtkunstwerk)? We could let this stand as an image of the unimpeded accumulation of the arts, on the grounds of the principle ‘spirit and letter’, if Schleiermacher himself did not suddenly call this into question. Reality breaks into the vision (‘But not just figuratively’91). From the two responsorial halves of the image there appears a sentence divided into two analogous halves: ‘just as such a speaking is music even without song and tone, so is there also a music among the saints that becomes speech without words’.92 This is probably Schleiermacher’s most romantic and yet also most realist sentence. He describes under real conditions, which is to say in the situation of total fragmentation of the arts and total dispersal of the rank and file, an apophatic liturgy in which each individual art form must be pushed to such an extent, in the absence of the other art forms, in the absence also of those who applaud and consume, that it takes over the tasks of the others, while remaining within itself and thus transcending its own limits. It is not the assembly of the arts that takes place but the vicariate of the arts, each substituting for the other. Thereby there appears on the one hand the ‘language of music’, as soon as pure melody produces its ‘songs without words’ in the absence of any spoken word.93 And on the other hand, there appears the ‘language of language’, as soon as the art of rhetoric generates its own music in the absence of music.

8  Allegory, wit and irony The more we are inspired with the energy of reversal which belongs to the Speeches and apply that same energy to other texts, the more we are obliged to consider concepts which are only marginal in Schleiermacher or which do not exist in his work at all. The seriousness of our speaker’s intentions, whose addresses ‘On Religion’ were carried out without any light relief but rather from beginning to end with upright sublimity and piety, does not leave much scope for allegory, wit and irony. We would have liked to have seen Schleiermacher in a context associated with irony, at least in places. But the fact is that there is no irony to be found in the Speeches. And ‘wit’94 and ‘mere allegory’95 occur only to be immediately dismissed as out of place. Only through them could the transcendental nature of language together with its characteristic ‘swinging movement’ (Schweben)96 be released. So both are alien to Schleiermacher effectively. But, fortunately, the Speeches should and can be read as a passage of thought which reverses itself. It is precisely what is dismissed that attracts our attention. No single proof is required for the way in which three or four named concepts take us beyond

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Schleiermacher to Friedrich Schlegel. Manfred Frank accords these a key role for our understanding of early Romanticism. While penetrating the impenetrable chaos of Romantic fragments, aphorisms, thoughts and so forth, he makes the impossible possible and abbreviates the infinite in wagering the statement: ‘Irony is the synthesis of wit and allegory’.97 The returning power of irony is indeed a necessary element in the progress of our own thoughts, which stretch like a taut bow between the first section on ‘Dead Letter’ and the last on ‘Living Letter’. The concepts of allegory and wit as the twin elements of irony emerged from the early Romantic perspective of the transcendental nature of language, which had to be learnt during the engagement with Kant. Friedrich Schlegel presents a precisely sketched outline of this in Athenaeum Fragment 238.98 Just as transcendental philosophy only deserves to be called critical when it represents the ‘producer’ together with the ‘product’, in the same way transcendental poetry fulfils its critical task only when it brings to representation ‘poetry’ at the same time as, but also distinct from, the ‘poetry of poetry’, in other words, when ‘it represents itself ’ in its representation. Now poetry, unlike philosophy, is nothing other than a rhetorical art form and the medium of its action is language. The task of being poetry and the poetry of poetry together and at the same time entirely corresponds with the task of being simultaneously language and the ‘language of language’. Correspondingly, just as transcendental philosophy is bound to expound the essence of ‘transcendental thinking’ in its exposition of ‘transcendental thought’, so too ‘transcendental poetry’ is only effective when it gives expression to the very act of speaking in what has been said. But now the language of language or the ‘speaking’ in what is said is in no way uniform. There appear rather different degrees and tempers, according to whether ‘speaking’ and ‘said’, irrespective of their fundamental incommensurability, sit in a relation of mutual affirmation or negation. For this, allegory and wit stand as terms for two relative maxima which run in opposite directions. Allegory comes about when the more-saying which announces itself in the said, points to the infinite trajectory which begins as soon as the saying negates the said. Allegory, alieniloquium, ‘saying otherwise’, signifies the other of the said, the saying, which makes the said open out onto the infinite other. So allegory is easily linked with exaltation but exaltation in the sense of sublime sublimity. Such a notion of allegory is contrary to the classical concept of the symbol which also attracts an increasing aesthetic dignity. Allegory is distinguished from symbol by its insistence on an infinite difference surpassing all unity. But it is also to be distinguished from the rationalist allegory which has no knowledge of the infinite. On the other hand, wit appears as soon as a finite linguistic image emerges suddenly from a sequence of finite linguistic images, as if the saying in the said remained still for a moment, affirming it, but without ever being absorbed by the said. Wit occurs when the saying that announces itself in something said, makes the latter transparent in a radiant beauty. But it is pre-supposed that both allegory and wit are relations of reflection which never arrive at any end-point in their reflexivity.99 If allegory and wit do not represent anything satisfied, then their combination in the concept of irony is not at all the attempt to create such a satisfaction after the

Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ‘On Religion’ 149 event. Frank’s term ‘synthesis’ – reminiscent of Schelling – is perhaps too inflexible; the following variants come closer to it: ‘irony is the movement to and fro between witty particularization and boundary-leaping allegory; as such it is the appearance of their identity beyond representation’.100 Schlegel’s own attempts at formulation, beginning with the Lyceum Fragment 42, may be hesitant but they are clear in their distinction between ordinary and romantic irony. The former emerges from rhetoric and is limited to specific ironic passages; it is particularly suited to polemics. The latter, on the other hand, comes from philosophy and shares its urbanity. It defines linguistic images as a whole: ‘there are . . . poems which are altogether and everywhere pervaded by the divine breath of irony’. The fundamental distinction resides in the fact that rhetorical irony only turns a said into a contrary said, which attains validity in its new position, while romantic irony exposes the said wholly to the infinity of saying and so for the first time produces the double floor which belongs to the oscillation of irony. That is ‘divine breath’; ironic speaking and writing ‘breathe’. According to Kant’s formula: only now does the spirit act as an enlivening principle in the mind. But if the infinity of saying is nothing other than the speaking word itself, which was in the beginning, while the said is that which was only ever produced by human speech, then it follows: ironic speaking comes about through ‘speaking is if one didn’t speak at all’.101 Here we have food for thought as we arrive at a point which is as far from Schleiermacher’s religious-rhetorical impulse as it is possible to be and, contrary to expectation, encounter once again a religious – and indeed Pauline102 – formula. When Schleiermacher rightly claims that the ground of his speaking is religion, then Schlegel too must claim the same for his speaking, with the consequence that irony turns religion into religion without religion.

9  Religion – religion without religion It is well known that the flow of the Speeches takes us from ‘religion’ to ‘religions’; it leads to an ever greater plurality. This is welcomed by Schleiermacher; in his text there are many different degrees and stages of religion, types and individuals. One sign of this conceptual development is the fact that ‘positive religion’ (or religion in a particular time and place) gains prominence at the cost of ‘the essence of religion’. And as already mentioned, the meaning of the antithesis ‘spirit and letter’ shifts in agreement with this. The initially strict opposition softens during the course of the Speeches. At the end, the positive religions relate to religion as such just like so many letters to spirit. The interpretation advanced here will therefore invite the objection that it lacks the required balance and that it places too much emphasis upon the early portions of the text rather than reading through to the end. This objection is easily met. It is striking that despite the opening towards plurality and specificity, in practice only the two religions appear which Schleiermacher knows from his own environment: Judaism and Christianity. The multicoloured scene (poikilia) of the world of religions that we might have expected threatens therefore to be painted over by a grisaille at best, or at worst by a drawing in black and white. While the religious speaker paints

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the characteristic features of the two historical religions Judaism and Christianity, it quickly becomes clear that their portraits fit only poorly within the frame that has been prepared for them, with respect to the essence of religion on the one hand and the positivism of religion on the other. Both Judaism and Christianity appear from a perspective which is irreconcilable with this frame. First, as far as Christianity is concerned, the conditions of its introduction have long since been named by Schleiermacher: ‘humility’, ‘friendly and inviting tolerance’, hospitality. But in his Fifth Speech, Christianity comes massively to predominate, as the speaker’s interest in Judaism wanes and it becomes effectively, with the lack of any other living perspective, the only religion to receive a decent representation. And the more the innermost theme of the Christian religion, the ‘God who became flesh’, by the admission of a ‘so to speak’, is extended from this religion to the many religions, which now participate in it somewhere between the essence on the one hand and the positivism on the other hand, the more the intention to discover religion in the religions103 must attract the suspicion that this is not a neutral stance to religious pluralism at all but one which from the outset guarantees Christianity a systematic advantage. One must even suppose that it cannot easily be denied that the question concerning the ‘essence of religion’, which traced its origins in the question concerning the ‘essence of Christianity’ (P. J. Spener), ‘true Christianity’ (J. Arndt) or the forma christianismi (P. Melanchthon, M. Luther), sets up a framework which puts Christianity at a competitive advantage. In addition, the ‘essence of religion’ turns out to be nothing other than the ‘spirit of religion’ which the theology of the letter has left behind. If religious pluralism is viewed from the structuring perspective of the essence of religion, then all religions would in principle have the right to represent their particular essence and particular spirit. But only in principle. Jewish Kantians (Hermann Cohen) could find only a little of their own in what Kant wrote about Judaism. And one only has to place the ‘essence of Christianity’ (Adolf Harnack) and the ‘essence of Judaism’ (Leo Baeck) side by side to recognize that essence and spirit certainly do not behave neutrally for they promote one thing and obstruct another. The irreconcilability of Christianity within a hermeneutic of religions determined by ‘spirit and letter’ consists in the fact that it is difficult for Christianity not to dominate under these auspices. Judaism also quickly proved itself irreconcilable within this frame. Religious interest in Judaism should really have increased on account of Schleiermacher’s summons to religious hospitality. But the opposite is the case. In the form in which it presented itself to Schleiermacher – ‘old-fashioned and barbaric lamentation’ over the ‘caved-in walls’ of ‘Jewish Zion’,104 grieving ‘sitting . . . beside the imperishable mummy of a dead religion’105 – the question was even raised whether Judaism belonged to the circle of religions. If Christianity from one perspective called into question the proposed frame based on essence and positivity on account of its constant gain and unceasing excellence, then so too did Judaism but from the other perspective of uninterrupted loss and irremediable inadequacy. As a religion it was, according to Schleiermacher’s representation, only ‘of a short duration’, and now ‘life and spirit have long since departed’. The Jewish religion ‘died when its holy books were closed’.106 It was no longer possible to speak of the ‘spirit of Judaism’. What remains of Judaism is nothing but

Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ‘On Religion’ 151 letter. Judaism is the ‘religion’ of the dead letter; the letter prevents it from being a religion. Judaism is letter, according to Schleiermacher, because it has perverted the religious idea of the relation between the infinite to the world by changing it into the relation between one finitude and another and it is this basic perversion which is at the root of all further characteristics of Jewish life. What Schleiermacher presented in his Fifth Speech has little to do with ‘on religions’, not even with Judaism and Christianity, which is understandable in view of the speaker’s limited world of experience. But it is concerned with just one religion, the Christian religion, to which belongs life and spirit and with another, which may have had life during its infancy, but is now dead: ‘a dead religion’,107 as Schleiermacher put it with a contradictio in adjecto. Dead religion is the adequate expression of the dead letter and the dead text. Now if Christianity tends towards being ‘religion’ as such, then there remains for Judaism the role of being a ‘religion without religion’.108 If religion receives its life from the fundamental hermeneutic arising from the principle ‘spirit and letter’, then the religion without religion will not be content to be a mere variation of this hermeneutical principle. It will be more likely, even at the risk of ironicizing its name – ‘religion without religion’ – and of taking upon itself the dismay of religious and cultural theory, to bring the platonic-Pauline hermeneutic to peripeteia and to declare itself to be on the side of the ‘anti-hermeneutical’ principle ‘letter and spirit’.

10  Living letter Schleiermacher summons no less than the whole of Plato and the whole of a (supposedly) platonizing Paul in order to consolidate himself in the illusion that he is writing Speeches about religion and, through repeated polemics against dead letters, is shielding himself against the thought that he is actually writing about religion, which commanded him to speak. By contrast, Schlegel appears from the beginning to adopt the form of ‘religion which is written’ in opposition to Schleiermacher’s Speeches.109 Schlegel’s whole attention is focused on religion as letter, in lieu of anything else. But it is precisely this for which he is so well prepared. ‘The letter’, he writes in 1800/01, ‘must be active and alive, agile or progressive’.110 Why a living letter? For Schlegel the letter often, though not always, has a positive resonance. This passes through all the essential planes of meaning which can be associated with the idea of a letter. Its meaning is more or less ‘literal’. We pass from the less to the more. In the broadest sense ‘letter’ means language as such, in so far as it is applied in as literal a way as possible, without giving rise to a sharp distinction between language and written text. That is the broad field which Schlegel calls ‘the philosophy of philology’. In particular, it is to this that the hermeneutical maxim belongs of ‘understanding the author better than he understands himself ’. Let us note: Schleiermacher’s aperçu returns in Schlegel. Whereas Schleiermacher takes up this maxim in its usual form, extending it at most by suggesting that the important thing is to understand the author ‘at first as well as and then better than its originator’, Schlegel prefers a sequence which is evidently reversed: first ‘better’, and then ‘as well as’. And finally it is even words

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which understand themselves best, whether they are spoken or written. The principle ‘spirit and letter’ is inverted: ‘no spirit without letter’.111 The letter is spoken of in its more restricted sense when Schlegel refers to text and not to language. Here we see the characteristic difference between Schleiermacher and Schlegel with respect to the distinction between language and text. Unlike Schleiermacher, who proceeds along the lines of the Rousseau–Herder tradition that language is ‘more ancient’ than text, Schlegel approaches the question of whether ‘text is more ancient than language’. The classical concern with the origins of language becomes in Schlegel a concern with the origins of text. ‘Of all things . . . that the human spirit has invented, text is without comparison the most wonderful and most important’.112 Now, reflections upon literalness in the broader sense of the word are not as astonishing as those upon literalness in its narrower sense. But it is far more astonishing that Schlegel also concerns himself with the letter in its most specific sense. It is concerning the literal letter that he writes about an ‘apology of the letter’.113 Two repeating motifs can be discerned in the fragments which Schlegel wrote before and after the Speeches. First, the letter deserves ‘honour’. It is the principle of art and science, the element of religion and organ of wit. In a series of elements, that element is honourable which warrants our initial attention. Secondly, ‘the letter is the true magic wand’.114 The letter can hardly be grasped more literally. The letter – grasped as magic wand – awakens the spirit. Here the ‘omnipotence of the letter’ is already implied which is for Schlegel the highest point of the living letter. It is omnipotent as a free standing and vital play, which is active in religion, rhetoric and poetics as their enlivening spirit. Having arrived at this point, the straining bow of Schlegel’s omnipotent letter springs back to Schleiermacher’s claim regarding the omnipotent word. Our study proceeds like a ride over the Bodensee. Schleiermacher’s early work On Religion is one of the programmatic works of modern Protestantism, if not the primary one. Contemporary theology is well aware of this point of origin, though this is not an uninterrupted tradition and theology renews awareness of this origin through extraordinary accomplishments in the cultivation and interpretation of texts. In so far as theology defines itself in the context of a religious and cultural theory, Schleiermacher’s inheritance will be advanced in a form which, viewed as a whole, corresponds to the one in which he himself took up the impulse of the Speeches in his late work. Our reading of the Speeches has brought to light a further, different kind of accent. Schleiermacher’s Speeches count as a programmatic text in so far as they must be read as a document which records the inevitable reversal of the principle ‘spirit and letter’, from out of which their composer conceived them, into ‘letter and spirit’, a principle which is first announced in early Romanticism, especially by Schlegel and Novalis. Now Schleiermacher and Schlegel are like two who lie on a single bed; one is accepted and the other is rejected (cf. Lk. 17.34). One of these was received by theology and the other was not. But the work which proceeds from ‘letter and spirit’ – obviously a religious text rather than speeches on religion – is not any the less programmatic, in the event that Protestantism and precisely the one which acts in an awareness of its modernity, feels itself called upon to cast a glance at its counterimage. The programmatic text of postmodern Protestantism has been awaited since

Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ‘On Religion’ 153 Schlegel. Its coefficients, in so far as they are stimulated by early Romanticism, are: negativity, transcendental poetry, allegory, irony and living letter. But now finally what kind of figure does our treatment of the theme ‘Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit’ itself cut? It appears as a palindrome of thought. And now we know: the more literal the palindrome, the more it breathes the divine breath of irony; it is this of which I have spoken here.

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Inspired Reading, Speaking and Listening: Letter and Spirit in Preaching Michael Meyer-Blanck

1  Preaching as conversation in the spirit If practical theology launches into the theme ‘letter and spirit’, it is homiletics that will initially come to mind. It is in the theory of preaching that the quest for the proper use of the text emerges most quickly. In what follows, preaching will be described as a process in which reading, speaking and listening are mutually dependent and permeate one another. The sermon, literally ‘interlocution’ or ‘conversation’ (homilia), is the staging of a text with its cast of characters, in which the letter of an inherited text is expounded anew in the spirit of the Lord and in liberty.1 In this respect, the different aspects of the process of preaching can be called inspired reading, speaking and listening, and these can all be seen as encompassing many dimensions of ‘inspired reading’.2 Yet from the outset, one has to bear in mind that the act of preaching itself is performed not through reading, but through speaking and listening; it is linked to and yet categorically distinct from, reading. The homiletic encounter with a biblical text is not meditative reading, but speaking and listening. The materiality of what is written, playing an important part in recent discussion that has been critical of hermeneutics, takes its place behind the performative. The letter is turned into sound. The homiletic reading of the text3 occurs in the context of liturgy and churchroom, in music, prayer and – to a greater or lesser extent – in the bodily closeness to other attendees (such as the reader, those who are praying and the singers). Preaching can lead to learning how to read, in the sense of reading properly (‘Lesen-Lernen’),4 but this mode of communication is not particularly characteristic for it. At any rate, preaching is not primarily concerned with the ‘inspired reader’,5 but with ‘inspired conversation’ (homilia); it is about inspired shared reading in the form of speaking and listening. The pleasure in the word (‘Wortgenuß’)6 that homiletics has lately come to promote is the pleasure of the perceived word, which is reconstructed in the realm of liturgy as a cooperative venture. The distinction between spirit and letter according to Paul, Augustine and Luther is not a merely exegetical distinction, but one that also pertains to soteriology and to fundamental theology; it broaches the issue of the very conditions that make theological

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discourse possible. Therefore, we need to engage in a preliminary discussion of a more general kind, which will range more broadly than homiletics alone and take a view on the whole of practical theology.

2  The distinction between letter and spirit in the context of practical theology The pair of terms ‘letter and spirit’ is, to begin with, not a subject matter of contemporary practical theology and in this it has suffered the same fate as many biblical and dogmatic themes. Practical theology nowadays sees itself as a topical theory of religion rather than as a theory about how to apply theological contents, which have been previously developed by exegesis and dogmatics. Consequently, the grand theological themes play a rather inferior role. This phenomenon is an ambivalent one and there is no space to discuss it here.7 Suffice it to say that the strength of the contemporary German discussion in practical theology lies in its aspiration to offer not only a method of pastoral action (worship, teaching and counselling), but also a hermeneutics of Christian praxis in the context of contemporary religion and culture. In my view, this means that practical theology must be a theory of discourse on religion as well as a theory of religious discourse.8 Homiletics is a domain in which the interlocking of both aspects must be taken into account, since the process of preaching is concerned with a mediation between the religion that is passed on corporately in the context of the church on the one hand and the religious subjectivity of the preacher and the listeners on the other hand. In this context, I wish to bring to mind a distinction which is parallel (not identical, and yet kindred) to that between letter and spirit, namely, the distinction between theology and religion. This model of thought, relating to Enlightenment theology, was propagated by the famous exegete Johann Salomo Semler (1725–91). It enabled theology to affiliate itself to enlightened linguistics and to historical research, which were on the rise in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, without neglecting religious truth claims. In Semler and in Enlightenment theology, the distinction between ‘writing’ and ‘divine word’ in the context of emerging historical-critical exegesis corresponds to the distinction between the theology of the professional scholar and the religion of the believer. Writing and ‘theology’ are drawn into the orbit of the concept of history, which is distinct from revelation, faith and religion. We should notice that this distinction may sound confusing to English ears, since in English the ‘study of religion’ denotes not faith and personal commitment but the attempt at an objective description of phenomena; this is the way, for example, that the term ‘religion’ is used in Robert Morgan’s chapter. However, understanding ‘religion’ within the Germanic tradition as designating devotion and response to revelation, the result of Semler’s distinction was that scholarly exegesis (theology) and pious self-consciousness (religion) were no longer dependent on each other in a mutually deductive way. Historical-critical exegesis thus became an identity marker of professional ‘theology’ as opposed to the practising parishioner. In this way, Semler’s distinction between theology and religion entailed a reassessment

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of the education of the theologian. It is in this situation that practical theology also develops as a theory of the education of the theologian. Theological knowledge is no longer regarded as a prerequisite of salvation, as was the case in both Protestant orthodoxy and pietism; rather, it is of service to the training of the minister and of the teacher of religious education in their particular expertise. It is historically conditioned and thus subject to change. This means that ‘theological scholarliness has always been a successively changeable discipline; its purpose has always been solely related to education, to expertness in teaching’.9 The distinction can become a dichotomy or even an antithesis; therein lies the danger of this distinction. And yet it is a decisive step that allows for differentiation between the religious system and the scientific system, without separating them from each other. As is commonly known, this is the gain from the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century: to keep united what ought to be united by means of relationships which at the same time explore the differences. It is not the case that there are two kinds of reality – religion and science. Rather, the distinction between theology and religion takes place within one reality. One must bear in mind, then, that practical theology as an academic discipline has its roots in the very changes occurring in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Historically, the emergence of practical theology as a self-contained discipline coincides with the appearance of the distinction between theology and religion introduced by the Enlightenment, at a time when individual religious practice could no longer be deduced from theology (as was the case in the old Protestant orthodoxy of the seventeenth century) and, conversely, when one could no longer deduce theology from piety (as was the case in pietism in the eighteenth century).10 Practical theology is a theory of theological education and a theory of religious knowledge, in which the distinction between theology and religion is integral to its very substance. It holds the two together while recognizing their difference, in a lively and creative tension. The process of making this distinction, while not prioritizing one element over the other, belongs to the ancient pair of terms ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ that was taken up by Luther. The issue at stake is a kind of apprenticeship in understanding, which first keeps religious communication alive (rather than codifying it doctrinally or piously) and secondly makes sure that scholarly reflection on religious communication remains transparent and calculable (rather than becoming a hermetic art by appealing to ‘special information’ like the verbal inspiration of the text or the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in exegesis and preaching). With particular reference to homiletics, this creative tension is lost and the art of preaching suffers harm, when exegesis is spiritually ‘short circuited’, and pious affirmation takes the place of careful and scholarly reading.11 Thus, the question is situated in the rise of modernity, which is characterized by a distinction between the ‘religious’ system and the ‘scientific’ system that took place in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.12 In this context, one should note that some Islamic scholars are wrestling at present with the distinction between ‘theology’ and ‘religion’, in making a distinction between letter and spirit in the Koran.13 For example, the Egyptian literary scholar Nasr Amid Abu Zaid (born 1943) was convicted of being an apostate from Islam because of his semiotic–linguistic distinction between God’s word and its historical codification and was forced to flee to the Netherlands.14

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His claim was merely that the Koran, too, must be understood metaphorically and that truth is not to be found in the letter of the text of the Koran, but rather it emerges in ‘an endless process of interpretation’ and ever-new understanding. Zaid thus employs European hermeneutics and semiotics in comprehending the reality of religion as communication.15

3  The play between text, history and interpretation in preaching The distinction between revelation and interpretation, religion and theology, proclamation and exegesis (that is, between letter and spirit in the broadest sense of the words) is thus a marker both of differentiation in modern culture and of the praxis of preaching. We can now turn our attention, therefore, to the particular part of practical theology which is homiletics. Homiletics becomes a theory in its own right at the very moment when preaching is understood as the point where theology evolves. That is, homiletics is no longer seen as a ‘conveyor belt’ for the implementation of previously known theological contents into the sermon, as is the case in approaches that adhere to a dualism of form and content.16 In homiletics, the relationship between letter and spirit is often treated as the quest for the relationship between the text and the sermon. In this chapter, I want to bring two forms of homiletic hermeneutics into confrontation with each other, presenting them as ideal models that have been somewhat sharpened up. The first is a two-term model, that of communication from experience to experience, in which both text and sermon are envisaged as a mere vehicle from one experience to another. As against this – admittedly caricatured – model, I am proposing a three-term model in which text, history and interpretation come into play with one another as three elements in a kind of way that does not privilege any of them and which expresses – I want to argue – the distinction between letter and spirit. This approach is intended to meet the concerns that have recently been expressed about certain hermeneutical procedures which interpret texts from static basic assumptions. The claim is that such readings arrest the text’s potential for meaning.17 In terms of homiletics, it would indeed be fatal if one was to always find the one story in the many biblical stories by means of abstraction from the Bible,18 rather than providing the listener with the chance to discover his or her own story in the letters of the text. Yet it would be equally fatal if the letter of the text were to be merely repeated in support of an approach to homiletics as an art form, in order to avoid the dangers of Western hermeneutics altogether.19 The critique of hermeneutics ‘as such’ can hardly be countered by a mere reversal of the hierarchy of letter and spirit, particularly with the attitude that it is always ‘the others’, the imbecile interpreters, who are responsible for the perversion of meaning (just as ‘tourists’ are always the other travellers). Rather than propagating a prioritization of either letter or spirit, homiletics must direct the attention to the use of the letter in reading, speaking and listening. This suggests a kind of hermeneutics that makes recourse to the theory of the sign.

