Theology, History, and Biblical Interpretation: Modern Readings 9780567459800, 9780567663269, 9780567034496

Table of contents :
FC
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Copyright Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Benedict de Spinoza: Theological-Political Treatise. Chapter 7, “On the Interpretation of Scripture”
2. David Strauss: The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Selections from the Introduction, “Development of the Mythical Point of View in Relation to the Gospel Histories”
3. Søren Kierkegaard: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Vol. 1. Chapter 1, “The Historical Pointof View”
4. Ernst Troeltsch: “On the Historical and Dogmatic Methods in Theology”
5. Karl Barth: The Epistle to the Romans Prefaces 1–6
6: Rudolf Bultmann: “New Testament and Mythology”
7. Pope Pius XII: Divino Afflante Spiritu
8. Gerhard Ebeling: Selections from “The Significance of the Critical Historical Method for Church and Theology in Protestantism”
9. Henri De Lubac: History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen. Selections from the Conclusion
10. Krister Stendahl: Selections from “Biblical Theology, Contemporary”
11. Brevard Childs: Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Chapter 3, “Canonand Criticism”
12. David Steinmetz: “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis”
13. Ulrich Luz: “Reflections on the Appropriate Interpretation of New Testament Texts”
14. Jean-Luc Marion: God without Being: Hors-Texte. Chapter 5, “Of the Eucharistic Site of Theology”
15. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza: “The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship”
16. Jon Levenson: “The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism”
17. Alvin Plantinga: “Two (or More) Kinds of Scripture Scholarship”
18. Paul Ricœur: “The Nuptial Metaphor”
19. James Barr: The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective. Chapter 12, “Evaluation, Commitment, Objectivity”
20. John Webster: Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch. Chapter 1, “Revelation, Sanctification, and Inspiration”
Index

Citation preview

Theology, History, and Biblical Interpretation

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Theology, History, and Biblical Interpretation Modern Readings

EDITED BY DARREN SARISKY

Bloomsbury Academic An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are registered trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Darren Sarisky, 2015 Darren Sarisky has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. 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. 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 or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-0-567-18427-6 PB: 978-0-567-45980-0 ePDF: 978-0-567-03449-6 ePUB: 978-0-567-27153-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

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Contents Copyright Acknowledgments  vii Introduction: Theology, History, and Biblical Interpretation  1

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4 5 6

7 8

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Spinoza, Benedict de. Theological-Political Treatise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Chapter 7, “On the Interpretation of Scripture.”  11 Strauss, David F. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. London: SCM, 1973. Selections from Introduction, “Development of the Mythical Point of View in Relation to the Gospel Histories.”  29 Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Chapter 1, “The Historical Point of View.”  69 Troeltsch, Ernst. “On the Historical and Dogmatic Methods in Theology.” In Religion in History, 11–32. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991.  89 Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Romans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Prefaces 1–6.  109 Bultmann, Rudolf. “The New Testament and Mythology.” In The New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, edited by Schubert Ogden, 1–44. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984.  131 Pope Pius XII. Divino Afflante Spiritu: On Promoting Biblical Studies. Rome, 1943.  165 Ebeling, Gerhard. Selections from “The Significance of the Critical Historical Method for Church and Theology in Protestantism.” In Word and Faith, 17–61. London: SCM Press, 1963.  187 Lubac, Henri de. History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007. Selections from the Conclusion.  219

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vi Contents

10 Stendahl, Krister. Selections from “Biblical Theology, Contemporary.”

11 12 13

14

15

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17 18

19

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In The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, edited by George A. Buttrick. New York: Abingdon, 1962.  239 Childs, Brevard S. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979. Chapter 3, “Canon and Criticism.”  255 Steinmetz, David C. “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis.” Theology Today 37 (1978): 27–38.  267 Luz, Ulrich. “Reflections on the Appropriate Interpretation of New Testament Texts.” In Studies in Matthew, 265–289. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.  279 Marion, Jean-Luc. God without Being: Hors-Texte. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Chapter 5, “Of the Eucharistic Site of Theology.”  303 Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. “The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship.” Journal of Biblical Literature 107 (1988): 3–17.  321 Levenson, Jon D. “The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism.” In The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies, 1–32. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993.  337 Plantinga, Alvin. “Two (or More) Kinds of Scripture Scholarship.” Modern Theology 14 (1998): 243–278.  365 Ricœur, Paul. “The Nuptial Metaphor.” In Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, edited by André LaCocque and Paul Ricœur, 265–303. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.  403 Barr, James. The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999. Chapter 12, “Evaluation, Commitment, Objectivity.”  439 Webster, John. Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Chapter 1, “Revelation, Sanctification, and Inspiration.”  459

Index  485

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Copyright Acknowledgments The author and publishers are grateful for permission to reproduce the following copyright material: “Reflections on the Appropriate Use of New Testament Texts” from Studies in Matthew by Ulrich Luz. © 2005, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Reprinted by permission of Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. “Revelation, Sanctification and Inspiration” (pp. 5–41) from Holy Scripture. A Dogmatic Sketch. © John Webster, 2003. Originally published Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. “On the Interpretation of Scripture” (pp. 97–117) in Jonathan Israel, Michael Silverthorne (eds) Spinoza: Theological-Political Treatise, © 2007, Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. Extract (pp. 22–61) from Word and Faith by Gerhard Eberling © SCM Press, 1963. Reproduced by permission of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd. [email protected] Extract (pp. 1–32) from The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies by Jon D. Levenson. Copyright © Jon D. Levenson, 1993. Reprinted by permission of Westminster John Knox Press. Extract (pp. 1–26) from The Epistle to the Romans, translated by Hoskyns, 1968. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. “Of the Eucharist Site of Theology” (pp. 139–58) from God Without Being by Jean-Luc Marion. © Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1982. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press. Extract (pp. 265–303) from Thinking Biblically by André Lacocque and Paul Ricoeur. © University of Chicago Press, 1998. Reprinted by permission of University of Chicago Press. Extract (pp. 243–78) from Two (or More) Kinds of Scripture Scholarship by Alvin Plantinga. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1998. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

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viii

Copyright Acknowledgments

“The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship” from Journal of Biblical Literature 107 (1988): 3–17, by Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. © Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, 1999. Reprinted here by permission of Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza.

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Introduction T

his reader brings together 20 of the most penetrating and influential statements made from the Enlightenment to the present day regarding the relationship between theological and historical factors in structuring an approach to interpreting the Bible. Of course the Bible makes theological claims. It speaks about God, about Jesus Christ, and about the Holy Spirit; in addition, it speaks about human beings and the world they inhabit in light of their relation to God. There is also no doubt that the Bible originated from a complex set of past historical contexts. The latest texts in the Christian Bible were written over a millennium and a half ago and were collected together to form the two-fold canon of Scripture. So, in this sense, the Bible is both a theological and a historical text. This reader concentrates, not just on different views of the text per se—through that issue is important—but on the question of which factors drive the process of reading, and specifically how theological and historical coefficients combine harmoniously or jostle with one another in determining the framework for understanding biblical texts. In the balance of this introduction, I will unpack this primary issue and explain its significance, and I will point readers to secondary themes as well. The contemporary debate over theological interpretation of Scripture hovers in the background of some of these readings, and its presence as a focus of academic discussion today is one reason that the central question of this volume is important. It is worth noting immediately that it is better to construe theological interpretation of Scripture as a debate or a discussion, rather than as a movement, for it is simply not a sufficiently unified phenomenon to warrant applying the latter term to it. There are a number of trends that mark this broad discussion. For instance, systematic theologians, who in the past might have been in dialogue primarily with other theologians or with philosophers, are increasingly turning to Scripture, and are writing sequential commentaries as well as incorporating biblical exegesis into their own constructive proposals.1 Conversely, the mainstream of biblical scholarship is giving greater attention to the theological questions that the text raises, and a number of commentary series have been launched with a mandate to prioritize theological issues as topics for discussion.2 In addition, historical scholars are increasingly focusing on the role of exegesis in past doctrinal debates; this trend includes noteworthy scholarship on the interpretation of the Bible in early Christianity, the medieval period, the Reformation, and beyond,3 as well as more popular works for a broad readership.4 The inter-faith venture known as Scriptural Reasoning also fits as part of this larger discussion.5 Scriptural Reasoning involves groups of Christians, Muslims, and Jews

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gathering together to study and debate one another’s scriptures in order to increase their understanding of the traditions of which they are not members, to see their own traditions in a new light, and to gain a vision for the common good toward which all the traditions might strive together. The scale and impact of these recent discussions has been significant. According to theologian Miroslav Volf, who speaks especially about the first couple of trends, but who bears the others in mind as well: “The return of biblical scholars to the theological reading of the Scriptures, and the return of systematic theologians to sustained engagement with the scriptural texts—in a phrase, the return of both to theological readings of the Bible—is the most significant theological development in the last two decades.”6 Whether one sees these developments as positive or negative, they are clearly a major factor on the current theological scene. These trends raise the question of what theological interpretation actually is. What is its nature? What makes it something that is worth advocating or opposing? The answer is not entirely clear. Some of the early fruit of these discussions has prompted scholars to ask these questions.7 There are some statements that seek to give an account of theological reading.8 But most of these statements are brief, and the question remains a pressing one for many today. The adjectival modifier theological in the phrase “theological interpretation” suggests that theological interpretation of Scripture is one type of reading among others. The further implication, then, is that there are other modes of interpretation as well. What might they be? The most obvious potential contrast is between theology and history, such that theological interpretation becomes something that stands in contradistinction to historical criticism, or perhaps something that calls for a re-orientation in how historical criticism is typically practiced. Another question the current ferment raises is how it relates to the much longer history of the discussion of theology and history in connection with biblical interpretation. At a minimum, it is important to register that such issues have been debated for some time. This reader demonstrates that the discussion of theological exegesis did not arise ex nihilo. If the nature and origin of theological reading are indeed issues worth pursuing, what would be a profitable angle from which to think about these topics? Is there an illuminating way to pursue these questions? To distinguish between two sharply defined and opposed paradigms, the one theological and the other historical, is to enter a blind alley. This is not an illuminating way to proceed. Major scholars sometimes indicate that this sort of distinction does exist, such that there is theological interpretation and historical reading, but these proposals are usually intended to be understood as rough and ready characterizations, not as analytical categories. For example, literary critic Northrop Frye claims: “There have always been two directions in Biblical scholarship, the critical and the traditional, though often they have merged. The critical approach establishes the text and studies the historical and cultural background; the traditional interprets it in accordance with what a consensus of theological and ecclesiastical authorities have declared the meaning to be.”9 What really interests Frye is how poets have read the Bible: the purpose of his study is to see how the Bible functions as a “great code,” to use the

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Introduction

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phrase that forms his title. An understanding of this code can unlock the meaning of many texts in the Western literary canon. Frye makes the above distinction in order to say that the aim of critical study of the Bible is so different from what a poet might do with the text that he does not make extensive use of such scholarship in his book. For his purposes, dialogue with traditional scholarship has greater utility. Putting aside Frye’s specific aim, the grave problem that results from differentiating two approaches absolutely is that it suggests that theological reading, as the alternative to historical reading, is itself a historical, that it is not based on a construal of the text of the Bible that is in any sense rooted in the past. This is misleading. Even the authors featured in this volume who come close to making a disjunction between theology and history do not want to contend for that quite implausible position. A quite hasty reading of Ernst Troeltsch might take him to imply such a dichotomy in sternly insisting that the historical and dogmatic methods in theology should be recognized as different from one another. But it is better to read Troeltsch as contrasting two different ways to think about history: a way that marginalizes theological categories and so begins to approximate naturalism, on the one hand, and as the history of salvation, on the other. It is not that what he calls the dogmatic mode of reading theological texts denies that these texts emerge from contingent circumstances in the past. This mode construes the history of which they are a part in relation to God, which is what constitutes it as “dogmatic.” This mode of reading is predicated on a denial that the Bible should be read against the backdrop of history in Troeltsch’s sense, but not on a denial of history in the sense of God’s dealing with human beings so as to reconcile them with himself. Karl Barth provides another example of the way in which affirming a theological perspective does not lead to a straightforward denial of a historical one. Barth is concerned with the interpretation of Paul’s letter to the Romans. He affirms that Paul was a child of his age and that, as such, he spoke to his contemporaries, that is, to the church at Rome. When Barth goes on to say that Paul is also an apostle whose writings entered into the canon of Scripture and continue to testify to God today, he does not deny the historical origin of Paul’s texts. Rather, he wants to say that these texts are taken up into God’s work of revealing himself to later generations. Barth has a different understanding of the history of the apostle Paul than do his critics. History is not the sole determinant of the text, and the text’s historical origin does not limit the scope of how it might legitimately function communicatively. For all of that, the text is genuinely historical. There is no ultimate choice such that an author must pick between either theology or history. Instead of polarizing theology and history, it is better to approach the texts in this reader with a different question in mind: how do theology and history function within what might be called the account of interpretation that the author is proposing? What is an “account of interpretation”? David Tracy provides a useful explanation: “We may begin the process of interpreting interpretation by starting with what seems obvious if indeterminate. Any act of interpretation involves at least three realities: some phenomenon to be interpreted, someone interpreting that phenomenon, and some interaction between these first two realities. How can we understand, that is,

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interpret, these three facts? That, at a first level of reflection, is the problem of interpretation.”10 That Tracy frames his point in quite general terms, or, as he says, in a way that seems “indeterminate,” is an advantage for present purposes, since the aim of this introduction is to articulate an issue to which all of the diverse readings in this collection relate. The proposal is that the authors of the selections use theological and historical categories, each in their own way, to describe the realities involved in interpretation—the biblical text and its context, the human person who is the interpreting subject, and the engagement between text and reader in the practice of interpretation. The contributors may not all give a complete account, fully covering each of the three key topics, but each author says something, using theological or historical language or both together, about at least one of these matters. When addressing the interaction between the text and the reader, the authors may speak of the aim of reading, or they may focus on the methods that are proper to use. When addressing the interpreter, contributors to this volume may default to reflection about an individual human being, or they may write about entire communities and thus think about reading in a broader social context. To pose questions about ontology, or about how these authors understand things to be, should prove to be an illuminating way to read and think about these texts. An example may help to illustrate what an account of interpretation could look like. The sample account of interpretation comes from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s magisterial book Truth and Method. Of all of the contributors to this book, Ulrich Luz is the one who is most clearly influenced by Gadamer’s model of interpretation. The model is concerned with classic texts, ones that have an origin at a set time and place, but that are substantial enough to provoke thought far beyond their context of origin. They have a history of effects that reaches forward and influences the thinking of interpreters even before they have come into direct contact with the text itself. Readers thus approach these works—whether they realize it or not—with a framework of thought and a way of asking questions that are influenced by classical texts, and that serve as a bridge between themselves and the text in question. Classics make serious claims; otherwise they would not have enduring power. Reading them becomes a dialogue between the text and the reader about the subject-matter of the work. Reading inevitably engages the pre-understanding of the interpreter; it is not simply a passive process by which the interpreter absorbs the text’s meaning the way a sponge soaks up water. While the classic has a gravitas that claims the attention of the reader, the reader has a certain background and a pattern of rendering judgments that is all brought to bear in thoughtful reading.11 Gadamer’s account of interpretation allows some scope for theology in spelling out what a believer’s presuppositions may be. And his model is not especially suspicious of the process by which classics are transmitted through history. Gadamer asks his readers to picture the tradition that transmits the classics as something generally benign to which readers ought to defer, though they may certainly criticize it in certain respects. It is in part for this reason that adherents of religious communities often employ Gadamer’s model for specifically religious or theological ends. His notion of tradition is, for Christians, thus assimilated to church or ecclesial community. But the

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main stress of this model is on seeing the text and the reader as positioned in a history that is described without reference to transcendence. His more basic description of the reader, the text, and reading do not make reference to God; his categories are more generic. Hence, Gadamer’s own view of interpretation employs historical resources as the main way of filling out an account of interpretation. Readers of Luz’s chapter should ask themselves how his appropriation of Gadamer is similar to or different from Gadamer himself. Given what this reader is about, there are a few questions that are worth putting to each of the chapters that follow. Above all, it will be fruitful to discern what each author is saying about interpretation and the realities that drive it. For instance, what is the author saying about the reader, either explicitly or by implication? Of those statements and suggestions, which are theological? Which are based in history? Is the author using both historical and theological language? How do they relate, either harmoniously or in competition? Are there any specific concepts that the author is using to combine the two? Once it is clear what the contributors are saying, it becomes possible to evaluate their positions. How can they be assessed on their own terms? Are they achieving their goals? How would they be assessed from a point of view different from their own? It is usually the early authors, those who wrote before the twentieth century, who almost seem inclined to take sides and think about the relationship between theology and history in conflictual terms, though I tried above to clarify what is and is not being claimed here. It is more of a trend for the twentiethcentury authors to work out some sort of resolution or synthesis. Do the later authors succeed in what they are trying to do? Or are the earlier authors simply more honest and clear-sighted in admitting a difficulty? I mentioned above that many of the later authors cite the earlier ones and subject their views to critical discussion. To what extent is there a unified discussion of theology and history in relation to the Bible that continues over the course of the centuries? Or, to what extent are these each local debates that take on a specific shape due to factors that are important in one temporal, geographical, or confessional context, but not in others? All of these are questions to consider in reading this volume. This list is, however, intended to be suggestive, not exhaustive. Surely there are other important questions to pose as well. While the reader as a whole revolves around the question of how theological and historical factors enter into the account of reading, a number of subordinate themes recur in the readings collected here. These include: 1 Method and Purpose in Interpretation. Many of the contributors consider

which methods of interpretation to apply to the Bible. A few are particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of understanding the text by using a powerful method of study. This attitude often goes together with construing biblical interpretation as a science of the text, in some cases after the model of natural science. By contrast, other authors think that this is a deeply problematic move, one that takes a stance toward the Bible that renders it impossible to hear it as a living voice. Still other contributors are just not

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exercised by method one way or another. These figures operate with the idea, which they sometimes render explicit, that there is an aim or purpose to interpretation that the practice of reading ought to seek to fulfill, even if this is not done by recourse to a definite method. It is worth asking how different views of the biblical texts generate different attitudes toward reading, and how reading can be guided by thinking in terms of method, purpose, or both. 2 The Status of Modernity. Some authors reflect explicitly on the significance

of modernity for theological claims and come to radically different conclusions. For some, the arrival of the modern period means that the ambitions of traditional theology should be curtailed because the progress of modernity shows the previous configuration of theology to be outmoded. Rudolf Bultmann has one of the most iconic lines in all of twentieth-century theology in which he gestures toward this view: “We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.” Other authors see efforts to accommodate theology within a modern, and perhaps secular, agenda as theology rendering its own enterprise feeble or anemic. As a result, they turn back to distant stretches of history in an effort to revivify their own theological traditions. Here history becomes a source of renewal instead of a set of obsolete views or harmful prejudices. 3 Bible as Past and Present. Some of our authors construe the Bible as a text

that is primarily, or even exclusively, a past act of communication. That is, it is an artifact that preserves the communicative exchange between people of the past. Others see it as possible and valid to read the text as a communication to present-day people. A question that the first group issues to the second is whether in hearing the text speak to them today, they do not become so active in the process of interpretation that they are really no longer listening to another voice, one that is different from their own. The charge here is that “exegesis” in this sense is really just eisegesis. This is a recurring query, and readers of this volume would do well to consider what sort of responses have been or could potentially be made to it, as well as how valid those retorts are or would be. 4 Judaism in relation to Christianity. Judaism is a minority report among the

authors of this volume, but the presence of Jewish voices in this book makes an important contribution. It provides a point of comparison with the Christian views, and it allows readers to explore a different tradition in its own right. The inclusion of Jewish authors makes clear a point that might otherwise have been invisible. For a Christian author, an account of interpretation is fleshed out by historical factors, Christian theological language, or both. For a Jewish author (who is operating with a different biblical text), an account of

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interpretation will receive its shape from historical elements, perhaps together with specifically Jewish theological language, and so the overall picture may appear quite different. Of course, these sort of considerations quickly become complex for a Jew whose views are as progressive as those of Spinoza. Readers should consult the introductory comments to the first chapter for background on him. Each selection weighs in on the main issue for this reader, though in other ways these readings are remarkable for their diversity. The reader contains texts from the seventeenth century right through to the twenty-first, and so the selections originate from quite different historical contexts. The reader is also inter-disciplinary in that it brings together contributions from philosophers, historians, biblical scholars, theologians, and religious leaders. That each author brings his or her own specific expertise and perspective to the issue at hand enriches and broadens the conversation—and many of the authors are literally in conversation with one another. Most of the authors are part of the Christian community, broadly speaking. Their denominational affiliations include Lutheranism, Reformed Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Methodism. The reader also includes works from a few Jewish authors, so there is an inter-faith element to the discussion. Some of the authors included in the volume were not a part of any religious community, at least at the time that they wrote the works that are anthologized here, and it is worth asking what difference this makes, if any, to their arguments. Finally, this book seeks to balance its coverage between authors who prioritize historical factors and those who stress theology in setting out an account of interpretation. Not all of the contributors to this volume see theology and history as in competition with one another; however, some seem to, and I have made an effort to include works from both sides of this debate. In sum, the reader considers the themes of theology, history, and biblical interpretation from all of these different points of view. This reader offers itself up to a range of different audiences. Because of the variety of material that it includes, it should be of interest at least to students and scholars in the disciplines of systematic theology, biblical scholarship, and the history of Christianity and Judaism. Each chapter begins with a brief summary of the author’s background and a precis of the argument that the text makes. Many of the readings are substantial, and these introductory comments should make the texts easier to access, especially for students. The reader is intended to be useful as a classroom text, but scholars will also find a great deal of food for thought among its chapters. Readers should work through these texts slowly, ponder the arguments that they make, and seek to digest them well. Because the authors are addressing nothing less than an entire approach to biblical texts, these statements carry implications that should be considered carefully. As a reader, this book offers a collection of texts on a single topic in the hope that it might stimulate informed contemporary reflection on the issue, but it forswears any more ambitious goals. These texts are practical devices or exhibits to consider.

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Together, they serve simply as a book of sources. They are intended as a representative sample of views on a defined issue, enough major texts to give readers the flavor of an ongoing debate over how to read the Bible. Yet even the sum total of all these texts does not constitute every point of view worth considering on interpretation. This book does not offer itself as a systematic, comprehensive history of the interpretation of the Bible.12 In making selections, priority has been given to including the most articulate exponents of a given viewpoint, and to texts that have generated discussion over a period of time. Thus most of the selections have classic status: they are either great works from the past or contemporary classics. It might have been possible to collect a greater number of shorter texts. Some of the texts have, in fact, been abridged in order to make them more manageable, especially for use in a classroom setting. But to shorten these texts much more, and render them mere extracts, would have deprived them of the rhetorical and argumentative power that they possess and that recommends them as deserving inclusion in this book. The texts are all “modern” in the loose sense that they derive from the Enlightenment period or later. This timeframe functions as a useful constraint because the theology-history debate gained a great deal of momentum in this period. More than three-fourths of the texts derive from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, thus the reader’s coverage is focused especially on the recent period of the discussion. The aim regarding the previous centuries is to pick out the texts that had the most influence on later history, one index of which is their frequency of citation by the later authors included here. Another strategy might have been to strive for a more even distribution over the centuries. The advantage of the current presentation is that it does more to bring readers up to date with the current discussion, and invites them to express their own views, thus engaging with these topics in a constructive way, not just in a historical way. The texts are arranged according to a simple chronological layout that is keyed to each work’s original publication date. This volume has a focus, and that means, inevitably, that otherwise compelling material that does not fit within the book’s purview had to be excluded. I have mentioned Scriptural Reasoning previously as an important form of theological reading. What discussion most often focuses on in a session of Scriptural Reasoning is how the various Abrahamic faiths interpret their scriptures, and how this reading is a telling expression of religious identity, one that can at least inform the others present about the tradition, and that might even serve as opportunity to testify to the truth of this tradition. Because the primary emphasis of these discussions is on the reception of sacred texts within religious communities, it is not the main purpose of Scriptural Reasoning to negotiate questions such as how biblical texts were understood in their context of origin versus how they are construed in religious communities today. Hence, no contribution from the Scriptural Reasoning discussion is present in this volume. That said, there is an inter-faith dimension to this collection, as I have already mentioned. Next, this volume is organized around a question of theory more than practice. So, while there are some actual readings of Scripture presented in a number of the chapters, and Ricoeur’s entire chapter is a worked example of how to interpret

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the Song of Songs, most of the discussion in the book is reflective thought regarding the structure of interpretation.

Notes 1

Commentary series include William C. Placher and Amy Plantinga Pauw, eds., Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010–); R. R. Reno, ed., Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005–); R. Michael Allen and Scott Swain, eds., T&T Clark International Theological Commentary (London: T&T Clark, 2015–). Theologians who include a substantial amount of exegesis in their theological work include: David F. Ford, Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996).

2

J. Gordon McConville and Craig Bartholomew, eds., The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008–); Joel B. Green and Max Turner, eds., The Two Horizons New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005–).

3

I list only one major work of scholarship per period: Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Thomas G. Weinandy, Daniel A. Keating, and John Yocum, eds., Aquinas on Scripture: An Introduction to His Biblical Commentaries (London: T&T Clark, 2005); Donald K. McKim, ed., Calvin and the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

4

Thomas C. Oden, ed., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998–)

5

On Scriptural Reasoning, see Nicholas Adams, Habermas and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 239–55; Nicholas Adams, “Making Deep Reasonings Public,” Modern Theology 22 (2006): 385–401. Other programmatic statements include: David Ford, “An Interfaith Wisdom: Scriptural Reasoning between Jews, Christians and Muslims,” Modern Theology 22 (2006): 345–66; Steven Kepnes, “A Handbook for Scriptural Reasoning,” Modern Theology 22 (2006): 367–83; Peter Ochs, “The Rules of Scriptural Reasoning,” The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning 2 (2002), http://jsr.lib.virginia.edu/issues/volume2/numberl/ssr02–01–eO1. html (accessed June 24, 2013).

6

Miroslav Volf, “Reading the Bible Theologically,” in Captive to the Word of God: Engaging the Scriptures for Contemporary Reflection (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 14.

7

For instance, see C. Kavin Rowe and Richard B. Hays, “What Is a Theological Commentary?” Pro Ecclesia 16 (2007): 26–32; Markus Bockmuehl, “Introduction,” in Scripture’s Doctrine and Theology’s Bible: How the New Testament Shapes Christian Dogmatics, Markus Bockmuehl and Alan J. Torrance, eds., (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 7–8.

8

For brief examples, see Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays, eds., The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 1–5; Richard B. Hays, “Reading the Bible with the Eyes of Faith: The Practice of Theological Exegesis,” Journal of Theological

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10

THEOLOGY, HISTORY, AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION Interpretation 1 (2007): 5–21; Kevin Vanhoozer, “Introduction: What Is Theological Interpretation of the Bible?,” in Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, Kevin J. Vanhoozer et al., eds. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 19–25. While not entirely an account of theological reading, Stephen Fowl’s major work does contain a definition and a great deal of exemplification: Stephen E. Fowl, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

9

Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), xvii.

10 David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 14. 11 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edn. (New York: Crossroad, 1989). 12 Major multi-volume histories of interpretation in English include James Carleton Paget et al, eds., The New Cambridge History of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012–); Alan J. Hauser and Duane Frederick Watson, eds., A History of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008–9); Henning Reventlow, History of Biblical Interpretation (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009–10). For a concise and insightful reading of the transition to modernity in biblical studies, see James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Free Press, 2008), 1–46.

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1 Benedict de Spinoza Theological-Political Treatise. Chapter 7, “On the Interpretation of Scripture”

B

enedict de Spinoza (1632–77) was a Dutch philosopher. He wrote on ethics, politics, the Bible, and other subjects. Because of his radical views, he was expelled from the Jewish synagogue of which he was a member in Amsterdam. Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise was published clandestinely in Latin in 1669–70. It is significant for the history of biblical interpretation because it contains the first argument that the books of the Bible need to be read exclusively against the backdrop of their history of origin. In many of its specifics, it has been massively superseded by further research, especially on the topics of the Hebrew language and the history of the biblical books. But its main contention, that history constitutes the only proper context for reading biblical passages, is now an influential view among modern biblical scholars. Scholars have brought this approach to bear on the New Testament writings as well as on the Hebrew scriptures, which were Spinoza’s own primary concern. Spinoza’s writing on the Bible resonates quite strongly with René Descartes’s work on rational method. Following a well-defined method of thought is the only way to move away from the dubious traditional modes of understanding the Bible that are so strongly associated with endless quarrels and even violence. Patient application of method yields assured results. Spinoza’s method is one that anyone can follow because it requires nothing other than the exercise of the natural light of reason, which each human being possesses. It does not require any supposedly supernatural assistance. People must throw off the heavy hand of tradition in order to exercise their reason freely. The main tenants of Spinoza’s system will be broadly familiar to anyone who has learned modern methods of biblical interpretation. First, it is necessary to learn the

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original language in which the texts of the Bible were composed; translations are neither fully reliable nor absolutely precise. Second, readers should collate various biblical passages with one another and organize the different statements that are made in them, not shying away from noting where discrepancies among the passages exist. Third, it is crucial to build up an account of the circumstances of origin for each biblical text. Important questions to ask include the following. Who is the author? What was the occasion for the composition of the text? To whom was the text written? How was the text received and initially understood? The aim of following this procedure is to grasp the intention of the author, not whether the author was correct in his assertions. These two questions must be kept distinct, lest the author’s intention be inadvertently assimilated to what is taken by the interpreter to be true regarding the topic being addressed. Similarly, it is fallacious to cross-reference one passage with another in order to attain its sense, for biblical authors did not write to expound one another’s thoughts. Each text should be read as a discrete entity, the key to the understanding of which lies in ascertaining how it functioned as a unit of communication in its setting in the past. Is Spinoza’s hermeneutical program compelling for those who do not share his commitment to naturalism? If one’s goal is to understand the text as a past act of communication, are the questions that Spinoza suggests the best ones to ask? In other words, does he achieve his own goal? How would later advances in research on the Bible alter what Spinoza says in this chapter?