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Furthermore, I wish to bring to mind the soteriological distinction between law and gospel, which is the theological setting of the hermeneutical distinction between letter and spirit. The specification of the Christian sermon is that it is Christ-sermon and not text-sermon. This clearly distinguishes it from the Jewish understanding.20 If one wants to make Jewish homiletic hermeneutics in modern times accessible for the homiletic debate within Christianity, as Alexander Deeg does, then this distinction must be heeded. Rightly, Deeg points out that the sermon in Judaism is not understood as ‘the word of God’, but as teaching, inspiration and edification.21 The Torah as scripture is the inexhaustible revelation that preaching can only mediate but not generate. A sacramental understanding of the preached word of the kind that one encounters in Luther’s theology22 and in the Lutherans’ Book of Concord23 is foreign to both Judaism and Islam. Furthermore, the concept of preaching as ‘the living voice of the gospel’ (viva vox evangelii) is genuinely Reformed. For the Catholic, the sermon is understood as ‘the living explanation of the church’ (viva explanatio Ecclesiae), but not as vox Christi, according to the dogmatic texts of the Second Vatican Council.24 I suggest that the Protestant understanding of preaching, maintaining a differentiating distance from the holy text, has even made a strong impact on the modern critical treatment of texts as such. Now it may well be the case that scholarly homiletics since the nineteenth century has often obeyed a form of ‘logocentrism’ by teaching that the sermon was to be arranged according to a strict scheme of theme and ‘partition’.25 Nevertheless, preaching has been the theological locale where creative readings of the text have been achieved and novel kinds of readings have been developed. With regard to preaching, the recourse to deconstructionist criticism of the modern hermeneutical tradition (as a ‘rage of understanding’)26 must bear in mind that the hour of birth of hermeneutics was not a codification of readings of the holy text, but conversely the loosening up of interpretations that had been officially approved as ‘the fourfold sense’ of the scripture.27 Jewish and Islamic hermeneutics assume that the letter of the holy text is inexhaustible and the ultimate meaning is withdrawn; for the Reformed understanding, by contrast, the liveliness of the Christ who is present (Christus praesens) is inexhaustible and Christ himself remains withdrawn until his Parousia. Christology is the decisive factor for a Christian hermeneutics of the text; the recourse to Jewish hermeneutics and to a hermeneutics of withdrawal (like Jacques Derrida’s) cannot ignore the differences that are given here.28 Nonetheless, Derrida’s concept of the inexhaustibility of the text can alert homiletics to the way that the resistance of the written word can challenge and overcome an approach which is centred on the subject.29

4  The two-term hermeneutic of text and experience in preaching It has been observed repeatedly that the distinction between letter and spirit in the Western intellectual tradition, as the starting point of (and a parallel30 to) Luther’s later distinction between law and gospel, has an Augustinian and Platonic background.31

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This can still be sensed in modern recourses to the distinction between letter and spirit. The problem of an idealist understanding of the relationship between letter and spirit is first caused by the fact that a changeover to a different realm, that is, a changeover from soteriology to hermeneutics, is taking place. Paul was concerned with the new covenant made in Christ which identified what had happened before and outside Christ as ‘the old’ (2 Cor. 5.17); from now on (apo tou nun, 2 Cor. 5.16), ‘the old’ was to be interpreted in the light of Jer. 31.31 and was to be antithetically opposed to the Christ-event,32 so that ‘spirit’ could be plainly identified with redeeming faith.33 Consequentially, Paul’s antithesis between spirit and letter, originally belonging to the economy of salvation and to soteriology34 is turned into a general hermeneutical principle for the interpretation of texts. Second, a pronounced hermeneutic prioritization – rather than an abiding distinction – is involved in this development. According to this prioritization, one must not enquire into the letter of the text, but seek for the spirit of the author that is expressed in it, with which the reader can communicate if he or she advances ‘beyond’ the letter and contacts the author directly – from spirit to spirit, as it were. Therein lies the strength and the limit of the kind of hermeneutics that Schleiermacher introduced. Following this account, perspectives pertaining to reader-response theory are only employed in those cases where a text cannot have an author other than the letter itself (as, for example, in myths). Normally, the letter is only a vehicle for the ideal of immediate communication: the spirit of the author is communicated by means of written letters and is subsequently brought to light out of them by the reader. Accordingly, no meaning at all is being attributed to the form of the sign. Form is regarded as a necessary though actually rather distracting husk of a spiritual core. The letter is ultimately a mere means of transportation, a necessary ‘wrapping’ for the conveyance of the spirit through the ages; indeed, it is a wrapping that one must remove. The analogy between reading on the one hand and a discourse among people present together on the other hand – an analogy that admittedly has its uses – has the consequence of making one forget about the materiality of the form of the sign due to the dominance of the ideal of the ‘live discourse’. Hermeneutics of the text and hermeneutics of discourse coalesce into the grand concept of communication, whereupon textuality and orality (i.e. homiletic communication) remain undifferentiated. This form of hermeneutics can come in the guise of a conservative-churchly form as well as in a critical one. The first of these two versions is manifest in the orthodox doctrine of verbal inspiration: The spirit of the text has assumed the letter and is now identical with it; the distinction of letter and spirit – like other distinctions – is arrested, because distinctions are no longer regarded as necessary. Theology and revelation, scripture and faith, letter and spirit are identical; they procure the contact with reality by their own devices. The preacher merely has to repeat the text in the context of a (preferably consistent, orthodox) doctrine systematically.35 In old Protestant orthodoxy, preaching was conceived of along the lines of this model. Yet, there is also a critical-idealistic way of defining the relationship between letter and spirit: here, the text is the medium of the experience that is conveyed from subject to subject. The experience of faith of a biblical person enters the text and it must then

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be distilled out of the letter. The overall concept is the consent between the spirit of the reader and the spirit of the author; the ideal is the famous maxim that one was ‘to understand the text at first as well as and then even better than its author’.36 This idea was initially introduced by Friedrich Schlegel and then taken up in Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics. Understanding is a reversal of the production of text:37 the listener recedes to a primordial experience that lies behind the text, just as the author proceeds from his experience in the course of producing the text. Spirit meets spirit via a medium. With respect to preaching, this theory assumes that what must be related to the listener is the content that is given by means of the text. This content may be envisaged as something that far surpasses the text (‘revelation’), as was usual in the seventeenth century or as the experience that lies behind the text, as has been common since the nineteenth century. The listener is the addressee, the preacher is the messenger or the witness and the text is the medium. We are therefore faced with a double two-term relation: between the experience of the listener and the text, and between the text and the spirit behind the text. listener experience

[text ] preacher

letter

spirit (Gospel: either ‘revelation’ or ‘experience’)

With the aid of the sermon and the preacher, the listener opens up the text, which is regarded as the mere vehicle of the spirit or the actual content of the text. By this means, the spirit communicates directly with the mind of the listener. The disadvantage of this hermeneutical model is that the actual form of the sign, that is, the intrinsic value of the text, is not taken into account. The text is no longer a textum, a fabric of form and content, of letter, reality and interpretation; it retreats behind its content. The letter is merely an extrinsic depiction of the actual intrinsic insight, of immediate experience, of pious sensation, of being awestruck by the gospel or in whatever guise the modern expressions of religious immediacy come (partly pietistic, partly belonging to the theology of enlightenment, partly liberal-theological). Here, the letter of the text remains undeveloped and so does the strange experience of the biblical witness, which both appears in the letter and is hidden in it at the same time. The classical hermeneutical model, which came in the wake of Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, assumes, as I have said, that one can understand the author even better than he understood himself. Here, criticism has a walkover job in unmasking this kind of hermeneutics as usurpation of both text and author and in agitating for the other of the other, in this case the foreign nature of the biblical text and of the biblical witness. These impulses have gradually made their way into homiletics with the emergence of aesthetic approaches.38 And yet the empirical turn in the practical theology of the 1970s only led to alterations on the surface, while the hermeneutic model basically stayed the same. The behaviouristic theories of communication that are now regularly resorted to are obviously parallel to the older idealist kind of two-term thought.39 They were designed

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according to the model ‘sender/encoding of the message ⇒ channel ⇒ recipient/ decryption of the message’. In this form, they were incorporated into the German homiletics of the 1970s. These theories of communication obeyed a model of a twofold two-term relation, aspiring to minimize interferences in the transmission. The capability of the medium of transmission to conserve and to transport was often overestimated, while the participation of the medium in the forming of the contents was often underestimated.40 Karl-Wilhelm Dahm, for example, states clearly: ‘One can describe preaching cybernetically as a stream of predominantly acoustic signals or elements of signals. According to the intention of the preacher, these signals transport certain assumptions, insights, appeals or sensations from the speaker to the listener. The preacher hopes that the meaning which he himself associates with the signal is also associated by the listener with the same signal, at least approximately’.41 History shows that the two-term relation results in a constriction of both subject and the object. The Protestant orthodox relation of letter and spirit turns the preaching, as the experience of a subject, into a mere transmission of the truth of revelation, which is actually contained in the text and must only be repeated. Moreover, since the redeeming truth is already available in the confessions, the individual text and its form can only be the medium for this object. On the other hand, in the idealist hermeneutic of subjective experience, the text and its form (that is, the ‘letter’) do not play a decisive part compared to what is to be communicated from person to person. There is some advance in the fact that the subjective hermeneutics of production (author) and reproduction (reader/hearer) brings three different levels into play with one another: the subject behind the biblical text is being opened up by the subject of the preacher for the subject of the listener, so that a triple-element conversation, a ‘homilia’ between three partners can be established (e.g. Paul, the preacher and the ‘I’ of the listener). Yet, the three subjects do not open up the basic two-term model: the letter is nothing more than a means for an end for the spirit, that is, the various experiences of the subjects.

5  Text, history and interpretation: A three-term model of preaching Learning from recent semiotics means proposing not a two-term model of the sign, but a three-term model. Text, experience and interpretation are neither identical, nor can one be derived from the other. They subsist only together. The text (letter) as the first point in the model represents a reality that is simultaneously contained and hidden within it. What is represented is the historical reality of experience or faith as the second point, and this cannot be simply isolated from the text as the actual element ‘behind’ it (as ‘spirit’ behind ‘letter’). The historical reality of experience or faith is thus accessible to the third point, which is the interpretation, and remains bound to the letter at all times. The experience we have today cannot communicate immediately with the experience of ancient times, and this is not an ideal to which we should aspire. Experience is mediated by signs and is not accessible in any direct kind of way. Actually, this applies as much to present experience as to experience in the past.

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text (sign)

past experience

interpretation

history

present experience

My own sensation, thinking and believing are never accessible for me ‘as such’, or, as Charles Sanders Peirce famously put it, ‘every thought is a sign’.42 Allegedly unmediated experience is still mediated by signs. This is also the case in religion. My religious thinking and experiencing subsists in signs, which again contain experience. Apart from biblical signs, religion – at least in our culture area – has liturgical signs such as the Lord’s Prayer, Aaron’s blessing or the sound of a chorale by Johann Sebastian Bach. Religious customs and multiple repetitions act as a lens for one’s own experience of immediacy; the ‘traces of usage’ enrich the connection between the form of the sign, the content of the sign and the backwards link to the historical origin. The longer one has an intense experience of a text or a different sort of sign, the more kinds of readings one discovers. For example, the religious richness of a sentence like ‘the Lord make his face to shine upon you’ is not opened up by means of a mere subjective appropriation, nor by means of an empathy with what is meant historically by the Priestly Writer. The three-term character of signs implies that the content – the longer one lives with it (and practises it religiously by the aid of signs) – must be opened up as that which is hidden in the signs. Yet all this applies only if there is a history of the actual usage of the signs. This affirms the experience of religious education that the modern principle of understanding is only one aspect, and that ‘initiation’ and ‘familiarization’ are equally important. According to the semiotic model above, one cannot simply substitute the principle of experience and understanding (‘spirit’) for the principle of text or letter, as if the text were an inexhaustible reservoir of meaning or simply a kind of ‘container’. This would take us back to a model that is ultimately analogous to the doctrine of verbal inspiration. With regard to a three-term model, by contrast, one will have to say that the binding of experience to signs means that, conversely, all signs are bound to experience. Signs that are not interpreted are only an irregular dispersion of printer’s ink on paper or of sound waves in a room. The semiotic model inculcates the old Reformed principle of the distinction between letter and spirit, resisting the temptation that one of the parties be prioritized and turned into a principle. From the viewpoint of semiotics, the significances of signs are neither located in the form of the sign (first term), nor in the original point of reference (second term), nor in the interpretation (third term). ‘Significances’ are not contained in a text at all; they are rather snapshots within processes of the generation of significance. Significance

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withdraws in the very moment where it appears, for it immediately becomes a sign that is open to interpretation, in need of interpretation and susceptible for interpretation. From the perspective of semiotics, the meaning of the text therefore shares the same features with what Barth once described as the ‘lacuna’ (or empty spot) of the Word of God. For the practice of preaching, it follows that none of the three terms may be isolated and turned into a privileged principle of interpretation. Each of the three terms has its own function within their cooperation together. The letter of the inherited text does not merely conserve experience, which would subsequently have to be opened up again. Instead, letter, interpretation and reality are to be observed together. The text as sign (the letter) is ambiguous, but that does not mean that it is arbitrary. It opens up experiences by virtue of its form; experiences are contained in the form, but cannot be detached from it. The more that interpretative work is devoted to the letter and the more ambiguous the interpretation is, the more meaning the letter gathers. Only the spirit turns the letter into a letter containing spirit; yet conversely, there is no hermeneutic process without the letter, and therefore no biblical spirit without letter.43 One can describe these interrelationships with respect to homiletic dangers and fallacies. If the first term of the model, the existing form of the biblical text, is underestimated (the letter existing only for the benefit of the spirit), then one is aspiring to detach the experience from the form. This can easily lead to boredom, to a kind of lecture instead of a sermon. Rather than speaking religiously, as the biblical texts do, the sermon speaks about religion by – for example – explaining what Paul thought about God (thus neglecting the apostrophizing character of the Pauline speech-act: ‘be reconciled to God’); or else it explains what the parable of the prodigal son means for us. By contrast, it must be emphasized that the biblical images and parables can only be trans-lated by being carried forward, not by being explained or by being ‘put into concepts’. In this respect, the semiotic model concedes something to the model of verbal inspiration: texts as such contain a surplus, something that can never be completely absorbed. If the second term of the model, the original historical experience, is underestimated, then one is seeking after religious experience without historical resistance. At its heart, this is the medieval model of the fourfold sense of the scripture, which aims to interpret the text in the context of the present with respect to faith, love and hope,44 losing sight of the sensus historicus and the sensus tropologicus (in Luther’s sense of a Christological understanding) in the course of the play of meanings. The Protestant sermon should be rather immune against negligence of the historical dimension, as it draws intensively from exegesis. And yet there subsist subtle forms of the negligence of the historical45 in many diverse attempts to push back its strangeness into the background, for the benefit of the contemporary interpretation.46 C. G. Jung’s ‘subjectal interpretation’ also counts among approaches of this kind; here, individual characters in the text are regarded as standing for intrapsychic instances. This kind of interpretation is widespread both in religious education and in preaching.47 Yet – apart from the specific intrapsychic angle – this form of the

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so-called ‘symbolic’ interpretation in preaching had become well known even before depth psychology had emerged. For example, it has been customary to construe the boat in Mk 4.35-41 as a symbol denoting the ‘the church, the early Christian housecongregation and individual believers’.48 In addition to this symbolic interpretation, the loss of the historical resistance of the text in the sermon also occurs whenever one believes all too quickly that one has found experiences and events today that have a close affinity to the text (to its letter and its spirit). Rather, the sermon should resemble a skilful presentation in a museum, in so far as it presents a strange world that is worth entering. The sermon can create encounters with biblical characters who are precisely not humans like you and me; we are not acquainted with these characters simply because they, too, are human beings and participate in alleged psychic universals. By contrast, it is precisely the strange and the alien that can incite our curiosity. What is opposed to our own experience, rather than that which is always and already familiar, draws us into the process of interpretation, into the letter and the spirit of the text. At any rate, the distinction between historical reconstruction and contemporary application must be made clear.49 If the third term of the model, the interpretation, is underestimated, then the illusion is being perpetrated that the form of the text and its historical content simply need to be presented to the reader in order to reach him or her. Here, again, we are confronted with a two-term model, comparable to the idealist hermeneutic from spirit to spirit. Supposedly, text and history are what actually matter, and the aesthetic response to the process of signification is only a kind of empty ‘channel for transportation’ for the objectively given blend of letter and spirit. This was the case, for example, in the later form of the theology of the Word of God; here, the preacher opted one-sidedly for a ‘sermon on the text’ to the detriment of a ‘sermon on a topic’, which led only to a monotony in preaching rather than to fidelity to the text. In view of such constrictions, the ancient rule of speaking holds good: the sermon must risk heresy over and over again in order to avoid the worst heresy of all – boredom. Against the backdrop of these deliberations, we have reasons to ask critical questions about the current German project of a ‘translation of the bible in politically-correct language’ (Bibelübersetzung in gerechter Sprache).50 Is it distrust in the interpretation of the reader/listener which urges that one must translate everything ‘correctly’, so that it corresponds to our understanding? Is the interpretation always in error if it uses the hierarchical image of ‘Lord’, or if it only reads the male grammatical case? Must one, for example, press upon the reader with utter political correctness that one can never assume Matthew was portraying Jesus with ‘anti-Judaistic’ overtones? The semiotic model, by contrast, assumes that interpretation can be best developed if the diversity of readings is increased rather than restricted. Fidelity to the letter does not imply an enclosed interpretation. As Alexander Deeg suggests, the reader is a potential author who makes use of the inherited text.51 The play between text, history and interpretation is a venture that one ought to embark on freely rather than try to constrain. Neither letter nor spirit is to be prioritized with respect to homiletics and practical theology, and one is not to be deduced from the other. Such domestication of the play between letter and spirit would arrest communication. The field of play of letter and spirit is rather action in motion. Any commitment to one position, that

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is, any commitment to a particular present-day, historical or textual fixation, would run counter to religious experience, which – like the manna in the desert – cannot be conserved. This is the benefit of the modern distinction between letter and spirit, which begins with Luther. The religious logic of this approach has been brought to bear many times against institutional and intellectual interests. It observes that whatever has just been learnt (‘letter’) is left behind by the person who is advancing, and that it must then be opened completely anew. Merely conserved matter has no religious meaning, but only a meaning which belongs to the history of religion. This is the way that Luther puts it as early as 1513–15, using the term litera (letter) in an indirect sense. He is not speaking about the letter of scripture, but about that which has become self-evident. We could say that in his view, ‘letter’ is that which no longer releases religious processes of signification, but which merely repeats commonplaces: For, as I said, everyone who moves forward forgets what is behind him, which is for him the letter and he reaches out to what is before him, which is for him the spirit. For always what is possessed is the letter in relation to what is to be acquired, as we said about motion. Thus the article of the Trinity as expressed in the time of Arius was spirit and given to few, but it is now the letter, because it has been revealed, unless we, too, add something, namely, a living faith in the Trinity. [. . .] If we are the children of God, we must always be in the process of birth. (First Lectures on the Psalms, 1513)52

9

Letter and Spirit Adrift: Kafka, Scholem and the Late-modern Crisis of Hermeneutics Jochen Schmidt

1  The crisis of ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ as a feature of late-modernity If the notion of the symbol has any meaning whatsoever in aesthetics – and this is far from certain – then it can only be that the individual moments of the work of art point beyond themselves by virtue of their interrelations, that their totality coalesces into meaning. Nothing could be less true of Kafka. . . . Each sentence is literal and each signifies. The two moments are not merged, as the symbol would have it, but yawn apart and out of the abyss between them blinds the glaring ray of fascination.1

In this comment on Franz Kafka that stages the tension between letter and spirit, Theodor Adorno is not only describing his very own approach to hermeneutics.2 Rather, this passage attests to a particularly late-modern crisis of hermeneutics on the whole. In terms of ‘letter and spirit’ – giving these words a hermeneutical meaning3 – the crisis of modernity can be described as a decline of the cohesion and compatibility of letter and spirit. Traditional hermeneutics had assumed that the ‘letter’ is a corpse that can be reanimated by means of interpretative techniques, which effectively means that the letter is overcome4 as the sensual is being converted into the spiritual5 and expression is being transformed into content. The late-modern critique of hermeneutics, by contrast, argues that sign and meaning never accord and that the alleged interpretative reanimation of the letter, its subordination under a spirit, is, in fact, an act of totalizing interpretation; this is effectively an act of lethal violence and so ‘the spirit kills’. To be clear, Adorno does not mean to imply that interpretation is impossible or that there simply exists no meaning whatsoever. The thrust of Adorno’s argument is that the culture of his times is drenched in ideology to such an extent that any kind of interpretation will be incorporated into this very same ideology. Spirit does not reanimate; it imposes itself on the individual, thereby depriving it of its very particularity, indeed of its self. Sensible interpretation and reflection can thus only be attempted by means of negative hermeneutical devices.

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In this chapter, I will not discuss the question of whether Adorno’s diagnosis of his times was apt; nor will I raise the question of whether it can be applied to our times, though my hunch is that it may be worth trying. Regardless of whether the crisis has even been as severe as Adorno (and others) suggest – the therapy that is proposed could act as a model for the surmounting of different crises of existential and hermeneutical meaning. The latter, I argue, are abundant.

2  Fatal celebrations of ‘spirit’ The late-modern distrust against spirit is condensed in Jacques Derrida’s treatise Of Spirit, which focuses on Heidegger’s catastrophic rectorial address at the University of Freiburg in  1933.6 This reading of Heidegger follows an agenda that several of Derrida’s writings share, as he shows first that Heidegger attempted to set ‘spirit’ free from forces that are alien to its ‘true nature,’ and second that Heidegger thereby fell prey to an alien character of spirit that was far more severe than the one from which he had attempted to cure it. Heidegger criticizes the ‘empty cleverness, the ‘noncommittal play of wit’7 and the deteriorated usage of ‘spirit’ that had become dominant in his times. Against this background, he reminds his hearers about the ‘spiritual mission of the German people’,8 which must be brought to bear by all means, even at the cost of coercion.9 The calling of the German university and indeed the calling of himself as its ‘spiritual leadership’10 is to reawaken this supposedly genuine spirit. Heidegger’s celebration of ‘spirit’ betrays the fact that in the very attempt to overcome the alienation that spirit undergoes according to his diagnosis, Heidegger’s own proposal for a renewed understanding of spirit in the face of the ‘crisis of the European spirit’11 falls captive to an even more dangerous alienation. The implication of Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s rectorial address is that any appeal to ‘spirit’ is prone to corruption.12 This is evident particularly in the fact that Heidegger’s idealization of spirit is not an accident, but that it is rooted so deeply in his thought that it re-emerges, though in a different cast, 20 years later in his reading of the poet Georg Trakl. The point of taking this example of Heidegger’s dangerous recourse to ‘spirit’ is not to suggest that one dispense with spirit and turn to ‘letter’ instead, as some branches of postmodernism may argue. Mark Taylor, for instance, claims that the history of religious thought in the West could be represented in (two columns of) binary terms, which include [A] Spirit vs. [B] Body, [A] Meaning vs. [B] Absurdity and [A] Speech vs. [B] Writing.13 While it is Taylor’s intention to surpass these dichotomies, the outcome of his thought is effectively the dissolution of the terms in column [A] into the terms in column [B].14 Yet even Derrida is prepared to accept, despite his critique of Heidegger, a cautious use of the term ‘spirit’, as another contribution in this volume shows.15 My own suggestion will be to look for meaning within the very gap between letter and spirit, rather than isolating one of the two. I will present this suggestion with reference to Gershom Scholem’s reading of Kafka’s literature. Yet before doing so, I aim to show that Kafka, too, was highly aware of the ambivalence of ‘spirit.’

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Franz Kafka was by no means a politically disinterested solipsist, as the focus on the realm of the interior experience in his writings particularly before 1914 may appear to suggest. Rather, some of Kafka’s texts can be read as his reaction to the culture of his times, for example In the Penal Colony. This short story features a machine that executes a verdict by means of writing; the ‘apparatus’ inscribes the sentence into the body of a transgressor, thereby killing him. He is never told his sentence; instead, ‘he learns it on his body’.16 The apparatus can be seen as a symbol of the antidote which technology has attempted to create for the modern crisis of universals, since it re-establishes the consistency of the material of the text, of signifier and signified17 and the act of communication in an unsurpassable kind of way. At the same time, the implementation of the apparatus is preceded by a lawsuit which also eradicates the diversity of readings of any given case. As the presiding officer explains: My guiding principle is this: guilt is never to be doubted. Other courts cannot follow that principle, for they consist of several opinions and have higher courts to scrutinize them.18

The apparatus presents a dominating spirit that uses the materiality of writing to exercise its totalitarian reign. The climax of this communicative praxis is the event of enlightenment that the punished transgressor allegedly experiences19 – even though it is dubious whether the transgressor would even speak the language of the colonial rulers.20 Thus, the officer describes the moment when the transgressor beholds his sentence: But how quiet he grows at just about the sixth hour! Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around his eyes. From there it radiates. . . . You have seen how difficult it is to decipher the script with one’s eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds.21

Kafka’s grim diagnosis of late modernity, spellt out in metaphors that play with ‘letter’ and ‘spirit,’ can be seen as a burning glass of late-modernity’s hermeneutic discontents. The drifting apart of letter and spirit, of matter and meaning, is being compensated for by the crudest violence of the spirit that imposes itself on matter at the cost of the destruction of the latter. Kafka’s gruesome vision of the Penal Colony can be read as a metaphor for a culture in which ‘letter’ becomes an instrument of a perverted mind. Again, the assumption that spirit is prone both to decay and to corruption, as Derrida and Kafka both imply in albeit very different terms, does not mean to suggest that one ought to dispense with spirit and opt for letter instead. Rather than taking sides against spirit, I will follow Adorno’s suggestion that one should look for a cure in the very gap or fracture between letter and spirit. What is actually threatening is not this gap itself, but the totalizing attempts to provide a remedy. It is therefore the wounds of discourse themselves that I will consult for help, following the logic of ho trōsas hiasetai (the wound must be healed with that by which it was struck) to which Adorno appeals.22 Gershom Scholem’s reading of Kafka, which draws him into the orbit of negative theology, can be seen as an example of such an attempt, as I will now try to show.

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3  Kafka, Scholem and the necessary decay of tradition Kafka, a most vivid literary exponent of the crisis of culture that the early twentieth century experienced, appears to have failed in his attempt to make sense of his world by virtue of literary production. At any rate, this is what Kafka’s last will, requesting that his writings be destroyed after his death, suggests. Walter Benjamin certainly finds in this last request a clue to what he diagnoses as Kafka’s failure: He did fail in his grandiose attempt to convert poetry into doctrine, to turn it into a parable and restore to it that stability and unpretentiousness which, in the face of reason, seemed to him to be the only appropriate thing for it. No other writer has obeyed the commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image” so faithfully.23

In accordance with this view that Kafka’s attempt had failed, Benjamin remarks at another point that Kafka’s work amounted to a ‘tradition fallen ill’. Kafka’s work represents tradition falling ill. Wisdom has sometimes been defined as the epic side of truth. Such a definition marks wisdom off as a property of tradition; it is the truth in its aggadic consistency. It is this consistency of truth that has been lost. . . . Kafka’s real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to transmissibility, to its aggadic element.24

It is certainly obvious that Kafka gave expression to a severe experience of crisis. Yet, taking up the question as to whether Kafka failed, Scholem articulates his own interpretation of negativity in Kafka. He makes it clear that Kafka had to fail. The crisis of tradition that comes to the fore in Kafka’s writings is by no means an accident or a coincidence. Tradition, according to Scholem, must pass through crises by necessity: It seems to me that the way of looking at things you’ve taken is exceptionally worthwhile and promising. But I would like to understand what you take to be Kafka’s fundamental failure, which you virtually embed at the heart of your reflections. You really seem to understand this failure as something unexpected or bewildering, whereas the simple truth [is] that the failure was the object of endeavours that, if they were to succeed, would be bound to fail. Surely that can’t have been what you meant. Did he express what he wanted to say? Of course. The antinomy of the aggadic you mention is not specific to the Kafkaesque Aggada alone; rather it is grounded in the nature of the aggadic itself.25

Scholem’s argument is that in the process of its transmission, tradition must inevitably decay. At some point, it loses its content altogether and it is reduced to the mere capacity to transmit. So he asks Benjamin: Does this opus really represent “tradition falling ill” in your sense? I would say such an enfeebling is rooted in the nature of the mystical tradition itself: it is only natural that the capacity of tradition to be transmitted remains as its sole living feature when it decays, when it is on the crest of a wave.26

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If it occurs (in a particular historical situation) that tradition becomes void of content, then there is nothing to be perceived any longer and all that remains to be ‘done’ with tradition is to comment on it. From Scholem’s point of view, Kafka is the prime example of an author who comments on a tradition that is now void of any content and which therefore exposes the ‘nothingness of truth’. That wisdom is a property of tradition is entirely true, of course: it has the essential unconstructability of all the possessions that inhere in tradition. It is wisdom that, when it reflects, comments rather than perceives. If you were to succeed in representing the borderline case of wisdom, which Kafka indeed does represent, as the crisis of the sheer transmissibility of truth, you would have achieved something truly magnificent. This commentator does indeed have Holy Scriptures, but he has lost them. Thus the question is: What can he comment upon? I take it that you would be able to answer these questions within the perspectives you expounded. But why “failure” – since he really did comment, if only on the nothingness of truth or whatever might emerge there? . . . .27

Crisis thus is an inherent necessity of tradition. In Scholem’s negativist hermeneutics, there is an irreducible obscurity of tradition. Spirit inevitably comes apart from the letter, meaning from the tradition. This idea deserves a little expansion. For Scholem, the obscurity of tradition is to be distinguished from its utter vacuousness. As a matter of fact, this fine line is an axis in Scholem’s work on the whole. There is such a thing as a preservation of meaning within its decay, as Scholem expresses it in his concluding words of his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Here, he retells the following story: When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer – and what he had set out to perform was done. When a generation later the “Maggid” of Meseritz was faced with the same task he would go to the same place in the woods and say: We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers – and what he wanted done became reality. Again a generation later Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said: We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs – and that must be sufficient; and sufficient it was. But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his golden chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And, the story-teller adds, the story which he told had the same effect as the actions of the other three.28

Scholem comments that his story could be read as the description of the decay of a great movement – yet this decay is not an endpoint of tradition, but a dialectical moment in its historical evolution: You can say if you will that his profound little anecdote symbolizes the decay of a great movement. You can also say that it reflects the transformation of all its values,

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a transformation so profound that in the end all that remained of the mystery was the tale. That is the position in which we find ourselves today, or in which Jewish mysticism finds itself. The story is not ended, it has not yet become history and the secret life it holds can break out tomorrow in you or in me.

In the situation of the decay of a great movement, there remains nothing but the narrative of this decay, that is, a narrative that accounts for the impossibility of performing the rite anymore. Kafka articulates this decay,29 yet precisely by doing this, he remains in continuity with this tradition, no matter how vigorously he denies its contents. For Scholem, Kafka represents tradition as decaying, and even as having decayed. But the decay of tradition is still a moment in the unfolding of tradition, and to become immersed in the contemporary decay of tradition may be the only means to maintain continuity with tradition. The decay of tradition is then distinct from its final exitus in so far as the history of the decay itself can be told, which means that continuity with tradition is not shattered completely. This point can be illustrated by looking at the dispute between Scholem and Benjamin about one particular passage in Kafka. On the assistants (‘Gehilfen’) of Kafka’s ‘K’ in The Castle, Walter Benjamin writes: ‘His assistants are sextons who have lost their house of prayer, his students are pupils who have lost the Holy Writ. Now there is nothing to support them on their “untrammelled, happy journey”’.30 In commenting on Benjamin’s statement, Scholem makes clear the thin line between an utter loss of meaning on the one hand and a conservation of meaning in the midst of its decay on the other. He consents to the observation that the relation to scripture is fractured, and yet he describes this relation in a way quite different from Benjamin: Kafka’s world is the world of revelation, but of revelation seen of course from that perspective in which it is returned to its own nothingness. I cannot accept your disavowal of this aspect . . . The nonfulfillability of what has been revealed is the point where a correctly understood theology . . . coincides most perfectly with that which offers the key to Kafka’s work. Its problem is not, dear Walter, its absence in a pre-animistic world, but the fact that it cannot be fulfilled. It is about this text that we will have to reach an understanding. Those pupils of whom you speak at the end are not so much those who have lost Scripture – even though a world in which that can happen is already not very Bachofen-like either! – but rather those students who cannot decipher it.31

Here, Scholem differentiates between the ‘nonfulfillability’ (‘Unvollziehbarkeit’) of revelation on the one hand and its mere absence on the other hand. This issue correlates to the question whether scripture is lost or whether it is unreadable. Unreadability amounts to a situation where there is text, but the means to penetrate to its meaning (the key) is lacking. Such absence is unhappy, but it need not be hopeless. Benjamin replies to Scholem that the question of whether scripture was merely lost or whether it was unreadable was of no impact: ‘Whether the pupils have lost [the Scripture] or whether they are unable to decipher it comes down to saying the same thing, because without the key that belongs to it, the Scripture is not the Scripture, but life’.32 Yet

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Scholem insists that this question is indeed vital, and that it is intimately related to his reading of Kafka: You ask what I understand by the “nothingness of revelation”? I understand by it a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but not significance. A state in which the wealth of meaning is lost and what is in the process of appearing (for revelation is such a process) still does not disappear, even though it is reduced to the zero point of its own content, so to speak. This is obviously a borderline case in the religious sense, and whether it can really come to pass is a very dubious point. I certainly cannot share your opinion that it doesn’t matter whether the disciples have lost the “Scripture” or whether they can’t decipher it, and I view this as one of the greatest mistakes you could have made. When I speak of the nothingness of revelation, I do so precisely to characterize the difference between these two positions.33

The ‘nothingness’ of revelation is a state in which revelation, although remaining ‘valid’ is non-fulfillable. By no means does the term imply that revelation has become nothing at all. ‘Revelation’ here refers in the first place, as Stephane Mosès points out, to the Torah.34 The nothingness of revelation consequently corresponds to the nothingness of a Torah that is void of meaning and unreadable. Moreover, the historical crisis of tradition, the exile of the Torah, can be seen as a mundane expression of an ultimately transcendental necessity. Mysticism is the kind of labour that penetrates through this nothingness and meaninglessness of scripture; it pierces through the fragility of revelation within the world towards the primordial beginning, which is infinite being and infinite nothingness, as Scholem indicates in connection with his studies of Jewish and Christian mysticism.35 Just as nothingness is the negative origin of being, likewise the Torah is a revelation without meaning.36 In his On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, Scholem again takes up this notion that the key to scripture is lost, once more with reference to Kafka: The word of God must be infinite or, to put it in a different way, the absolute word is as such meaningless, but it is pregnant with meaning. Under human eyes it enters into significant finite embodiments which mark innumerable layers of meaning. Thus mystical exegesis, this new revelation imparted to the mystic, has the character of a key. The key itself may be lost, but an immense desire to look for it remains alive. In a day when such mystical impulses seem to have dwindled to the vanishing point they still retain an enormous force in the books of Franz Kafka.37

Although the ‘nothingness of revelation’ thus refers in the first place to the Torah, it is clear that these words describe the general hermeneutical situation of Scholem’s time, as he sees it. There is revelation, but it is present only in the mode of absence; it has lost ‘meaning’ and ‘significance,’ though it is still valid. Scripture, Scholem insists, is not lost, though it has become void of content, which creates a gap between text and meaning similar to the gap that Adorno described. In the gap there is an awareness of

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the meaning that has been lost, and therefore a sense of lament. Yet this gap, Scholem argued, is the situation that religious tradition always finds itself in; or rather, it is only through this negativity that tradition ‘works’ in the first place: ‘Real tradition remains obscure; only decaying tradition falls onto its object – and it becomes discernible only in its decay’.38 The reason for the obscurity of tradition, Scholem thus says (from the orbit of negative theology),39 is that tradition is never properly applicable – tradition and historical presence never meet properly. The negative relation between tradition and historical presence capsizes into tradition itself, and the result is not only a necessary obscurity but also heresy.