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[1]  All men are ready to say that Holy Scripture is the word of God that teaches us true happiness or the way of salvation, but their actions betray a quite different opinion. For the common people, the last thing that they appear to want is to live by the teaching of Scripture. We see them advancing false notions of their own as the word of God and seeking to use the influence of religion to compel other people to agree with them. As for theologians, we see that for the most part they have sought to extract their own thoughts and opinions from the Bible and thereby endow them with divine authority. There is nothing that they interpret with less hesitation and greater boldness than the Scriptures, that is the mind of the Holy Spirit. If they hesitate at all, it is not because they are afraid of ascribing error to the Holy Spirit or straying from the path of salvation, but rather of being convicted of error by others and seeing themselves despised and their authority trodden underfoot. If people truly believed in their hearts what they say with their lips about Scripture, they would follow a completely different way of life. There would be fewer differences of opinion occupying their minds, fewer bitter controversies between them, and less blind and reckless ambition to distort our interpretation of the Bible and devise novelties in religion. On the contrary, they would not dare to accept anything as biblical teaching which they had not derived from it in the clearest possible way. Sacrilegious persons, who have not been afraid to corrupt the Scriptures in so many places, would have been careful to avoid committing such a dreadful offence and kept their impious hands off them. But vice and ambition have in the end exercised so much influence that religion has been made to consist in defending purely human delusions rather than in following the teachings of the Holy Spirit. Far from consisting of love, it has been turned, under the false labels of holy devotion and ardent zeal, into the promotion of conflict and dissemination of senseless hatred. These bad things have been aggravated by superstition, which teaches people to despise reason, and nature, and revere and venerate only such things as conflict with these both. So it is hardly surprising that to enhance their admiration and reverence for scripture, men seek to interpret it in such a way that it seems to conflict altogether with reason and with nature. They imagine that the most profound mysteries are hidden in Holy Scripture and put all their energy into investigating these absurd issues while neglecting other matters which are useful. The fantasies they come up with they ascribe to the Holy Spirit, attempting to defend them with all the force and power of their passions. For this is how human beings are constructed: whatever they conceive purely with their intellects, they also defend purely with intellect and reason while, on the other hand, whatever opinions they derive from their passions, they defend with their passions. [2] To extricate ourselves from such confusion and to free our minds from theological prejudices and the blind acceptance of human fictions as God’s teaching, we need to analyse and discuss the true method of interpreting Scripture. For if we do not know this, we can know nothing for certain regarding what the Bible or the Holy Spirit wishes to teach. To formulate the matter succinctly, I hold that the method of interpreting

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Scripture, does not differ from the [correct] method of interpreting nature, but rather is wholly consonant with it. The [correct] method of interpreting nature consists above all in constructing a natural history from which we derive the definitions of natural things, as from certain data. Likewise, to interpret Scripture, we need to assemble a genuine history of it and to deduce the thinking of the Bible’s authors by valid inferences from this history, as from certain data and principles. Provided we admit no other criteria or data for interpreting Scripture and discussing its contents than what is drawn from Scripture itself and its history, we will always proceed without any danger of going astray, and we shall have the same assuredness in discussing things that surpass our understanding as in discussing things that we learn by the natural light of reason. [3]  But in order to be perfectly clear that this method is not only the sure way but also the only way, and is consistent with the method of interpreting nature, we should note that the Bible is very often concerned with things that cannot be deduced from principles known by the natural light of reason. For the greater part of it is composed of historical narratives and revelations. In particular, these histories contain miracles, that is (as we showed in the previous chapter), narratives of things unknown to nature adapted to the beliefs and judgments of the chroniclers who compiled them. Revelations likewise are adjusted to the beliefs of the prophets, as we showed in the second chapter, and really do transcend human understanding. Consequently, knowledge of all these things, that is, of almost everything in Scripture, must be sought from the Bible itself, just as knowledge of nature has to be sought from nature itself. [4] As for the moral teachings contained in the Bible, these can indeed be demonstrated from general concepts, but it cannot be demonstrated from general concepts that Scripture teaches them; this can only be made evident from Scripture itself. In fact, if we want to attest the divine character of Scripture objectively, we must establish from the Bible alone that it offers true moral doctrines. This is the only ground on which its divine character can be proven. For we have shown that this is principally what the assurance of the prophets derived from, that their minds were attuned to the right and the good; and this is what we need to be convinced of ourselves, if we are to have confidence in them. We have also already proven that God’s divinity cannot be attested by miracles, not to mention the fact that miracles could also be performed by false prophets. Hence, the divine character of the Bible must needs be established by this one thing alone, that it teaches true virtue, something which can only be established from Scripture itself. Were this not the case, we could not acknowledge the Bible and its divine character without massively prejudging the issue. All of our knowledge of the Bible, hence, must be derived only from the Bible itself. Finally, Scripture does not offer definitions of the things which it speaks of, any more than does nature. Such definitions must be drawn from the various narratives about different things in Scripture just as definitions of natural things are deduced from the different actions of nature.

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[5] The universal rule then for interpreting Scripture is to claim nothing as a biblical doctrine that we have not derived, by the closest possible scrutiny, from its own [i.e. the Bible’s] history.1 What sort of thing a history of Scripture needs to be and what are the principal things it must deal with have now to be explained. (1)  Firstly, such a history must include the nature and properties of the language in which the biblical books were composed and which their authors were accustomed to speak. We can then investigate all the possible meanings that every single phrase in common usage can admit; and because all the writers of both the Old and the New Testament were Hebrews undeniably the history of the Hebrew language is more essential than anything else not only for understanding the books of the Old Testament which were first written in this language, but also those of the New Testament. For while the latter were propagated in other languages, they are full of Hebrew idioms. (2)  [Such a history] must gather together the opinions expressed in each individual book and organize them by subject so that we may have available by this means all the statements that are found on each topic. We should then make note of any that are ambiguous or obscure or seem to contradict others. By obscure expressions I mean those whose sense is difficult to elicit from the context of a passage while those whose meaning is readily elicited I call clear. I am not now speaking of how easily or otherwise their truth is grasped by reason; for we are concerned here only with their meaning, not with their truth. Moreover, in seeking the sense of Scripture we must take care especially not to be blinded by our own reasoning, in so far as it is founded on the principles of natural knowledge (not to mention our preconceptions). In order not to confuse the genuine sense of a passage with the truth of things, we must investigate a passage’s sense only from its use of the language or from reasoning which accepts no other foundation than Scripture itself. To make all this more clearly understood, I will give an example. Moses’ statements, “God is fire” and “God is jealous” are as plain as possible so long as we attend exclusively to the meaning of the words, and therefore I class them as clear expressions, even though, with respect to truth and reason, they are exceedingly obscure. Moreover even though their literal sense conflicts with the natural light of reason, unless it is also clearly in conflict with the principles and fundamentals derived from investigating the history of Scripture we must still stick to this, the literal sense. Conversely, if the literal sense of these expressions is found to conflict with the principles drawn from Scripture, even if they are fully in agreement with reason, they will nevertheless need to be interpreted differently (i.e. metaphorically). In order to know whether or not Moses believed that God is fire, we certainly must not argue on the basis of whether this statement agrees or conflicts with reason but only from other statements made by Moses himself. For example, since Moses also plainly teaches, in many passages, that God has no similarity with visible things in the sky or on earth or in the water, we must conclude that either this statement or all the others have to be interpreted metaphorically. But we should depart as little as possible

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from the literal sense, and therefore we must first ask whether this unique expression, “God is fire,” admits any but a literal sense, i.e. whether the word “fire” has any other meaning apart from natural fire. If we do not find it signifying anything else in normal linguistic usage, that is how we must interpret the expression, however much it may conflict with reason. All the others, however much they agree with reason, will have to be accommodated to this one. Where linguistic usage does not permit this, such statements are irreconcilable, and hence we must suspend judgment about them. Now the word “fire” also stands for anger and jealousy (see Job 31.12), and therefore Moses’ statements are readily reconciled, and we are justified in concluding that they are one and the same. Again, Moses plainly teaches that God is jealous and nowhere teaches that God lacks emotions or mental passions. Hence, we must evidently deduce that this is what Moses believed, or at least what he wanted to teach, however much we may think this statement conflicts with reason. For, as we have already shown, we are not permitted to adjust the meaning of Scripture to the dictates of our reason or our preconceived opinions; all explanation of the Bible must be sought from the Bible alone. (3)  Finally our historical enquiry must explain the circumstances of all the books of the prophets whose memory has come down to us: the life, character and particular interests of the author of each individual book, who exactly he was, on what occasion he wrote, for whom and in what language. Then the fate of each book: namely how it was first received and whose hands it came into, how many variant readings there have been of its text, by whose decision it was received among the sacred books, and finally how all the books which are now accepted as sacred came to form a single corpus. All this, I contend, has to be dealt with in a history of the Bible. It is important to know of the life, character and concerns of each writer, so that we may know which statements are meant as laws and which as moral doctrine; we are more readily able to explain someone’s words, the better we know his mind and personality. It is also crucial to know on what occasion, at what time and for what people or age the various texts were written so that we may not confuse eternal doctrines with those that are merely temporary or useful only to a few people. It is essential, finally, to know all the other things mentioned above, so that, apart from the question of authorship, we may also discover, for each book, whether it may have been contaminated with spurious passages or not; whether mistakes have crept in, and whether the mistakes have been corrected by unskilled or untrustworthy hands. It is vital to know all this, so that we will not be carried away by blind zeal or just accept whatever is put in front of us. We must acknowledge exclusively what is certain and unquestionable. [6]  Only when we have this history of Scripture before us and have made up our minds not to accept anything as a teaching of the prophets which does not follow from this history or may be very clearly derived from it, will it be time to begin investigating

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the minds of the prophets and the Holy Spirit. But this also requires a method and an order like we use for explaining nature on the basis of its history. In setting out to research natural history, we attempt first of all to investigate the things that are most universal and common to the whole of nature, viz. motion and rest and their laws and rules which nature always observes and by which it continually acts; from these we proceed by degrees to others that are less universal. Similarly we must first seek from the biblical history that which is most universal, the basis and foundation of the whole of Scripture, something affirmed by all the biblical prophets as eternal doctrine of supreme value for all men: for example, that there is a God, one and omnipotent, who alone is to be adored and cares for all men, loving most those who worship Him and love their neighbour as themselves, etc. These and similar things, I contend, Scripture teaches so plainly and so explicitly throughout that no one has ever called its meaning into question in these matters. But Scripture does not teach expressly, as eternal doctrine, what God is, and how he sees all things and provides for them, and so on. On the contrary, as we have already seen above, the prophets themselves have no agreed view about these matters, so that on these questions nothing can be regarded as the teaching of the Holy Spirit, even if they can be decided very well by the natural light of reason. [7] Once we have adequately got to know this universal doctrine of Scripture, we should then proceed to other less universal things which concern matters of daily life, flowing like rivulets from the universal teaching. Such are all the particular external actions of true virtue which can only be done when the opportunity arises. Anything found in the Scriptures about these things which is obscure and ambiguous, should be explained and decided only by the Bible’s universal doctrine, and where such passages are self-contradictory, we must consider on what occasion, when, and to whom they were written. When Christ says, “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall receive consolation,” for example, we do not know from the text what he means by “those who mourn.” But later he teaches that we should be anxious about nothing but the kingdom of God alone and its justice, and this is what he commends as the supreme good (see Mt. 6.33). From this it follows that by “those who mourn” he means only those who mourn that the kingdom of God and justice are neglected by men; for only those can mourn this who love nothing but God’s kingdom and justice, and wholly despise all fortune besides. So too when he says, “but to him who strikes you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also,” etc. Had Christ given these commands to judges as a legislator, he would have destroyed the Law of Moses by this edict. But he openly commends that Law (see Mt. 5.17); consequently, we must examine who it was exactly that said these things, to whom and at what time. Certainly, it was Christ who uttered them, but he was not laying down ordinances as a legislator. Rather he was offering doctrine as a teacher, because (as we showed above) it was less external actions that he sought to correct than people’s minds. He pronounced these words to people who

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were oppressed and living in a corrupt state where justice was completely neglected, and he saw that the ruin of that state was imminent. This very doctrine that Christ taught at a time when the city’s desolation was imminent, we see that Jeremiah had also expounded at the time of the first destruction of the city (see Lamentations 3, letters Tet and Yod).2 Hence, the prophets offered this teaching only at a time of oppression, and it is nowhere promulgated as a law. On the contrary, Moses (who did not write at a time of oppression, but, it should be noted, was striving to construct a well-ordered state) issued the edicts to pay an eye for an eye, even though he too condemned vengeance and hatred of one’s neighbour. Thus, it most evidently follows from the very principles of Scripture itself, that the doctrine of suffering injury and giving way to impious men in everything, is appropriate only in places where justice is neglected and in times of oppression, but not in a well-ordered state. Indeed in a viable state, where justice is protected, everyone is obliged, if he wants to be considered just, to prosecute wrongs before a court (see Lev. 5.1), not so as to secure revenge (see Lev. 19.17–18) but to defend justice and his country’s laws and to ensure that wrongdoing does not pay. All of this fully accords with natural reason. I could give many other examples pointing in the same direction, but consider these sufficient to explicate my meaning and the usefulness of this method, which is what concerns me at present. [8]  So far we have explained only how to explore the meaning of biblical statements about questions of daily life. These are issues which are relatively easy to investigate since none of this was ever a subject of controversy for biblical writers. But other matters to be found in the Bible concerning purely philosophical questions, cannot be so easily resolved. The path to be followed here is thus more arduous. As we have already seen, the prophets disagreed among themselves in philosophical matters, and their narratives of things are very much adapted to the presuppositions of their respective times, and therefore we may not infer or explain the meaning of one prophet from clearer passages in another, unless it is absolutely evident that they both held exactly the same opinion. I will therefore now briefly explain how the mind of the prophets in such matters is to be investigated by an enquiry into Scripture. Here too we must again begin from the most universal things, by inquiring first of all, from the clearest scriptural expressions, what prophecy or revelation is, and what it chiefly consists in. Then we must ask, what a miracle is, and continue thus with the most general questions. From these we must descend to the opinions of each individual prophet, and from these in turn proceed finally to the sense of each particular revelation or prophecy, of each narrative and miracle. We have given many examples above, in the appropriate places, showing how much care is needed not to confuse the minds of the prophets and historians with the mind of the Holy Spirit, so I do not think I need to discuss this at greater length. I should remark, however, with regard to the meaning of revelations, that our method only teaches us to invest­ igate what the prophets actually saw or heard, not what they intended to signify or