4  Meaning in the midst of the violation of meaning Scholem was intrigued by a particular crisis of meaning in history, which was represented by the heresy of the Sabbatian movement. He writes: A hundred years before Kafka, Jonas Wehle in Prague wrote . . . for the last adepts of a Kabbalah that had capsized into heresy . . .  He was the first one to ask (and to affirm), whether paradise had not experienced a greater loss than mankind had in the latter’s expulsion from the former. This facet has definitely not been sufficiently accounted for hitherto. Was it sympathy of souls that led Kafka to ideas bearing a strong resemblance to Jonas Wehle’s? It is perhaps due to our ignorance about what happened in paradise that he pondered on the question why the good was “in a certain sense desolate.” Indeed such reflections appear to emerge from a heretical Kabbalah. For he has given expression to the boundary between religion and nihilism in an unsurpassable kind of way. This is why his writings, secular depictions of the kabbalistic worldview (unknown to him), strike many of today’s readers as radiating the grim brilliance of the canonical – of that which is perfect and thus has to be broken.40

By linking Kafka to the Frankist Jonas Wehle, leader of the Sabbatians in Prague after 1790, Scholem proposes a (sublime) continuity between the heresy of the Sabbatian movement – which has inspired a very recent, quite heretical and indecent novel41 – and  Kafka’s writing. To understand how the Sabbatian movement, advocating a heretical Kabbalah, represented a prime example of the collapse of tradition and a catastrophe of meaning, we need to take a brief look at its doctrines. The structure of the world, so runs the basic assumption of orthodoxy and the Sabbatian heresy, is being internally amended through the process of ‘Tikkun Olam’, the restitution of all things. As Scholem describes it, this process envisions the role of Israel in the world as follows: According to the recognized, orthodox interpretation, Israel has been dispersed among the nations in order that it may gather in from everywhere the sparks of the souls and divine light which are themselves dispersed and diffused throughout

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the world and through pious acts and prayers “lift them up” from their respective prisons. When this process is more or less complete, the Messiah appears and gathers the last sparks, thereby depriving the power of evil of the element through which it acts. The spheres of good and evil, of pure and impure, are from then on separated for all eternity. 42

Sabbatians ‘adapt’ the concept of the process of Tikkun by radicalizing the vision of the Messiah’s descent into the (evil) world: The heretic version of this doctrine . . . differs from the orthodox mainly in its conclusions: there are stages in the great process of Tikkun, more particularly its last and most difficult ones, when in order to liberate the hidden sparks from their captivity or to use another image, in order to force open the prison doors from within, the Messiah himself must descend into the realm of evil. . . . It can easily be seen how this doctrine satisfied those who thought they had experienced their own and the world’s salvation in their inner consciousness and consequently demanded a solution of the contradiction between their experience and the continuation of Exile.43 The apostasy of the Messiah is the fulfilment of the most difficult part of his mission, for redemption implies a paradox which becomes visible only at the end, in its actual occurrence.44

The apostasy of the Messiah Sabbatai Sevi therefore attempted to interpret the conflict between a world of exile and the experience of redemption. The paradox between religious symbolism and historical reality is transferred into the religious symbolism itself. But this shift affects the whole Jewish belief system. If the work of the Messiah must take a guise that is contrary to its aim, then the same must apply to any other aspect of Jewish belief, particularly to the understanding of the Torah: the logic of subversion must be transferred to the Torah, which means that the destruction of the Torah serves to unearth the true purpose of the Torah. For instance, days of fast as decreed in the Torah were to be changed into days of feasting and celebration. Scholem writes: What the Sabbatians call “the strange acts of the Messiah” have not only a negative aspect, from the point of view of the old order, but also a positive side, in so far as the Messiah acts in accordance with the law of a new world. If the structure of the world is intrinsically changed by the completion of the process of Tikkun, the Torah, the true universal law of all things, must also appear from then on under a different aspect. Its new significance is one that conforms with the primordial state of the world, now happily restored, while as long as the Exile lasts the aspect it presents to the believer naturally conforms to that particular state of things which is the Galuth. The Messiah stands at the crossing of both roads. He realizes in his Messianic freedom a new law, which from the point of view of the old order is purely subversive. It subverts the old order, and all actions which conform to it are therefore in manifest contradiction with the traditional values. In other words, redemption implies the destruction of those aspects of the Torah which merely reflect the Galuth, the Torah itself remains one and the same, what has changed is its relation to the mind.45

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In this respect, the abolition of all values amounts to a passage through the abyss of destruction:46 True faith remains hidden, which cannot be expressed in institutions and the only expression that it finds are rituals that bring the power of the negative and of the destructive to bear . . . The power of destruction is a constructive power.47

Let us be clear. Scholem did not approve of Sabbatianism: he pointed out that Sabbatai Sevi was beyond any doubt a sick man.48 Nonetheless, Sabbatianism presents the most exaggerated expression of a crisis that is inevitable, and which can – from a certain perspective – become meaningful. Scholem is dedicated to tracing the positive in the negative, that is, the longing for stability in the midst of destruction. Sabbatianism emerged in a situation where traditional meaning (redemption) and the presence of that tradition in history had become incompatible.49 In a fallen world, this is always the case, although this divergence becomes particularly graspable in times of crisis. As Scholem puts it, brokenness is a sign for the ‘perfect’ that is irretrievably lost and can be present only by virtue of brokenness and decay. Again, this does not mean to celebrate brokenness, but to celebrate that to which brokenness testifies dialectically. The catastrophe of meaning, Scholem thus implies, still testifies to the very meaning that is lost. The import is not that we should imitate decadent figures, but that we are enabled to find traces of meaning and continuities where nothing but loss and discontinuity is at hand. Even a most obscure and decadent development of tradition, Sabbatianism, does not need to be completely cut off from tradition. The utmost violation of meaning (heresy) can set a crisis of meaning on a promising track through awareness of what is lost and a lament for it. The task is not then to resign in the face of the ‘nothingness of revelation’, but to adopt a very careful kind of interpretation, as exemplified in Adorno’s remarks on Kafka as well as in Scholem’s reading of Kafka. For Scholem, Kafka’s writings make sense of a situation of loss that he experiences by lamenting the world that is void of (ultimate) coherence. If there is hope in Kafka’s work, it is in those extremes rather than in the milder phases, in the capacity to stand up to the worst by turning it into language: If Kafka’s writings do know anything of hope, then it is to be found in the most extreme rather than in the milder phases: in the ability to withstand the utmost by turning it into language.50

5  Meanings from the abyss My notes on the crisis of meaning intend to make a twofold point. First, in late modernity, hermeneutics is confronted with a severe crisis that can be described as a drifting apart of letter and spirit. This is exemplified in the breach between tradition and meaning. Second, there are different kinds of ways to deal with such a crisis. One can opt for either spirit or letter, which I envisage as being dangerous and frustrating. Prioritizing neither letter nor spirit, Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem have

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attempted to find meaning in the very gap that opens up when the two go adrift. This gap engenders meaning, which is a claim very different from any abandonment of ‘spirit’. Spirit and letter need both be taken firmly in sight in order for this gap to become discernible in the first place. By taking the action they do, the writers whom I have consulted may have provided a model for a constructive response to a crisis of meaning. I emphasize that I am not offering this model as a substitute for theology, nor am I claiming that theological hermeneutics needs to proceed precisely in the way here illustrated. I am taking a view on particular situations, and other kinds of situation may require other kinds of response. Nevertheless, to cope with the crisis of meaning is a task of undiminished urgency.

Part Four

Conclusion: Spirit in the World

10

Spirit, Letter and Body Oliver Davies

1  Two kinds of memory and history The experience of the colloquium reflected in this book has been that the theme ‘spirit and letter’ generates overlapping and mutually informing perspectives from across a range of theological disciplines: the exegetical, the historical, the philosophical, the literary, the pastoral-theological and the systematic-theological. It has confirmed for us as contributors the extent to which theological problematics can both multiply and migrate, seeming to fuse with intellectual configurations, which reach deep into our general cultural traditions, as well as remaining dynamic within their original theological contexts. My intention in this final chapter is to set out a distinctively systematic-theological response with respect to the polarity between ‘spirit and letter’. It will therefore be a way of reading 2 Cor. 3.6. It is not possible to read this particular text, however, without two different kinds of memory. The first is that of our own intellectual history and the fluctuating polarities between ‘spirit’, signifying both human freedom and interpretation more generally and ‘letter’ as signifying the positivism of texts, received and handed on as material objects, constraining interpretation, by the historical communities of those who wish to see these particular objects preserved. Text as material entity can be preserved across time and by its constraining, though negotiated, resistance to interpretation can constitute the possibility for the generation of responsible meanings. But text as material object (visible signs on paper or parchment1) bears with it a second kind of memory or history. This history is authorial to the extent that it asks questions about the original meaning of the text at the point of its conception. There is  – or has been – a widespread mood in hermeneutics to find this second kind of history less interesting than the first. The author is dead; the text lives. Texts are more easily read, rendered intelligible and enjoyed than they are reconstituted as ancient personal utterance, entailing all kinds of philological and historical labour, which will itself, at the end of the day, likely be the object of robust criticism. The angles and spirals of the historical-critical enterprise can seem alien to the systematician concerned to find intelligibility now. While sympathetic to this ultimately pragmatic mood in most cases, I firmly reject it in this case, which is to say in the reading of 2 Cor. 3.6. And I

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do so for primarily ecclesial reasons, along the lines outlined by Philip Esler,2 which recognize the authority of the apostle Paul, as an individual or ‘saint’, within the reading tradition of which I am, as a systematic theologian, a part. I understand the relation between myself reading this text today and Paul who wrote it, to be one fundamentally grounded in incarnation and thus in a kind of divine disclosure, which exhibits temporal structure but which also binds and unites across historical distances by its transformative power. It is not possible for me to ignore the historical-critical moment in this text, for it is an ecclesial one. Indeed, it is even this – second – history which is primary for me. While my own reasoning about this text may locate me in the passage of the history of its interpretation (and thus within the first mode of memory proposed above), it is the second history that is authoritative for me and for my reading of it; this remains so even if, as may transpire, my way of understanding this is significantly different from any straightforwardly historical account. A further thought: this commitment to ‘second’ or historical-critical history necessarily entails some engagement with the highly specialized arts of biblical exegesis of an advanced kind. As I am myself an uncertain walker at these heights, I wish to signal my gratitude to Michael Wolter, whose contribution to this project gives me an opportunity here to develop my own systematic-theological reading in the light of his highly reliable and informative reading of ‘The letter kills but the Spirit gives life’.3 So we could say that commitment to the historical-critical opens out in a new way the reception of the memory associated with this text; thus, our ‘first’ history of extended intellectual and cultural engagement with 2 Cor. 3.6 is properly subordinated to our ‘second history’ of reconstructed authorial intent. And so through this collaboration, perhaps we can say that an ecclesial reading contains, can transform and ‘repair’ the fecund cultural matrix of text against interpretation.4 The idea that the relation between letter and spirit as indicated and performed by Paul actually constitutes a reparative possibility within contemporary culture and can lead to the transformation of the polarities that beset our intellectual histories, will be one which sounds throughout this chapter and to which we shall at its end return. Elucidating the ‘second history’ of the text, in his chapter in this book Michael Wolter has argued that, contrary to other views, the spirit–letter opposition of 2  Cor.  3.6 is not the same antithesis which holds elsewhere between Spirit or grace and law, between the New and Old Covenant. Rather, the word ‘letter’ here means das Geschriebene or ‘something written’. The occurrence of the spirit–letter opposition has to be seen as forming part of Paul’s apology as a missionary delivered against those others whose alternative missionary activity had recently gained influence in Corinth, an area initially evangelized by Paul. The spirit–letter polarity expresses the reality of the life-giving activity of God’s Spirit, which authoritatively mandates evangelization, in contrast to another kind of missionary activity which is false and which looks to letters of recommendation for the basis of its authority. I would like to take Michael Wolter’s account of the meaning of the spirit–letter opposition as leading, for me, to a reflection on two further ‘pairings’ which have at times in the ‘first history’ of the text been associated with 2 Cor. 3.6. I recognize that Michael Wolter himself may not follow me in doing so. The first of these pairings is an opposition between the abstraction and immateriality of reflection (spirit-Geist) on

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the one hand and the intractable resistance of materiality on the other (letter). Written letters are signs and signs are always either material or memory of the material: the word remembered is memory of something seen, something heard and the active communication of words to another; the realization of their nature as signs always entails materiality and the senses. We see or hear the signs/letters written or uttered by another. This polarity between the immaterial and materiality can be further glossed in epistemological terms as the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity. Such a polarity, we observe, can become radicalized into a complete separation between its two poles and this is what has indeed happened in the Western intellectual tradition. Yet, from a Christian perspective, both mind and matter are created and are thus commonly ordered to God as Creator. This commonality – which makes the meaningfulness of their polarity possible – can be glossed as ‘world’, which is to say the irreducible totality within which the meaningful coordination of mind and matter, subjectivity and objectivity, becomes possible.5 But there is a second, quite distinct pairing which attaches to 2 Cor. 3.6 – that of Creator and created. ‘Spirit’ can be read as signifying both the Creator as Spirit and created (human) spirit separately and at the same time. Now, what has happened in our cultural history is a confusion between divine and human spirit. When we simply equate the divine with the human in the first term of the polarity ‘spirit–letter’, then the result is to intensify the opposition of the immaterial and the material. There is no intrinsic link between these two polarities, and no compelling logic why they should become confused. That they are so intertwined in the histories of our religious–philosophical imagination, and at times fatally so, is a given of our cultural history. And from various points of view, we can say that we are accustomed to live within such oppositions; our thinking is conditioned at its core by polarities. That indeed is why the topic ‘spirit and letter’ is of such interest to us. It appears to offer a review of one of the deepest polarities of our culture, namely, the conviction that ‘spirit’, understood as the immaterial, the reflective, the self-authenticating and the non-temporal, is the source of life and is set in perpetual opposition to the material, which is the opaque, the conditioned and the temporal. Spirit alone, it seems, affords the possibility of freedom. Against this, Derrida – as has been noted many times in this book – argues that it is the letter that gives life, with its architecture of lifegenerating difference and liberating polyvalence. We have become accustomed to such radical antinomies, and to their reversal. They foster a heroic and agonistic picture of human existence which sits well with the self-realization of technological ‘man’ (and it is usually the male in view), who achieves a hard-won existence wrested from the intractable exigencies of nature. They appeal to the titan in us. Indeed, we have lived with these starkly radicalized polarities for so long that we have come to forget that they are in essence largely rhetorical enterprises. And so, let us give attention for a while to the ‘first’ history of our text, which is to say with the polarity or antagonistic dualism between the two principles of sign and meaning, text and interpretation, which have proved so formative but also at times destructive in our intellectual history. The particular trajectory I wish to focus upon here is that which takes spirit and letter to be fundamentally in opposition to each other, so acutely that human freedom stands or falls according to the ability of spirit (as

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subjectivity, as consciousness) to overwhelm the material order. This is a philosophical tendency, which takes on a uniquely modern form at a particular moment in our intellectual history, and it is my intention to track this moment first in the byways of an impassioned theological discussion around the nature of the Eucharistic presence which seems to many to be quite arbitrary today. The debate concerned is that which took place principally between Luther and Zwingli during the early decades of the sixteenth century. The second such moment is much better known and concerns the German Idealist turn to Spirit which is associated with the early response to the Kantian challenge and with the foundation of the University of Berlin, an institutional innovation which has been so paradigmatic for the modern world.

2  A ‘first history’: The history of spirit In the turbulent Reformation years of the early sixteenth century, one of the key and earliest topics of debate was the nature of the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. It is natural that the Eucharist as the visible focus of Catholic liturgical and sacerdotal traditions should have been an issue which the Reformers felt it imperative to address, but the extent and, indeed, ultimately inconclusive character of the internal polemics which the Eucharist inspired over a number of decades reflected the intractable character of some of the fundamental issues which informed the debate. The first of these was to do with cosmology and the radical changes in astronomy, which were underway in this period. The second was the nature of matter itself, as a result of developments in natural science mediated more broadly into society by the humanistic ethos of the day. This radical evolution in the understanding of matter, from essences to quanta or measurable (and by implication therefore reproducible) fields of forces, was implied also in the changing cosmology. Both trajectories came together in the issue of where exactly heaven was, on the one hand, and the character of the glorified Christ’s ‘local’ existence within it, on the other. The difficult issue that informed these debates was the character of Christ’s ascended body, which tradition asserted had risen to heaven and was seated at the right hand of the Father. If heaven was indeed to be found within the known universe, at the ‘highest’ point, as pre-Copernican science maintained, then the body of Jesus located ‘in’ it could be said to exhibit properties which had a real continuity with our own bodies, since the ascended Jesus was still in some sense within the finite extension of space.6 Alternatively, if heaven has no topographical purchase, then it becomes more difficult to conceive of any continuity at all between the ascended body and our own. In such a dispute about the location of heaven and the character of the materiality of the ascended body of Jesus, it was easy to draw conclusions about the nature of materiality as such. If the final or resting body of Jesus is still in continuity with the material world (in some sense), then the implications are that matter is capable of undergoing such a transformation: it has such a potentia, to put it in scholastic terms. On the other hand, if this is not the case, then it may be presumed that matter, in true Newtonian fashion, is itself untransformable. Any transformation will be within subjectivity therefore and will be bound to perpetuate a dualism between mind and matter, spirit and letter.7

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The Eucharistic debate The Eucharistic debate in its Reformation form effectively began when Zwingli, the humanist-trained Reformer, addressed the Eucharist in one of his earliest reforming texts, the First Disputation of January 1523. Here, he set out a critique of its sacrificial character.8 Later in the same year, in his Exposition of the Articles of the First Disputation, Zwingli contested Luther’s description of the Mass as a ‘testament’, preferring the term ‘memorial’.9 And then, in a letter of 1524, Zwingli defined the word ‘is’ from the words of institution (‘This is my Body . . .’) as meaning ‘signifies’, or ‘calls to mind’, and thus set himself in clear opposition to the Lutheran as well as Catholic understanding of the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist.10 The importance of the question of heaven and of the ascended body within it, is shown by Zwingli’s argument, first adduced in 1527, to the effect that since the body of Jesus was in heaven, it could not simultaneously be in the Eucharist.11 Not until 1526 did Luther write specifically against Zwingli’s teaching. In The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ – Against the Fanatics, Luther argued for the view that Christ could be in the bread and wine as well as in heaven with an appeal to the glorified body of Christ and to the principle articulated in Ephesians: ‘Moreover we believe that Christ, according to his human nature is put over all creatures (Eph 1.22) and fills all things, as Paul says in Eph 4.10. Not only according to his divine nature, but also according to his human nature, he is a lord of all things, has all things in his hand and is present everywhere’.12 Luther pointed to the way in which preaching can create the sense for us that Christ is in our hearts and adds: ‘Christ still sits on the right hand of the Father, and also in your heart, the one Christ who fills heaven and earth. I preach that he sits on the right hand of God and rules over all creatures . . .; if you believe this, you already have him in your heart. Therefore your heart is in heaven, not in an apparition or dream, but truly. For where he is, there you are also. So he dwells and sits in your heart, yet he does not fall from the right hand of God. Christians experience and feel this clearly’.13 Luther’s appeal was to a very traditional conception of heaven therefore, and he based his ‘ubiquity theory’ on the presence in heaven of Jesus’ human body, again following tradition, specifically Eph. 4.9-10. Zwingli’s belief that the ‘local’ character of Christ’s body in heaven precludes the possibility of his ‘local’ presence in the bread and wine accords with Thomas Aquinas’ view that the nature of the sacramental presence in the Eucharist is not ‘local’ as such; Jesus has a ‘local’ existence in heaven.14 Calvin likewise denies the possibility of the ‘local’ presence of Christ in the Eucharist, while arguing (against Zwingli) that God’s promise in the Eucharist allows us to feed upon his ‘local’ body as it exists in heaven.15 Luther too accepts that Jesus has a ‘local’ existence in heaven, which is the presence and power of God in ‘the humanity of Christ’.16 The reasons why Zwingli dissents from a commitment to the real, which is to say sacramental or material, presence of Christ in the Eucharist in the forms set out by both Luther and Calvin cannot therefore be reduced to the issue of localization. We should look rather to comments which Zwingli makes on the nature of a body as such, in which he develops an account of the material body as something which belongs irreducibly to humanity and createdness and cannot be penetrated or changed by divine life. In  1528, responding to Luther, he remarks that a body is necessarily

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‘circumscribed, limited and particular’.17 Zwingli insisted that although divinity and humanity are one in Jesus Christ, having a body is solely a property of the human nature, while ubiquity is solely a property of the divine nature. Zwingli therefore does not shy away from the corollary that the divinity of Jesus, which is everywhere, has no body. A further corollary is that the body of Jesus, which is purely a human body, is indistinguishable from our own bodies.18 We would be wrong to think of it as possessing extraordinary properties or as being capable of doing extraordinary things therefore: after all, if we cannot be in two places at once, then how can he? Indeed, Zwingli paints a memorable picture for us of the resurrected and ascended body of Jesus sitting beside the Father in heaven, in an entirely ‘unchanged’ state, until the Last Days. The sense that the dispute between Zwingli and his fellow Reformers on the nature of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist finds its focus in his understanding of matter, is only increased when we take into consideration the remarks he makes specifically about the relation between Spirit and matter. The text of Jn 6.63 (‘It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless’) played an important part in Zwingli’s work.19 But what is clear (as Luther pointed out at length20) is that Zwingli used the ethical character of ‘Spirit’ and ‘flesh’ to designate ontological categories. Indeed, in a work of 1524 it seems that Zwingli presents the Pauline ethical ‘spirit-flesh’ opposition as refiguring the ontological relation between the Holy Spirit and the material world. Spirit is not something that acts in the world, transforming the materiality of the signs into sacramental realities, as was the case with Luther’s ordo salutis, but is now something that is set up over and against materiality as such. If Christ ‘leads us away from sensible realities to internal and spiritual ones’ as Zwingli states, then the spirit offers paths of access to the divine which do not lead through the material world.21 Zwingli’s account of the structure of the Eucharist is predicated upon the primacy of a ‘spiritualized’, which is to say disembodied, self and a ‘spiritualized’ Holy Spirit, which is to say a Holy Spirit whose sphere of action is now primarily the human spirit itself, fostering an ontology of either non-relation or indeed opposition between spirit on the one hand and the materiality of the external world on the other. What we see in Zwingli’s revisiting of Eucharistic theology in fact is the emergence of a new polarization between spirit (whether divine or human) and matter which comes to expression in two quite distinct types of causality. According to this new and greatly influential paradigm (indeed, perhaps it is in a sense the pre-eminent modern paradigm), divine causality operates in the world through acting directly on the human spirit. Accordingly, divine causality does not act from within the material order as such. This precludes the sense that is so strong in Luther, for instance, that the power of the divine Creator permeates also the material order and that this paradigmatically finds its locus in the transformed body of the ascended and glorified Jesus spoken of at Eph. 4.7-10.

The foundation of the University of Berlin The second body of texts with which we are concerned dates from the beginning of the nineteenth century and concerns the institution of the University of Berlin, which took place in 1810. This is again a highly politicized environment, though in

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quite different ways. In 1806, Prussia entered the war against Napoleon. One of the consequences of the resulting defeat was the loss of substantial territories to the West of the Elbe, including the university town of Halle, where German learning had one of its major centres. Under French control, in the new satellite state of Westphalia, the University of Halle was dissolved.22 This lent new life to Karl Friedrich Beyme’s idea of setting up a university in Berlin, which would give fresh and radical expression to the ambitions of Prussia as Kulturstaat through the new values of Wissenschaft and an expansive and committed Erziehungspädagogik. The consultation that followed sought to establish a consensus around the fundamental principles of what appeared to many to be a new departure of enormous significance and it led to the production of seminal works of institutional reflection by Heinrich Steffens, Friedrich Schleiermacher and J. G. Fichte, among others. The picture that emerged was of an ‘allgemeine Lehrgestalt’ (‘universal form of learning’) which would be very different from the traditional, outmoded, Catholic and small-scale Universität.23 The new institution would incorporate the values of ‘research’ as an unfolding project of rigorous and systematic inquiry, based upon professionalism, collegiality and multidisciplinarity. In addition to the atmosphere of national self-consciousness and renewal, which attended the discussion, there was an unmistakable sense of what might best be described as mission, which is to say a vision of humanity and human progress that placed free and advanced learning at its centre. In a letter of 1810, Fichte described the new institution as ‘a new creation’ (employing the biblical phrase ‘eine neue Schöpfung’).24 In Über Geist und Buchstab in der Philosophie (On Spirit and Letter in Philosophy, 1794), he had already addressed the spirit–letter polarity with respect to anthropology.25 There, he had pointed to two categories of cultural artefact or composition: one with which we can only struggle to engage, for it seems dull and lifeless, and the other from which we cannot tear ourselves away, so inspired are we by its ‘enlivening power’ (belebende Kraft). This constitutes its ‘Geist’ (spirit) and evokes the imaginative creativity of the ‘geistvolle Künstler’ (‘spiritfilled artist’).26 The source of this inspiration lies in the ‘Trieb’, meaning ‘drive’ or ‘life force’ (perhaps akin to Spinoza’s conatus). This is the principle of our ‘Selbsttäthigkeit’, which is our will or spontaneity, as well as our capacity for mental organization and representation (Vorstellung); it is this ‘self-motivation’ that defines us as human beings and sets us apart from all other creatures. As the fundamental power (Grundkraft) in the human self, ‘Selbsttäthigkeit’ is not to be identified with our simple knowledge of things, but rather with our questioning and ultimately discerning knowledge of things which we call ‘taste’. Aesthetic ‘taste’ tests the congruence between objects as perceived and objects as they might be. Thus, it grounds the possibility of a capacity to conceive of a reality not yet present.27 By ‘Geist’, Fichte means precisely this capacity to see what needs to be rather than what is, and it is the ‘free creativity’ (freies Schöpfungsvermögen) in us.28 Pointing to a fusion of the cognitive and the aesthetic ideals (in which he parallels the aesthetic philosophy of his contemporary Friedrich Schiller), Fichte concludes: ‘Spirit leaves the limits of reality behind, and in its own proper sphere there are no limits. The drive to which it is given over, advances into infinity; it is drawn by it from one vista to another and when it arrives at the intended goal, it sees new fields opening up before it’.29

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Geist appears again in a different though related context in a work from 1811, Fünf Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten, in which Fichte set himself the task of reflection upon the nature of scholarship and the vocation of the scholar.30 It is not everyday knowledge (Wissen), which is merely the image and imitation (Abbild und Nachbild) of what is external to itself that constitutes the goal of learning but rather a practical, dynamic knowledge which itself governs action and shapes or creates reality. Such a knowledge is in a sense both free and pure to the extent that it is self-determining and not determined by another. It does not merely reflect reality as it exists but governs a reality that is not yet existent.31 At this point, Fichte adds the following significant adjunct: Knowledge however determines itself and is not at all determined by anything outside itself, which it might be said to mirror. And it is this absoluteness which makes it the image of the inner being and essence of God. God alone truly transcends the senses and is the real object of every vision. Knowledge only exists as the image of God, and by virtue of being the image of God, and is only maintained by the appearance of God within it.32

He adds that the value of ‘sensible knowledge of the given world’ lies only in the capacity of the divine image to be realized within it. But the divine self-imaging is infinite and can be glimpsed only in the successive acts of knowing which change the world and which make the ‘invisible’ world beyond the senses visible within it. The value of the scholar’s life depends upon his capacity to attain this self-determining knowing, for it is by this that God is glorified and the glorification of God is the goal of all that is.33 Through his ‘practical’ knowledge (i.e. knowledge which changes the world) the scholar thus becomes ‘the true power of life in the world and the primary agent of the continuing Creation’.34 A later passage makes it clear indeed how much Fichte is indebted to the Christian concept of the creation as a paradigm for his account of a radical pedagogics through the distinctive, world-changing knowledge which is the highest achievement of the cadre of scholars. These are to be distinguished from the ordinary Volk on the one hand and from the prophets, poets and seers of past times, on the other. Although the former can relate to the ‘supersensible world’ through religion, religion generally fosters a posture of passivity and resignation before the givenness of the world. It fails to encourage individuals to change the sensible world in the light of ‘supersensible’ reality. While the latter have in the past served to ‘inspire’ the people to such change, they are now a fading or even vanished power in society (and poetry has moved away from philosophy). The call is for ‘inspiration’ by the ‘spiritual world’ through the mediation of ‘clarity’, which is to say through the reflexive cognitions of advanced thought.35 Fichte states: The creation of the world from God is in no way completed, as it is normally imagined to be, nor is God now at rest. But the act of creation continues and God remains the Creator, in so far as the immediate object of His creation is not the dull and static world of bodies, but the free Life that eternally springs forth. The truly real world is the Spiritual one, the life and thought of men . . . .