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represent by these visions; that we can only conjecture, since we certainly cannot deduce it from the principles of Scripture [9]  We have offered a method for interpreting Scripture and at the same time demonstrated that this is the most certain and only way to uncover its true meaning. I grant that certainty about this last is easier to find for those, if they exist, who possess a solid tradition or a true exegesis inherited from the prophets themselves, such as the Pharisees claim to have, or those who possess a Pope who cannot err in the interpretation of scripture, as Roman Catholics proclaim. Since, however, we cannot be certain either about that tradition or papal authority, nothing certain can be grounded on either of these. The latter was denied by the earliest Christians and the former by the most ancient Jewish sects; further, if we then examine the chronology (apart from any other arguments) which the Pharisees inherited from their rabbis by which they trace this tradition back to Moses, we shall find that it is false, as I show in another place.3 This is why such a tradition should be altogether suspect to us. And although we are obliged, by our method, to consider one Jewish tradition as uncorrupt, namely the meaning of words in the Hebrew language we have received from them, we can still fairly have doubts about the former tradition while accepting the latter. For it could never have been of any use to change a word’s meaning, but it might quite often have been useful to someone to alter the meaning of a passage. In fact it is extremely difficult to alter the meaning of a word; anyone who tried it would have at the same time to interpret in his own way and manner all the authors who have written in that language using that term in its accepted sense, or else with the greatest wariness corrupt the text. Again, the learned share with the common people in preserving a language, but the learned alone preserve books and the meanings of texts. Accordingly, we can easily conceive that the learned could have altered or perverted the sense of a passage in a very rare book which they had under their control, but not the significance of words. Anyone who attempts to change the meaning of a word to which he is accustomed will have great difficulty in afterwards sticking consistently to the change in his speech and writing. We are thus wholly convinced, for these and other reasons, that it could never have entered into anyone’s head to corrupt a language but might certainly occur to someone to misrepresent the meaning of a writer by doctoring his texts or interpreting them wrongly. [10] Since our method, based on the principle that knowledge of the Bible is to be sought from Scripture alone, is the only true method, wherever it is unable to yield what is needed for a complete knowledge of Scripture, we must simply give up. I must now therefore point out the limitations and difficulties in this method’s capacity to guide us towards a full and certain knowledge of the sacred books. [11]  Firstly, a major obstacle in this method is that it requires a perfect knowledge of the Hebrew language. But where is this to be sought? The ancient scholars of Hebrew

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have left nothing to posterity about the principles and structure of the language; at least we have absolutely nothing from them: no dictionary, no grammar, no book of rhetoric. The Jewish people have lost all their cultural and artistic accomplishments—no wonder, after suffering so many massacres and persecutions—and have held on to nothing but a few fragments of their language and a few books. Almost all the names of fruits, birds, fish, and very many other words, have perished through the ravages of time. Thus the meaning of many nouns and verbs occurring in the Bible is either completely unknown or disputed. Not only do we lack all this but, worst of all, we have no phrase-book of the language; for almost all the idioms and modes of speech peculiar to the Hebrew people have been erased from man’s memory by all-devouring time.4 We cannot therefore always discover, as we should, all the meanings of each and every phrase which usage of the language might yield, and there will be many statements expressed in distinctly known words whose sense will nevertheless still be highly obscure or utterly incomprehensible. [12]  Besides our inability fully to reconstruct the history of Hebrew, the very nature and structure of the language create so many uncertainties that it is impossible to devise a method which will show us how to uncover the true sense of all the statements of Scripture with assurance. For besides the usual causes of ambiguity common to all tongues, there are certain other features of this language that procduce a whole host of ambiguities. I think it is worth mentioning them here. Firstly, a frequent source of vagueness and obscurity of expression in the Bible arises from the fact that all the letters of each single organ of speech are used interchangeably. Hebrew divides all the letters of the alphabet into five classes, according to the five organs of the mouth involved in pronunciation, i.e. the lips, the tongue, the teeth, the palate and the throat. For example, alef h.et, ‘ayin and heˉ are called gutturals, and one is used for another without any distinction, at least so far as we know. Similarly, el which means “to,” is often used for al, which means “above,” and vice versa. This often renders all the parts of a phrase ambiguous or turns them into sounds devoid of meaning. A second major source of ambiguity of phrases arises from the fact that conjunctions and adverbs have multiple significations. For instance, vav serves indifferently as a conjunction and disjunction: it can mean “and,” “but,” “because,” “moreover” and “then,” ki has seven or eight meanings: “because,” “although,” “if,” “when,” “just as,” “that,” “burning,” etc. It is the same with nearly all the particles. The third ambiguity, that generates many others, is that verbs in the indicative have no present, imperfect, pluperfect, future perfect or other tenses which are usual in other languages; in the imperative and the infinitive they lack all but the present tense, and in the subjunctive they have no tenses at all. All these deficiencies of tense and mood can indeed be compensated for, very readily and neatly, from basic features of the language, following certain rules. But the earliest writers completely ignored them, and indifferently used the future tense for the present and past, and the past for the future, as well as the indicative for the imperative and subjunctive, and this has caused a good deal of uncertainty.

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[13]  Besides these three causes of obscurity in Hebrew, two others should be noted both of which are far more important. The first of these is that Hebrew has no letters for vowels. The second is that the Hebrews did not use punctuation marks to separate clauses or for any kind of expression or emphasis. While both these things (both vowels and signs) are normally indicated by points and accents, we cannot accept these uncritically because they were invented and inserted by critics of a later period, whose authority ought not to weigh with us. It is clear from an abundance of evidence that the ancient writers wrote without points (i.e. without vowels and accents). Later generations added these two features in accordance with their own interpretations of the biblical books. Hence, accents and points which we now have are merely recent interpretations, and deserve no more credit or authority than other explanations of these authors. Those who do not know this criticize the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (11.21) for giving an interpretation of the text of Genesis 47.31 which is very wide of the reading of the pointed Hebrew text—as if the apostle should have learned the meaning of Scripture from those who inserted the points. My view is that it is, rather, the “pointers” who are to blame. I will give both interpretations here, so that everyone may see this, and realize that the difference arises specifically from the lack of vowels. The “pointers” interpreted this text, their points show, as meaning: “and Israel leaned over” (or, changing ‘ayin into alef which is a letter of the same organ of speech, “towards”) “the head of the bed.” But the author of the Letter interprets: “and Israel leant over the head of the stick,” because he is reading mate where others read mita, a difference arising solely from the vowels. Now this narrative is about the old age of Jacob, not about his sickness which comes in the next chapter, and it therefore seems more likely that the historian meant that Jacob leaned on the head of the stick (which of course very old people use to support themselves) and not of the bed, especially since in this way there is no need to suppose any substitution of letters. My aim in giving this example is not just to reconcile the passage of the Letter to the Hebrews with the text of Genesis, but, more importantly, to show how little we should trust modern points and accents. Consequently, anyone who sets out to interpret Scripture without preconceptions is obliged to be sceptical about them and to study the text with fresh eyes. [14] To return to our point, one may easily discern from the structure and nature of the Hebrew language that numerous ambiguities are inevitable, and that no method will resolve them all. We cannot hope for this to be completely achieved by comparing expressions with each other which we have shown is the only way of distinguishing the true sense from the many senses which an expression may admit in ordinary usage. This is because comparison of expressions can only throw light on an expression accidentally, since no prophet wrote with the intention of deliberately explaining either another’s words or his own. It is also because we can only infer the mind of one prophet, Apostle etc. from the mind of another in common, everyday matters, as we have already clearly shown but not when they speak about philosophical things or

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when they narrate miracles or historical events. I could also give some examples to show that many expressions that occur in Holy Scripture are inexplicable, but I prefer to pass this over for the present, and proceed to make some further remarks about the difficulties and limitations of this the true method of interpreting Scripture. [15] A further problem with this method is that it requires a history of the vicissitudes of all the biblical books, and most of this is unknown to us. For either we have no knowledge whatever of the authors, or (if you prefer) the compilers, of many of the books—or else we are uncertain about them, as I will demonstrate fully in the next chapters. Also, we do not know under what circumstances these books whose compilers are unknown were composed or when. Nor do we know into whose hands all these books subsequently came, or in whose copies so many variant readings occur, nor whether there may not have been many additional readings in others. I touched upon the need to know all this at one point but purposely omitted a few things which we should deal with now. If we read any book that contains incredible or incomprehensible things, or is written in very obscure language, and if we do not know its author or when and under what circumstances he wrote it, our efforts to get at its true sense will be fruitless. For if all this is unknown, we cannot ascertain what the author intended or might have intended. When, on the other hand, all these things are adequately known, we determine our thoughts so as not to make prejudicial judgments or attribute to the author, or person on whose behalf he wrote, either more or less than is correct, or take anything else into consideration but what the author could have had in mind, or what the period and context demanded. This I think will be clear to everyone. It frequently happens that we read very similar stories in different books, about which we make quite contrasting judgments, depending on the different views we have of the writers. I remember once reading in a certain book that a man whose name was Orlando Furioso5 was wont to drive a winged monster through the air and fly over any regions he wished, single-handedly killing large numbers of men and giants, and other fantasies of this kind, which are totally incomprehensible to our intellect. I have read a similar story in Ovid about Perseus,6 and another in the books of Judges and Kings7 about Samson (who alone and unarmed killed a thousand men) and Elijah,8 who flew through the air and finally went off to heaven in a fiery chariot and horses. Yet although these stories, as I say, are very much alike, we nevertheless make a very different judgment about each of them. We persuade ourselves that the first writer intended to write only fables, the second poetical themes,9 and the third sacred matters, and the only reason for such [differentiation] is the opinion we have about the writers. Thus it is vitally important to have some knowledge of the authors who have written things which are obscure or incomprehensible to the intellect, if we want to interpret their writings. For the same reasons, it is likewise vital, if we are to be able, when a passage is unintelligible, to reach a true reading from all the variants, to know in whose copy these readings were found and whether other readings have ever been encountered in the copies of other scribes of greater authority.

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[16]  Another and final difficulty in interpreting some biblical books by our method is that we do not now have them in the same language in which they were originally written. The Gospel of Matthew and without doubt also the Letter to the Hebrews are commonly believed to have been composed in Hebrew, but these versions are not extant. There is also some doubt in what language the book of Job was written. Ibn Ezra10 asserts in his commentary that it was translated into Hebrew from another language, and that this is the cause of its obscurity. I will not discuss the apocryphal books, since they are of very different authority. [17]  All these, then, are the difficulties of this method of interpreting Scripture on the basis of its own history which I undertook to describe. I think these difficulties are so great that I do not hesitate to affirm that in numerous passages either we do not know the true sense of Scripture or can only guess at it without any assurance. However, we must also stress that all these problems can only prevent our understanding the minds of the prophets in matters that are incomprehensible and which we can only imagine, and not those topics that are accessible to the intellect and of which we can readily form a clear conception. For matters that by their nature are easily grasped can never be so obscurely phrased that they cannot be readily understood, according to the saying, a word is enough for a wise man.11 Euclid, who wrote nothing that was not eminently straightforward and highly intelligible, is easily explained by anyone in any language. In order to see his meaning and be certain of his sense there is no need to have a complete knowledge of the language in which he wrote, but only a very modest, even schoolboy, acquaintance with it, nor does one need to know the life, interests and character of the author, nor in what language he wrote, to whom and when, nor the subsequent fate of his book or its variant readings, nor how or by what Council it was authorized. What is true of Euclid we may also say about all who have written about things that are intelligible via their own nature. We thus conclude that we can readily discover the meaning of the Bible’s moral teaching from the history of it that we are able to reconstruct, and can be certain about its true sense. For the teachings of true piety are expressed in the most everyday language, since they are very common and extremely simple and easy to understand. And since true salvation and happiness consists in our intellect’s genuine acquiescence [in what is true] and we truly acquiesce only in what we understand very clearly, it most evidently follows that we can securely grasp the meaning of Scripture in matters necessary for salvation and happiness. Consequently, there is no reason why we should be concerned to the same extent about the rest, given that for the most part we are unable to grasp it by reason or the intellect and it is therefore something more curious than useful. [18]  I have now explained, I think, the true method for interpreting Scripture, and sufficiently expounded my view of it. Moreover, I do not doubt that everyone now sees that this method requires no other light than that of natural reason. For the special character and excellence of this light chiefly consists in deducing and concluding by

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valid inferences from things known or accepted as known, matters that are imperfectly understood and this is all that our method requires. Admittedly, this procedure does not suffice to achieve certainty about everything in the biblical books, but this is due not to any defect in our methodology but because the path it shows to be the true and right one was never cultivated, or even ventured on, by men, so that owing to the passage of time, it became arduous and almost impassable, as is eminently clear, I think, from the difficulties that I have pointed out. [19]  It remains now to examine the views of those who disagree with us. First, I shall consider the opinion of those who hold that the natural light of reason does not have the power to interpret Scripture and that for this a supernatural light is absolutely essential.12 What this light is which is beyond nature, I leave to them to explain. I, for my part, can only surmise that they have been trying to admit, in very obscure terms, that they are generally in doubt about the true sense of Scripture; for if we examine their interpretations, we shall find that they contain nothing supernatural, indeed nothing more than mere conjectures. Compare them if you will with the interpretations of those who frankly admit that they have no light beyond the natural light—they will be found to be entirely comparable to them; that is, they are just human conceptions, the result of hard work and much thought. As for their claim that the natural light of reason is not adequate for this task, it is evident that this is false. We have already proved that none of the difficulties in the interpretation of Scripture arises from the inadequacy of the natural light, but only from human carelessness (not to mention malice) in neglecting to construct the history of the Bible when it would have been possible to do so. It is also due (as everyone, I think, would admit) to this supernatural light being a divine gift bestowed only on the faithful. But the prophets and Apostles used to preach not only to the faithful but, primarily, to unbelievers and impious persons, who were thus enabled to understand the meaning of the prophets and Apostles. Otherwise the prophets and Apostles would have appeared to be preaching to little children and infants, not to people endowed with reason; it would have been pointless for Moses to make laws if they could be understood only by the faithful who need no law. Hence those who postulate the need for a supernatural light to interpret the minds of the prophets and Apostles truly seem to be lacking in natural light themselves; so I am very far from believing that such men have a divine supernatural gift. [20]  Maimonides’ view, though, was very different. He thought that every passage of Scripture yields various, even contradictory, senses and that we cannot be certain of the truth of any of them unless we know that that passage which we are interpreting, contains nothing that is contrary to or that does not accord with reason. If its literal sense is found to conflict with reason, no matter how evident that may seem to be in itself, he insists it should then be construed differently. He makes this absolutely plain in his More Nebuchim13 Part II, Chapter 25, where he says: “Know that we do not refrain from saying that the world has existed from eternity on account of texts in Scripture about the creation of the world.