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It is this world which God constantly continues to create, according to his own image, in that he continues to develop His image in it to an ever greater clarity.36

The world of Geist therefore is one that is unconditioned and is the immediate object of divine creative power. The ‘world of bodies’ is one which constantly undergoes transformation and is brought into conformity with the divine image, precisely through the mediations of the autonomous and envisioned or inspired, knowledge of scholars. Fichte also writes that the current age is one in which the powers of light and darkness are ranged against each other with particular intensity; it is the new University of Berlin, as a place in which the values and practices of Geist (through the scholar as ‘scientific artist’37), which leads way in establishing and fostering ‘spiritual’ values and practices.

Spirit and matter The two bodies of texts reviewed above represent key moments in our intellectual history, especially, of course, with respect to the intellectual history of Christianity. The former represents a point of collision between science and the Christian sacramental tradition as this was based on a particular set of beliefs about the nature of heaven, the place of Christ in heaven, the nature of his body as having continuing ‘local’ existence and thus, by implication, the nature of matter itself. When heaven was no longer to be found within the finite universe, as its highest point, the body of the ascended Jesus could no longer be held in continuity with space and time and the transformation of the material brought about in that body by God, with cosmic implications, was no longer conceivable. The critical issue here was causality and whether the divine causality could operate from within the material order or whether, in accordance with modern understandings of matter and material forces, ‘spiritual’ causality had to be judged to operate ‘outside’, ‘beyond’ or ‘above’ material causality. With respect to the second body of texts, we may well feel that we recognize much about the University of Berlin, with its emphasis upon research, professionalism and multidisciplinarity, since this remains the dominant paradigm of the modern university. But the kinds of arguments which Fichte, and indeed other important figures of his generation, bring to bear in support of it will seem quite alien to us. We will have a more political understanding of academic freedom, defining it in terms of contents rather than fundamental, self-determining practices of the intellect; academic freedom for us is not freedom from representation. We will also wonder at the primacy of the ‘suprasensible world’ for Fichte, and will wish to translate this into values such as civilization, culture and perhaps the acquisition of the higher intellectual skills of discernment and argumentation. People who conclude a university degree are expected to be clearer about what they know and do not know and more able to apply themselves successfully to the intellectual tasks required for positive living in a complex society. From our perspective today, Fichte’s advocacy of science or Wissen as agent of change in the world seems to point forward not so much to the bringing to birth of the divine image in the world as to the magnification of the human one – at times starkly so.

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Technology is in a sense the – at times unwanted – realization of Fichte’s project. It is causality equally, which underlies Fichte’s philosophy, though in a form we are more likely to recognize as intellectual and artistic freedom. Fichte, of course, understands the exercise of that freedom to be a participation in or at least conformity with, divine creativity. Neither of these bodies of texts are presented here as having been seminal in our intellectual and religious history. Indeed, they are both remarkably obscure. But what each does is offer us a glimpse of quite fundamental dynamics within that history, which come to the surface in these key documents of their own time. The nature of fundamental elements within intellectual culture is that they are opaque, because they are formative of the whole and part of the very structure of thinking. They are frequently also in some sense cosmological in that they attempt to deal with or be expressive of the whole or what Clifford Geertz means by ‘worldview’.38 Our best opportunity to identify them comes therefore when they first emerge and trigger debate. Thereafter, the same basic structures will continue to exist, but in new ways, new vocabularies and as principles of decision or perspective which from now on we can simply assume. It is easy to see the Zwinglian inheritance in terms of a fundamental shift in sacramental understanding, across the Christian traditions, reflecting also a shift in doctrinal understanding (regarding the ascended body of Jesus); but what were the theological consequences of the deep developments in intellectual configuration which come into view in Fichte’s texts? The period immediately after the institution of the University of Berlin was one which saw the birth of modern systematic theology as Vermittlungstheologie or ‘mediating theology’, which characteristically sought to develop theological accounts of the Christian faith which were strongly obliged to the insights of contemporary secular philosophies. The emergent philosophy of the day stressed System as a concern with the principle of knowing itself, which might then become the foundational hermeneutic of all knowledge. Fichte’s own Wissenschaftslehre pointed forward to Hegel’s definitive example of this trend. The ‘mediating’ theologians began to seek to address the whole as System and typically treated doctrinal, biblical and ethical sources as well as philosophical ones in a way that underpinned the validity of Christianity as a dogmatic ‘system’ with respect to other coordinates of the day. The systematic nature of their enterprise also served to consolidate its intellectual authority and led to a new concern with problematics that are internal to the dogmatic system itself, such as the relation between immanent and economic Trinity and the intractable questions of Christology. These new theological systems were permeated with the principle of Geist, which was both incorporated within the system itself as human subjectivity and which was also performed in the articulation and development of an unfolding, multilayered and articulated ‘system’, which won its audience through the compelling power of its multifaceted coherence. In the Ankündigung der Theologischen Studien und Kritiken of 1827 (which was the principal organ of the ‘mediating theology’), Friedrich Lücke wrote that one of the chief characteristics of the new theology was that it was to be distinguished from ‘Knechtschaft des Buchstaben und aller falschen Autorität’ (‘slavery to the letter and all false authority’).39 Two points need therefore to be made about the continuing influence of the spirit–letter opposition. The first is that it would be wrong to assume that the reaction

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of dialectical theology against human systems freed theology from the spirit–letter divide. What we find in Barth, for instance, is, in fact, a clear commitment to the philosophical principles of Cartesianism in that Barth entirely agrees with Descartes’ scepticism regarding the reality of the world but concludes that Descartes’ project was disadvantaged by his appeal to an account of God that was unnecessarily weak.40 It is only God who guarantees for us belief in the reality of the world. From one perspective, what Barth did in his account of the sovereignty of God was transpose into the doctrine of God the very same qualities of autonomy and regency which were characteristic of Descartes’ account of human consciousness as the ground of philosophical method. Also, it is difficult not to see in Barth’s theology of the Word an account of language that closely parallels that of Hegel and also of Husserl, as set out in the latter’s Logische Untersuchungen. Husserl exercised an enormous influence over German philosophy from the publication of his Untersuchungen in 1900–1 until the Husserlian project began to be assumed into that of his student Heidegger from the appearance of Sein und Zeit in 1927. If for Husserl, the primary and original site of language is human consciousness itself (and not in its extensive or referential aspects), then does not Barth argue that the proper site of divine language, the Word, is also within the Godhead itself? Elsewhere, Barth also argues that God always first relates to the human spirit rather than the human body on account of a natural affinity between the two and on account of the rational nature of the communication.41 This is not to suggest that Barth perpetrates a radical polarization between spirit and letter, in a way that might compromise Chalcedonian orthodoxy. The structure here is more subtle and presupposes a primacy of spirit over matter which not only sees divine causality as operating outside material causality (though sovereignly commandeering it, in accordance with the freedom of the divine will), but is also unclear about the boundaries between created human spirit and uncreated divine Spirit. Thus, philosophical notions which derive from philosophical conceptualizations of human spirit cross over into the doctrine of God, while the human spirit itself is seen to have an affinity with the Spirit of God and to have priority as the site of divine–human encounter through revelation.42 Once again, we might note, the issue is freedom – the freedom of God in this instance. And freedom turns on the question: who or what causes, and who or what is caused? The second way in which the Idealist inheritance is still active in contemporary theology appears in a predisposition to construct theology as a narrative system which is comprehensive in itself and which can stand as an alternative to other ‘grand narratives’ of philosophical and ideological traditions. The issue then becomes dogmatic and theological coherence within the system, without a confrontation or encounter with the problematics set up by alternative discourses. Thus, bolstered by philosophical trends that stress the role of tradition and community in the formation of knowledge and by a widespread scepticism regarding the capacity of reason to sustain conversations across discourses, the modern theologian is called upon to ‘out-think’ from within the Christian tradition the persuasive power of competing non-Christian systems. Freed from constraints, except those which are internal to the system itself and which are thus susceptible of resolution through new permutations of the system (albeit at the cost of becoming tautology), the theologian can present theology, in his

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or her hands, as something that is ‘resolved’.43 Thus, theology is given an orientation towards conceptual system, which means that significant disruptors of system may be neglected. These might include, for instance, challenging questions to do with the relation between the Christian revelation and other religions, revelation and science, revelation and suffering, revelation and the tough philosophical problematics of analytical tradition, revelation and the intractable ethical and political questions of the day or indeed the disabling contradictions between Church as ideal and Church as cultural and political reality. Above all, the need for ‘resolution’ will generate a tendency not to ask further difficult, though also fundamental, questions about how academic theology can properly relate to the life of the Church which, in its calling to witness and engagement, is frequently more intense precisely in confrontation with challenge and disruption.

3  A return to the ‘second history’: Reading the letter I began this chapter with the intention of offering a corrective reading of the spirit– letter opposition through a close exegesis of 2 Cor. 3.6, undertaken in the light of the parameters marked out by Michael Wolter in his chapter in this volume. In his study of this passage, Michael Wolter points to four occurrences of the gramma–pneuma polarity in the New Testament. All are in Paul (2 Cor. 3:6 [twice], Rom. 2.29 and 7.6). The Corinthian occurrences belong together, while in the first of the passages from Romans the true opposition is first between gramma and physis (2.27), leading to an opposition between what is ‘internal’ and ‘external’. The opposition in Rom. 7.6 is between law and Spirit. Wolter argues that the stark opposition of gramma and pneuma at 2 Cor. 3.6 is without parallel in extra-biblical tradition, either in classical Greek tradition or Hellenic Jewish writings and that it was not in use in the Christian communities which were otherwise influenced by Pauline language (it appears neither in the Deutero-Pauline nor in the Lukan material for instance). It was therefore an ad hoc usage. Michael Wolter believes that gramma here is most appropriately translated as das Geschriebene (‘a written thing’). While there may be resonances of this passage in later occurrences, there are no grounds for reading back into this very first application of the spirit–letter antithesis any reference to law as a theological idea. At the outset of his chapter, Michael Wolter distances 2 Cor. 3.6 from two alternative polarities: the communicative opposition between gramma as written communication and Logos as spoken utterance which occurs in Platonic texts (as A. Stimpfle attempts)44 and the anthropological (and indeed ethical) opposition between pneuma and sarx or soma, which is frequent in Pauline writings and elsewhere in the New Testament. In terms of the broad historical traditions of reading 2 Cor. 3.6, he opposes the tradition based on Augustine (and adopted by Lutheranism) which read 2 Cor. 3.6 as an opposition between law and spirit, as he does the tradition based on Origen (and adopted by Ernst Käsemann) of understanding it to refer to two different modes of interpreting scripture, one Jewish and the other Christological. Michael Wolter understands the distinction between gramma and pneuma at 2 Cor. 3.6 to be fixed within the apologetic context which extends from 2 Cor. 2.14 to 7.4, in which

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Paul writes from his confrontation with Jewish-Christian ‘apostles’ at Corinth. Wolter summarizes Paul’s view to the effect that false apostles believe the evangelical message to originate from themselves and that they themselves are that message, while, for Paul, the true apostle is one who understands the message to come not from himself but from Christ and who confesses that he is only Christ’s servant. For Wolter, the critical difference between false and true apostles comes in 2 Cor. 1-3, with the distinction between a letter (epistolē) of recommendation on the one hand and a different kind of epistolē on the other. This latter usage is ‘metaphorical’ and is identified first with the Corinthian community themselves, to whom Paul is writing. Paul then gives a gloss to this new usage and states that this epistolē is written ‘on the heart’, that it can be recognized and read by all, and that it is the epistolē of Christ: Christ is its author. Wolter expounds this point with the words: ‘Of course, this does not mean a letter which someone like the opponents can hold in their hands; it can only be carried “on hearts” (v.2b), because this is a letter which cannot be seen’. Unlike the former letter, which is written in ink, this letter is written pneumati theou zontos (2 Cor. 3.3) or ‘with the Spirit of the living God’. Wolter’s reading about the ‘unseen’ at this point picks up the internal–external polarity of Rom. 2.27-9, as it does the ‘stones-heart’ opposition of Exod. 11.19-20, 31.18, 32.15-6 (LXX) and 36.26-7 (which appears in 2 Cor. 3.3). I am entirely convinced by Wolter’s careful, sensitive and erudite arguments which structure his chapter, but I have reservations at this point, for his gloss ‘which cannot be seen’ seems to me not at all to be the point of Paul’s text but to be an instance in which a distinctively modern polarity has subtly crept into Wolter’s reception of Paul. Our passage alludes to two different kinds of writing, or gramma. The first is ‘external’ (and hence ‘visible’ of course), human and in the form literally of an epistolē. The second is ‘internal’, divine and manifests as a metaphorical epistolē (though it is ‘to be known and read by all’). The crux of the difference between the two lies in the word ‘heart’, for Paul tells his Corinthian readership ‘you yourselves are the letter’ for it is written ‘on our [other sources have “your”] hearts’ and is written by ‘the Spirit of the living God’. Three elements combine here therefore: internality, heart and Spirit, and of course authenticity or the reality of faith. My question turns on ‘visibility’. Wolter has himself introduced the phrase ‘which cannot be seen’ to describe the second epistolē. But the text itself makes no reference to invisibility; on the contrary, the only relevant phrase that occurs in these lines is ‘to be known and read by all’. This would seem not only to argue against the invisibility of the metaphorical letter but also to assert even its paramount visibility. And yet how can this be: how can a metaphorical letter be more visible, let us say, than a literal letter? How can it be more easily ‘read’? The answer would seem to turn on what we understand by ‘heart’. I want here to distance myself from the modern understanding of heart as seat of the emotions. This seems to me to be a wholly metaphorical usage. There are other, scriptural meanings of heart as the centre of the self: as core of our identity as volitional beings active in the world. Be that as it may, I wish to take the occurrence of ‘heart’ here as that which receives the spiritual writing in the light of Paul’s remarks about body and glorification, which follow in ch. 4 of his letter. In other words, I want to place ‘heart’ within a corporal semantic field, and suggest that whatever its alignment with ‘spirit’

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its occurrence here also has a distinctively physical – and thus implicitly also a visible – resonance. The activity of the Spirit can be seen, not as letters on a page can be seen, but nevertheless seen with the senses; for it manifests in the life and the changed life of the apostle’s body. I want to take 2 Cor. 4.12 into account here: ‘So death is at work in us, but life in you’. This repeats the life–death polarity of 2 Cor. 3.6 but does so in ways that compress the two terms: according to the preceding lines, Paul feels that he (and his companions) are ‘always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh’ (2 Cor. 4.10-1). This is a text then about different kinds of visibility, both equally physical, but the one predicated upon a writing and a receptor which signals that the agent of the writing is God, while the other signals that it is not God. The former, of course, is the human body and the latter is a sheet of paper or parchment/animal skin. The reason, I would suggest, why the spiritual divine writing needs to manifest in the human body is that it would otherwise in some important sense not be real. To be real for embodied human beings is to exist in space and time. Something that exists only in spirit, understood as interiority/invisibility, does not have ‘the divine signature’ (Wolter’s phrase): it lacks the proof or evidence of authenticity. That proof is a demonstration also that it is Yahweh the creator who is the causal agent in the case of the second, spiritual epistolē. Unlike the invisibility of spirit, the visibility of body stands in direct continuity with the material world. The changed life we read from the bodily gestures, actions and expressions of the Apostle signal that this is a causality which operates from within the world, conceived as a totality or better unity, of subject and object, of mind and matter. Finally then, this reading of a text which sees a polarity between different kinds of physical inscription or material text, within the world can be taken to support our understanding of the encompassing unity of subject and object, mind and matter, which reflects precisely divine causation as an effect of uncreated Spirit within the created order. At the beginning of this chapter, I drew attention to a double polarity: mind and matter, uncreated and created. These have become confused in our tradition. Paul’s depiction of the Spirit of God returns us to a point prior to that confusion. The Spirit manifests both in the human mind (spirit) and in the human body, as a signal of the authenticity of faith. Thus, the refusal to confuse divine Spirit and human spirit (a confusion to which we, and not the Apostle Paul, are liable, as the ‘first history’ of spirit shows) yields a more intensive apprehension of ‘world’ as a unity. This one world is radically hospitable to all manner of differences, but it is defined by its common receptivity – as both created spirit and created matter – to the Holy Spirit as God’s uncreated cause. It is indeed only this commonality that makes ‘difference’ possible at all.

4  Spirit in letter At the end of this reflection, therefore, we return to the theme of our two histories. Let us recall: the first history is that of the interpretation of this text, which we may

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call ‘tradition’, while the second is the attempt to reconstruct original authorial intent. While there may be strongly historical impulses for undertaking such a ‘second history’ of authorial intent, it may also have particular motivations arising out of the life of the church.45 In the case of 2 Cor. 3.6, these may go beyond the issue simply of authority and become something that has more to do with the living power of text in a world changed by incarnation. For the Christian reader, Paul’s epistolē is not by his own authorship alone: its source is also ‘the Spirit of the living God’. Here we should recall the apparent irony or paradox to which attention was drawn in the opening chapter of this volume, the fact that Paul’s own confrontation with the false apostles with their letters of recommendation comes in the form of an epistolē of the literal kind.46 His own claim to authority is communicated in the form of a letter, to be handed over, since he cannot himself be physically present (2 Cor. 1.12– 2.4). But we begin to see a resolution of the paradox in the fact that, by confessing his own total dependence upon divine initiative, in contrast with his opponents, Paul has discretely changed the status of his own written word, his own Geschriebenes. In the act of writing, the human causality of the letter writer (human spirit) has merged with the divine causality (Spirit of the living God). As text, it has been reordered from the domain of the merely ‘external’ into that of the manifestation of the divine power or Spirit through glory: the metaphorical epistolē. This is not a purely ‘internal’ reality; it is rather a holistic reality, which encompasses both ‘inner’ spirit and ‘outer’ flesh. Paul has both removed the letter from his own authorship and taken it back into his possession as Spirit-filled apostle. Paul speaks to them from afar, but Paul the apostle is also present among them. As material entity, the letter written by St Paul – preserved by the church community down the centuries – embodies a certain transformation of the material order (since, like any text, it remains an assemblage of material signs) though in this case, one which is in accordance with the divine creative will since the generation of this text also involves the activity of the Holy Spirit. This letter is thus expressive of and belongs to, the new order of things inaugurated by the incarnation and glorification of Christ, which Paul refers to repeatedly as ‘new creation’. To that extent it can be said to have its ground in that world-engendering transformation, as Paul himself participates in this, through his own embodiment, as one called into the life of Christ, wounded and glorified. We can speak here of a kind of presence therefore, although not a personal one in any conventional sense. It is perhaps analogous to the way that the saints can be said to be present to one another through the Eucharistic presence of Christ within the body of his church. It is a deep presence therefore, the visibility of which is pervasive but never direct: always complexly mediated, not least through the reception of others in the lived contexts of their everyday lives. It is a presence that is embedded within ‘ecclesial awareness’ or the sense of being ‘in’ Christ. It cannot be known primarily through the content of what is communicated (through the ‘said’, which, as Günter Bader has it, is always a human factum)47 in Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians (for all the power of its content), but rather through the act of communication itself (cf. Bader’s ‘saying’). It is at this point, where the text itself becomes a ‘saying’, that the Holy Spirit is inevitably in play.

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And it is in the ‘saying’ of the text or its ‘live’ communication, that the fundamentally ecclesial sense of authorial communicative intent, which is our second kind of history, can interact with history in our first sense, as interpretative tradition. The letter communicates to the modern reader something vital about the life of Paul as a life lived through the Spirit in Jesus Christ. It is a powerful, Spirit-filled communication of that reality. In this text then, the reader also receives an author whose life has been transformed through dominical commissioning and whose writing is now in the Spirit, who is the power of God made manifest in and for the reality of the world. What we receive here then and what is communicated expressively in the text as it is taken up and received within ecclesial contexts of worship and devotion, are the effects of a double causation: one that is both human and divine. This is necessarily transformative in its primary structure, and in different ways. Within that transformative structure there must lie also the possibility of the discernment of a transformation or repair of hermeneutics and specifically of the sterile opposition between spirit and letter as the polarizing of mind and matter which is so influential in our second history, that of interpretation. The overcoming of this opposition may not be one which can be received straightforwardly by an act of ratiocination or representational intellect, however. It may need to be grasped less directly, through that kind of intellection which is most associated with embodiment and action (what tradition calls ‘practical intellect’ or ‘wisdom’). If the language of the ‘saying’ in our ecclesial reception of this text speaks to us directly in our embodied freedom, calling us into discipleship as the mode of human living and believing which is itself the fruit of the Spirit, then it may be that the textuality itself of this letter, can cast light on this enduring and conflicted polarization in our culture in which spirit and matter seek to annul or subordinate each other. After all, the opposition between created and uncreated is more fundamental even than the modern opposition between spirit (abstraction, freedom, immateriality, interpretation) and letter (materiality, concreteness, constraint). Once divine Spirit is properly received and understood as not to be confused in any way with human spirit, then both ‘spirit’ and ‘letter’ can be seen to belong to the category of the ‘created’. In the light of this, the relation between Spirit as Creator and the polarity ‘spirit/ letter’ as created, cannot be a sterile opposition since its mediating term is the act of creation itself. In the fecundity of that act, spirit shows itself to be generative and eirenic. It may be then that the bringing together of our two histories in the reading of this text opens out the possibility of a richer hermeneutic according to our first sense of history, as interpretation, since this can now be informed by the communicated life of our first sense of history. Such an intersection may itself be generative and eirenic as a distinctive form of ecclesial interpretation. By this we may – as church – learn to ‘read’ the world, with all its multiple texts, as the place of God’s peace.

Notes Chapter 1 1 Following NRSV, which prints ‘Spirit’ with an uppercase initial here, but not in the preceding phrase ‘not of letter but of spirit’. This English typography offers a theological and indeed soteriological, interpretation, which is not indicated in the Greek uncial script. For a thorough discussion of the matter see Chapter 2, and the note about the typography of ‘spirit’ in the Preface. 2 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green; Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), III. 5.9.3-7, p. 141: ‘To begin with, one must take care not to interpret a figurative expression literally. What the apostle says is relevant here: “the letter kills but the Spirit gives life.” For when something meant figuratively is interpreted as if it were meant literally, it is understood in a carnal way’. In Confessions V.14 (24), VI.3 (3-5), Augustine describes the biographical circumstances of the discovery of 2 Cor. 3.6, which took place during his stay in Milan in 384 CE. See Yoshichika Miyatani, ‘Spiritus und littera bei Augustin’, Kwansei Gakuin University Annual Studies 22 (1973): 1–16. 3 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana III. 33.46. 1–7. 4 Augustine, De Spiritu et Littera III. 5. 5 Augustine, De Spiritu et Littera IV. 6; Augustine, The Spirit and the Letter, in John E. Rotelle (ed.), The Works of Saint Augustine, trans. R. J. Teske (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), p. 152: ‘That teaching from which we receive the commandment to live in continence and rectitude is the letter that kills, unless the life-giving Spirit is present. We read in scripture, The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life (2 Cor 3.6). We ought not to understand this merely in this sense: that we should not interpret literally something that scripture expresses figuratively, when its proper sense is absurd and that we should consider what else it signifies and nourish the interior human being with its spiritual interpretation. . . . We should not, then, interpret in this sense alone the apostle’s words, The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life; rather, we should interpret them in the sense – and especially in the sense – that he expresses in another passage

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with perfect clarity: I would not have known desire, if the law had not said, “You shall not desire” (Rom 7.7 with Ex 20.17). And a little later he said, Having seized the opportunity, sin deceived me by the commandment and killed me through it (Rom 7.11). See what the letter kills means!’ 6 Augustine, De Spiritu et Littera V. 7-8; cf. XIV. 24. 7 Luther, First Lecture on the Psalms (1513), in Luther’s Works. General eds. Hans Joachim Grimm, H. T. Lehmann, Hilton C. Oswald and Jaroslav Pelikan. American Edition; 56 volumes (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House/ Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1955–86), vol. 10, p. 4 (Martin Luthers Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe    WA 55/1, p. 4: 25f). 8 Luther, Table Talk (1533), No. 626, in Luther’s Works, vol. 54, p. 111; On the Bondage of the Will (1525) in Luther’s Works, vol. 33, p. 132 (WA 18, p. 680: 28–30); Lectures on Galatians (1531/35), in Luther’s Works, vol. 26, p. 115, cf. pp. 313, 330f (WA 40/1, p. 207: 17–18, cf. p. 486: 3–5; p. 511: 2–3). 9 Gerhard Ebeling, Luther. An Introduction to His Thought, trans. R. A. Wilson (London: Collins, 1970), pp. 110–14. 10 Gerhard Ebeling, ‘Das rechte Unterscheiden. Luthers Anleitung zu theologischer Urteilskraft’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 85 (1988): 219–58 (245). 11 Luther, in The Complete Sermons of Martin Luther, ed. and trans. J. N. Lenker, 10 volumes (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 2000), vol. 1.1–2, Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, p. 96 (WA 10/1–2, p. 155: 27–8). 12 Luther, Complete Sermons, vol. 1.1–2, p. 99 (WA 10/1–2, p. 158: 6–15). 13 Luther, Complete Sermons, vol. 1.1–2, p. 100 (WA 10/1–2, p. 159: 13–19). 14 Luther, Complete Sermons, vol. 1.1–2, p. 100 (WA 10/1–2, p. 159: 5–8). 15 Origen, De Principiis IV. 2.1    Origen on First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), p. 269. 16 Origen, De Principiis IV.2.3. Origen then continues to explain that he considers the gap to be the whole into which the “key of recognition” (he kleis tēs gnoseos) fits. 17 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über den Begriff der Hermeneutik. Erste Abhandlung 1829, ed. Martin Rössler; KGA I/11; (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 608, 620f. 18 Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik’ (1900), in Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, 4th edn (Göttingen: Vandenhock & Ruprecht, 1964), pp. 317–31, p. 319. 19 Geoffrey Hartman, Easy Pieces (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 194.

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20 Aleida and Jan Assmann, ‘Schrift’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 13 volumes (Basle: Benno Schwabe, 1971–2007), vol. 8, col. 1427: ‘Der Geist ist tot, es lebe der Buchstabe!’. 21 For example, see Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit. Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 24, 31. 22 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Ch. Spivak (Baltimore/London: John Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 17–18, 24–6. 23 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 17. 24 David Martyn, ‘Der Geist, der Buchstabe und der Löwe. Zur Medialität des Lesens bei Paulus und Mendelssohn’, in Ludwig Jäger and Georg Stanitzek (eds), Transkribieren – Medien/Lektüre (Munich: Fink, 2002), pp. 43–71. 25 Martyn, ‘Der Geist, der Buchstabe und der Löwe’, pp. 47–55. 26 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics. Volume I: Seeing the Form, trans. E. Leiva-Merikakis, ed. J. Fessio and J. Riches (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1982), pp. 46, 80. 27 Von Balthasar, Seeing the Form, p. 118. 28 Von Balthasar, Seeing the Form, pp. 29, 36. 29 Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in Derrida, Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 61–172 (79–84).

Chapter 2 1 For example, Mk 14.38 parr.; Mt. 26.41; Jn 3.6 and 6.63; Rom. 7.14, 8.4f. and 9.13; 1 Cor. 3.1; Gal. 4.29, 5.17 and 6.8. 2 On the basis of Plato, Phaedrus 274b–278e, A. Stimpfle, ‘“Buchstabe und Geist”. Zur Geschichte eines Mißverständnisses von 2 Kor 3,6’, Biblische Zeitschrift Neue Folge 39 (1995): 181–202, makes the ‘dichotomy of writing and word (Schrift und Wort)’ into the clue for his interpretation of the antithesis between gramma and pneuma in 2 Cor. 3.6 (p. 199), but this dichotomy is totally absent from the Pauline text. 3 For example, F. Blass and A. Debrunner, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 10th edn, trans. R. W. Funk (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1961)    BDF, § 109(2). 4 Technically, a nomen rei actae. 5 Cf. also the overview about the spectrum of meanings given by G. Schrenk, Art. graphō, in Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich (eds), Theological Dictionary of

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the New Testament, trans. and ed. G. W. Bromiley, 10 volumes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964–74)  TDNT, vol. 1, pp. 761–3. 6 English translations are taken from the Loeb Classical Library (London/ Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann/Harvard University Press) unless otherwise indicated. 7 See also Testamentum Levi 13.2: grammata with the meaning of ‘letters’, is used here as a metonym for ‘reading’: ‘Teach your children also letters (grammata), so that they might have understanding throughout all their lives as they ceaselessly read the Law of God’. English translation from H. C. Kee, in J. H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 volumes (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1983–85), vol. 1, p. 792. 8 See also Josephus, Jewish War 7.61: ‘Some scoundrels . . . imagined that if they burnt the . . . public records (ta dēmosia...grammata) they would be rid of all demands’; Josephus, Antiquities 11.224: the decree against the Jews according to Est. 3.12-15 is called to gramma to kata tōn Ioudaiōn. And likewise, Josephus designates the king’s letter for the benefit of the Jews as to gramma to basilion (Ibid. 288); Xenophon, Memorabilia 4,2,1: ‘Euthydemus . . . had formed a large collection of the works (grammata polla) of celebrated poets and professors’; Philo, De Sacrificiis 79: ‘We should make it our aim to read the writings (grammata) of the sages’; Josephus, Contra Apion 1.12: ‘Throughout the whole range of Greek literature no undisputed work (ouden . . . gramma) is found more ancient than the poetry of Homer’. 9 My translation. See also Philo, De Confusione Linguarum 50, with the quotation of Num. 16.15; Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit 258, where the quotation of Gen. 20.7 is introduced by: ‘the actual word engraved in the holy Scriptures’ (translation mine); De Congressu 58: ‘this text graven as on a stone’ followed by a quotation of Deut. 32.8. 10 Greek: kata to poiētikon gramma. The quotation is from Homer, Odyssey 4.392; cf. also Philo, Somniis 1.57. 11 Here, ek physeōs is attribute of akrobystia (uncircumcision). In 2.14, the syntactical relations are different: there, Paul writes about the fact that ‘Gentiles who do not have the law observe by nature precepts of the law’. 12 The kai which correlates gramma and peritomē has to be understood as a kaiepexegeticum or explicativum (BDF [see n. 4], § 442[9]). 13 Cf. F. Heinimann, Nomos und Physis, 5th edn (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980); H. Koester, art. physis ktl., in Kittel and Friedrich (eds), TDNT, vol. 9, pp. 251–77 (260–2).

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14 Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca. Historica 9.26.4. 15 Cf. as analogy Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 11.77 about Nestor’s cup: ‘It is of silver, and has the Homeric verses embossed upon it in letters of gold (chrysois grammasin)’. 16 Cf. G. Häfner, ‘Nützlich zur Belehrung’ (2 Tim 3,16). Die Rolle der Schrift in den Pastoralbriefen im Rahmen der Paulusrezeption (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2000), p. 227f. with further references and literature; cf. also Schrenk, graphō ktl. (see n. 5), p. 763f. 17 The commentaries usually render polla . . . grammata by ‘great learning’: e.g. J. A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles. Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1998), p. 762; C. K. Barrett, The Acts of the Apostles, 2 volumes. International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994–98), vol. 2, p. 1143. However, the references that are adduced in favour of this understanding (esp. Xenophon, Cyropaedia 1.2.6; Plato, Apology 26d) do not allow this interpretation. 18 Cf. primarily the overview of S. J. Hafemann, Paul, Moses and the History of Israel. The Letter/Spirit Contrast and the Argument from Scripture in 2 Corinthians 3 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), pp. 1–7, 26–9. 19 G. Ebeling, ‘Geist und Buchstabe’, in Galling (ed.), Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3rd edn, 7 volumes (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1957–65), vol. 2, cols. 1290–6. 20 M. M. Gruber, Herrlichkeit in Schwachheit. Eine Auslegung der Apologie des Zweiten Korintherbriefs 2 Kor 2,14 – 6,13 (Würzburg: Echter, 1998), p. 189. Cf. also the addition in the footnote: ‘In the case of “Gramma” a metonymical and symbolic relation is intended (. . .) . . . That means here: “letter”’ denotes the stone plates, engraved with letters and these again denote the Law’ (Ibid., n. 197). 21 Ebeling, ‘Geist und Buchstabe’, col. 1291. 22 O. Hofius, ‘Gesetz und Evangelium nach 2. Korinther 3’, in Hofius (ed.), Paulusstudien, 2nd edn (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), pp. 82–4. 23 Hofius, ‘Gesetz und Evangelium’, p. 82. 24 Hofius, ‘Gesetz und Evangelium’, p. 84. His position is also supported by E. Gräßer, Der zweite Brief an die Korinther. I. Kapitel 1,1 – 7,16 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2002), p. 126. 25 Hofius, ‘Gesetz und Evangelium’, p. 84 n. 64. 26 E. Käsemann, ‘The Spirit and the letter’, in Käsemann (ed.), Perspectives on Paul, trans. M. Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1971), p. 147. Käsemann’s

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interpretation was criticized by Stephen Westerholm, ‘Letter and Spirit: The Foundation of Pauline Ethics’, New Testament Studies 30 (1984): 229–48, who argues that ‘letter’ in Rom. 2.27 ‘does not refer to a particular interpretation of the Old Testament law, but to the possession of God’s commands in written form’ (p. 236). 27 E. Kamlah, ‘Buchstabe und Geist. Die Bedeutung dieser Antithese für die alttestamentliche Exegese des Apostels Paulus’, Evangelische Theologie 14 (1954): 277. 28 Hans-Josef Klauck, 2. Korintherbrief, 2nd edn. Neue Echter Bible. Neues Testament (Würzburg: Echter, 1988), p. 37. Also Ulrich Luz, Das Geschichtsverständnis des Paulus (München: Christian Kaiser, 1968), p. 124: ‘“Gramma” is . . . “Law” to a certain effect, in a certain respect, in a certain use – or else misuse’; Ibid., 126: ‘“Gramma” would be the law of God, if it were misunderstood as a human law which can be fulfilled’. This is rejected by J. Schröter, ‘Die Schriftbenutzung des Paulus in 2 Kor. 3’, Novum Testamentum 40 (1998): 254: ‘Contrary to a long tradition of interpretation gramma here . . . must not be translated by “law”’. 29 Käsemann, ‘Spirit and letter’, p. 155. 30 Käsemann, ‘Spirit and letter’, pp. 155ff. 31 Dietrich-Alex Koch, Die Schrift als Zeuge des Evangeliums (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986), p. 339f. Cf. also Th. E. Provence, ‘“Who is Sufficient for these Things?”. An Exegesis of 2 Corinthians ii 15 – iii 18’, Novum Testamentum 24 (1982): 65: ‘The opposition between letter and Spirit is expressive of the opposition between two widely divergent approaches to the law’. 32 Peter Stuhlmacher, Vom Verstehen des Neuen Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979), p. 61. Similarly, Johan C. Beker, Paul the Apostle. The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1984), p. 253: ‘2 Cor. 3.14–16 suggests that “the letter” (  “the old covenant ”: v. 14) is able to become “scripture”, when in Christ the veil is taken away from the hardened minds of the Jews’. 33 So NRSV. 34 Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. and ed. H. Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 384. 35 For example, Plato, Phaedo 79a. 36 Nevertheless, Morwenna Ludlow argues (pp. 89–92 below) that Origen does also have a place for the deadly effect of the letter, when the literal sense is not open to the spiritual sense.

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37 The literary critical questions about the Corinthian correspondence cannot be discussed here. 38 The question of whether 6.14–7.1 is part of the original letter also remains undiscussed here. 39 Paul does the same in the Epistle to the Galatians, when he discusses the dispute over the demand of his opponents for baptized pagans to become Jews, so that they could belong to the chosen people of God in Abraham; there he takes the discussion to the abstract level of ‘Law’ and ‘Faith’. 40 To understand diakonia and related terms, the critical part of the work of John N. Collins, Diakonia. Re-interpreting the Ancient Sources (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), rightly questions the usual view of diakonia as ministry and diakonein as ‘to serve’. His own suggestion, that these terms always describe mediating (‘go between’), however, replaces one one-sideness with another. Diakonia can best be rendered as ‘task’ or ‘function’ or ‘ministry’. The German word Amt also fits, because it includes the connotation of a field of activity independent of any special person. 41 Cf. the use of metamorphousthai in this context in Philo, Vita de Mosis 2.69. 42 Like ink, the substance of the Spirit is conceived as being like liquid, because the Spirit can be ‘poured out’ like water (Rom. 5.5; cf. Joel 3.1f; Acts 10.45; Tit. 3.6) and one can ‘dip’ into Spirit as into water (Mk 1.8 and parallels.; Jn 1.33; Acts 1.5; 11.16). 43 See n. 1. 44 Whenever the Septuagint talks about plax (singular or plural), the tablets from Sinai are meant; cf. Exod. 32.19; 34.4; Deut. 4.13; 5.22; 9.9–11.15; 2 Chron. 5.10. 45 See Hafemann, Paul, Moses and the History of Israel, p. 157, n. 196. 46 This is the opinion of the majority. 47 I have not found any commentary in which this connection is established. 48 See already Gen. 2.7, then Ezek. 37.5, 10; Jn 6.63; Rom. 8.10-11; 1 Cor. 15.45; Gal. 6.8; Rev. 1.11. 49 Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 131. 50 For a more thorough treatment of this text and its position within early Christian thinking, cf. Michael Wolter, ‘Von der Entmachtung des Buchstabens durch seine Attribute. Eine Spurensuche, ausgehend von Röm 2,29’, in: Sprachgewinn. Festschrift für Günter Bader, hg.v. H. Assel u. H.C. Askani (Berlin/Münster: Verlag Aschendorff, 2008), pp. 149–61. 51 For the opposition of physis and gramma in v. 27 see pp. 32–3 above. 52 The same is the case in 1 Cor. 1.22-4.

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53 Zōēs is a gen. qualitatis: its meaning is not ‘to walk in a new life’, but ‘to walk in newness, that is in life’. Accordingly, it is life that is new, since it has replaced death as the human condition. 54 This is valid even though the example does not quite fit: in 7.2-3, Paul refers to the death of the wife’s husband (i.e. to the death of a different person) that liberates her from his law, whereas in Rom. 6.2-11 it is one’s own death that brings about liberation. 55 See n. 52. 56 Beyond that, they are semantically isotopic. 57 See n. 47.

Chapter 3 1 H. de Lubac Medieval Exegesis (1959–64), trans. M. Sebanc (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000), has been influential, as have the writings of Hans von Balthasar, e.g. Origen: Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of his Writings, trans. R. Daly (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1984). 2 In De Spiritu et Littera 6–7 Augustine interprets ‘letter’ by reference to Rom. 7.7-11 and 4.15 on the law, and ‘Spirit’ by reference to Rom. 5 and 8. He had earlier learnt Origen’s application of 2 Cor. 3.6 from Ambrose and continued to accept it: see Chapter 1, n. 2 and n. 5. 3 See G. Ebeling ‘Die Anfänge von Luthers Hermeneutik’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 48 (1951): 172–230. Also Ebeling, Luther, pp. 93–109 and Ebeling, ‘Geist und Buchstabe’, 1290–96. 4 The secularist argument of Philip Davies in Whose Bible Is It Anyway? (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2004), invites more theological contributions like Francis Watson, Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1997), as well as the cool analysis of John Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007), pp. 167–9. See also K. P. Donfried, Who Owns the Bible? Toward the Recovery of a Christian Hermeneutic (New York: Crossroad, 2006). 5 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. from the Sixth Edition by Edwyn Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933). 6 Käsemann, ‘The Spirit and the Letter’, p. 138 (see Chapter 2, n. 27 above). He refers to Vielhauer’s essay ‘Paulus und das Alten Testament’ (1969), now reprinted in Oikodome, ed. G. Klein (Munich: Kaiser, 1979), pp. 196–228. See further Scott

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J. Hafemann, Paul, Moses and the History of Israel. The Letter/Spirit contrast and Argument from Scripture in 2 Cor. 3 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995). 7 The term ‘Gegenwartsbezug’ is frequently used in F. Hahn, Theologie des Neuen Testaments, 2 volumes (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002). It corresponds to other recent definitions of the discipline in C. Rowland and C. Tuckett (eds), The Nature of New Testament Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006): in this volume Gerd Theissen, Theory of Primitive Christian Religion and New Testament Theology: An Evolutionary Essay (London: SCM Press, 1999), pp. 207–8, describes New Testament theology as ‘the normative exposition of a religion through an interpretative summary of its canonical texts. It is done by people with a Christian identity and aims to facilitate Christian belief ’; Ulrich Luz, ‘The Contribution of Reception History to a Theology of the New Testament’ in Christopher Rowland and Christopher Tuckett (eds), The Nature of New Testament Theology. Essays in Honour of Robert Morgan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 123–34, expects a contextual theology of the New Testament for today to give ‘at least guidelines that explain what is theologically important in the New Testament for today’ (p. 124). 8 Hays, Echoes of Scripture, pp. 178–92 insists on ‘Paul’s letters as hermeneutical model’, but imitates him at the level of community formation and by reading scripture as a narrative of election and promise, sharing his ‘imaginative vision of the relation between Scripture and God’s eschatological activity in the present time’ (p. 183), not in the application of his terms letter and Spirit. Francis Watson Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (London: T. & T. Clark, 2004), p. 532, recognizes the ‘theological potential’ of his analysis but does not pursue it. 9 Westerholm, ‘Letter and Spirit’, p. 24. 10 Hays, Echoes of Scripture, p. 125. 11 See Wolter, Chapter 1, p. 36. 12 Morwenna Ludlow argues (Chapter 5, pp. 91–2) that for Origen the ‘letter that kills’ is not the literal sense as such, but the literal sense taken on its own without being open to the spiritual sense. This brings Origen close to the argument of this chapter and closer to Paul’s theology than is usually thought. 13 Editors’ note. The phrase ‘open to spirit’ raises especially acutely the issues about the typography of ‘spirit’ raised in the Preface. ‘Spirit’ here (lower-case initial) carries both human and divine associations. 14 Ebeling quoted Luther to this effect, e.g. Luther, p. 98: ‘In the holy scriptures it is best to distinguish between the Spirit and the letter; for it is this that makes a true theologian. . . ’. See Luther’s Works (American Edition), vol. 10, p. 4.

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15 My suggestion about this is contained in ‘New Testament Theology and Christian Identity’, in J. Barton and M. Wolter (eds), The Unity of the Canon and the Diversity of Scripture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 151–94 (176). 16 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.1.9. 17 For a full bibliography on this debate about ‘spiritual exegesis’ see R. E. Burnett, Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), p. 27. 18 Stuhlmacher, ‘“Aus Glauben zu Glauben” – Zur geistlichen Schriftauslegung’ (1995), reprinted in P. Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie und Evangelium (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), pp. 215–32. 19 See R. Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, trans. L. P. Smith (London: SCM Press, 1969), p. 158f. Barth was less hostile to the phrase. 20 See Käsemann and Hays, above n. 6 and n. 8. 21 This qualification is, of course, fundamental. The common (Lutheran) misreading of Rom. 10.4, in which telos (end or goal) is read as ‘termination’, however, should by now be set aside and allowances can be made for the polemical situation in Galatians. Gal. 3.19 is mildly negative, and Paul’s attitude to circumcision at Gal. 5.2 and 6.15, and especially 1 Cor. 7.19, must have perplexed other Jews. 22 Whether Paul thinks it still gives ‘knowledge of sin’ (Rom. 3.20) under the New Covenant is debatable – like whether for Paul Rom. 7.14-25 reflects Christian experience as well as expressing pre-Christian reality. 23 Many exegetes understand nomos at Rom. 3.27 and 8.2 to mean ‘principle’. Others think Paul has the Torah in mind here (as in the next verse in both cases, 3.28 and 8.3) but distinguishes between the law as it functions in connection with faith and the law as it is associated with ‘works’ (3.20) and with sin and death (chs. 5–8.11). Paul may have been deliberately ambiguous here where his argument was likely to evoke opposition. 24 Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith, pp. 291–8. 25 This phrase was made popular in another context by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, enlarged edition, trans. R. Fuller et al. (London: SCM, 1971), p. 360. 26 For example, Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 67 on Is. 7.14. 27 See above, n. 12. 28 ‘I myself know what it means year in year out to mount the steps of the pulpit . . . utterly incapable, because at the University I had never been brought beyond that well-known “Awe in the Presence of History” . . .’ Barth, Romans, p. 9.

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29 See n. 3. 30 Ebeling, Luther, p. 100. 31 Wilhelm Vischer, Das Christuszeugnis des alten Testaments (Zürch-Zollikon: Evangelischer Verlag, 1948). 32 James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology (London: SCM Press, 1999), p. 23. Barr observes that Vischer was ‘widely understood to have re-introduced a kind of allegorical exegesis’. His own disagreement with this judgement indicates how imprecisely the term is used. 33 Ebeling, Luther, p. 98. 34 Ibid. 35 Francis Watson has made an important start in his ‘Bible, Theology and the University: a Response to Philip Davies’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 71 (1996): 3–16. 36 In contrast to Wrede’s improperly ‘so-called New Testament theology’, i.e. ‘the history of early Christian religion and theology’ (in our terms ‘letter without interest in spirit’) which he thought should replace New Testament theology done ‘with an eye to dogmatics’ (in our terms ‘letter intending spirit’). See ‘The Task and Method of New Testament Theology So-called’ (1897), trans. Robert Morgan, The Nature of New Testament Theology (London: SCM Press, 1973), pp. 68–116, at pp. 116, 69. 37 J. P. Gabler (1787), ‘On the Proper Distinction Between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology and the Specific Objectives of Each’, English translation. Scottish Journal of Theology 33 (1980): 133–58. 38 Krister Stendahl, ‘Biblical Theology: A Program’ (1962), reprinted in Stendahl, Meanings (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 11–44. 39 This point is made forcefully by Wayne Meeks, ‘Why Study the New Testament?’, New Testament Studies 51 (2005): 155–70. 40 Wrede, ‘Task and Method’, p. 75, thought New Testament theology with its extensive use of this language ‘makes doctrine out of what in itself is not doctrine, and fails to bring out what it really is’. 41 Wrede, ‘Task and Method’, p. 69. 42 Wrede, ‘Task and Method’, p. 183. They might have explained themselves more clearly had they had access to our terms to explain that their historical work in New Testament theology (‘letter’) was oriented towards their own Christianity. 43 Wrede, ‘Task and Method’, p. 69. 44 He valued it for clarifying the humanity of Jesus. See A. T. Lincoln and A. Paddison (eds), Christology and Scripture (London: T. & T. Clark, 2007), pp. 58–83.

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45 The same can be said of his follower Heikki Räisänen’s admirable The Rise of Christian Beliefs (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2010), and Gerd Theissen’s outstanding A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion. See also n. 7. 46 Ernst Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W. J. Montague (London: SCM Press, 1969), p. 7. 47 Nicholas Lash, ‘What might martyrdom mean?’ Lash, Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986), pp. 75–94. See also Andrew Lincoln, Truth on Trial (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2000). 48 See Rudolf Bultmann, ‘The Problem of a Theological Exegesis of the New Testament’ (1925), trans. L. de Grazia and K. R. Crim, in J. M. Robinson (ed.), The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1968), pp. 236–56, esp., p. 256. 49 That is how he concludes his review of Barth’s Romans, 2nd edn; see Robinson, Beginnings, p. 120. 50 See n. 47, and also the Introduction to R. Bultmann, Jesus and the Word [1926], trans. L. P. Smith (London: Collins/Fontana, 1958), p. 11. 51 Rudolf Bultmann, ‘What does it Mean to Speak of God?’ [1926], in R. Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, trans. L. P. Smith (London: SCM Press, 1969), pp. 53–65. 52 Reprinted in Nils Dahl, The Crucified Messiah (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1974), pp. 90–128, at p. 94. 53 See n. 48. 54 Barth, Romans, p. 7. 55 Barth, Romans, p. 3. 56 Paul Wernle, Die Anfänge unserer Religion (1901)  The Beginnings of Christianity, trans. G. A. Bienemann, 2 volumes (London: Williams and Norgate, 1903–4). 57 Translated from Kurt Aland (ed.), Glanz und Niedergang der deutschen Universität (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1979), p. 34, citing a 1926 letter by Lietzmann. See also E. Stange (hrsg.) Die Religionswissenschaft der Gegenwart, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Meiner, 1926), p. 100. 58 Aland, Glanz und Niedergang, p. 34. 59 Ibid. 60 C. K. Barrett, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1962), p. vi. 61 His Barthian distaste for ‘religion’ became less pronounced in the revised edition of 1991. See Robert Morgan ‘S. G. Wilson on Religion and its Theological

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Despisers’, in Z. A. Crook and P. A. Harland (eds), Identity and Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean (Sheffield: Phoenix, 2007), pp. 238–52 (240–8). 62 Friedrich Niebergall, Praktische Auslegung des Neuen Testaments (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1909), p. 1. 63 See n.60. 64 See n.7. 65 See the German title in n. 56. 66 By C. H. Dodd The Meaning of Paul for Today [1920] (London: Collins/Fontana, 1958). 67 By Leander E. Keck (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark), 1971. 68 C. H. Dodd, Meaning of Paul, p. 10. 69 Ibid., p. 11. 70 Keck, Who is Jesus?, p. x. 71 E. C. Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel, ed. F. Noel Davey, 2nd edn (London: Faber & Faber, 1947), p. 47. 72 E. C. Hoskyns, The Riddle of the New Testament, ed. F. Noel Davey (London: Faber & Faber, 1931), p. 181. 73 Schlatter’s celebrated 1905 essay, reprinted in 1969, is now translated with that title in Werner Neuer, Adolf Schlatter, trans. R. W. Yarbrough (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1995), pp. 211–25. 74 Rahner, Karl, Theological Investigations, vol. 1, God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. C. Ernst (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1961), p. 80. 75 F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Brief Outline on the Study of Theology [1830], trans. T. Tice (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1966), §147, p. 60.

Chapter 4 1 Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, On Psalm 33 Sermon 2.25, ll. 25-27 (Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina, vol. 38, p. 298). I am grateful to Professors Jochen Schmidt (Paderborn) and Ulrich Volp (Mainz) for helpful remarks and criticisms. 2 Augustine, Enchiridion 4–5. 3 Cf. Augustine On the Trinity 14.8. 4 See Eugene TeSelle, art. ‘Fides’, in Cornelius Mayer et al. (eds), AugustinusLexikon, vol. 2 (Basel: Schwabe & Co, 1996–2002), cols. 1333–40, esp. 1337–8.

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5 For this term in the New Testament see Otto Michel, art. ‘homologeō ktl’, in Kittel and Friedrich (eds), Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 5 (1979), pp. 199–220. 6 The terminology is somewhat arbitrary. I use the term ‘creed’ for the subgroup because its origin and etymology suggests a fixed formula. Similar distinctions between homology and creed are current in New Testament research; cf. Adolf Martin Ritter, art. ‘Glaubensbekenntnis(se), V. Alte Kirche’, in Horst Balz, Gerhard Krause and Gerhard Müller (eds), Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1976–), vol. 13 (1984), p. 401. 7 Wolfram Kinzig and Markus Vinzent, ‘Recent Research on the Origin of the Creed’, Journal of Theological Studies 50 (1999), pp. 540–1. 8 Earlier research is summed up in J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd edn (London: A & C Black, 1972); Frederick E. Vokes/Hans-Martin Barth/ Henning Schröer, art. ‘Apostolisches Glaubensbekenntnis’, in Balz, Krause and Müller (eds), Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 3 (1978), pp. 528–71; Ritter, art. ‘Glaubensbekenntnis(se)’. The present state of scholarship is found in Hanns Christof Brennecke, art. ‘Nicäa, Ökumenische Synoden, I. Ökumenische Synode von 325’, in Balz, Krause and Müller (eds), Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 24 (1994), pp. 429–41; Wolf-Dieter Hauschild, art. ‘NicänoKonstantinopolitanisches Glaubensbekenntnis’, in Balz, Krause and Müller (eds), Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 24 (1994), pp. 444–56; Christoph Markschies, art. ‘Apostolicum’, in Betz et al. (eds), Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4th edn (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998–2007), vol. 1, cols. 648f; Christoph Bochinger et al., art. ‘Bekenntnis’, in Betz et al. (eds), Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4th edn, vol. 1, cols. 1246–69; Reinhart Staats, Das Glaubensbekenntnis von Nizäa-Konstantinopel: Historische und theologische Grundlagen, 2nd edn (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999); Wolfram Kinzig/Christoph Markschies/Markus Vinzent, Tauffragen und Bekenntnis: Studien zur sogenannten ‘Traditio Apostolica’, zu den ‘Interrogationes de fide’ und zum ‘Römischen Glaubensbekenntnis’ (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999); Kinzig/Vinzent, ‘Recent Research on the Origin of the Creed’; Liuwe H. Westra, The Apostles’ Creed: Origin, History, and some Early Commentaries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002); Peter Gemeinhardt, Die FilioqueKontroverse zwischen Ost- und Westkirche im Frühmittelalter (Berlin/New York; Walter de Gruyter, 2002); Volker H. Drecoll, ‘Nicaenisches Symbol’, in Betz et al. (eds) Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4th edn, vol. 6 (2004), cols. 280–1; Drecoll, ‘Nicaeno-Constantinopolitanum’, in Betz et al. (eds), Religion in

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Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4th edn, vol. 6 (2004), cols. 281–3; Markus Vinzent, Der Ursprung des Apostolikums im Urteil der kritischen Forschung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006). 9 Cf. esp. the controversy between Kinzig/Vinzent and Westra concerning the nature, origin and age of the Roman Creed, the predecessor of the Apostles’ Creed: see the literature cited in n. 8. 10 Compare e.g. Klaus Wengst, art. ‘Glaubensbekenntnis(se), IV. Neues Testament’, Theologische Realenzyklopädie vol. 14 (1984), pp. 392–9 and J. Reumann, in Bochinger et al., ‘Bekenntnis’, cols. 1248f. Here ‘confession’ seems to be identical with ‘formula’ tout court, a confused approach. 11 Hans von Campenhausen, ‘Das Bekenntnis im Urchristentum’, Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 63 (1972), pp. 210–53; also in von Campenhausen, Urchristliches und Altkirchliches: Vorträge und Aufsätze (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1979), pp. 217–72 (see pp. 220–4). 12 Von Campenhausen, Urchristliches und Altkirchliches, pp. 224–6. 13 Von Campenhausen, Urchristliches und Altkirchliches, pp. 236–7. This view is criticized by Ritter, ‘Glaubensbekenntnis(se), V. Alte Kirche’, pp. 400–1. 14 Von Campenhausen, Urchristliches und Altkirchliches, pp. 237–43. 15 Ibid., p. 244. 16 Ibid., p. 245. 17 Ibid., pp. 245–7. 18 Ibid., pp. 250–3. 19 Ibid., p. 253. 20 Ibid., pp. 253–70. 21 Ibid., pp. 270–2. 22 Cf. n. 13. 23 Hans von Campenhausen, ‘Der Ehrentitel Jesu und das urchristliche Bekenntnis’, Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 66 (1975), pp. 127–9; also in von Campenhausen, Urchristliches und Altkirchliches, pp. 273–7; von Campenhausen, ‘Das Bekenntnis Eusebs von Caesarea (Nicaea 325)’, Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 67 (1976), pp. 123–30, also in von Campenhausen, Urchristliches und Altkirchliches, pp.  278–99. 24 Cf. e.g. Ritter, ‘Glaubensbekenntnis(se)’, pp. 400–401; Staats, Das Glaubensbekenntnis von Nizäa-Konstantinopel, pp. 123, 145, 149–50. In New Testament studies, James Dunn’s views now appear to be more influential; cf. J. D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Enquiry into the

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Character of Earliest Christianity, 2nd edn (London: SCM Press, 2006), ch. 3; J. Reumann, in: Bochinger et al., ‘Bekenntnis’, cols. 1248–9. 25 Von Campenhausen, Urchristliches und Altkirchliches, pp. 223f. 26 For what follows cf. also Staats, Das Glaubensbekenntnis von NizäaKonstantinopel, pp. 121–42 whose observations are similar to mine, but whose conclusions are different. 27 Cf. Jorg-Ch. Salzmann, Lehren und Ermahnen. Zur Geschichte des christlichen Wortgottesdienstes in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), esp. pp. 196f. 28 Cf. Wolfram Kinzig, ‘The Nazoraeans’, in Oskar Skarsaune/Reidar Hvalvik (eds), Jewish Believers in Jesus, vol. 1: The Early Centuries (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007), pp. 463–87. 29 Cf. Tacitus, Annals 15.44.4. 30 One example may be contained in chs 1–6 of the Didache (early second century). Cf. Wolfram Kinzig/Martin Wallraff, ‘Das Christentum des dritten Jahrhunderts zwischen Anspruch und Wirklichkeit’, in Dieter Zeller (ed.), Das Christentum I: Von den Anfängen bis zur Konstantinischen Wende (Stuttgart: 2002 [Die Religionen der Menschheit I]), pp. 331–88, esp. 336 and n. 12 (literature). In addition, see Kelly Early Christian Creeds, pp. 49–52; Ottorino Pasquato/Heinzgerd Brakmann, art. ‘Katechese (Katechismus)’, in Theodor Klauser (ed.), Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. 20 (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 2004), cols. 422–96, esp. 425–32; Marcel Metzger/Wolfram Drews/ Heinzgerd Brakmann, art. ‘Katechumenat’, in Klauser (ed.), Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. 20 (2004), cols. 497–574, esp. 506–18. 31 Cf. Salzmann, Lehren und Ermahnen, p. 463. There were regional variations on this point. 32 Cf. Kinzig in Markschies/Kinzig/Vinzent, Tauffragen und Bekenntnis. 33 Martyrdom of Polycarp 10.1; 12.1; Martyrdom of Ptolemaeus and Lucius 11; Martyrdom of Carpus, Papylus and Agathonice 3. 5. 23. 34; Acts of Justin recension A and B 3.4-4.9 (cf. recension C 3,5; a whole series of confessions during interrogation by the prefect); recension B 5.7; Letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne in Eusebius, Church History 5.1.20; Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs 10.13; Acts of Apollonius 1f.; Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas 1.3; 4.7; Martyrdom of Pionius 8.2; 15.7; 16.2; 18.6; 20.7; Martyrdom of Fructuosus and Companions 2.3; Martyrdom of Dasius 6.1; 7.2; 8.2; 10.2; Martyrdom of Agape, Irene and Chione 3.2; Martyrdom of Ignatius (Martyrium Romanum) 8.4; cf. also I Peter 4.16; Acts of John 4. ll. 2f. (Corpus Christianorum [Brepols:

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Turnholt] SA 2, p. 867); Pliny, Epistles, 10.96.3; 10.97.1; Justin Martyr, First Apology 11.1; id., Second Apology 2.10f.; Dialogue with Trypho 35.2; 96.2; Tertullian, To the Nations e.g. 1.2.1; 1.3.2; id., Apologeticum 1.4; 2f.; 49.5; id., On the Crown 1; Cyprian, To Demetrian 13; Eusebius ‘Gallicanus’, Homily 56.4f.; (Ps.-)John of Damascus, Martyrdom of Artemius 24 (Patrologia Graeca  PG 96, 1273B). In addition cf. Ritter, ‘Glaubensbekenntnis(se)’, p. 400; Staats, Das Glaubensbekenntnis von Nizäa-Konstantinopel, pp. 123f.; id. in: Bochinger et al., ‘Bekenntnis’, cols. 1249f. 34 Cf. Friedrich Vittinghoff, ‘“Christianus Sum” – Das “Verbrechen” von Außenseitern in der römischen Gesellschaft’, Historia 33 (1984), pp. 331–57. 35 Cf. Ritter, ‘Glaubensbekenntnis(se)’, p. 400; Staats, Das Glaubensbekenntnis von Nizäa-Konstantinopel, pp. 123f.; id. in Bochinger et al., ‘Bekenntnis’, col. 1249f. 36 Cf. e.g. Tacitus, Annals 15.44.2-5. 37 Cf. e.g. Basil of Caesarea, On the forty martyrs of Sebaste 3 (PG 31, 512B); 4 (512C); 7 (520C); Ephraem Syrus, Sermon on the Martyrdom of St Boniface (ed. Konstantinos G. Phrantzolas, Hosiu Ephraim tu Syru erga, Vol. 7 [Thessalonike: Periboli tēs Panagias, 1988], p. 192, line 10); John Chrysostom, Sermon on Lucian Martyr 3 (PG 50, 524f.). 38 See von Campenhausen, ‘Der Herrentitel Jesu und das urchristliche Bekenntnis’, p. 274. By means of illustration compare e.g. Martyrdom of Polycarp 8, where the police captain asks Polycarp: ‘Now what harm is there for you to say “Caesar is lord” (kyrios Kaisar), to perform sacrifices and so forth, and thus to save your life?’ (The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, ed. and trans. Herbert Musurillo [Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972]). In order not to provoke an official demand such as this, the Christians on the whole avoided calling Christ ‘lord’ outside worship, yet they could not avoid being challenged to participate in pagan sacrifices which they were unable to do. Cf. also Tertullian, Apologeticum 34.1: ‘Augustus, the founder of the empire, would not even want to be called Lord; for that, too, is a name of deity. For my part, I am willing to call the emperor Lord, but in the common acceptation of the word and when I am not forced to call him Lord as in God’s place. But my relation to him is one of freedom; for I have but one true Lord, the God omnipotent and eternal, who is Lord of the emperor as well’: trans. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson. Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973), vol. 3, p. 43 altered. Similarly, Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs 6. 39 Cf. now also e.g. William Horbury, Jewish Messianism and the Cult of Christ (London: SCM, 1998).