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For the passages teaching that the world was created are no more numerous than those which teach that God is corporeal. None of the ways by which we might explain the texts on the creation of the world are barred to us or even obstructed; indeed, we could have used the same method to interpret these as we used to reject the corporality of God. It might even have been much easier. We might have been able to explain these texts more naturally and find more support [in Scripture] for the eternity of the world than we found for the view that the blessed God is corporeal, which, on our interpretation, Scripture excludes. But two reasons persuade me not to do this and not to believe this” (namely, that the world is eternal). “Firstly, because there is clear proof that God is not corporeal, and it is necessary to explain all the passages whose literal sense is in conflict with this proof, for it is certain that they will have an explanation” (other than the literal one). “But there is no proof of the eternity of the world; and therefore it is not necessary, in quest of such a conception, to do violence to Scripture for the sake of an apparent opinion since we would accept its contrary if we found a convincing argument for it. The second reason is that to believe that God is incorporeal is not in conflict with the fundamentals of the Law, etc. But to believe in the eternity of the world in the manner in which Aristotle held destroys the Law from its foundations, etc.” These are the words of Maimonides, from which what we have just said plainly follows. For if it was clear to him on the basis of reason that the world was eternal, he would not hesitate to bend Scripture to devise an interpretation that would ultimately render it saying apparently the same thing. In fact, he would be immediately convinced that Scripture intended to teach the eternity of the world, despite the fact that it everywhere says the opposite. Hence, it is impossible for him to be certain of the Bible’s true meaning, however plain it may be, as long as he can doubt the truth of what is stated there, or as long as its truth is not fully evident to him. For while the truth of a thing is not evident we will not know whether it agrees with reason or contradicts it and, consequently, will also not know whether the literal sense is true or false. Were this approach indeed the correct one, I absolutely agree that we would then need something beyond the natural light for interpreting Scripture. For there is almost nothing in the Bible that can be deduced from principles known by the natural light of reason (as we have already shown), and therefore we simply cannot be certain about their truth by means of the natural light. Hence, we could not be certain about the true meaning and sense of Scripture either, and we would necessarily need another light. Again, were this conception [of Maimonides] correct, it would follow that the common people, who for the most part do not understand proofs or do not have time to examine them, will only be able to reach any conclusion at all about Scripture on the sole authority and testimony of philosophers, and consequently would have to suppose that philosophers cannot err in interpreting Scripture. This would surely produce a new ecclesiastical authority and a novel species of priest or pontiff, which would more likely be mocked than venerated by the common people. While our method requires a knowledge of Hebrew and the common people likewise have no time to study that, no such objection weakens our position. For

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the Jewish and gentile common people for whom in their day the prophets and Apostles preached and wrote, understood their language so that they also grasped the prophets’ meaning. Yet they did not understand the reasons for what the prophets preached, though, according to Maimonides, they needed to know them if they were going to grasp their meaning. Under our methodological scheme, hence, it need not follow that the common people must accept the testimony of interpreters. I can point to the common people who understood very well the language of the prophets and Apostles, but Maimonides will not be able to point to any common people who understand the causes of things and grasp their meaning on that basis. As far as the common people of today, are concerned, we have already shown that they can readily grasp in any language everything necessary for salvation as this is all entirely normal and familiar, even if they are ignorant about the reasons for what is required; and the common people rely on this understanding, and certainly not on the testimony of interpreters. As for everything else, there they are in the same position as the learned. [21]  But let us return to Maimonides’ stance and look at it more carefully. Firstly, it presupposes that the prophets agreed among themselves in everything and were consummate philosophers and theologians; for he insists that they reached conclusions from the truth of things which we showed in Chapter 2 to be false. Then his position assumes that the sense of Scripture cannot be established from the Bible itself; for the truth of things is not established from Scripture since it offers no demonstration of anything, and does not teach the things about which it speaks by means of definitions and their own first causes. According to Maimonides, therefore, its true sense cannot be established from itself and should not be sought from the Bible itself. But it is evident from this chapter that this too is incorrect. We have shown by both reason and examples that the sense of Scripture is established from the Bible itself and, even when it speaks about things known by the natural light of reason, is to be sought from the Bible alone. Finally, his view assumes that we are permitted to explain and distort the words of Scripture according to our own preconceived opinions, and to reject the literal sense, even when it is perfectly lucid and explicit, and bend it to some other sense. Apart from the fact that such liberty is diametrically opposed to what we have proved in this and other chapters, nobody can fail to see that it is excessively audacious. But suppose we granted such great freedom, what does it achieve? Assuredly, nothing at all. For those things that are indemonstrable and which compose the larger part of Scripture cannot be investigated by this procedure nor explained or interpreted by this approach. Whereas, on the other hand, by following our method, we can explain many such things and discuss them with assurance, as we have already shown both by reason and by the fact itself. As for whatever is comprehensible from its nature, its sense, as we have already shown, can readily be derived from the context of what is said. Hence the method [of Maimonides] is plainly useless. It also utterly deprives the common people of the assurance they derive from conscientious reading and which

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everyone can have of the sense of Scripture by following a different method. This is why we dismiss this opinion of Maimonides as harmful, useless and absurd. [22]  As for the tradition of the Pharisees, we have already noted above that it is inconsistent with itself while the authority of the Roman Popes requires clearer evidence, and for this reason alone I reject it. For if they could prove [their authority] to us from Scripture itself and with the same certainty as the Hebrew high priests could once do, it would not worry me that among the Roman Popes there have been a number of heretics and impious men. For formerly among the Hebrews heretics and impious men were also to be found who acquired the supreme pontificate by dubious means and yet nevertheless wielded, by edict of Scripture, the supreme power of interpreting the law. See Deuteronomy 17.11–12 and 33.10 and Malachi 2.8. But as they produce no such testimony, their authority remains wholly suspect. In case anyone is misled by the example of the Hebrew High Priest to believe that the Catholic religion too requires a high priest, one must remark that the laws of Moses were the public laws of a country and necessarily needed therefore a public authority for their preservation. If every individual had the liberty to interpret the public laws at his own discretion, no state could survive; it would immediately be dissolved by this very fact, and public law would be private law. It is wholly different with religion. Since it does not consist so much in external actions as in simplicity and truth of mind, it does not belong to any public law or authority. For simplicity and truth of mind are not instilled in men by the power of laws or by public authority, and absolutely no one can be compelled to be happy by force of law. It requires rather pious and fraternal advice, a proper upbringing and, more than anything else, one’s own free judgment. Since therefore the supreme right of thinking freely, about religion also, belongs to each and every individual, and it cannot be conceived that anyone could surrender this right, every individual will also possess the supreme right and authority to judge freely about religion and to explain it and interpret it for himself. The reason why the supreme authority in interpreting the laws and the supreme judgment on public questions lie with the magistrate is simply because they are matters of public right. For the same reason the authority to interpret religion and make judgments about it, will lie with each individual man, because it is a question of individual right. It is therefore far from being the case that the authority of the Roman Pontiff to interpret religion can be inferred from the authority of the Hebrew High Priest to interpret the laws; on the contrary, one may more readily conclude from this that it is principally the individual who possesses this authority. And as the highest authority to interpret Scripture rests with each individual, the rule of interpretation must be nothing other than the natural light of reason which is common to all men, and not some light above nature or any external authority. The criterion should not be so difficult that it cannot be applied by any but the most acute philosophers, but should be adapted to the natural and common intelligence and capacity of [all] human beings, as we have shown that our norm is; for we have seen that the difficulties which it continues to present have their origin not in the nature of the method but in men’s carelessness.

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Notes 1

Ex ipsius historia.

2

Lamentations 3.25–30.

3

See chapter 10.

4

Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.234 tempus edax rerum.

5 Ariosto, Orlando Furioso 10.66. 6 Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.600ff. 7

Judges 15.9–16.

8

2 Kings 2.11.

9

Accepting the emendation “res poeticas” for “res politicas.”

10 Ibn Ezra, Commentary on Job, 2.11. 11 Terence, Phormio 541, Plautus, Persa 729. 12 Presumably, Spinoza is chiefly thinking here of such Dutch Collegiant Bible critics as Petrus Serrarius (1600–9), Jan Pietersz. Beelthower (c. 1603–c. 1669), and his close friend Jarig Jelles (c. 1620–83), all of whom he knew well since his early years in Amsterdam and with whom he had doubtless often debated. 13 Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed II.25.

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2 David Strauss The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Selections from the Introduction, “Development of the Mythical Point of View in Relation to the Gospel Histories”*

D

avid Strauss (1808–74) was a German theologian, philosopher, and biographer. His major early publications were a life of Jesus, excerpted in this reader, and a history of Christian doctrine. Because of the backlash against the heterodox conclusions he reached, he was denied academic appointments. He spent 20 years engaged in other pursuits, including writing biographies and holding political office. After this, he returned to theology and published further works in that field as well as in philosophy. Strauss’s Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835/6) is known primarily for two things. First, it vigorously develops a richly detailed case that the overall picture of Jesus Christ emerging from the four Gospels is not historically reliable. Strauss’s text attempts to persuade by the cumulative weight of its argument, and it stirred responses from many more traditional theologians. Second, another aspect of the text underwrites Strauss’s verdict on the historicity of the New Testament’s portrayal of Jesus, and is more directly germane to the theme of this reader. That is his construal of the genre of the Gospels as “mythology.” A great deal turns on what he means by this term. As Strauss employs the term, it does not refer to a spurious story that was invented with a view toward misleading people. Instead, the Gospels are myths in

All original notes have been removed.

*

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the following sense. They were not created in a single act of composition, but were pieced together gradually over the course of time as stories about Jesus accumulated. They are the product of the memory and imagination of whole communities, not the work of an individual author. These ancient communities did not, of course, think along modern lines, attributing every effect in the world to a natural cause. Instead, they were quick to explain events with reference to divine action. Furthermore, their minds were formed by the Hebrew scriptures; as a result, they developed the expectation that a messiah of a certain sort would come, and they interpreted events that they witnessed by means of the categories they had. Because the Gospels consist of unconscious projections of the hopes of primitive people who were steeped in a religious thought matrix, there are many inaccuracies in the Gospels. Yet it does not follow that the texts perpetrate willful deception. At the end of this selection, Strauss spells out a series of criteria by which to discern whether or not individual passages are accurate. Before fully expounding his own account of myth, Strauss provides a pre-history of the view by canvassing various forerunners, beginning with pre-Christian sources and continuing up to his close contemporaries. Despite resistance to applying the category of myth to the Gospels, not least from theologians, Strauss positions himself as capitalizing on previous developments and consolidating these gains with his own formulation. Though Strauss’s work met with stiff resistance at the time of its publication, the ideas of the text have percolated through later Christian history and have had influence, especially among liberal Christians and among historians of early Christianity. The details of Strauss’s proposals have been widely questioned, and even those who follow the broad outlines of his work, in seeing the Gospels as myths in some sense, though not as deliberate falsehoods, seldom root themselves as deeply as Strauss does in the philosophy of Hegel. Is Strauss right to claim that the Gospels offer themselves to readers in the terms that he sets out? How would more recent research affect the plausibility of his category of myth?

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1. Inevitable rise of different modes of explaining sacred histories Wherever a religion, resting upon written records, prolongs and extends the sphere of its dominion, accompanying its votaries through the varied and progressive stages of mental cultivation, a discrepancy between the representations of those ancient records, referred to as sacred, and the notions of more advanced periods of mental development, will inevitably sooner or later arise. In the first instance this disagreement is felt in reference only to the unessential—the external form: the expressions and delineations are seen to be inappropriate; but by degrees it manifests itself also in regard to that which is essential: the fundamental ideas and opinions in these early writings fail to be commensurate with a more advanced civilization. As long as this discrepancy is either not in itself so considerable, or else is not so universally discerned and acknowledged, as to lead to a complete renunciation of these Scriptures as of sacred authority, so long will a system of reconciliation by means of interpretation be adopted and pursued by those who have a more or less distinct consciousness of the existing incongruity. A main element in all religious records is sacred history; a history of events in which the divine enters, without intermediation, into the human; the ideal thus assuming an immediate embodiment. But as the progress of mental cultivation mainly consists in the gradual recognition of a chain of causes and effects connecting natural phenomena with each other; so the mind in its development becomes ever increasingly conscious of these mediate links which are indispensable to the realization of the ideal; and hence the discrepancy between the modern culture and the ancient records, with regard to their historical portion, becomes so apparent, that the immediate intervention of the divine in human affairs loses its probability. Besides, as the humanity of these records is the humanity of an early period, consequently of an age comparatively undeveloped and necessarily rude, a sense of repulsion is likewise excited. The incongruity may be thus expressed. The divine cannot so have happened; (not immediately, not in forms so rude;) or, that which has so happened cannot have been divine:—and if a reconciliation be sought by means of interpretation, it will be attempted to prove, either that the divine did not manifest itself in the manner related,—which is to deny the historical validity of the ancient Scriptures; or, that the actual occurrences were not divine—which is to explain away the absolute contents of these books. In both cases the interpretation may be partial or impartial: partial, if undertaken with a determination to close the eyes to the secretly recognized fact of the disagreement between the modern culture and the ancient records, and to see only in such interpretation the original signification of these records; impartial, if it unequivocally acknowledges and openly avows that the matters narrated in these books must be viewed in a light altogether different from that in which they were regarded by the authors themselves. This latter method, however, by no means involves the entire rejection of the religious

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documents; on the contrary, the essential may be firmly retained, whilst the unessential is unreservedly abandoned.

2. Different explanations of sacred legends among the Greeks Though the Hellenistic religion cannot be said to have rested upon written records, it became enshrined in the Greek poems, for example, in those of Homer and Hesiod; and these, no less than its orally transmitted legends, did not fail to receive continually varying interpretations, successively adapted to the progressive intellectual culture of the Greeks. At an early period the rigid philosophy of the Greeks, and under its influence even some of the Greek poets, recognized the impossibility of ascribing to Deity manifestations so grossly human, so immediate, and so barbarous, as those exhibited and represented as divine in the wild conflicts of Hesiod’s Theogony, and in the domestic occupations and trivial pursuits of the Homeric deities. Hence arose the quarrel of Plato, and prior to him of Pindar, with Homer; hence the cause which induced Anaxagoras, to whom the invention of the allegorical mode of interpretation is ascribed, to apply the Homeric delineations to virtue and to justice; hence it was that the Stoics understood the Theogony of Hesiod as relating to the action of the elements, which, according to their notions, constituted, in their highest union, the divine nature. Thus did these several thinkers, each according to his own peculiar mode of thought, succeed in discovering an absolute meaning in these representations: the one finding in them a physical, the other an ethical signification, whilst, at the same time, they gave up their external form, ceasing to regard them as strictly historical. On the other hand, the more popular and sophistical culture of another class of thinkers led them to opposite conclusions. Though, in their estimation, every semblance of the divine had evaporated from these histories; though they were convinced that the proceedings ascribed to the gods were not godlike, still they did not abandon the historical sense of these narratives. With Evemerus they transformed the subjects of these histories from gods to men, to heroes and sages of antiquity, kings and tyrants, who, through deeds of might and valour, had acquired divine honours. Some indeed went still further, and, with Polybius, considered the whole system of heathen theology as a fable, invented by the founders of states to awe the people into subjection.

3. Allegoric interpretations among the Hebrews—Philo Whilst, on the one hand, the isolation and stability of the Hebrews served to retard the development of similar manifestations amongst this people, on the other hand, when once actually developed, they were the more marked; because, in proportion to the high degree of authority ascribed to the sacred records, was the skill and caution

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required in their interpretation. Thus, even in Palestine, subsequent to the exile, and particularly after the time of the Maccabees, many ingenious attempts were made to interpret the Old Testament so as to remove offensive literalities, supply deficiencies, and introduce the notions of a later age. Examples of this system of interpretation occur in the writings of the Rabbins, and even in the New Testament; but it was at that place where the Jewish mind came into contact with Greek civilization, and under its influence was carried beyond the limits of its own national culture—namely, at Alexandria—that the allegorical mode of interpretation was first consistently applied to the whole body of historical narrative in the Old Testament. Many had prepared the way, but it was Philo who first fully developed the doctrine of both a common and a deeper sense of the Holy Scriptures. He was by no means inclined to cast away the former, but generally placed the two together, side by side, and even declared himself opposed to those who, everywhere and without necessity, sacrificed the literal to the higher signification. In many cases, however, he absolutely discarded the verbal meaning and historical conception, and considered the narrative merely as the figurative representation of an idea. He did so, for example, whenever the sacred story appeared to him to present delineations unworthy of Deity, tending either to materialism or anthropomorphism, or otherwise to contain contradictions. The fact that the Jews, whilst they adopted this mode of explaining the Old Testament, (which, in order to save the purity of the intrinsic signification, often sacrificed the historical form), were never led into the opposite system of Evemerus (which preserved the historical form by divesting the history of the divine, and reducing it to a record of mere human events), is to be ascribed to the tenacity with which that people ever adhered to the supernatural point of view. The latter mode of interpretation was first brought to bear upon the Old Testament by the Christians.