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40 Cf. Wolfram Kinzig, ‘Warum ist der Gott der Christen ein dreieiniger Gott? Historische Überlegungen zur Trinitätslehre im Horizont des christlichjüdischen Gesprächs’, in Katja Kriener/Johann M. Schmidt (eds), ‘. . . um Seines NAMENS willen’: Christen und Juden vor dem Einen Gott Israels (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2005), pp. 102–17. 41 As regards the building-block model (Baukastenmodell) which was first suggested by Markus Vinzent, cf. Kinzig/Vinzent, ‘Recent Research on the Origin of the Creed’, pp. 555f. 42 For details cf. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, pp. 62–99. 43 Cf. e.g. Irenaeus, Epideixis 6. 44 Cf. Tertullian, On the Veiling of Virgins 1.4(3). 45 Cf. Wolfram Kinzig, Novitas Christiana: Die Idee des Fortschritts in der Alten Kirche bis Eusebius (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1994), pp. 267–9. 46 Twenty such horoi issued by the council have been preserved. As regards the legal implications, cf. Heinz Ohme, Kanon ekklesiastikos: Die Bedeutung des altkirchlichen Kanonbegriffs (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 352–68. 47 Cf. his letter to the Church of Caesarea in which he justified signing the creed. It is edited in Hans-Georg Opitz, Athanasius Werke, vol. III/1: Urkunden zur Geschichte des arianischen Streites 318–328 (Berlin und Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1934–35), Urkunde 22. 48 As regards the underlying ideology of the welfare of the state, cf. Kinzig, Novitas Christiana, pp. 564f. 49 See Codex Theodosianus 16,1,2. 50 Cf. Daniel H. Williams, Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Arian-Nicene Conflicts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 154–84. 51 Cf. Gemeinhardt, Die Filioque-Kontroverse. 52 Cf. Vinzent, Der Ursprung des Apostolikums, p. 390. The variations are conveniently listed and analysed in Westra, The Apostles’ Creed. 53 An exception was the Visigoths who continued to confess to a Homoean creed for some time to come. 54 For what follows cf. Wolfram Kinzig, ‘The Creed in the Liturgy: Prayer or Hymn?’, in Albert Gerhards/Clemens Leonhard (eds), Jewish and Christian Liturgy and Worship: New Insights into its History and Interaction (Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2007), pp. 229–46. 55 For what follows, cf. Josef A. Jungmann, Missarum sollemnia: Eine genetische Erklärung der Römischen Messe, 5th edn, 2 volumes (Vienna: Herder, 1962), vol. 1, pp. 603–6.

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56 This becomes immediately clear when one reads some of the German or Nordic versions of the creeds assembled in August Hahn/Ludwig Hahn (eds), Bibliothek der Symbole und Glaubensregeln der Alten Kirche, 3rd edn (Breslau: E. Morgenstern, 1897), §§105f., 108f., 110–2, 114–7, 120–1. 57 One of the few exceptions is Zeno of Verona who discusses the relation between law and faith. Zeno argues that the law is ineffective without faith, but that faith is effective without the law, because otherwise only those experienced in the law would be justified: (Sermon II.3.2 in Corpus Christianorum SL 22, p. 153, ll. 12–23).

Chapter 5 1 Origen, On First Principles [conventionally abbreviated DP from the Latin title, De Principiis] IV.2.2; trans. G. W. Butterworth, Origen On First Principles (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). See also DP IV.1.7. Parts of DP Book IV are extant both in Rufinus’ Latin translation and in Greek (preserved as Chapter I of the Philokalia). In this chapter, all references are to the Greek version, except where indicated otherwise. 2 Origen, DP IV.2.3. 3 Origen, DP IV.2.3, referring to 2 Cor. 3.6, 12-13. 4 DP IV.3.1 on narrative in Genesis 1-3 and Matthew 4; DP IV.3.2-3 on law in both Testaments. 5 Origen, DP IV.2.4, referring to 1 Cor. 2.6-7 and Heb. 10.1; trans. Butterworth, pp. 275–6. 6 Origen, DP IV.2.6. 7 Origen, DP IV.2.7. 8 Origen, Homilies on Leviticus, trans. Mark Edwards, Origen against Plato (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 134–5. See also Origen, DP IV.2.6: ‘It is a spiritual explanation when one is able to show of what kind of “heavenly things” the Jews “after the flesh” served as a copy or a shadow, and of what “good things to come” the law has a “shadow”’ (trans. Butterworth, p. 279, alluding to Heb. 8.5; 10.1 and Rom. 8.5) and DP IV.3.12. 9 Origen, Commentary on John X.13, trans. A. Menzies, in Roberts and Donaldson (eds), Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF), vol. 10, pp. 389ff. 10 Origen, Commentary on John X.13: ‘those who have been trained (paidagōgoumenoi) by tutors and governors under the true law’ (ANF, vol. 10, p. 389); cf. Gal. 3.24; 4.2. See below on Augustine’s use of the same figure: p. 99.

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11 Origen, Commentary on John X.13 (ANF, vol. X, p. 391). 12 For example, Origen, Against Celsus 6.70, trans. Henry Chadwick, Origen Contra Celsum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), p. 384. 13 Edwards, Origen against Plato, p. 136. Edwards points out that much of Origen’s ethics derives from the bodily sense of scripture – literal obedience to many scriptural commands. The soul sense seems to comprise of less obvious (more advanced?) ethical advice, and often concerns the overall disposition of the soul rather than particular precepts and needs to be understood in the context of Origen’s ascetic theology. 14 Edwards, Origen against Plato, p. 136. 15 Ibid., p. 135. 16 See the quotations from the Homilies on Leviticus and Homilies on John above, which suggest an emphasis on the soul meaning. DP, on the other hand, seems more concerned with the spiritual, eschatological range of meanings. 17 Origen, DP IV.2.9; see also IV.2.5 and IV.3 passim. 18 Origen, DP IV.3.5 (trans. Butterworth, pp. 296–7, with minor emendations including translating proēgoumenos as ‘guiding’, not ‘outstanding’). This passage is from the Greek: significantly, it is omitted from Rufinus’ Latin translation. An impossible literal meaning in one place can generate multiple occasions for allegorical reading in passages where the literal meaning is possible and true: see the discussion of ‘wells’ in Edwards, Origen against Plato, p. 139. 19 Origen, DP IV.2.6; see also DP IV.2.8 quoted above. 20 Origen, DP IV.3.4. 21 This is partly due to Origen’s exegesis of The Shepherd of Hermas that follows: Origen, DP IV.2.4; citing Hermas II.4.3. 22 Edwards, Origen against Plato, p. 138; see also Judith Kovacs, ‘Servant of Christ and Steward of the Mysteries of God: The Purpose of a Pauline Letter According to Origen’s Homilies on 1 Corinthians’, in Paul M. Blowers et al. (eds), In Dominico Eloquio. In Lordly Eloquence. Essays on Patristic Exegesis in Honour of Robert Louis Wilken (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 157–65. 23 Origen, ‘Prologue’ to the Commentary on the Song of Songs, trans. Rowan A. Greer, in Origen, An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer and Selected Works (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1979), p. 217; see also Kovacs, ‘Servant of Christ’, passim, on Origen’s view of the differing purposes of Paul’s letters. 24 Origen, DP IV.2.4 (my emphasis), referring to 1 Cor. 2.6-7 and Heb. 10.1. 25 This is comparable to Origen’s exegesis of the ‘inner man’ and the ‘outer man’ in Paul (2 Cor. 4.16 and Rom. 7.22): Origen, ‘Prologue’ to the Commentary on the Song of Songs, Greer, An Exhortation, p. 220.

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26 On the connection between eschatological embodiment and hermeneutics see David Dawson, ‘Allegorical Reading and the Embodiment of the Soul in Origen’, in Lewis Ayres and Gareth Jones (eds), Christian Origins. Theology, Rhetoric and Community (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 42–3. 27 Origen, DP IV.2.5; 1.7. 28 Origen, DP IV.3.11; 2.3; 1.6. 29 Edwards, Origen against Plato, p. 138, citing Origen Against Celsus 4.15. 30 Origen, DP III.5.1 (Latin), trans. Butterworth, p. 237 (slightly altered). 31 Origen, DP IV.2.2 – my emphasis. 32 Origen, DP IV.2.1. Here Origen again elides the failure to read allegorically with the tendency to read metaphors literally. 33 See Origen, ‘Prologue’ to the Commentary on the Song of Songs, trans. Greer, An Exhortation, pp. 217–19; see also Dawson, ‘Allegorical Reading’, p. 27. 34 He even appears to use the concept of ‘law’ to symbolize the bodily meaning in the New Testament which is in some ways faulty (another ‘stumbling block’) and thus should not be read at the bodily level, but as pointing to a deeper meaning: ‘And not only did the Spirit supervise the writings which were previous to the coming of Christ, but because he is the same Spirit and proceeds from the same God he has dealt in like manner with the gospels and the writings of the apostles. For the history even of these is not everywhere pure, events being woven together in the bodily sense without having actually happened; nor do the law and the commandments contained therein entirely declare what is reasonable’: Origen, DP IV.2.9; trans. Butterworth, p. 287. 35 See the account of graptē in DP IV.2.4 36 Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs IV.1.18, ed. L. Brésard et al., Commentaire sur le Cantique des Cantiques. Sources Chrétiennes 376 (Paris: Du Cerf, 1992), trans. R. P. Lawson Origen, the Song of Songs Commentary and Homilies. Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 26 (Westminster, MD: Newman; London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1957), p. 244. 37 This is not to imply, of course, that Paul intended such a hermeneutical interpretation of the veil image. 38 This section is not extant in Greek, so we do not know whether Origen used the terms lexis, rhēton or gramma. 39 Here, as we have shown above, the key text is Origen, DP IV.3.5. 40 See DP IV.2.4, where graptē, the ‘bare letter’ is aimed at ‘child souls’, whom Origen says are called orphans because ‘they are not yet able to enrol God as their father’; see also DP IV.2.1: right interpreters ‘keep to the rule of the heavenly Church of Jesus Christ through the succession from the Apostles’.

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41 Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), passim. 42 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, p. 95, cited by David Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), p. 49. 43 This is admittedly clearer in his later Homilies than in Book IV of DP where he sometimes seems to write of Israel as a mere symbol. 44 Dawson, Christian Figural Reading, p. 50. 45 Jean Daniélou, Origen, trans. Walter Mitchell (London: Sheed and Ward, 1955), pp. 131–99, especially pp. 139–40, 173–4, 199. Dawson, Christian Figural Reading, makes a much more subtle argument, qualifying Auerbach’s distinction between ‘figural’ and ‘allegorical’, yet the distinction still seems to persist in Dawson’s own argument which consistently defends Origen’s ‘figural’ readings: passim, but see especially pp. 207–18. 46 Origen, Philokalia 1.28.19-20; cf. Philokalia 10 and 12, trans. J. A. Robinson, The Philocalia of Origen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893). 47 Rowan D. Williams, ‘Language, Reality and Desire in Augustine’s De Doctrina’, Journal of Literature and Theology 3 (1989): 138; see also J. J. O’Donnell, ‘De Doctrina Christiana’, in Allan D. Fitzgerald (ed.), Augustine through the Ages (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 178). 48 Augustine, On Christian Teaching [ De Doctrina Christiana] Preface 1, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 3. 49 Augustine, On Christian Teaching Preface 9, trans. Green, p. 4. 50 Augustine On Christian Teaching II.9, trans. Green, p. 32. 51 Origen does however recognize the contributions of human authors, especially in matters of style and expression: e.g. his text-critical skills lead him to believe that Hebrews was perhaps not written by Paul, although he believes the letter shares Paul’s theology and Origen quotes it as if it had the authority of the Apostle himself. See Origen Homilies on Hebrews, fragment preserved in Eusebius The History of the Church VI.25.11-14; also Edwards, Origen against Plato, p. 133. 52 Augustine, Confessions XII.xxxii.43, trans. Henry Chadwick, St Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 271. 53 Augustine, Confessions XII.xxxii.43, trans. Chadwick, p. 271. 54 Augustine, On Christian Teaching III.9, 10, 19, trans. Green, pp. 69–70, 72. 55 The irony here is that while Augustine chides those who vehemently claim that their reading reveals what Moses meant and recommends charity to other interpreters, he does in fact argue quite energetically for his own particular readings of Gen 1.1-2 in Book XII.

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56 Augustine, Confessions. XII.xxxi.42, trans. Chadwick, p. 271. 57 Augustine, Confessions. XII.xiv.17, trans. Chadwick, p. 254: ‘What wonderful profundity there is in your utterances! The surface meaning lies open before us and charms beginners. Yet the depth is amazing, my God, the depth is amazing’. 58 Augustine, Confessions. XII.xxvii.37, trans. Chadwick, p. 266. 59 Michael Cameron, ‘Sign’, in Allan D. Fitzgerald (ed.), Augustine through the Ages (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 796. 60 R. A. Markus, ‘St Augustine on Signs’, Phronesis 2 (1957): 65. 61 Cameron, ‘Sign’, p. 795. 62 Augustine, On Christian Teaching III.1-4, trans. Green, p. 68. 63 Augustine, On Christian Teaching III.54, trans. Green, p. 80. 64 This appears to be a closer Latin rendition of kata tēn lexin than ad litteram. 65 Augustine, On Christian Teaching III.20-1, trans. Green, p. 72. 66 Augustine, On Christian Teaching III.23, trans. Green, p. 73. 67 Augustine, On Christian Teaching III.23-4, trans. Green, p. 73. 68 Cameron, ‘Sign’, p. 795. 69 Augustine, On Christian Teaching III.22-6, trans. Green, pp. 72–3. 70 See above on Origen, p. 89. 71 Augustine, On Christian Teaching III.22, trans. Green, p. 72. 72 2 Cor. 3.14. 73 Augustine, On Christian Teaching III.33, trans. Green, p. 75. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., p. 84; see also III.48, trans. Green, pp. 78–9. 76 Origen, Homilies on Genesis XI, trans. R. E. Heine, Origen. Homilies on Genesis and Exodus. The Fathers of the Church, vol. 71 (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1982). See, e.g. the rhetorical question: ‘Or, as we have often said, do the marriages of the patriarchs indicate something mystical and sacred?’ (Heine, Origen, p. 168; see also p. 171). 77 Augustine’s interpretation of Paul’s concept of the ‘spiritual body’ develops over his career, probably in response to the developing Origenist controversy: see Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), p. 143. Augustine’s direct attacks on Origen, however, were focused mainly on the question of pre-existent souls and the temporal punishment of the damned. 78 Augustine, On Christian Teaching IV.27, and IV.61, trans. Green, p. 106 and p. 114. 79 Augustine, On Christian Teaching IV.62, trans. Green, p. 115.

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80 For example, Williams, ‘Language, Reality and Desire’, pp. 139, 142–3, 145–6, 148, seems to think that Augustine allows more polyvalence than O’Donnell reckons in ‘De Doctrina Christiana’. 81 In light of the Pauline root of the discussion, it might be more accurate to say that Augustine is moving back to his theological roots. 82 Williams, ‘Language, Reality and Desire’, p. 139: ‘The distinction between frui and uti (DDC [de Doctrina Christiana] I.iii) is thus imposed on the res-signum distinction, and will pervade the whole of DDC; it is the means whereby Augustine links what he has to say about beings who “mean” and about the fundamentally desirous nature of those beings – a link which is undoubtedly the most original and interesting feature about this treatise’.

Chapter 6 1 Geoffrey Hartman, Easy Pieces (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 194. 2 Jacques Derrida ‘White Mythology’ in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 207–72. 3 See e.g. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), paras. 5552–55522. 4 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. F. Kersetn (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), pp. 214–15. See the critique by Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays On Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. D. B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 77–81. 5 For example, Jacques Derrida, ‘Afterword’, in Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 148. 6 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. R. Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 116. 7 ‘Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers’: from Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th edn, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 58. On metaphor and difference, see Derrida, ‘White Mythology’, pp. 218, 228, 242–3. 8 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Soivak (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 7.

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9 Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 6–15; Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, pp. 129–30. 10 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. A. Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 19–20; cf. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 49–50. 11 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), pp. 45–7 (§6). 12 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or, Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), pp. 51–9, 153–65. 13 See the critique of Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 12; Speech and Phenomena, p. 39. 14 Or, in phenomenology, because their ‘essence’ is directly and fully present/ presented to the mind: see n. 4. 15 Jacques Derrida, ‘Semiology and Grammatology’ in Derrida, Positions, trans. A. Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 26; Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 62. 16 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit. Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 23–6. 17 Derrida, Of Spirit, pp. 39–40. 18 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 419 (§70). 19 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University’ in Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 33. 20 Derrida, Of Spirit, pp. 55–7. 21 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 15. 22 Augustine, Confessions VI.iv.6, trans. Chadwick, p. 94. 23 Augustine, Confessions XIII.xv.18, trans. Chadwick, p. 283. 24 My inverted commas, to bring out Derrida’s meaning. 25 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 18. 26 Augustine, Confessions XIII.xv.16, trans. Chadwick, p. 282. 27 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 17. 28 Directed by Scott McGehee and David Sieghel, produced by Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, starring Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche. There is a ‘tie-in’ edition of the novel of the same title by Myla Goldberg, published by Harper Perennial (2005). 29 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 16. 30 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 76.

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31 Mark Vessey, ‘Reading Like Angels: Derrida and Augustine on the Book’ in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds), Augustine and Postmodernism. Confessions and Circumfession (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 179. 32 Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. G. Bennington (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 1. 33 Augustine, Confessions XI.ii.3; Derrida, Circumfession in Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida, 45, pp. 239–41. 34 Derrida, Circumfession, 48, pp. 257–8. 35 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 18. 36 Augustine, Confessions XII.xxxi.42, trans. Chadwick, p. 271. 37 Derrida, Circumfession, 38, pp. 199–204. 38 William Blake, ‘A Memorable Fancy’, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), Plates 22–4. 39 Augustine, Confessions XII.xxvi.36–7. 40 Derrida, On Spirit, pp. 83–98. 41 Elijah/Elie was Derrida’s own secret Jewish name, associated with his circumcision. 42 Augustine, Confessions XII.xxxi.42, trans. Chadwick, p. 270. Cited by Derrida, Circumfession, 44, p. 233. 43 Derrida, Circumfession, 43, p. 229. 44 Derrida, Circumfession, 42, p. 224; this is followed by a citation from Augustine, Confessions XII.xxxi.42. 45 Note Derrida’s objection to ‘pure’ awareness in Speech and Phenomena, pp. 77–80. 46 Derrida, Circumfession, 48, pp. 254–8. 47 Augustine, Confessions XIII.xxiv.36. 48 Augustine, Confessions XIII.xv.16. 49 Derrida, Circumfession, 55, pp. 293–5, quoting Augustine, Confessions VII.xxi.27 (Col. 2.14). 50 Derrida, Circumfession, 42, p. 220. 51 Derrida, Circumfession, 45, pp. 239–41. 52 See Derrida, Circumfession, 1, pp. 3–5. 53 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 75. 54 Ibid., p. 77. 55 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 69–81, 204–9.

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56 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, pp. 18, 36; Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (New York: Harvester, 1982), p. xvii. 57 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 17. 58 Derrida, Circumfession, p. 365. 59 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card. From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 29–30. 60 Derrida, Circumfession, p. 11. 61 Ibid., p. 357. 62 Vessy, ‘Reading Like Angels’, pp. 191–2. 63 For example, Theophilus of Antioch Ad Autolycum, 2.10, 22; Hippolytus Refutatio, 10.33.1. 64 Augustine, de Trinitate XV.18–20. See Tarmo Toom, Thought Clothed With Sound: Augustine’s Christological Hermeneutics in De Doctrina Christiana (Bern/ New York: Peter Lang, 2002), passim; Giovanni Manetti, Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity, trans. C. Richardson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 162–3. 65 Augustine, de Trinitate XV.20. 66 For a modern version, see Oliver Davies, The Creativity of God. World, Eucharist, Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 111–14. 67 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, pp. 131–2. 68 Ibid., pp. 133–4. 69 See ‘Afterword’, pp. 152–3. 70 Directed by Peter Greenaway, starring John Gielgud as Prospero. 71 Peter Greenaway, Prospero’s Books. A Film of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991), p. 9. 72 Greenaway, Prospero’s Books, p. 9. 73 Shakespeare, The Tempest, 5.1.27–8. 74 Ibid., 5.1.54–7. 75 Peter S. Donaldson, ‘Shakespeare in the Age of Post-Mechanical Reproduction: Sexual and Electronic Magic in Prospero’s Books’ in Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt (eds), Shakespeare, The Movie. Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV and Video (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 175. 76 Greenaway, Prospero’s Books, p. 164. 77 See the essays in Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (eds), Technoculture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 78 Donaldson, ‘Shakespeare in the Age of Post-Mechanical Reproduction’, p. 176. 79 Derrida, Post Card, pp. 23, 29–30.

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80 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 71. 81 Jacques Derrida, ‘Limited Inc abc’, trans. S. Weber, Glyph 2 (1977): 197; cf. Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 298–9. 82 Derrida, Writing and Difference, pp. 297–8. 83 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. D. Wills (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1995), pp. 49–52, 83–7; more generally on the subversive power of gifts, see Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. P. Kamuf (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992), pp. 14–17, 29–35. 84 Derrida, Circumfession, 39, p. 208. 85 Derrida, Circumfession, 53, p. 285. 86 Derrida, Circumfession, 43, p. 228 87 Derrida, Circumfession, 43, p. 229. 88 Derrida, Circumfession, 45, p. 238. 89 Vessey, ‘Reading Like Angels’, p. 201. 90 Published in Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘Der Ister’, trans. W. McNeil and J. Davis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 123–67. 91 Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn, pp. 125–36 (§22). 92 Lines from a late draft for the last strophe of ‘Brod und Wein’; see Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn, p. 126. 93 Derrida, Of Spirit, pp. 75–6, 106. 94 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 486 (§82). 95 Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 80. 96 Derrida, Of Spirit, pp. 78–9. 97 ‘Destiny’, but with overtones of ‘sending’ and ‘mission’ (from the verb schicken); see Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 76; Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn, pp. 127–8. 98 Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 78. 99 Jacques Derrida, ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy’, trans. J. Leavey, in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (eds), Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 65–7. 100 Hölderlin, ‘Brod und Wein’: final strophe, late draft. See Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 81; Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn, p. 126. 101 First line of ‘The Ister’; see Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn, pp. 8–9. 102 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4 volumes, trans. and ed. David Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), vol. 4, p. 97. 103 Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 84. 104 Heidegger, ‘Language in the Poem: a Discussion on Georg Trakl’s Poetic Work’, in On the Way to Language, trans. P. Hertz (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 159–98.

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105 Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 84; see ‘Language in the Poem’, pp. 179, 181. 106 For example, Gregory of Nyssa, Sermo de Spiritu Sancto 6. 107 Trans. in Derrida, Of Spirit, pp. 97–8; for another translation, see Heidegger, ‘Language in the Poem’, p. 179. 108 Cited Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 103; see Heidegger, ‘Language in the Poem’, p. 179. 109 Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 31. 110 From Trakl’s poem, ‘Springtime of the Soul’; cit. Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 87. 111 Derrida, Of Spirit, pp. 94–8, 99–102. 112 Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 94. 113 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’ in Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 287–9. 114 Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 94. 115 Derrida, Of Spirit, pp. 110–11. 116 Martin Heidegger, What is called Thinking? trans. J. Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 245ff. 117 Jacques Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’, trans. K. Frieden, in Coward and Foshay (eds), Derrida and Negative Theology, p. 107. 118 Graham Ward, The Postmodern God. A Theological Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. xxxiii. 119 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. M. Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 25–6; cf. Luce Irigaray, ‘Place, Interval’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G. C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 34–40. 120 See Augustine, De Trinitate 5.6. Augustine was, rather experimentally, attempting to meet the alternative presented by the Arians, that ‘persons’ in God must be distinguished either by substance or accident; Augustine replied that the persons fell into neither category, but were relations, an idea later elaborated by Aquinas as ‘subsistent relations’, in Summa Theologiae, 1a.29.4. 121 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, trans. and ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936–77), II/1, p. 263. 122 2 Cor. 1.20; cf. Rom. 8.34, Heb. 7.25. 123 Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn, pp. 127–8. 124 For a more extensive account, see Paul S. Fiddes, Participating in God. A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2000), pp. 34–9. 125 See Robert R. Magliola, Derrida on the Mend (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1986), pp. 134–5. 126 A play may be made between the traditional concept of perichoresis (interpenetration of the divine persons) and perichoreuo (to dance around).

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127 Further on this, see Fiddes, Participating in God, pp. 49–50, 81. 128 Directed by Norah Ephron, produced by Laura Schuler Donner, and starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. 129 For example, Mark Slouka, War of the Worlds. Cyberspace and the Hi-tech Assault on Reality (London: Abacus, 1996), pp. 52–5. 130 See Derrida, Grammatology, pp. 12, 20. 131 For my own positive assessment of the film, see Paul S. Fiddes, ‘When Text Becomes Voice: You’ve Got Mail’ in Anthony J. Clarke and Paul S. Fiddes (eds), Flickering Images. Theology and Film in Dialogue (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys Press, 2005), pp. 97–112. 132 It plays a significant part in Shakespearean romantic comedy, such as Love’s Labours Lost, Much Ado and Twelfth Night. In previous versions of this particular story the contrast is between posted letters and the voice. In the play (Parfumerie) written in 1937 by Miklos Laszlo, the characters corresponding to Joe and Kathleen are assistants in a shop selling perfumes and soaps. The earlier Hollywood film, The Shop Around the Corner – directed by Ernst Lubitsch in 1940 – adapting Laszlo’s play, portrays the leading characters as fellow assistants in a leather goods store. The 1949 musical film In the Good Old Summertime, has the two characters as assistants in a music store. The Ephrons intensify the theme of textuality by changing the venue to two bookshops, each with a different philosophy about the place of books in society. 133 Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. J. Stambaugh (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985), p. 128; cit. Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 77.

Chapter 7 1 See the claim of Geoffrey Hartman, Ch. 1, p. 8. 2 See the statement of Aleida and Jan Assmann, Ch. 1, p. 8. 3 See Ch. 1, pp. 11–12. 4 Report about the death of Schleiermacher, 12th February 1834, in Wilhelm Dilthey (ed.), Aus Schleiermacher’s Leben in Briefen, 4 volumes (1858–63); vol. II (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1860), pp. 510–13: ‘Ich habe nie am todten Buchstaben gehangen . . . ’. 5 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion, Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. and ed. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)

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[henceforth Speeches], p. 149  Schleiermacher, Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (Berlin: Johann Friedrich Unger, 1799) [henceforth Reden], p. 152. 6 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 85 (Reden, p. 16), p. 91 (Reden, p. 28), p. 108 (Reden, p. 64), p. 135 (Reden, p. 122), p. 164 (Reden, p. 179f), p. 210 (Reden, p. 285), p. 221 (Reden, p. 307). 7 Karl-Heinz Göttert, Wider den toten Buchstaben. Zur Problemgeschichte eines Topos, in Friedrich Kittler, Thomas Macho and Sigrid Weigel (eds), Zwischen Rauschen und Offenbarung. Zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Stimme (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), p. 94. 8 Letter of Friedrich Schlegel to Schleiermacher, circa 10.10.1799, Friedrich Schleiermacher Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 5/3, Briefwechsel 1774–96, ed. Andreas Arndt and Wolfgang Virmond (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), nr. 710.4-9. 9 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 211 (Reden, p. 286: ‘todte Religion’). 10 Marita Rödszus-Hecker, Der buchstäbliche Zungensinn. Stimme und Schrift als Paradigmen der theologischen Hermeneutik (Waltrop: Hartmut Spenner, 1992), p. 183. 11 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 90 (Reden, p. 26). 12 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 91 (Reden, p. 29): ‘literalistic theologians’. 13 Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus 1796/97 (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 volumes [Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1969–71], vol. 1, p. 235): ‘Die Menschen ohne ästhetischen Sinn sind unsre BuchstabenPhilosophen. Die Philosophie des Geistes ist eine ästhetische Philos[ophie]’. 14 Luther, First Lecture on the Psalms (1513) in Luther’s Works, vol. 10, p. 4;  WA 55/1. 4.25f. 15 Johann Gerhard, Loci theologici 1610–25, ed. Franz Frank, 10 volumes (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1885), 8b, ‘Proemium de natura theologiae’ (1625), 31. 16 David Hollaz, Examen Theologicum Acroamaticum (Stargard: J. N. Ernesti, 1707), prol. I: De theologiae constitutione, prol. II: De religione et articulis fidei. 17 Johann Franz Buddeus, Institutiones Theologiae Dogmaticae (Leipzig: Thomas Fritzsche, 1724), I, cap. 1: De religione (§§ 1–36) et theologia (§§ 37–54). 18 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Attempt at a Critique of all Revelation, ed. Allen Wood, trans. G. Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 19 Immanuel Kant, Religion Innerhalb der Bloßen Vernunft, 2nd edn (Königsberg: Nicolovius, 1794)  Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,

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trans. and ed. George di Giovanni, in Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (eds), Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 39–216. 20 Johann Gottfried Herder, Christliche Schriften, 5 volumes (Leipzig: Hartknoch, 1794–98), vol. 4, Vom Geist des Christentums. Nebst einigen Abhandlungen verwandten Inhalts, ed. Bernhard Suphan, pp. 1–131. 21 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 84 (Reden, p. 15); p. 100 (Reden, p. 47); p. 101 (Reden, p. 49); p. 134 (Reden, p. 121f); p. 213 (Reden, p. 290); pp. 220–1 (Reden, pp. 305–6). 22 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 164 (Reden, p. 179). 23 Hollaz, Examen, prol. III De . . . theologiae principio, q. 2 prob. c. (pp. 88–9). 24 Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 2nd edn, ed. and trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press and Edinburgh and T. & T. Clark, 1976), p. 591. 25 Schleiermacher, Speeches, pp. 134–5 (Reden, pp. 121–2). 26 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 220 (Reden, p. 305). 27 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 158 (Reden, p. 168). 28 Aleida and Jan Assmann, ‘Schrift’, col. 1424. 29 Plato, Phaedrus 274c–5b. 30 Gorgias, in Hermann Diels/Walther Kanz (eds), Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 volumes, 6th edn (Berlin:Weidmann, 1966), vol. 2, nr. 82 B 11a, 30; Aischylos, Prom., 459ff. 31 Euripides, Palamedes, fragm. 578.1 (enumeration by A. Nauck). 32 Plato, Phaedrus 275d-e. 33 For instance, Plato, Phaedrus 344d5f: ‘On the first and highest principles of nature’. 34 Plato, Epistles VII, 341c4-6. 35 Plato, Phaedrus 276b; Epistles VII, 344c1-7, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds), The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 1591: ‘For this reason no serious man will ever think of writing about serious realities for the general public so as to make them a prey to envy and perplexity. In a word, it is an inevitable conclusion from this that when anyone sees anywhere the written work of anyone, . . . the subject treated cannot have been his most serious concern – that is, if he is himself a serious man’. 36 Plato, Phaedrus 278b7. 37 Schleiermacher, Platons Werke, vol. 1/1 (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1804), p. 75.

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38 Paul Friedländer, Platon, 3rd edn, 3 volumes (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1953–64), vol. 1, p. 177: ‘Der Dialog ist die einzige Form des Buches, die das Buch selber aufzuheben scheint’. 39 See Plato, Phaedrus 277e8; 278a2f; Epistles VII, 341c5f., 341d3, 341d5f., 343d5, 343d7, 343d8. 40 Plato, Phaedrus 278a3. 41 Aristotle, Physics IV, 2 (209b15). 42 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 91 (Reden, p. 28). 43 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 94 (Reden, p. 34). 44 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 96 (Reden, pp. 38f.). 45 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 102 (Reden, p. 50). 46 Schleiermacher, Speeches, pp. 111–12 (Reden, p. 72). 47 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 112 (Reden, p. 73). 48 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 112 (Reden, p. 72). 49 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 144 (Reden, p. 138). 50 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 144 (Reden, p. 140). 51 See the theme of Manfred Frank, ‘Unendliche Annäherung’. Die Anfänge der Philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997). 52 Karl Reinhold, an early ‘Kantian’, also admired Fichte: see René Wellek ‘Between Kant and Fichte: Karl Leonhard Reinhold’, Journal of the History of Ideas 45/2 (1984): 323–32. 53 Fichte, Attempt at a Critique of all Revelation, p. 55. 54 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Ueber Geist und Buchstabe in der Philosophie (1795/1800), in Fichte, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Immanuel H. Fichte, vol. 8 (Berlin: Veit, 1846), pp. 270–300  J. G. Fichte, On the Spirit and the Letter in Philosophy. trans. Elizabeth Rubenstein, in David Simpson (ed.), German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 74–93. 55 F. W. J. Schelling, Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen (1795), Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling, volume 1 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856), part 1, p. 153. 56 G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy [1801], trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977), p. 79. 57 Immanuel Kant, Erklärung in Beziehung auf Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre (7.8.1799), in Kants gesammelte Schriften: Akademieausgabe, ed. Otto Schöndörffer, volume 12 (Berlin und Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1922),

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p. 371  Kant, Declaration concerning Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, August 7, 1799, in Kant, Correspondence, trans. and ed. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 560: ‘I therefore declare again that the Critique is to be understood by considering exactly what it says’. 58 F. Schlegel, ‘Philosophische Fragmente I’, 15 (1796) in Kritische Friedrich-SchlegelAusgabe, ed. Ernst Behler, Jean-Jacques Anstett and Hans Eichner, 35 volumes (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1963), vol. 18, p. 5: ‘Apologie d[es] Buchstabens, d.[er] als einziges ächtes Vehikel d[er] Mittheilung sehr ehrwürdig ist’. 59 F. Schlegel, ‘Philosophische Fragmente II’, 233 (1797) in Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 18, p. 40: ‘Kant’s . . . Buchstabe aber ist wohl mehr werth als s.[ein] Geist’. 60 F. Schlegel, On Incomprehensibility (1800), in J. M. Bernstein (ed.), Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 298. 61 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Alan W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 248. 62 I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 3. 63 I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 192   Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Berlin and Libau: Lagarde and Friederich, 1790) (§49 B192) [henceforth Urteilskraft]. 64 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, p. 192 (Urteilskraft B192). 65 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, p. 193 (Urteilskraft B194-6). 66 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, p. 192: ‘The imagination (as a productive cognitive faculty) is, namely, very powerful in creating, as it were, another nature, out of the material which the real one gives it’ (Urteilskraft B193). 67 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, p. 193 (Urteilskraft B195). 68 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, p. 193: ‘. . . rather, poetry and oratory also derive the spirit which animates their works . . .’ (Urteilskraft B195). 69 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, p. 193: ‘. . . it is really the art of poetry in which the faculty of aesthetic ideas can reveal itself in its full measure’ (Urteilskraft B194). 70 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, p. 194: ‘. . . which is combined with such a manifold of partial representations in the free use of the imagination that no expression designating a determinate concept can be found for it, which

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therefore allows the addition to a concept of much that is unnameable, the feeling of which animates the cognitive faculties and combines spirit with the mere of language’ (Urteilskraft B197). 71 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, p. 201(Urteilskraft B211). 72 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, p. 205 (Urteilskraft B218). 73 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, p. 206 (Urteilskraft B218). 74 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, p. 206 (Urteilskraft B219). 75 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, p. 191 (Urteilskraft B192). 76 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, p. 194 (Urteilskraft B197). 77 F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst (1802/05), Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856), vol. I/5, pp. 483–4. 78 F. Schlegel, ‘Ueber die Philosophie. An Dorothea’, Athenaeum 2 (Berlin: Heinrich Frölich, 1799), p. 36. 79 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 101 (Reden, p. 49). 80 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 165 (Reden, p. 181). 81 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 78 (Reden, p. 3): ‘All this I know and am nevertheless convinced to speak by an inner and irresistible necessity that divinely rules me, and cannot retract my invitation that you especially should listen to me’. Speeches, p. 85. (Reden, p. 15f.): ‘If I am so permeated by religion that I must finally speak and bear witness to it, to whom shall I turn with this matter other than to you?’ 82 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 79 (Reden, p. 5): ‘It is the inner, irresistible necessity of my nature; it is a divine calling’; Speeches, p. 84 (Reden, p. 14): ‘To this very power I submit. This very nature is my calling’. 83 Schleiermacher, Speeches, pp. 81–5 (Reden, pp. 9–12). 84 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 187 (Reden, p. 232). 85 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 164 (Reden, p. 178). 86 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 83 (Reden, pp. 12–13): ‘May it yet happen that this office of mediator should cease and the priesterhood of humanity receive lovelier definition! May the time come that an ancient prophecy describes when no one will need a teacher because all will be taught by God!’ 87 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 168 (Reden, p. 188). 88 Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), often known as the ‘Father of Pietism’, laid emphasis on personal transformation through spiritual rebirth and renewal (e.g. in his Pia Desideria, 1675). 89 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 165 (Reden, p. 181).

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90 Schleiermacher, Speeches, pp. 165–6 (Reden, p. 181–3). 91 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 166 (Reden, p. 183): ‘But not only “as it were”’. 92 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 166 (Reden, p. 183), my italics. 93 For example, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Lieder ohne Worte, Op. 19. 94 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 164 (Reden, p. 180). 95 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 104 (Reden, p. 54). 96 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 132 (Reden, p. 115); p. 156 (Reden, p. 165): ‘a constant to-and-fro movement’. 97 Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Vorlesungen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 303. 98 F. Schlegel, from ‘Athenaeum Fragments’ no. 238, in J. M. Bernstein (ed.), Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 252f. 99 Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, p. 291. 100 Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, p. 380. 101 Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, p. 465; cf. p. 380. 102 Cf. 1 Cor. 7.29-31. 103 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 190 (Reden, pp. 237–8): ‘in the religions, you are to discover religion’. 104 Schleiermacher, Speeches, pp. 78–9 (Reden, p. 4). 105 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 211 (Reden, p. 286): ‘I should, to be sure, speak of only one, for Judaism is long since a dead religion and those who at present still bear its colours are actually sitting and mourning beside the undecaying mummy and weeping over its demise and its legacy’. 106 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 213 (Reden, pp. 290–1). 107 Schleiermacher, Speeches, p. 211 (Reden, p. 286). 108 A key term of Jacques Derrida: see, for example, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), p. 83, on ‘the strange syntax of the sans [without]’. 109 Letter of F. Schlegel to Schleiermacher, March 1799, Kritische Friedrich-SchlegelAusgabe, vol. 5/3, nr. 579:49. 110 F. Schlegel, ‘Philosophische Fragmente II’, 510 (1800/01), Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 18, p. 364: ‘Der Buchstabe muß grade thätig, lebendig seyn, agil oder progressiv’. 111 F. Schlegel, ‘Philosophische Fragmente II’, 274 (1799), Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 18, p. 344: ‘Ohne Buchstabe kein Geist’. 112 F. Schlegel, Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (1812), Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 6, p. 14.

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113 Schlegel, ‘Philosophische Fragmente I’, 15 (1796), Kritische Friedrich-SchlegelAusgabe, vol. 18, p. 5. See Martin Götze, ‘Friedrich Schlegels ‘Apologie des Buchstabens’. Zum philosophischen Darstellungsproblem in der Frühromantik. Mit einer Anmerkung über Ironie und Allegorie’, in Claudia Albes et al. (ed.), Darstellbarkeit. Zu einem ästhetisch-philosophischen Problem um 1800 (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2003), pp. 29–51. 114 F. Schlegel, ‘Philosophische Fragmente II’, 846 (1798), Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 18, p. 265: ‘Der Buchstabe ist d[er] wahre Zauberstab’.

Chapter 8 1 2 Cor. 3.17. In Lk. 24.14, we read that the disciples converse about the occurrences during the last days in the orbit of Easter, talking with each other (autoi homiloun) about all the things that had happened. The verb homilein is found only here, twice in the Acts of the Apostles (20.11 and 24.26) and in Paul’s quotation from Meander (1 Cor. 15.33) which runs that bad ‘homilies’ – meaning gossip or bad company – ruin good morals. Homilein thus plainly means: to communicate, to converse, to disclose something to one another, to interact, to address someone or simply to talk. The word originally does not have a religious, Christian or liturgical meaning, but rather a profane context. With respect to the literal sense of the word, homiletics is the art of communication. The term ‘homiletics’ in the sense of the theory of Christian preaching was introduced in the seventeenth century. 2 See Ulrich H. J. Körtner, Der inspirierte Leser. Zentrale Aspekte biblischer Hermeneutik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994). 3 This term is introduced by Alexander Deeg, Predigt und Derascha. Homiletische Textlektüre im Dialog mit dem Judentum (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), p. 21; cf. pp. 312–38 on ‘slow and responsive reading’. In this context, preaching is described not only as ‘staging’ (Inszenierung) of the text, but also as ‘rehearsal’ of the text, in contrast to a performance (p. 316). 4 Deeg, Predigt und Derascha, pp. 345–57. 5 The phrase comes from Körtner’s discussion: see n. 2. 6 Hans Ulrich Gehring, Schriftprinzip und Rezeptionsästhetik. Rezeption in Martin Luthers Predigt und bei Hans Robert Jauß (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1999), pp. 160–77; Deeg, Predigt und Derascha, pp. 30ff.

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7 See Michael Meyer-Blanck ‘Die Aktualität trinitarischer Rede für die Praktische Theologie’, in Rudolf Weth (ed.), Der lebendige Gott. Auf den Spuren neueren trinitarischen Denkens (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2005), pp. 129–42. 8 See Michael Meyer-Blanck, ‘Semiotik und Praktische Theologie (Research Report)’, International Journal of Practical Theology 5 (2001): 94–133. 9 From J. S. Semler’s memoirs of 1781; see Botho Ahlers, Die Unterscheidung von Theologie und Religion. Ein Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte der Praktischen Theologie im 18. Jahrhundert (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1980), p. 107, n. 28. 10 Ahlers, Die Unterscheidung von Theologie und Religion, pp. 42, 51, 159. 11 See Eberhard Jüngel’s animadversion on Rudolph Bohren’s article, ‘Die Krise der Predigt als Frage an die Exegese’, Evangelische Theologie 22 (1962): 66–92, in Jüngel, ‘Was hat die Predigt mit dem Text zu tun?’ in Albrecht Beutel, Volker Drehsen and Hans Martin Müller (eds), Homiletisches Lesebuch. Texte zur heutigen Predigtlehre (Tübingen: Katzmann, 1986), p. 114. 12 See the theory of Niklas Luhmann, in e.g. Luhmann, Die Religion der Gesellschaft, ed. André Kieserling (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000). 13 See Felix Körner, Revisionist Koran Hermeneutics in Contemporary Turkish University Theology (Würzburg: Ergon, 2005), with reference to Turkish Islamic theological faculties. 14 Abu Zaid taught in Leiden from 1995 until 2005. In 2004, he was appointed as Professor at the Faculty of Arts and the Humanities, Utrecht University; see Thomas Hildebrandt, ‘Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid: Interpretation – die andere Seite des Textes’, in Katajun Amirpur and Ludwig Ammann (eds), Der Islam am Wendepunkt. Liberale und konservative Reformer einer Weltreligion (Freiburg: Herder, 2006), pp. 127–35. 15 Zaid makes recourse to Schleiermacher and Dilthey, de Saussure, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Lotman and others. His most important hermeneutical work The Concept of the Text: A Study of the Qur’anic Sciences, 5th edn (Beirut/Cairo, 1998) and his introduction to semiotics, The Systems of Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics (Cairo, 1986) have hitherto only been published in Arabic. While Zaid maintains that the Koran is a text that was transmitted to Mohammed by God, he maintains that ‘the Koran [. . .] must be reinterpreted with respect to the code of the cultural and linguistic context of the interpreter. This entails an interpretative diversity, an endless process of interpretation and reinterpretation. Without this process, the message degenerates; in this case, the Koran can continue to be the object of political and pragmatic manipulation’:

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see Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, ‘Spricht Gott nur Arabisch?’ in Michael Thumann (ed.), Der Islam und der Westen (Berlin: Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003), p. 126. 16 Deeg, Predigt und Derascha, p. 37, argues against such a kind of dualism. 17 See most notably Jochen Hörisch’s Die Wut des Verstehens. Zur Kritik der Hermeneutik, 2nd edn (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998). According to Hörisch, Paul establishes a ‘dialectics’ – based on the ‘capital sentence’ of 2 Cor. 3.6 – which allows him to distinguish and thus to affirm manifold events of speaking and writing with respect to a diversity of events, though the final outcome is that he recommits these events to uniformity and to one single sense, i.e. to Spirit. 18 Thus, Odo Marquard, Abschied vom Prinzipiellen. Philosophische Studien (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991), p. 129. Marquard distinguishes a ‘singularizing’ hermeneutics from a ‘pluralizing hermeneutics’; in his opinion, Christian hermeneutics is an ‘absolutist reading of the Bible in view of salvation’. 19 Thus rightly Deeg, Predigt und Derascha, p. 25. 20 This also distinguishes the Christian understanding of scripture from the Islamic one. For a Muslim believer, scripture as such is revelation, while God is conceived of as radically transcendent. In comparative religious studies, one therefore often speaks of the ‘inliberation’ of God in the text of the Koran as opposed to the ‘incarnation’ of God in Christ: ‘In Islam, the divine word has become Book’: Annemarie Schimmel, Im Namen Allahs, des Allbarmherzigen. Der Islam (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), p. 37. 21 See the manifold examples from Jewish literature in the modern period presented by Deeg, Predigt und Derascha, particularly pp. 223–30. However, according to Deeg, ‘Judaism, too, does not stop at the “letter”, but reads and interprets with the expectation to hear God’s word as Tora anew in the course of reading and interpreting the letter’ (pp. 228f.). 22 See Martin Luther, Die Deutsche Bibel, WA 9, p. 440: ‘Itaque sacramentaliter notandum est Euangelium, idest verba Christi sunt meditanda tamquam symbola, per que detur illa ipsa iusticia, virtus, salus, quam ipsa verba pre se ferunt’. Translation: ‘Thus the words of Christ are sacraments, through which our salvation is carried out. Therefore the gospel must be conceived of in a sacramental kind of way, i.e. the words of Christ are to be contemplated like symbols, through which justice, virtue, salvation are given, which these words contain’. 23 Cf. the well-known sententia of the Zürich Reformer Heinrich Bullinger from the Confessio Helvetica Posterior (1562/66): ‘The Preaching of the word of God is the word of God’.

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24 See Michael Meyer-Blanck, ‘ “Verbum visibile” o “sacramentum audibile”. Eucaristia e predicazione nella teologia evangelica e cattolica contemporanea’, Protestantesimo 62 (2007), pp. 251–61. 25 The ‘rules for adequate partition’ (Partitionsregeln) had been discussed for an extensive period of time; see Paul Kleinert, Homiletik (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1907), pp. 162–78. 26 See Hörisch, Die Wut des Verstehens, pp. 59ff, 126ff: the phrase derives from Schleiermacher’s third discourse On Religion. 27 See further, n. 44. 28 It should be noted that deconstructionist hermeneutics can cause a loss of the text. Thus, George Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 116, points out that post-structuralism and deconstruction amount to a ‘mutiny of theory . . . against the authority of the poetic’. 29 Derrida’s concept of text is directed against those theories of the subject which see ‘the subject as primordial, primary and unbeatable’, i.e. which attribute the status of a foundation (Grund) to it: see Georg Lämmlin, Die Lust am Wort und der Widerstand der Schrift. Homiletische Re-Lektüre des Psalters (Münster: Lit, 2002), p. 403. 30 See Gerhard Ebeling, Luther. An Introduction to his Thought (London: Collins, 1970), pp. 93–109. 31 See Oswald Bayer, Martin Luthers Theologie. Eine Vergegenwärtigung, 2nd edn (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), p. 71 and Johanned von Lüpke, ‘Geist und Buchstabe’, in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4th edn, vol. 3, pp. 578–82. 32 See 2 Cor. 3.6; Rom. 2.27ff. and Rom. 7.6. 33 Ebeling, Luther, states with respect to the young Luther of the first lecture on the Psalms (1513/15), p. 106, that ‘The Spirit and faith are the same’. 34 Editor’s note. This does not necessarily mean that the antithesis of letter and spirit in 2 Cor. 3.6 is to be understood as the antithesis of law and gospel: see the discussion by Robert Morgan, pp. 56–9 above. 35 The doctrine of verbal inspiration as advocated by old Protestant orthodoxy in the seventeenth century (e.g. by Johann Gerhard, Johannes Andreas Quenstedt and David Hollaz), meaning that the individual words are literally inspired by the Holy Spirit, was a constriction that Barth called ‘the beginning of the end’: Karl Barth, ‘Menschenwort und Gotteswort in der christlichen Predigt’, in Friedrich Wintzer (ed.), Predigt. Texte zum Verständnis und zur Praxis der Predigt in der Neuzeit (München: Christian Kaiser, 1989), p. 101.

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36 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1977), p. 112. 37 Stefan Alkier, ‘Verstehen zwischen Rekonstruktion und Schöpfung. Der hermeneutische Ansatz Friedrich Schleiermachers als Vorlage einer Praktischtheologischen Hermeneutik’, in Praktisch-theologische Hermeneutik. Ansätze – Anregungen – Aufgaben, hrsg. Dietrich Zilleßen et al. (Rheinbach-Merzbach: cmz Verlag, 1991), p. 5. Alkier reads Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics as a kind of semiotic inspiration, offering his concept of ‘retrospective constructing’ as a middle term between ‘creation’ and ‘reconstruction’ (p. 9). 38 See Lämmlin, Die Lust am Wort; also Gerhard Marcel Martin, ‘Predigt als “offenes Kunstwerk”? Zum Dialog zwischen Homiletik und Rezeptionsästhetik’, Evangelische Theologie 44 (1984): 46–58; Wilfried Engemann, ‘“Unser Text sagt . . .” Hermeneutischer Versuch zur Interpretation und Überwindung des “Texttods” der Predigt’, Die Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 93 (1996): 450–80; Erich Garhammer and Heinz-Günther Schöttler, Predigt als offenes Kunstwerk. Homiletik und Rezeptionsästhetik (Munich: Don Bosco, 1998); Martin Nicol, Einander ins Bild setzen. Dramaturgische Homiletik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002). 39 See my critique in Michael Meyer-Blanck, ‘Predigt als “Neues Sehen”. Zum Verhältnis didaktischer und theologischer Kategorien in der Homiletik’, Praktische Theologie 30 (1995): 310–13. 40 See e.g. Karl-Wilhelm Dahm, Beruf: Pfarrer. Empirische Aspekte zur Funktion von Kirche und Religion in unserer Gesellschaft, 2nd edn (Munich: Claudius, 1972), p. 225, and the whole section pp. 224–44 on preaching as an event of communication in the sense of signalling. 41 Dahm, Beruf, p. 229. 42 Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), vol. 5, p. 253. 43 Thus one can summarize the insights from reader-response theory with respect to our topic; see Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 149; more widely, Körtner, Der inspirierte Leser and Engemann, ‘Unser Text sagt’, have importance for the topic. Lämmlin, Die Lust am Wort, pp. 133–44 starts from Rudolf Iser’s reader-response theory in particular. 44 See the well-known mnemonic by Nicholas of Lyra that accords to the sequence ‘letter – belief – love – hope’: Littera gesta docet; quid credas, allegoria, moralis

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quid agas, quo tendas anagogia (citation, inherited in many versions, follows Körtner, Der inspirierte Leser, pp. 74, 93). Rightly, Hörisch, Die Wut des Verstehens, p. 42 and Körtner, Der inspirierte Leser, p. 94f. point out that the medieval doctrine of the fourfold sense of the scripture did not make for the opening of new alternatives of interpretation, but, conversely, was instrumental for the fixation of meaning by the church. On a reinterpretation of the fourfold sense of the scripture in the context of the homiletic ‘slow and responsive reading’, see Deeg, Predigt und Derascha, pp. 327–33. 45 On the level of exegesis, a one-sidedly synchronic analysis counts among these. 46 Bayer, Martin Luthers Theologie, p. 73 argues in reference to Luther that letter represented the ‘strangeness, which serves communication by observing differences and thus creating a relationship’. 47 See Eugen Drewermann, Tiefenpsychologie und Exegese, 2 volumes (Olten: Walter de Gruyter, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 172–7: for example, Father, mother, brother and sister allegedly represent integrated though also conflictive elements of the self rather than actual individual characters. 48 E. Christian Achelis, Lehrbuch (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1911), p. 172. Achelis adds, however, that ‘the purely symbolic construal is to be avoided; it abets the view that sees nothing but mythological fictions in the miracle narratives of Jesus’. Carl Clemen, Predigt und biblischer Text. Eine Untersuchung zur Homiletik (Gießen: Töpelmann, 1906), p. 57, objected even to the careful symbolic interpretation by Achelis. The subjectal interpretation of boat and sea can be found in Drewermann, Das Markusevangelium. Bilder von Erlösung, 2nd edn (Olten: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), Part 1, pp. 356–8: ‘If we aim to find inner peace ever more deeply in a kind of way similar to the figure of Jesus sleeping in the boat, then the waves will calm down. . . . “Sea” represents not only the abyss of the soul, but, more profoundly, also the abyss of life’. See Michael MeyerBlanck, ‘Ursprung und Tiefe. Einige religionspädagogische Anmerkungen zu Eugen Drewermanns Märchen- und Bibelauslegung’, Evangelischer Erzieher 48 (1996): 57–69. 49 Thus rightly Körtner, Der inspirierte Leser, pp. 80f., 84: ‘While today’s dominant historical-critical exegesis overlooks the autonomy of the text compared to the author, allegorical interpretation tends to overlook the autonomy of the text compared to the reader’. 50 The Bibel in gerechter Sprache was published in October 2006; on the concept of the project, see Helga Kuhlmann, Die Bibel – übersetzt in gerechte Sprache?

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Grundlagen einer neuen Übersetzung, 2nd edn (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2005). 51 Deeg, Predigt und Derascha, pp. 322–3, taking up J. L. Austin’s speech act theory. 52 Luther, First Lectures on the Psalms II. Psalms 76–126, in Luther’s Works, vol. 11, p. 497.

Chapter 9 1 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. S. Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), p. 245f. On ‘symbol’ in the sense that Adorno assumes here, see Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann et al., 20 volumes (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970–86), vol. 11, p. 465. 2 Adorno makes recourse to ‘letter and spirit’ in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann, vol. 6, p. 304; vol. 8, p. 164; and esp. vol. 10.1, p. 414, where he criticizes a culture that prioritizes the spirit as against the letter. 3 On the different strands of meaning to which the Pauline coinage ‘letter and spirit’ gives rise, see Chapter 1. 4 See Christoph Menke, Die Souveränität der Kunst. Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 35; cf. Gerhard Ebeling, art. ‘Geist und Buchstabe’, in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3rd edn, pp. 1290 ff.; Peter V. Zima, Das literarische Subjekt. Zwischen Spätmoderne und Postmoderne (Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 2001), p. 26. 5 Thus, Peter V. Zima, Literarische Ästhetik, 2nd edn (Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 1995), pp. 30, 272 (with respect to Hegel’s aesthetics); cf. Jochen Hörisch, Die Wut des Verstehens. Zur Kritik der Hermeneutik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), passim. 6 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit, pp. 31–46. 7 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Self-assertion of the German University’, in Günther Neske and Amil Kettenberg (eds), Martin Heidegger and National Socialism. Questions and Answers, trans. L. Harries and J. Neugroschel (New York: Paragon House, 1990), p. 9. 8 Heidegger, ‘The Self-assertion of the German University’, p. 10. 9 Martin Heidegger/Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel, 2nd edn, ed. J. W. Storck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989), p. 61 (emphasis mine); cf. Rüdiger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland. Heidegger und seine Zeit, 5th edn (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2006), pp. 270–3. 10 Heidegger, ‘The Self-assertion of the German University’, p. 5.

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11 Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges. 1910–1976 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittario Klostermann, 2000), p. 398. 12 Derrida, Of Spirit, pp. 39–40. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International (London: Routledge, 2006): here, Derrida points out that in attempting to overcome religion, Marx adopted a form of messianism that is certainly religious and so ‘spirit’. 13 Mark C. Taylor, Erring. A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 8f. 14 John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Religion without Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 14, criticizes Taylor’s book along these lines. 15 See Chapter 6 (by Paul S. Fiddes). 16 Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony. Stories and Short Pieces, 2nd edn (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), p. 197. 17 See Oliver Jahraus, Kafka. Leben, Schreiben, Machtapparate (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006), p. 334f. 18 Kafka, The Penal Colony, p. 198. 19 See Axel Hecker, An den Rändern des Lesbaren. Dekonstruktive Lektüren zu Franz Kafka (Wien: Passagen, 1998), pp. 79, 85ff. 20 Alexander Honold, ‘In der Strafkolonie’, in Oliver Jahraus and Bettina Von Jagow (eds), Kafka-Handbuch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), p. 492. 21 Kafka, The Penal Colony, p. 204. 22 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1973), p. 53: ‘Concepts alone can achieve what the concept prevents. Cognition is a trosas hiasetai’. Adorno is alluding to Apollodorus, Epitome 3.20. 23 Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka. On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death’, in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. H. Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 125 (emphasis mine). 24 Gershom Scholem (ed.), The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–40, trans. G. Smith and A. Lefevere (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. 224. 25 Scholem (ed.), Correspondence, p. 236. 26 Ibid. 27 Scholem (ed.), Correspondence, p. 236f.

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28 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), p. 350. 29 See Stéphane Mosès, Der Engel der Geschichte. Franz Rosenzweig. Walter Benjamin. Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt a. M.: Jüdischer Verlag, 1992), p. 207. 30 Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’, p. 135. 31 Scholem (ed.), Correspondence, p. 126f. 32 Scholem (ed.), Correspondence, p. 135. 33 Scholem (ed.), Correspondence, p. 142. 34 Mosès, Der Engel der Geschichte, p. 199. 35 See Gershom Scholem, Űber einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 89. 36 Scholem, Űber einige Grundbegriffe, p. 109. 37 Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. R. Mannheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 12. 38 Gershom Scholem, Judaica 3. Studien zur jüdischen Mystik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 264. On Scholem’s understanding of tradition see also Gershom Scholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem. Kindheitserinnerungen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 54ff. 39 Scholem’s work has been connected with ‘negative theology’: see Elisabeth Hamacher, Gershom Scholem und die allgemeine Religionsgeschichte (Berlin/ New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), pp. 42, 168; Irving Wohlfarth, ‘“Haarscharf an der Grenze zwischen Religion und Nihilismus”. Zum Motiv des Zimzum bei Gershom Scholem’, in Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith (eds), Gershom Scholem. Zwischen den Disziplinen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1995), pp. 178, 202. However, Scholem said of himself that he was not a negative theologian (Hamacher, Gershom Scholem, p. 60); cf. also David Biale, Gershom Scholem. Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 108f. 40 Gershom Scholem, ‘Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbalah’, in Gershom Scholem (ed.), Judaica 3, pp. 264–71 (p. 270); see David Biale, ‘Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah: Text and Commentary’, in Modern Judaism. A Journal for Jewish Ideas and Experience 8 (1985): 67–93. 41 Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater (London: Vintage, 1996). The link between ‘Sabbath’s Theatre’ and ‘Sabbatianism’ becomes obvious in a scene where the leading character Mickey Sabbath visits the graveyard where his ancestors lie and points to a tombstone with the name ‘Shabas’ explaining: ‘“There’s a relative

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of mine right there. . . . The old-timers,” he explained . . ., “were Shabas. They wrote it all kinds of ways: Shabas, Shabbus, Shabsai, Sabbatai.”’(Roth, Sabbath’s Theater, p. 357). See Jochen Schmidt, ‘Roth’s rotten prophet. “Sabbath’s Theater” and the Sabbatian logic of salutary destruction’, in: Literatur & Religion 2006 (www.literatur-religion.net), pp. 1–5. 42 Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p. 310f; cf. Gershom Scholem, ‘Die Theologie des Sabbatianismus im Lichte Abraham Cardosos’, in Gershom Scholem (ed.), Judaica 1, 6th edn (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp. 119–46. 43 See also Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi. The Mystical Messiah, revised translation (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 691: ‘The various Sabbatian doctrines sought to bridge the gulf between the inner experience and the historic reality that was supposed to symbolize it’. For the Lurianic Kabbala, exile becomes a cosmic symbol for a world that is fallen due to the breaking of the vessels. On the historical conditions of the evolution of the Sabbatian Kabbalah, see also Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (London/New York: Continuum, 1981), p. 14; Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 183. 44 Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p. 311. 45 Ibid., p. 312. 46 Gershom Scholem, Judaica 4, ed. R. Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1984), p. 178. 47 Scholem, Judaica 3, p. 207. On this, Scholem quotes Bakunin; see Scholem, Judaica 4, p. 131: ‘The lust of destruction is a creative lust’. 48 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, p. 125; Cf. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p. 290. 49 Cf. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p. 310f. 50 Adorno, Prisms, p. 254.