4. Allegorical interpretations among the Christians—Origen To the early Christians who, antecedent to the fixing of the Christian canon, made especial use of the Old Testament as their principal sacred record, an allegorical interpretation was the more indispensable, inasmuch as they had made greater advances beyond the views of the Old Testament writers than even the most enlightened of the Jews. It was no wonder therefore that this mode of explanation, already in vogue among the Jews, was almost universally adopted by the primitive Christian churches. It was however again in Alexandria that it found the fullest application amongst the Christians, and that in connexion with the name of Origen. Origen attributes a threefold meaning to the Scriptures, corresponding with his distribution of the human being into three parts: the literal sense answering to the body; the moral, to the soul; and the mystical, to the spirit. The rule with him was to retain all three meanings, though differing in worth; in some particular cases, however, he was of opinion that the literal interpretation either gave no sense at all, or else a perverted sense, in order the more directly to impel the reader to the discovery of its mystical signification.

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Origen’s repeated observation that it is not the purpose of the biblical narratives to transmit old tales, but to instruct in the rules of life; his assertion that the merely literal acceptation of many of the narratives would prove destructive of the Christian religion; and his application of the passage “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,” to the relative worth of the allegorical and the literal modes of biblical interpretation, may be understood as indicating only the inferiority of the literal to the deeper signification. But the literal sense is decidedly given up when it is said, “Every passage of Scripture has a spiritual element, but not every one has a corporeal element” “A spiritual truth often exists embodied in a corporeal falsehood;” “The Scriptures contain many things which never came to pass, interwoven with the history, and he must be dull indeed who does not of his own accord observe that much which the Scriptures represent as having happened never actually occurred. Among the passages which Origen regarded as admitting no other than an allegorical interpretation, besides those which too sensibly humanized the Deity, he included those which attributed unworthy action to individuals who had held intimate communion with God. It was not however from the Old Testament views alone that Origen had, in consequence of his Christian training, departed so widely that he felt himself compelled, if he would retain his reverence for the sacred records, to allegorize their contents, as a means of reconciling the contradiction which had arisen between them and his own mind. There was much likewise in the New Testament writings which so little accorded with his philosophical notions, that he found himself constrained to adopt a similar proceeding in reference to them. He reasoned thus:—the New Testament and the Old are the work of the same spirit, and this spirit would proceed in the same manner in the production of the one and of the other, interweaving fiction with reality, in order thereby to direct the mind to the spiritual signification. In a remarkable passage of his work against Celsus, Origen classes together, and in no ambiguous language, the partially fabulous stories of profane history, and of heathen mythology, with the gospel narratives. He expresses himself as follows: “In almost every history it is a difficult task, and not unfrequently an impossible one, to demonstrate the reality of the events recorded, however true they may in fact be. Let us suppose some individual to deny the reality of a Trojan war on account of the incredibilities mixed up with the history; as, for example, the birth of Achilles from a goddess of the sea. How could we substantiate the fact, encumbered as it is with the numerous and undeniable poetical fictions which have, in some unascertainable manner, become interwoven with the generally admitted account of the war between the Greeks and the Trojans? There is no alternative: he who would study history with understanding, and not suffer himself to be deluded, must weigh each separate detail, and consider what is worthy of credit and may he believed without further evidence; what, on the contrary, must be regarded as merely figurative; (τίνα δὲ τροπολογήσει) always bearing in mind the aim of the narrator,—and what must be wholly mistrusted as being written with intent to please certain individuals.” In conclusion Origen says, “I was desirous of making these preliminary observations in relation to the entire history of Jesus given in the Gospels, not with the view of exacting from the enlightened a blind and baseless

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belief, but with design to show how indispensable to the study of this history are not only judgment and diligent examination, but, so to speak, the very penetrating into the mind of the author, in order to discover the particular aim with which each narrative may have been written.” We here see Origen almost transcending the limits of his own customary point of view, and verging towards the more modern mythical view. But if his own prepossessions in favour of the supernatural, and his fear of giving offence to the orthodox church, combined to hinder him from making a wider application of the allegorical mode of interpretation to the Old Testament, the same causes operated still more powerfully in relation to the New Testament; so that when we further inquire of which of the gospel histories in particular did Origen reject the historical meaning, in order to hold fast a truth worthy of God? the instances will prove to be meagre in the extreme. For when he says, in illustration of the above-mentioned passage, that amongst other things, it is not to be understood literally that Satan showed to Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth from a mountain, because this is impossible to the bodily eye; he here gives not a strictly allegorical interpretation, but merely a different turn to the literal sense, which, according to him, relates not to an external fact, but to the internal fact of a vision. Again, even where the text offers a tempting opportunity of sacrificing the literal to the spiritual meaning, as, for example, the cursing of the fig-tree, Origen does not speak out freely. He is most explicit when speaking of the expulsion of the buyers and sellers from the temple; he characterizes the conduct of Jesus according to the literal interpretation, as assuming and seditious. He moreover expressly remarks that the Scriptures contain many more historical than merely scriptural truths.

5. Transition to more modern times—deists and naturalists of the 17th and 18th centuries—The Wolfenbüttel fragmentist Thus was developed one of those forms of interpretation to which the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, in common with all other religious records, in relation to their historical contents, became necessarily subjected; that, namely, which recognizes in them the divine, but denies it to have actually manifested itself in so immediate a manner. The other principal mode of interpretation, which, to a certain extent, acknowledges the course of events to have been historically true, but assigns it to a human and not a divine origin, was developed amongst the enemies of Christianity by a Celsus, a Porphyry, and a Julian. They indeed rejected much of the history as altogether fabulous; but they admitted many of the incidents related of Moses, Jesus, and others, to be historical facts: these facts were however considered by them as originating from common motives; and they attributed their apparently supernatural character either to gross fraud or impious sorcery. It is worthy of observation that the circumstances attending the introduction of these several modes of interpretation into the heathen and Jewish religions, on the one hand, and into the Christian religion, on the other, were different. The religion

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and sacred literature of the Greeks and Hebrews had been gradually developed with the development of the nation, and it was not until the intellectual culture of the people had outgrown the religion of their fathers, and the latter was in consequence verging towards decay, that the discrepancy which is the source of these varying interpretations became apparent. Christianity, on the contrary, came into a world of already advanced civilization; which was, with the exception of that of Palestine, the Judaico-Hellenistic and the Greek. Consequently a disagreement manifested itself at the very beginning; it was not now however, as in former times, between modern culture and an ancient religion, but between a new religion and ancient culture. The production of allegorical interpretations among the Pagans and the Hebrews, was a sign that their religion had lost its vitality; the allegories of Origen and the attacks of Celsus, in reference to Christianity, were evidences rather that the world had not as yet duly accommodated itself to the new religion. As however with the christianizing of the Roman empire, and the overthrow of the chief heresies, the Christian principle gained an ever-increasing supremacy; as the schools of heathen wisdom closed; and the uncivilized Germanic tribes lent themselves to the teaching of the church;—the world, during the tedious centuries of the middle ages, was satisfied with Christianity, both in form and in substance. Almost all traces of those modes of interpretation which presuppose a discrepancy between the culture of a nation, or of the world, and religion, in consequence disappeared. The reformation effected the first breach in the solid structure of the faith of the church. It was the first vital expression of a culture, which had now in the heart of Christendom itself, as formerly in relation to Paganism and Judaism, acquired strength and independence sufficient to create a reaction against the soil of its birth, the prevailing religion. This reaction, so long as it was directed against the dominant hierarchy, constituted the sublime, but quickly terminated, drama of the reformation. In its later direction against the Bible, it appeared again upon the stage in the barren revolutionary efforts of deism; and many and various have been the forms it has assumed in its progress down to the present time. The deists and naturalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries renewed the polemic attacks of the pagan adversaries of Christianity in the bosom of the Christian church; and gave to the public an irregular and confused mass of criticisms, impugning the authenticity and credibility of the Scriptures, and exposing to contempt the events recorded in the sacred volume. Toland, Bolingbroke, and others, pronounced the Bible to be a collection of unauthentic and fabulous books; whilst some spared no pains to despoil the biblical histories, and the heroes whose actions they celebrate, of every ray of divine light. Thus, according to Morgan, the law of Moses is a miserable system of superstition, blindness, and slavery; the Jewish priests are deceivers; and the Jewish prophets the originators of the distractions and civil wars of the two kingdoms of Judah and Israel. According to Chubb, the Jewish religion cannot be a revelation from God, because it debases the moral character of the Deity by attributing to him arbitrary conduct, partiality for a particular people, and above all, the cruel command to exterminate the Canaanitish nations. Assaults were likewise made by these and other deists upon the New Testament: the apostles

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were suspected of being actuated by selfish and mercenary motives; the character of Jesus himself was not spared, and the fact of his resurrection was denied. The miracles of Jesus, wrought by an immediate exercise of divine power in human acts and concerns, were made the particular objects of attack by Woolston. This writer is also worthy of notice on account of the peculiar position taken by him between the ancient allegorists and the modern naturalists. His whole reasoning turns upon the alternative; either to retain the historical reality of the miracles narrated in the Bible, and thus to sacrifice the divine character of the narratives, and reduce the miracles to mere artifices, miserable juggleries, or common-place deceptions; or, in order to hold fast the divine character of these narratives, to reject them entirely as details of actual occurrences, and regard them as historical representations of certain spiritual truths. Woolston cites the authority of the most distinguished allegorists among the fathers in support of this view. He is wrong however in representing them as supplanting the literal by the figurative meaning. These ancient fathers, on the contrary, were disposed to retain both the literal and the allegorical meaning. (A few examples in Origen, it is true, are an exception to this rule.) It may be doubted, from the language of Woolston, which alternative was adopted by himself. If we reason from the fact, that before he appeared as the opponent of the commonly entertained views of Christianity, he occupied himself with allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures, we may be led to consider the latter alternative as expressing his real conviction. On the other hand, he enlarges with so evident a predilection on the absurdities of the miracles, when literally understood, and the manner in which he treats the whole subject is so tinged with levity, that we may suspect the Deist to put forward the allegorical interpretations merely as a screen, from behind which he might inveigh the more unreservedly against the literal signification. Similar deistical objections against the Bible, and the divine character of its history, were propagated in Germany, chiefly by an anonymous author (Reimarus) whose manuscripts were discovered by Lessing in the Wolfenbüttel library. Some portions of these manuscripts, called the “Wolfenbüttel Fragments,” were published by Lessing in 1774. They consist of Essays, one of which treats of the many arguments which may be urged against revealed religion in general; the others relate partly to the Old and partly to the New Testament. It is the opinion of the Fragmentist, in relation to the Old Testament, first, that the men, of whom the Scriptures narrate that they had immediate communications with God, were so unworthy, that such intercourse, admitting its reality, compromised the character of Deity; secondly, that the result of this intercourse,—the instructions and laws alleged to have been thus divinely communicated,—were so barbarous and destructive, that to ascribe them to God is impossible; and thirdly, that the accompanying miracles were at once absurd and incredible. From the whole, it appears to him clear, that the divine communications were only pretended; and that the miracles were delusions, practised with the design of giving stability and efficiency to certain laws and institutions highly advantageous to the rulers and priests. The author finds much to condemn in the conduct of the patriarchs, and their simulations of divine communications; such as the command

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to Abraham to sacrifice his son. But it is chiefly Moses upon whom he seeks, in a long section, to cast all the obloquy of an impostor, who did not scruple to employ the most disgraceful means in order to make himself the despotic ruler of a free people: who, to effect his purpose, feigned divine apparitions, and pretended to have received the command of God to perpetrate acts which, but for this divine sanction, would have been stigmatized as fraudulent, as highway robbery, as inhuman barbarity. For instance, the spoiling of the Egyptians, and the extirpation of the inhabitants of Canaan; atrocities which, when introduced by the words “Jehovah hath said it,” became instantly transformed into deeds worthy of God. The Fragmentist is as little disposed to admit the divinity of the New Testament histories. He considers the aim of Jesus to have been political; and his connexion with John the Baptist a preconcerted arrangement, by which the one party should recommend the other to the people. He views the death of Jesus as an event by no means foreseen by himself, but which frustrated all his plans; a catastrophe which his disciples knew not how else to repair than by the fraudulent pretence that Jesus was risen from the dead, and by an artful alteration of his doctrines.

6. Natural mode of explanation adopted by the rationalists— Eichhorn—Paulus Whilst the reality of the biblical revelation, together with the divine origin and supernatural character of the Jewish and Christian histories, were tenaciously maintained in opposition to the English deists by numerous English apologists, and in opposition to the Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist by the great majority of German theologians, there arose a distinct class of theologians in Germany, who struck into a new path. The ancient pagan mythology, as understood by Evemerus, admitted of two modes of explanation, each of which was in fact adopted. The deities of the popular worship might, on the one hand, be regarded as good and benevolent men; as wise lawgivers, and just rulers, of early times, whom the gratitude of their contemporaries and posterity had encircled with divine glory; or they might, on the other hand, be viewed as artful impostors and cruel tyrants, who had veiled themselves in a nimbus of divinity, for the purpose of subjugating the people to their dominion. So, likewise, in the purely human explanation of the bible histories, besides the method of the deists to regard the subjects of these narratives as wicked and deceitful men, there was yet another course open: to divest these individuals of their immediate divinity, but to accord to them an undegraded humanity; not indeed to look upon their deeds as miraculous;—as little on the other hand to decry them as impositions;—but to explain their proceedings as altogether natural, yet morally irreprehensible. If the Naturalist was led by his special enmity to the Christianity of the church to the former explanation, the Rationalist, anxious, on the contrary, to remain within the pale of the church, was attracted towards the latter. Eichhorn, in his critical examination of the Wolffenbüttel Fragments, directly opposes this rationalistic view to that maintained by the Naturalist. He agrees with

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the Fragmentist in refusing to recognize an immediate divine agency, at all events in the narratives of early date. The mythological researches of a Heyne had so far enlarged his circle of vision as to lead Eichhorn to perceive that divine interpositions must be alike admitted, or alike denied, in the primitive histories of all people. It was the practice of all nations, of the Grecians as well as the Orientals, to refer every unexpected or inexplicable occurrence immediately to the Deity. The sages of antiquity lived in continual communion with superior intelligences. Whilst these representations (such is Eichhorn’s statement of the matter) are always, in reference to the Hebrew records, understood verbally and literally, it has hitherto been customary to explain similar representations in the pagan histories, by presupposing either deception and gross falsehood, or the misinterpretation and corruption of tradition. But Eichhorn thinks justice evidently requires that Hebrew and pagan history should be treated in the same way; so that intercourse with celestial beings during a state of infancy, must either be accorded to all nations, pagan and Hebrew, or equally denied to all. The mind hesitates to make so universal an admission: first, on account of the not unfrequent errors contained in religions claiming to have been divinely communicated; secondly, from a sense of the difficulty of explaining the transition of the human race from a state of divine tutelage to one of self-dependence: and lastly, because in proportion as intelligence increases, and the authenticity of the records may be more and more confidently relied upon, in the same proportion do these immediate divine influences invariably disappear. If, accordingly, the notion of supernatural interposition is to be rejected with regard to the Hebrews, as well as to all other people, the view generally taken of pagan antiquity presents itself, at first sight, as that most obviously applicable to the early Hebrews; namely, that their pretended revelations were based upon deceit and falsehood, or that their miraculous histories should be referred to the misrepresentations and corruptions of tradition. This is the view of the subject actually applied by the Fragmentist to the Old Testament; a representation, says Eichhorn, from which the mind on a nearer contemplation recoils. Is it conceivable that the greatest men of antiquity, whose influence operated so powerfully and so beneficially upon their age, should one and all have been impostors, and yet have escaped the detection of their contemporaries? According to Eichhorn, so perverted a view could arise only in a mind that refused to interpret the ancient records in the spirit of their age. Truly, had they been composed with all the philosophical accuracy of the writers of the present day, we should have been compelled to find in them either actual divine interpositions, or a fraudulent pretence. But they are the production of an infant, and unscientific age; and treat, without reserve of divine interventions, in accordance with the conceptions and phraseology of that early period. So that, in point of fact, we have neither miracles to wonder at, on the one hand, nor deceptions to unmask on the other; but simply the language of a former age to translate into that of our own day. Eichhorn observes that before the human race had gained a knowledge of the true causes of things, all occurrences were referred to supernatural agencies, or to the interposition of superhuman beings. Lofty conceptions, noble resolves, useful inventions and regulations, but more

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especially vivid dreams, were the operations of that Deity under whose immediate influence they believed themselves placed. Manifestations of distinguished intelligence and skill, by which some individual excited the wonder of the people, were regarded as miraculous; as signs of supernatural endowments, and of a particular intercourse with higher beings. And this was the belief, not of the people only, but also of these eminent individuals, who entertained no doubt of the fact, and who exulted in the full conviction of being in mysterious connexion with the Deity. Eichhorn is of opinion that no objection can be urged against the attempt, to resolve all the Mosaic narratives into natural occurrences, and thus far he concedes to the Fragmentist his primary position; but he rejects his inference that Moses was an impostor, pronouncing the conclusion to be over-hasty and unjust. Thus Eichhorn agreed with the Naturalists in divesting the biblical narratives of all their immediately divine contents, but he differed from them in this, that he explained the supernatural lustre which adorns these histories, not as a fictitious coloring imparted with design to deceive, but as a natural and as it were spontaneous illumination reflected from antiquity itself. In conformity with these principles Eichhorn sought to explain naturally the histories of Noah, Abraham, Moses, etc. Viewed in the light of that age, the appointment of Moses to be the leader of the Israelites was nothing more than the long cherished project of the patriot to emancipate his people, which when presented before his mind with more than usual vividness in his dreams, was believed by him to be a divine inspiration. The flame and smoke which ascended from Mount Sinai, at the giving of the law, was merely a fire which Moses kindled in order to make a deeper impression upon the imagination of the people, together with an accidental thunderstorm which arose at that particular moment. The shining of his countenance was the natural effect of being overheated; but it was supposed to be a divine manifestation, not only by the people, but by Moses himself, he being ignorant of the true cause. Eichhorn was more reserved in his application of this mode of interpretation to the New Testament. Indeed, it was only to a few of the narratives in the Acts of the Apostles, such as the miracle of the day of Pentecost, the conversion of the Apostle Paul, and the many apparitions of angels, that he allowed himself to apply it. Here too, he refers the supernatural to the figurative language of the Bible; in which, for example, a happy accident is called—a protecting angel; a joyous thought—the salutation of an angel; and a peaceful state of mind—a comforting angel. It is however remarkable that Eichhorn was conscious of the inapplicability of the natural explanation to some parts of the gospel history, and with respect to many of the narratives took a more elevated view. Many writings in a similar spirit, which partially included the New Testament within the circle of their explanations, appeared; but it was Dr. Paulus who by his commentary on the Gospels in 1800, first acquired the full reputation of a Christian Evemerus. In the introduction to this work he states it to be the primary requisite of the biblical critic to be able to distinguish between what is fact, and what is opinion. That which has been actually experienced, internally or externally, by the participants in an event, he calls fact. The interpretation of an event, the supposed causes to which it is referred either

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by the participants or by the narrators, he calls opinion. But, according to Dr. Paulus, these two elements become so easily blended and confounded in the minds both of the original sharers in an event, and of the subsequent relators and historians, that fact and opinion lose their distinction; so that the one and the other are believed and recorded with equal confidence in their historical truth. This intermixture is particularly apparent in the historical books of the New Testament; since at the time when Jesus lived, it was still the prevailing disposition to derive every striking occurrence from an invisible and superhuman cause. It is consequently the chief task of the historian who desires to deal with matters of fact, that is to say, in reference to the New Testament, to separate these two constituent elements so closely amalgamated, and yet in themselves so distinct; and to extricate the pure kernel of fact from the shell of opinion. In order to do this, in the absence of any more genuine account which would serve as a correcting parallel, he must transplant himself in imagination upon the theatre of action, and strive to the utmost to contemplate the events by the light of the age in which they occurred. And from this point of view he must seek to supply the deficiencies of the narration, by filling in those explanatory collateral circumstances, which the relator himself is so often led by his predilection for the supernatural to leave unnoticed. It is well known in what manner Dr. Paulus applies these principles to the New Testament in his Commentary, and still more fully in his later production, “The Life of Jesus.” He firmly maintains the historical truth of the gospel narratives, and he aims to weave them into one consecutive chronologically arranged detail of facts; but he explains away every trace of immediate divine agency, and denies all supernatural intervention. Jesus is not to him the Son of God in the sense of the Church, but a wise and virtuous human being; and the effects he produced are not miracles, but acts sometimes of benevolence and friendship, sometimes of medical skill, sometimes also the results of accident and good fortune. This view proposed by Eichhorn, and more completely developed by Paulus, necessarily presupposes the Old and New Testament writings to contain a minute and faithful narration, composed shortly after the occurrence of the events recorded, and derived, wherever this was possible, from the testimony of eye-witnesses. For it is only from an accurate and original report, that the ungarbled fact can be disentangled from interwoven opinion. If the report be later and less original, what security is there that what is taken for the matter-of-fact kernel does not belong to opinion or tradition? To avoid this objection, Eichhorn sought to assign a date to the Old Testament histories approximating as nearly as possible to the events they record: and here he, and other theologians of the same school, found no difficulty in admitting suppositions the most unnatural: for example, that the Pentateuch was written during the passage through the wilderness. However this critic admits that some portions of the Old Testament, the Book of Judges, for instance, could not have been written contemporaneously with the events; that the historian must have contemplated his heroes through the dim mist of intervening ages, which might easily have magnified them into giant forms. No historian who had either witnessed the circumstances, or had been closely connected with them in point of time, could embellish after such fashion, except

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with the express aim to amuse at the expense of truth. But with regard to remote occurrences it is quite different. The imagination is no longer restricted by the fixed limits of historical reality, but is aided in its flight by the notion that in earlier times all things were better and nobler; and the historian is tempted to speak in loftier phrase and to use hyperbolical expressions. Least of all is it possible to avoid embellishment, when the compiler of a subsequent age derives his materials from the orally transmitted traditions of antiquity. The adventures and wondrous exploits of ancestors, handed down by father to son, and by son to grandson, in glowing and enthusiastic representations, and sung by the poet in lofty strains, are registered in the written records of the historian in similar terms of high flowing diction. Though Eichhorn took this view of a portion of the Old Testament Books, he believed he was not giving up their historical basis, but was still able, after clearing away the more or less evident legendary additions, to trace out the natural course of the history. But in one instance at least, this master of the natural mode of interpretation in reference to the Old Testament, took a more elevated view:—namely, of the history of the creation and the fall. In his influential work on primitive history, although he had from the first declared the account of the creation to be poetry, he nevertheless maintained that of the fall to be neither mythology nor allegory, but true history. The historical basis that remained after the removal of the supernatural, he stated to be this: that the human constitution had at the very beginning become impaired by the eating of a poisonous fruit. He thought it indeed very possible in itself, and confirmed by numerous examples in profane history, that purely historical narratives might be overlaid by a mythical account; but owing to a supranaturalistic notion, he refused to allow the same possibility to the Bible, because he thought it unworthy of the Deity to admit a mythological fragment into a book, which bore such incontestable traces of its divine origin. Later, however, Eichhorn himself declared that he had changed his opinion with regard to the second and third chapters of Genesis. He no longer saw in them an historical account of the effects of poison, but rather the mythical embodying of a philosophical thought; namely, that the desire for a better condition than that in which man actually is, is the source of all the evil in the world. Thus, in this point at least, Eichhorn preferred to give up the history in order to hold fast the idea, rather than to cling to the history with the sacrifice of every more elevated conception. For the rest, he agreed with Paulus and others in considering the miraculous in the sacred history as a drapery which needs only to be drawn aside, in order to disclose the pure historic form.

7. Moral interpretation of Kant Amidst these natural explanations which the end of the eighteenth century brought forth in rich abundance, it was a remarkable interlude to see the old allegorical system of the Christian fathers all at once called up from its grave, and revived in the form of the moral interpretation of Kant. He, as a philosopher, did not concern himself with the

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history, as did the rationalist theologians, but like the fathers of the church, he sought the idea involved in the history: not however considering it as they did an absolute idea, at once theoretical as well as practical, but regarding it only on its practical side, as what he called the moral imperative and consequently belonging to the finite. He moreover attributed these ideas wrought into the biblical text, not to the Divine Spirit, but to its philosophical interpreters, or in a deeper sense, to the moral condition of the authors of the book themselves. This opinion Kant bases upon the fact, that in all religions old and new which are partly comprised in sacred books, intelligent and well-meaning teachers of the people have continued to explain them, until they have brought their actual contents into agreement with the universal principles of morality. Thus did the moral philosophers amongst the Greeks and Romans with their fabulous legends; till at last they explained the grossest polytheism as mere symbolical representations of the attributes of the one divine Being, and gave a mystical sense to the many vicious actions of their gods, and to the wildest dreams of their poets, in order to bring the popular faith, which it was not expedient to destroy, into agreement with the doctrines of morality. The later Judaism and Christianity itself he thinks have been formed upon similar explanations, occasionally much forced, but always directed to objects undoubtedly good and necessary for all men. Thus the Mahometans gave a spiritual meaning to the sensual descriptions of their paradise, and thus the Hindoos, or at least the more enlightened part of them, interpreted their Vedas. In like manner, according to Kant, the Christian Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, must be interpreted throughout in a sense which agrees with the universal practical laws of a religion of pure reason: and such an explanation, even though it should, apparently or actually, do violence to the text, which is the case with many of the biblical narratives, is to be preferred to a literal one, which either contains no morality at all or is in opposition to the moral principle. For example, the expressions breathing vengeance against enemies in many of the Psalms are made to refer to the desires and passions which we must strive by all means to bring into subjection; and the miraculous account in the New Testament of the descent of Jesus from heaven, of his relationship to God, etc., is taken as an imaginative description of the ideal of humanity well-pleasing to God. That such an interpretation is possible, without even always too offensive an opposition to the literal sense of these records of the popular faith, arises according to the profound observations of Kant from this: that long before the existence of these records, the disposition to a moral religion was latent in the human mind; that its first manifestations were directed to the worship of the Deity, and on this very account gave occasion to those pretended revelations; still, though unintentionally, imparting even to these fictions somewhat of the spiritual character of their origin. In reply to the charge of dishonesty brought against his system of interpretation, he thinks it a sufficient defence to observe, that it does not pretend that the sense now given to the sacred books, always existed in the intention of the authors; this question it sets aside, and only claims for itself the right to interpret them after its own fashion. Whilst Kant in this manner sought to educe moral thoughts from the biblical writings, even in their historical part, and was even inclined to consider these thoughts

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as the fundamental object of the history: on the one hand, he derived these thoughts only from himself and the cultivation of his age, and therefore could seldom assume that they had actually been laid down by the authors of those writings; and on the other hand, and for the same reason, he omitted to show what was the relation between these thoughts and those symbolic representations, and how it happened that the one came to be expressed by the other.

8. Rise of the mythical mode of interpreting the sacred history, in reference first to the Old Testament It was impossible to rest satisfied with modes of proceeding so unhistorical on the one hand, and so unphilosophical on the other. Added to which, the study of mythology, now become far more general and more prolific in its results, exerted an increasing influence on the views taken of biblical history. Eichhorn had indeed insisted that all primitive histories, whether Hebrew or Pagan, should be treated alike, but this equality gradually disappeared; for though the mythical view became more and more developed in relation to profane history, the natural mode of explanation was still rigidly adhered to for the Hebrew records. All could not imitate Paulus, who sought to establish consistency of treatment by extending the same natural explanation which he gave to the Bible, to such also of the Greek legends as presented any points of resemblance; on the contrary, opinion in general took the opposite course, and began to regard many of the biblical narratives as mythi. Semler had already spoken of a kind of Jewish mythology, and had even called the histories of Samson and Esther mythi; Eichhorn too had done much to prepare the way, now further pursued by Gabler, Schelling, and others, who established the notion of the mythus as one of universal application to ancient history, sacred as well as profane, according to the principle of Heyne: A mythis omnis priscorum hominum cum historia tum philosophia procedis. And Bauer in 1820 ventured so far as to publish a Hebrew mythology of the Old and New Testament. The earliest records of all nations are, in the opinion of Bauer, mythical: why should the writings of the Hebrews form a solitary exception?—whereas in point of fact a cursory glance at their sacred books proves that they also contain mythical elements. A narrative he explains, after Gabler and Schelling, to be recognizable as mythus, first, when it proceeds from an age in which no written records existed, but in which facts were transmitted through the medium of oral tradition alone; secondly, when it presents an historical account of events which are either absolutely or relatively beyond the reach of experience, such as occurrences connected with the spiritual world, and incidents to which, from the nature of the circumstances, no one could have been witness; or thirdly, when it deals in the marvellous and is couched in symbolical language. Not a few narratives of this description occur in the Bible; and an unwillingness to regard them as mythi can arise only from a false conception of the nature of a mythus, or of the character of the biblical writings. In the one case mythi are confounded with fables, premeditated fictions, and wilful falsehoods, instead of being recognised as the