Chapter 10 1 This same argument concerning the material nature of the sign holds also for oral texts of course, where the medium is sound. 2 Philip Esler, ‘New Testament Interpretation as Interpersonal Communion: the Case for a Socio-Theological Hermeneutics’, in Christopher Rowland and Chris Tuckett (eds), The Nature of New Testament Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 51–74.

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3 See Chapter 2, pp. 36–42. 4 The language of repair belongs to Peter Ochs and his scriptural reasoning. See Peter Ochs, Peirce, Pragmatism and the Logic of Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 5 To call ‘world’ a totality is not to assert that it is objectifiable as such. Rather it is constituted as a non-objectifiable ‘totality’, which is known not directly but in its mediations. 6 It is important to note the role of Eph. 4.10 in this configuration, which used the concept of height to justify the presence of the ascended Christ on earth below, through a polarity of ascent and descent, in line with Old Testament passages which spoke of God’s glory ‘filling the earth’ such as Ps. 57.5 or Isa. 6.3. See also Thomas Aquinas for a medieval summary of this view: Summa Theologiae 3a, q. 57, a. 5. 7 The complexity of this intellectual landscape within which the Eucharistic debates took place is heightened by problematics concerning the influence of Copernican thinking prior to the appearance of De revolutionibus in 1543. Zwingli makes no reference to Copernicus or his ideas, while Luther seems to speak deprecatingly of him. Calvin seems to know the force of his arguments but still to hold in some respects to the traditional model of heaven. See Brian Gerrish, ‘The Reformation and the Rise of Modern Science’, in Gerrish (ed.), The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press/Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1982), pp. 163–78. 8 The 18th Article asserts that the Mass is not a sacrifice but is a ‘memorial’ of the sacrifice; Huldrich Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke, 14 Volumes. Corpus Reformatorum 88–101 (Berlin/Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1905–59), vol. 88, p. 460 (pp. 458–65)    Huldrych Zwingli Werke Digitale Texte. Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte; accessed 7 July 2012; www.irg.uzh. ch/static/zwingli-werke/index.php?n  Werk.171. 9 Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke, Corpus Reformatorum, vol. 89, pp. 137–8. 10 ‘Ad Mattheum Alberum de coena dominica epistola’, in Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke, Corpus Reformatorum, vol. 90, pp. 335–54, esp. p. 345    Huldrych Zwingli Werke Digitale Texte; accessed 7 July 2012; www.irg.uzh.ch/static/ zwingli-werke/index.php?n  Werk.41. Here, Zwingli is borrowing from the treatise on the Eucharist by the Dutch humanist Cornelis Hoen. 11 ‘Antwort über Straussens Büchlein, das Nachtmahl Christi betreffend’, in Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke, Corpus Reformatorum, vol. 92, pp. 464–547    Huldrych

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Zwingli Werke Digitale Texte; accessed 7 July 2012; www.irg.uzh.ch/static/ zwingli-werke/index.php?nWerk.103. Again, this point had appeared in the treatise by Cornelis Hoen. 12 Luther’s Works (American Edition), vol. 36, p. 342. 13 Luther’s Works, vol. 36, p. 340. 14 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3, q.76, a.5. 15 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559) 4.17.29; 4.17.18. A further key area in which Calvin agreed with Luther against Zwingli was in his commitment to the instrumental character of the sign, based, as with Luther, upon the characteristically Reformation emphasis of belief in the fidelity of God’s word in the sacrament: Institutes 4.17.10. 16 Luther’s Works, vol. 37, p. 69. 17 Zwingli, ‘Über D. Martin Luthers Buch, Bekenntnis gennant’, in Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke, Corpus Reformatorum, vol. 93, p. 167 (‘Die ist ein lyb, ein umbzyleter, umbfasseter, umpryßner lyb’)    Huldrych Zwingli Werke Digitale Texte. Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte; accessed 7 July 2012; www.irg.uzh.ch/static/zwingli-werke/index.php?nWerk.125. This work dates from August 1528, and is a response to Luther’s piece of March 1528. 18 Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke, Corpus Reformatorum, vol. 91, pp. 828–9. 19 See for instance ‘Ad Mattheum Alberum’, pp. 336–7. 20 This accusation forms a substantial part of That These Words of Christ, “This is my Body”, etc., Still Stand Firm against the Fanatics of 1527 (Luther’s Works, vol. 37, Word and Sacrament 3, pp. 13–155), and it returns in Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper of 1528 (Luther’s Works, vol. 37, pp. 161–372; see for instance pp. 287–8). 21 ‘Ad Mattheum Alberum’, p. 337. In his comments on Luther’s dispute with Zwingli, Paul Althaus significantly uses the phrase ‘Spirit has an effect only on Spirit’ to describe the position of Luther’s opponents: Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1966), p. 395. 22 See Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 148–9. 23 This was how the King of Prussia described the new institution as he commissioned Beyme to oversee its construction: see Howard, Protestant Theology, p. 149. 24 2 Cor. 5.17. letter to J. J. Griesbach, 4 October 1810, in Fichte, Briefwechsel, 1806–1810, Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,

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vol. 4, part 3, eds Reinhard Lauth and Hans Glitwitzy (Stuttgart: FrommannHolzboog, 1997), p. 339 (quoted in Howard, Protestant Theology, p. 142). 25 Fichte, ‘Über Geist und Buchstab in der Philosophie’, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 8, pp. 271–300. 26 Fichte, ‘Über Geist und Buchstab’, p. 274. 27 Fichte, ‘Über Geist und Buchstab’, pp. 278–91. 28 Fichte, ‘Über Geist und Buchstab’, p. 290. 29 Fichte, ‘Über Geist und Buchstab’, pp. 290–1. 30 Fichte, ‘Fünf Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten’, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 11, pp. 145–220. 31 Fichte, ‘Fünf Vorlesungen’, pp. 147–9. Thus practical knowing, for Fichte, corresponds to what is called in Greek ‘idea’ (p. 150). 32 Fichte, ‘Fünf Vorlesungen’, p. 151 (my translation). 33 Fichte, ‘Fünf Vorlesungen’, pp. 152–5. 34 Fichte, ‘Fünf Vorlesungen’, p. 155: ‘und so wird denn dieser Wisser durch sein thätig gewordenes Wissen zur eigentlichen Lebenskraft in der Welt, und zur Triebfeder der Fortsetzung der Schöpfung’. 35 Summarized at Fichte, ‘Fünf Vorlesungen’, pp. 170–3. 36 Fichte, ‘Fünf Vorlesungen’, pp. 193 (my translation). 37 Fichte, ‘Fünf Vorlesungen’, p. 190. 38 Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in Michael Banton (ed.), Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (London: Tavistock, 1968), pp. 1–46. 39 Theologische Realenzyklopädie, eds Horst Robert Balz, Gerhard Krause, Gerhard Müller (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1976–), vol. 34 (2002), p. 730. 40 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/1, pp. 350–62. 41 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1, pp. 134–5. 42 This inverts Luther’s ordo salutis. 43 Here I am indebted to the work of Paul Janz, who has developed the concept of ‘a finality of non-resolution’ to describe the proper epistemological structure of revelation. Revelation in space and time intrinsically resists the resolution to which much modern systematic theology hastens through rich, imaginative though often tautologous constructions. See especially Janz’s critiques of Karl Barth in Paul Janz, The Command of Grace (London: T. & T. Clark/Continuum, 2009), pp. 41–56; see also Oliver Davies, Paul Janz and Clemens Sedmak, Transformation Theology. Church in the World (London: T. & T. Clark, 2007), pp. 76–84.

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Notes

44 See Chapter 2, n. 2 above. 45 See the reference to Philip Esler’s work at n. 2. 46 See Chapter 1, pp. 11–12. 47 See Chapter 7, pp. 148–9.

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Index of Scripture Gen

1-3 1.1-2 2.7 2.9 3.21 20.7

213n. 4 216n. 55 201n. 48 31 113 198n. 9

Jer.

4.4 9.25-26 31 31.31 31.31-33 31.31-4

43 43 56 41, 159 40 56

Exod.

8.19 11.19-20 31.18 32.15-16 32.16 32.19 34 34.1 34.4 34.29-30 34.29-35 36.26-7

32 191 39, 191 39, 191 32 201n. 44 56 39 201n. 44 38 40 191

Ezek.

11.19 11.19f 11.19-20 19.19 36.26 36.26f 36.26-27 37.5, 10

56 39 39 39 39 39, 56 39 201n. 48

Joel

3.1f

201n. 42

Num.

15.32-36

64

Deut.

4.13 5.22 9.9-11.15 32.8

201n. 44 201n. 44 201n. 44 198n. 9

Mt.

4 10.32 10.32f 11.27 16.16 26.41

213n. 4 77 76, 80 80 77 197n. 1

1 Kgs. 1 Sam.

8.9 16.7

40 43

Mk

1.8 4.35-41 8.29 14.38 parr.

201n. 42 164 77 197n. 1

Lk.

10.22 16.6-7 17.34 24.14

80 33 152 231n. 1

Jn

1 78 1.33 201n. 42 3.6 197n. 1 6.45 137 6.63 71, 184, 197n. 1, 201n. 48

2 Chron. 5.10

201n. 44

Est.

3.12-15

198n. 8

Ps.

57.5

241n. 6

Prov.

7.3 22.20

40 40

Isa.

6.3 54.13

241n. 6 137

Index of Scripture

260

14.6 20.28

80 81

Acts

1.5 8.26-40 10.45 11.16 17.16-34 18.27 19.21-40 26.24 28.21

201n. 42 79 201n. 42 201n. 42 79 36 79 33 33

Rom.

1.17 58 2 43 2.27 32, 200n. 26 2.27ff 234n. 32 2.27-29 49, 54, 57, 60–2, 191 2.29 4, 31–2, 34, 44–7, 49, 56, 190 3.20 204n. 22 3.21 58 3.27 57, 204n. 23 3.31 56 4.15 202n. 2 5 202n. 2 5-8.10 57 5.5 38, 201n. 42 5.12 44–5 5.12-14 46 6 44 6.2-11 202n. 54 6.3 44 6.4 44, 45 6.4 6, 44 6.7 44 6.10 44 6.16 45 6.17-18 45 6.19 45 6.22 45 6.23 46 7 45, 60, 74 7.1-6 45 7.5f 35







7.6 4, 14, 31, 34, 44–5, 47, 49, 53, 56–7, 60, 74, 190, 234n. 32 7.7-11 202n. 2 7.7ff 34 7.12 56 7.14 56, 197n. 1 7.14-25 204n. 22 7.22 214n. 25 8 202n. 2 8.2 57, 204n. 23 8.3 34 8.4 56–7 8.4f 197n. 1 8.5 213n. 8 8.10-11 201n. 48 9.13 197n. 1 10.4 204n. 21 10.5 35 10.5-13 35 10.6 35 11.36 81

1 Cor.

1.18 58 1.22-4 201n. 52 2.6-7 213n. 5, 214n. 24 3.1 197n. 1 3.6 18 7.19 204n. 21 7.29-31 230n. 102 8.5f 81 9.21 57 11.25 56 15.33 231n. 1 15.45 71, 201n. 48

2 Cor.

1-3 191 1.12-2.4 193 1.22 38 2.12 37 2.14-7.4 190 2.15f 58 3 36–7, 42, 49, 56, 57, 60, 87, 92, 98–9 3.3 39, 191



Index of Scripture



3.3c 39 3.6 3–5, 7–11, 16, 22, 31, 34, 36, 42, 45, 46, 49, 53, 56, 57, 58, 60, 92, 105, 131–5, 137, 139, 179–81, 190, 192–3, 195nn. 2, 5, 197n. 2, 202n. 2, 233n. 17, 234nn. 32, 34 3.6, 12-13 213n. 13 3.6a 40 3.6f 46 3.7 31, 33 3.7-11, 18 37 3.10 58 3.12-18 13 3.14 217n. 72 3.14-16 49, 56–7, 59 3.15-16 92 3.16 56 3.16-17 35 3.17 231n. 1 4.1 37 4.3-4 34 4.10-1 192 4.12 192 4.16 214n. 25 5.16 159 5.17 159, 242n. 24 5.18 37 6.1 58 6.3 37 8.4 37 8.18 37 8.19-20 37 9.1, 12-13 37

261



9.13 10.14 11.4, 7 11.8

37 37 37 37

Gal.

3.19 204n. 21 3.24 99, 213n. 10 4.2 99, 213n. 10 4.6 38 4.29 197n. 1 5.2 204n. 21 5.17 197n. 1 6.2 57 6.8 197n. 1, 201n. 48 6.11 33 6.15 204n. 21

Eph.

4.7-10 4.9-10 4.10 22

184 183 183, 241n. 6 183

Phil.

2

78

Col.

1.12(15)-20 81 1.15-20 78

1 Thess.

5.23

60

2 Tim.

4.13

42

Tit.

3.6

201n. 42

Heb.

8.5 213n. 8 10.1 213nn. 5, 8, 214n. 24 12.22-23 147

Rev.

1.11

201n. 48

Index of Names Achelis, E. Christian  236n. 48 Adorno, Theodor W.  21, 166–8, 172, 175, 237nn. 1, 2, 238n. 22, 240n. 50 Ahlers, Botho  232nn. 9–10 Aland, Kurt  206nn. 57–9 Alkier, Stefan  235n. 37 Althaus, Paul  242n. 21 Aquinas, Thomas  24, 53, 183, 204n. 16, 223n. 120, 241n. 6, 242n. 14 Aristotle  81, 227n. 41 Arndt, Andreas  225n. 8 Assmann, Aleida and Jan  8, 197n. 20, 224n. 2, 226n. 28 Augustine  4, 12, 15–17, 25, 34, 47, 60, 74, 87, 95–102, 108–16, 120, 131, 136, 154, 190, 195nn. 2–5, 196n. 6, 207nn. 1–3, 216nn. 48–50, 52–4, 217nn. 56–8, 62–3, 65–7, 69, 71, 73–5, 77–9, 219nn. 22–3, 26, 220nn. 33, 36, 39, 42, 47–8, 221nn. 64–5, 223n. 120 Bader, Günter  18–20, 22, 24, 25, 193 Balthasar, Hans Urs von  24, 197nn. 26–8, 202n. 1 Barr, James  61, 205n. 32 Barrett, C. K.  69–71, 199n. 17, 206n. 60 Barth, Karl  48, 50, 55, 60–1, 67–73, 125, 163, 189, 202n. 5, 204nn. 19, 28, 206nn. 49, 54–5, 61, 223n. 121, 234n. 35, 243n. 40–1 Bauer, G. L.  63 Baur, F. C.  51, 67–8, 72 Bayer, Oswald  234n. 31, 236n. 46 Beker, Johan C.  200n. 32 Benjamin, Walter  21, 169–73, 175, 238n. 23, 239n. 30 Bennington, Geoffrey  110, 115, 120, 197n. 21, 219n. 16, 220n. 32 Bernstein, J. M.  228n. 60, 230n. 98

Beyme, Karl Friedrich  185, 242n. 23 Beyschlag, W.  66 Biale, David  239nn. 39–40 Blake, William  112, 220n. 38 Blass, F.  197n. 3 Bloom, Harold  240n. 43 Bohren, Rudolph  232n. 11 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich  204n. 25 Bornkamm, Günther  71 Boyarin, Daniel  93–5, 216nn. 41–2 Brakmann, Heinzgerd  210n. 30 Brennecke, Hans Ch.  208n. 8 Buddeus, Johann Franz  137, 225n. 17 Bultmann, Rudolf  48, 55, 66–8, 70–2, 204n. 19, 204n. 19, 206nn. 48, 51 Burnett, Richard E.  204n. 17 Calvin  68–9, 136, 183, 241n. 7, 242n. 15 Cameron, Michael  217n. 59, 61, 68 Campenhausen, Hans von  77–8, 80, 209nn. 11–21, 23, 210n. 25, 211n. 38 Caputo, John D.  220n. 31, 238n. 14 Clemen, Carl  236n. 48 Collins, John N.  201n. 40 Dahl, Nils A.  67, 206n. 52 Dahm, Karl-Wilhelm  161, 235nn. 40–1 Daley, Brian E.  217n. 77 Daniélou, Jean  216n. 45 Davies, Oliver  11, 22–3, 25–6, 221n. 66, 243n. 43 Davies, Philip R.  202n. 4, 205n. 35 Dawson, David  94–5, 215nn. 26, 33, 216nn. 42, 44–5 Debrunner, A.  197n. 3 Deeg, Alexander  158, 164, 231nn. 3–4, 6, 233nn. 16, 19, 21, 236n. 44, 237n. 51

264

Index of Names

Derrida, Jacques  8–9, 11–12, 16–18, 20, 22, 25–6, 105–29, 158, 167–8, 181, 197nn. 21–3, 29, 218nn. 2, 5, 8, 219nn. 9–10, 15–17, 20–1, 25, 27, 29–30, 220nn. 32, 34–5, 37, 40, 43–4, 46, 49–54, 221nn. 56–61, 67–8, 221n. 79, 222nn. 80–8, 93, 95–6, 98–9, 103, 223nn. 105, 109, 111–15, 117, 237n. 6, 238n. 12 Dilthey, Wilhelm  6, 67, 72, 160, 196n. 18, 224n. 4, 232n. 15 Diodorus Siculus  33, 199n. 13 Dodd, C. H.  70–1, 207nn. 66, 68–9 Donaldson, Peter S.  118–19, 221nn. 75, 78 Drecoll, Volker H.  208n. 8 Drewermann, Eugen  236nn. 47–8 Dunn, James D. G.  209n. 24 Ebeling, Gerhard  5, 33–4, 47–8, 60–2, 196nn. 9–10, 199nn. 19, 21, 202n. 3, 203n. 14, 205nn. 30, 33–4, 234nn. 30, 33, 237n. 4 Eco, Umberto  235n. 43 Edwards, Mark  89, 213n. 8, 214nn. 13–15, 18, 22, 215n. 29, 216n. 51 Engemann, Wilfried  235nn. 38, 43 Ephraem Syrus  211n. 37 Esler, Philip  180, 240n. 2 Euripides  226n. 31 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  22, 137, 143–4, 185–8, 225n. 18, 227nn. 52–4, 242n. 24, 243nn. 25–34, 36–7 Fiddes, Paul  16–18, 25–6, 223n. 124, 224nn. 127, 131 Fitzmyer, Joseph A.  199n. 17 Frank, Manfred  148–9, 225n. 15, 230nn. 97, 99–101 Friedländer, Paul  141, 227n. 38 Gabler, J. P.  63–7, 70, 73, 205n. 37 Galling, Kurt  199n. 19 Garhammer, Erich  235n. 38 Geertz, Clifford  188, 243n. 38 Gehring, Hans Ulrich  231n. 6 Gemeinhardt, Peter  208n. 8, 212n. 51 Gerhard, Johann  136–7, 225n. 15 Gerrish, Brian  241n. 7

Göttert, Karl-Heinz  225n. 7 Götze, Martin  231n. 113 Greenaway, Peter  117–19, 221nn. 70–2, 76 Gruber, M. M.  199n. 20 Hafemann, Scott J.  199n. 18, 201n. 45, 203n. 6 Häfner, G.  199n. 16 Hafemann, Scott J.  199n. 18, 201n. 45, 203n. 6 Hahn, August  213n. 56 Hahn, Ferdinand  70, 203n. 7 Hahn, G. Ludwig  213n. 56 Hamacher, Elisabeth  239n. 39 Hartman, Geoffrey  8, 16, 105, 196n. 19, 218n. 1, 224n. 1 Hartshorne, Charles  235n. 42 Hauschild, Wolf-Dieter  208n. 8 Hays, Richard B.  49, 201n. 49, 203nn. 8, 10, 204n. 20 Hecker, Axel  238n. 19 Hegel, G. W. F.  68, 121–3, 143, 145, 188–9, 225n. 13, 227n. 56 Heidegger, Martin  17, 21, 106–7, 120–5, 127, 129, 167, 189, 219nn. 11, 18–19, 222nn. 91, 94, 104, 223nn. 116, 123, 224n. 133, 237nn. 7–10, 238n. 11 Heinimann, F.  198n. 13 Herder, Johann Gottfried  137, 152, 226n. 20 Hildebrandt, Thomas  232n. 14 Hofius, Otfried  34, 199nn. 22–5 Hölderlin 17, 107, 121–2, 222n. 100 Hollaz, David  137, 225n. 16, 226n. 23 Honold, Alexander  238n. 20 Hopkins, Gerard Manley  218n. 7 Horbury, William  211n. 39 Hörisch, Jochen  233n. 17, 234n. 26, 236n. 44, 237n. 5 Hoskyns, E. C.  71–2, 202n. 5, 207nn. 71–2 Howard, Thomas Albert  242nn. 22–3 Husserl, Edmund  105, 117, 189, 218n. 4 Idel, Moshe  240n. 43 Irigaray, Luce  124, 223n. 119 Jahraus, Oliver  238n. 17 Janz, Paul D.  243n. 43

Index of Names Jung, C. G.  163 Jüngel, Eberhard  232n. 11 Jungmann, Josef A.  212n. 55 Kafka, Franz  21, 166–73, 175, 238nn. 16, 18, 21 Kähler, Martin  66 Kamlah, Erhard  35, 200n. 27 Kant, Immanuel  6, 18, 137, 142–5, 148–50, 182, 225n. 19, 227nn. 52, 57, 228nn. 61–70, 229nn. 71–6 Keck, Leander E.  71, 207nn. 67, 70 Kelly, J. N. D.  208n. 8, 210n. 30, 212n. 42 Kierkegaard, Søren  73 Kinzig, Wolfram  14, 208n. 7, 210nn. 28, 32, 212nn. 40, 45, 48, 54 Klauck, Hans-Josef  35, 200n. 28 Kleinert, Paul  234n. 28 Koch, Dietrich-Alex  35, 200n. 31 Koester, H.  198n. 13 Körner, Felix  232n. 13 Körtner, Ulrich H. J.  231n. 2, 236nn. 44, 49 Kovacs, Judith  214nn. 22–3 Kristeva, Julia  124, 223n. 119 Kuhlmann, Helga  236n. 50 Lämmlin, Georg  234n. 29, 235nn. 38, 43 Lash, Nicholas  67, 206n. 47 Levinas, Emmanuel  106, 114, 219n. 12, 220n. 55 Lietzmann, Hans  69–71, 206n. 57 Lightfoot, J. B.  72 Lincoln, Andrew  206n. 47 Lubac, Henri de  202n. 1 Lücke, Friedrich  188 Ludlow, Morwenna  15–17, 25, 200n. 36, 203n. 12 Luhmann, Niklas  232n. 12 Luther, Martin, D.  5, 12, 22, 34, 47, 49, 51–3, 56, 60–2, 68–9, 72, 132, 136, 138, 150, 154, 156, 158, 163, 165, 182–4, 196nn. 7–8, 11–14, 225n. 14, 233n. 23, 234n. 33, 237n. 52, 241n. 7, 242nn. 15, 21 Luz, Ulrich  200n. 28, 203n. 7 Magliola, Robert R.  223n. 125 Manetti, Giovanni  221n. 64 Marcion  50, 53, 58–9, 82, 88

265

Markschies, Christoph  208n. 8 Markus, R. A.  97, 217n. 60 Marquard, Odo  233n. 18 Martin, Gerhard Marcel  235n. 38 Martyn, David  11, 197nn. 24–5 Martyr, Justin  59, 204n. 26 Meeks, Wayne A.  205n. 39 Menke, Christoph  237n. 4 Metzger, Marcel  210n. 30 Meyer-Blanck, Michael  19–20, 24–6, 232nn. 7, 8, 234n. 24, 235n. 39, 236n. 48 Michel, Otto  208n. 5 Miyatani, Yoshichika  195n. 2 Morgan, Robert  12–15, 205n. 36, 206n. 61 Mosès, Stéphane  172, 239nn. 29, 34 Moule, C. F. D.  71–2 Neuer, Werner  207n. 73 Nicol, Martin  235n. 38 Niebergall, Friedrich  69–71, 207n. 62 O’ Donnell, J. J.  216n. 47, 218n. 80 Ochs, Peter  241n. 4 Ohme, Heinz  212n. 46 Origen  4, 6, 12–13, 15–16, 25, 35–6, 47–50, 52, 54, 58–60, 87–102, 131–2, 190, 196nn. 15–16, 200n. 34, 213nn. 1–3, 5–10, 214nn. 11, 17–20, 23–4, 215nn. 27–8, 30–3, 36, 216nn. 46, 51, 217n. 76 Pasquato, Ottorino  210n. 30 Peirce, Charles Sanders  162 Plato  5–7, 12, 16, 18, 20, 25–6, 31, 36, 60, 81, 93, 115, 119, 123–4, 131, 133, 139–41, 146, 158, 190, 197n. 2, 200n. 35, 226nn. 29, 32–6, 227nn. 39–40 Provence, Th. E.  200n. 31 Rahner, Karl  73, 207n. 74 Räisänen, Heikki  206n. 45 Reinhold, Karl  143, 227n. 52 Ritter, Adolf Martin  208nn. 6, 8, 209nn. 13, 24, 211n. 33, 35 Robinson, J. A. T.  72 Rödszus-Hecker, Marita  225n. 10 Roth, Philip  239n. 41

266

Index of Names

Safranski, Rüdigger  237n. 9 Salzmann, Jorg C.  210nn. 27, 31 Saussure, Ferdinand de  106, 218n. 6, 232n. 15 Schelling, F. W. J.  129, 143, 145, 149, 227n. 55, 229n. 77 Schlatter, Adolf  67–8, 72, 207n. 73 Schimmel, Annemarie  233n. 20 Schlegel, Friedrich  18–19, 25–6, 133, 138–9, 143, 145, 148–9, 151–3, 160, 225n. 8, 228nn. 58–60, 229n. 78, 230n. 98, 109–12, 231nn. 113–14 Schleiermacher, F. D. E.  207n. 75 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  6, 18–20, 22–3, 69, 73, 133–43, 145–52, 159–60, 185, 196n. 17, 224n. 5, 225nn. 6, 9, 11–12, 226nn. 21–2, 24–7, 226n. 37, 227nn. 42–50, 229nn. 79–87, 89, 230nn. 90–2, 94–6, 103–7, 235n. 36 Schmidt, Jochen  21, 25, 240n. 41 Scholem, Gershom  21, 168–75, 238nn. 24–7, 239nn. 28, 31–3, 36–40, 240nn. 42, 44, 46–9 Schöttler, Heinz-Günther  235n. 38 Schrenk, G.  197n. 5, 199n. 16 Schröter, J.  200n. 28 Shakespeare  117–19, 221nn. 73–4 Slouka, Mark  224n. 129 Spener, Philipp Jakob  146, 150, 229n. 88 Staats, Reinhard  208n. 8, 209n. 24, 210n. 26, 211nn. 33, 35 Steffens, Heinrich  185 Steiner, George  234n. 28 Stendahl, Krister  64, 205n. 38 Stimpfle, A.  190, 197n. 2 Stuhlmacher, Peter  35, 55, 200n. 32, 204n. 18 Taylor, Mark C.  21, 167, 238n. 13 Tertullian  82, 212n. 44

TeSelle, Eugene  207n. 4 Theissen, Gerd  203n. 7, 206n. 45 Toom, Tarmo  221n. 64 Vessey, Mark  110, 121, 220n. 31, 221n. 62, 222n. 89 Vielhauer, Paul  202n. 6 Vinzent, Markus  208n. 7, 212n. 41 Virmond, Wolfgang  225n. 8 Vischer, Wilhelm  61, 205n. 31 Vittinghoff, Friedrich  211n. 34 Vokes, Frederick E.  208n. 8 von Hardenberg (Novalis), Friedrich  133, 138 Von Lüpke, Johannes  234n. 31 Ward, Graham  223n. 118 Watson, Francis  202n. 4, 204n. 24, 205n. 35 Weiss, B.  65–6 Weiss, Paul  235n. 42 Wellek, René  227n. 52 Wengst, Klaus  209n. 10 Wernle, Paul  69, 206n. 56 Westerholm, Stephen  49, 200n. 26, 203n. 9 Westra, Liuwe H.  208n. 8, 212n. 52 Williams, Daniel H.  212n. 50 Williams, Rowan D.  216n. 47, 218nn. 80, 82 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  218n. 3 Wohlfarth, Irving  239n. 39 Wolter, Michael  10–11, 22–3, 180, 190–1, 201n. 50, 203n. 11, 234n. 34 Wrede, William  65–7, 205nn. 36, 40–3 Zaid, Nasr Amid Abu  156–7, 232nn. 14–15 Zima, Peter V  237nn. 4–5 Zwingli, Huldrich  22, 182–4, 188, 241n. 7, 242n. 17