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necessary vehicle of expression for the first efforts of the human mind; in the other case it certainly does appear improbable, (the notion of inspiration presupposed), that God should have admitted the substitution of mythical for actual representations of facts and ideas, but a nearer examination of the scriptures shows that this very notion of inspiration, far from being any hindrance to the mythical interpretation, is itself of mythical origin. Wegscheider ascribed this greater unwillingness to recognise mythi in the early records of the Hebrew and Christian religion than in the heathen religions, partly to the prevailing ignorance respecting the progress of historical and philosophical science; partly to a certain timidity which dares not call things manifestly identical by the same name. At the same time he declared it impossible to rescue the Bible from the reproaches and scoffs of its enemies except by the acknowledgment of mythi in the sacred writings, and the separation of their inherent meaning from their unhistorical form. These biblical critics gave the following general definition of the mythus. It is the representation of an event or of an idea in a form which is historical, but, at the same time characterized by the rich pictorial and imaginative mode of thought and expression of the primitive ages. They also distinguished several kinds of mythi. 1st. Historical mythi: narratives of real events colored by the light of antiquity, which confounded the divine and the human, the natural and the supernatural. 2nd. Philosophical mythi: such as clothe in the garb of historical narrative a simple thought, a precept, or an idea of the time. 3rd. Poetical mythi: historical and philosophical mythi partly blended together, and partly embellished by the creations of the imagination, in which the original fact or idea is almost obscured by the veil which the fancy of the poet has woven around it. To classify the biblical mythi according to these several distinctions is a difficult task, since the mythus which is purely symbolical wears the semblance of history equally with the mythus which represents an actual occurrence. These critics however laid down rules by which the different mythi might be distinguished. The first essential is, they say, to determine whether the narratives have a distinct object, and what that object is. Where no object, for the sake of which the legend might have been invented, is discoverable, every one would pronounce the mythus to be historical. But if all the principal circumstances of the narrative concur to symbolize a particular truth, this undoubtedly was the object of the narrative, and the mythus is philosophical. The blending of the historical and philosophical mythus is particularly to be recognised when we can detect in the narrative an attempt to derive events from their causes. In many instances the existence of an historical foundation is proved also by independent testimony; sometimes certain particulars in the mythus are intimately connected with known genuine history, or bear in themselves undeniable and inherent characteristics of probability: so that the critic, while he rejects the external form, may yet retain the groundwork as historical. The poetical mythus is the most difficult to distinguish, and Bauer gives only a negative criterion. When the narrative is so wonderful on the one hand as to exclude the possibility of its being a detail of facts, and when on the other it discovers no attempt to symbolize a particular

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thought, it may be suspected that the entire narrative owes its birth to the imagination of the poet. Schelling particularly remarks on the unartificial and spontaneous origin of mythi in general. The unhistorical which is interwoven with the matters of fact in the historical mythus is not, he observes, the artistical product of design and invention. It has on the contrary glided in of itself, as it were, in the lapse of time and in the course of transmission. And, speaking of philosophical mythi, he says: the sages of antiquity clothed their ideas in an historical garb, not only in order to accommodate those ideas to the apprehension of a people who must be awakened by sensible impressions, but also on their own account: deficient themselves in clear abstract ideas, and in ability to give expression to their dim conceptions, they sought to illumine what was obscure in their representations by means of sensible imagery. We have already remarked, that the natural mode of interpreting the Old Testament could be maintained only so long as the records were held to be contemporaneous, or nearly so, with the events recorded. Consequently it was precisely those theologians, Vater, De Wette, and others who controverted this opinion, who contributed to establish the mythical view of the sacred histories. Vater expressed the opinion that the peculiar character of the narrations in the Pentateuch could not be rightly understood, unless it were conceded that they are not the production of an eye-witness, but are a series of transmitted traditions. Their traditional origin being admitted, we cease to feel surprised at the traces which they discover of a subsequent age; at numerical exaggerations, together with other inaccuracies and contradictions; at the twilight which hangs over many of the occurrences; and at representations such as, that the clothes of the Israelites waxed not old during their passage through the wilderness. Vater even contends, that unless we ascribe a great share of the marvellous contained in the Pentateuch to tradition, we do violence to the original sense of the compilers of these narratives. The natural mode of explanation was still more decidedly opposed by De Wette than by Vater. He advocated the mythical interpretation of a large proportion of the Old Testament histories. In order to test the historical credibility of a narrative, he says, we must ascertain the intention of the narrator. If that intention be not to satisfy the natural thirst for historical truth by a simple narration of facts, but rather to delight or touch the feelings, or to illustrate some philosophical or religious truth, then his narrative has no pretension to historical validity. Even when the narrator is conscious of strictly historical intentions, nevertheless his point of view may not be the historical: he may be a poetical narrator, not indeed subjectively, as a poet drawing inspiration from himself, but objectively, as enveloped by and depending on poetry external to himself. This is evidently the case when the narrator details as bona fide matter of fact things which are impossible and incredible, which are contrary not only to experience, but to the established laws of nature. Narrations of this description spring out of tradition. Tradition, says De Wette, is uncritical and partial; its tendency is not historical, but rather patriotic and poetical. And since the patriotic sentiment is gratified by all that flatters national pride, the more splendid, the more honourable, the more wonderful the narrative, the more acceptable it is; and where tradition has left any blanks,

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imagination at once steps in and fills them up. And since, he continues, a great part of the historical books of the Old Testament bear this stamp, it has hitherto been believed possible (on the part of the natural interpreters) to separate the embellishments and transformations from the historical substance, and still to consider them available as records of facts. This might indeed be done, had we, besides the marvellous biblical narratives, some other purely historical account of the events. But this is not the case with regard to the Old Testament history; we are solely dependent on those accounts which we cannot recognize as purely historical. They contain no criterion by which to distinguish between the true and the false; both are promiscuously blended, and set forth as of equal dignity. According to De Wette, the whole natural mode of explanation is set aside by the principle that the only means of acquaintance with a history is the narrative which we possess concerning it, and that beyond this narrative the historian cannot go. In the present case, this reports to us only a supernatural course of events, which we must either receive or reject: if we reject it, we determine to know nothing at all about it, and are not justified in allowing ourselves to invent a natural course of events, of which the narrative is totally silent. It is moreover inconsistent and arbitrary to refer the dress in which the events of the Old Testament are clothed to poetry, and to preserve the events themselves as historical; much rather do the particular details and the dress in which they appear, constitute a whole belonging to the province of poetry and mythus. For example, if God’s covenant with Abraham be denied in the form of fact, whilst at the same time it is maintained that the narrative had an historical basis,—that is to say, that though no objective divine communications took place, the occurrence had a subjective reality in Abraham’s mind in a dream or in a waking vision; in other words, that a natural thought was awakened in Abraham which he, in the spirit of the age, referred to God:—of the naturalist who thus reasons, De Wette asks, how he knows that such thoughts arose in Abraham’s mind? The narration refers them to God; and if we reject the narration, we know nothing about these thoughts of Abraham, and consequently cannot know that they had arisen naturally in him. According to general experience, such hopes as are described in this covenant, that he should become the father of a mighty nation which should possess the land of Canaan, could not have sprung up naturally in Abraham’s mind; but it is quite natural that the Israelites when they had become a numerous people in possession of that land, should have invented the covenant in order to render their ancestor illustrious. Thus the natural explanation, by its own unnaturalness, ever brings us back to the mythical. Even Eichhorn, who so extensively employed the natural explanation in reference to the Old Testament, perceived its inadmissibility in relation to the gospel histories. Whatever in these narratives has a tendency to the supernatural, he remarks, we ought not to attempt to transform into a natural occurrence, because this is impossible without violence. If once an event has acquired a miraculous coloring, owing to the blending together of some popular notion with the occurrence, the natural fact can be disentangled only when we possess a second account which has not undergone the like transformation; as, concerning the death of Herod Agrippa, we have not only the

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narrative in the Acts, but also that of Josephus. But since we have no such controlling account concerning the history of Jesus, the critic who pretends to discover the natural course of things from descriptions of supernatural occurrences, will only weave a tissue of indemonstrable hypotheses:—a consideration which, as Eichhorn observes, at once annihilates many of the so-called psychological interpretations of the Gospel histories. It is this same difference between the natural and mythical modes of interpretation which Krug intends to point out, referring particularly to the histories of miracles, when he distinguishes the physical or material, from the genetic or formal, mode of explaining them. Following the former mode, according to him, the inquiry is: how can the wonderful event here related have possibly taken place with all its details by natural means and according to natural laws? Whereas, following the latter, the question is: whence arose the narrative of the marvellous event? The former explains the natural possibility of the thing related (the substance of the narrative); the latter traces the origin of the existing record (the form of the narrative). Krug considers attempts of the former kind to be fruitless, because they produce interpretations yet more wonderful than the fact itself; far preferable is the other mode, since it leads to results which throw light upon miraculous histories collectively. He gives the preference to the exegetist, because in his explanation of the text he is not obliged to do violence to it, but may accept it altogether literally as the author intended, even though the thing related be impossible; whereas the interpreter, who follows the material or physical explanation, is driven to ingenious subtleties which make him lose sight of the original meaning of the authors, and substitute something quite different which they neither could nor would have said. In like manner Gabler recommended the mythical view, as the best means of escaping from the so called natural, but forced explanation, which had become the fashion. The natural interpreter, he remarks, commonly aims to make the whole narrative natural; and as this can but seldom succeed, he allows himself the most violent measures, owing to which modern exegesis has been brought into disrepute even amongst laymen. The mythical view, on the contrary, needs no such subtleties; since the greater part of a narrative frequently belongs to the mythical representation merely, while the nucleus of fact, when divested of the subsequently added miraculous envelopments, is often very small. Neither could Horst reconcile himself to the atomistic mode of proceeding, which selected from the marvellous narratives of the Bible, as unhistorical, isolated incidents merely, and inserted natural ones in their place, instead of recognizing in the whole of each narrative a religious moral mythus in which a certain idea is embodied. An anonymous writer in Bertholdt’s Journal has expressed himself very decidedly against the natural mode of explaining the sacred history, and in favour of the mythical. The essential defect of the natural interpretation, as exhibited in its fullest development by Paulus’s Commentary, is, according to that writer, its unhistorical mode of procedure. He objects: that it allows conjecture to supply the deficiencies of the record; adopts individual speculations as a substitute for real history; seeks by vain

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endeavours to represent that as natural which the narrative describes as supernatural; and lastly, evaporates all sacredness and divinity from the Scriptures, reducing them to collections of amusing tales no longer meriting the name of history. According to our author, this insufficiency of the natural mode of interpretation, whilst the supernatural also is felt to be unsatisfactory, leads the mind to the mythical view, which leaves the substance of the narrative unassailed; and instead of venturing to explain the details, accepts the whole, not indeed as true history, but as a sacred legend. This view is supported by the analogy of all antiquity, political and religious, since the closest resemblance exists between many of the narratives of the Old and New Testament, and the mythi of profane antiquity. But the most convincing argument is this: if the mythical view be once admitted, the innumerable, and never otherwise to be harmonized, discrepancies and chronological contradictions in the gospel histories disappear, as it were, at one stroke.

9. The mythical mode of interpretation in reference to the New Testament Thus the mythical mode of interpretation was adopted not only in relation to the Old Testament, but also to the New; not, however, without its being felt necessary to justify such a step. Gabler has objected to the Commentary of Paulus, that it concedes too little to the mythical point of view, which must be adopted for certain New Testament narratives. For many of these narratives present not only those mistaken views of things which might have been taken by eye-witnesses, and by the rectification of which a natural course of events may be made out; but frequently, also, false facts and impossible consequences which no eye-witness could have related, and which could only have been the product of tradition, and must therefore be mythically undcrstood. The chief difficulty which opposed the transference of the mythical point of view from the Old Testament to the New, was this:—it was customary to look for mythi in the fabulous primitive ages only, in which no written records of events as yet existed: whereas, in the time of Jesus, the mythical age had long since passed away, and writing had become common among the Jews. Schelling had however conceded (at least in a note) that the term mythi, in a more extended sense, was appropriate to those narratives which, though originating in an age when it was usual to preserve documentary records, were nevertheless transmitted by the mouth of the people. Bauer in like manner asserted, that though a connected series of mythi,—a history which should be altogether mythical,—was not to be sought in the New Testament, yet there might occur in it single myths, either transferred from the Old Testament to the New, or having originally sprung up in the latter. Thus he found, in the details of the infancy of Jesus, much which requires to be regarded from a mythical point of view. As after the decease of celebrated personages, numerous anecdotes are circulated concerning them, which fail not to receive many and wondrous amplifications in

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the legends of a wonder-loving people; so, after Jesus had become distinguished by his life, and yet more glorified by his death, his early years, which had been passed in obscurity, became adorned with miraculous embellishments. And, according to Bauer, whenever in this history of the infancy we find celestial beings, called by name and bearing the human shape, predicting future occurrences, etc., we have a right to suppose a mythus; and to conjecture as its origin, that the great actions of Jesus being referred to superhuman causes, this explanation came to be blended with the history. On the same subject, Gabler remarked that the notion of ancient is relative; compared with the Mosaic religion Christianity is certainly young; but in itself it is old enough to allow us to refer the original history of its founder to ancient times. That at that time written documents on other subjects existed, proves nothing, whilst it can be shown that for a long period there was no written account of the life of Jesus, and particularly of his infancy. Oral narratives were alone transmitted, and they would easily become tinged with the marvellous, mixed with Jewish ideas, and thus grow into historical mythi. On many other points there was no tradition, and here the mind was left to its own surmises. The more scanty the historical data, the greater was the scope for conjecture; and historical guesses and inferences of this description, formed in harmony with the Jewish-Christian tastes, may be called the philosophical, or rather, the dogmatical mythi of the early Christian Gospel. The notion of the mythus, concludes Gabler, being thus shown to be applicable to many of the narratives of the New Testament, why should we not dare to call them by their right name; why—that is to say in learned discussion—avoid an expression which can give offence only to the prejudiced or the misinformed? As in the Old Testament Eichhorn had been brought over by the force of internal evidence from his earlier natural explanation, to the mythical view of the history of the fall; so in the New Testament, the same thing happened to Usteri in relation to the history of the temptation. In an earlier work he had, following Schleiermacher, considered it as a parable spoken by Jesus but misunderstood by his disciples. Soon however he perceived the difficulties of this interpretation; and since both the natural and the supernatural views of the narrative appeared to him yet more objectionable, he had no alternative but to adopt the mythical. Once admit, he remarks, a state of excitement, particularly of religious excitement, among a not unpoetical people, and a short time is sufficient to give an appearance of the marvellous not only to obscure and concealed, but even to public and well-known facts. It is therefore by no means conceivable that the early Jewish Christians, gifted with the spirit, that is, animated with religious enthusiasm, as they were, and familiar with the Old Testament, should not have been in a condition to invent symbolical scenes such as the temptation and other New Testament mythi. It is not however to be imagined that any one individual seated himself at his table to invent them out of his own head, and write them down, as he would a poem: on the contrary, these narratives like all other legends were fashioned by degrees, by steps which can no longer be traced; gradually acquired consistency, and at length received a fixed form in our written Gospels.

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We have seen that in reference to the early histories of the Old Testament, the mythical view could be embraced by those only who doubted the composition of these Scriptures by eye-witnesses or contemporaneous writers. This was equally the case in reference to the New. It was not till Eichhorn became convinced that only a slender thread of that primitive Gospel believed by the Apostles ran through the three first Gospels, and that even in Matthew this thread was entangled in a mass of unapostolic additions, that he discarded as unhistorical legends, the many narratives which he found perplexing, from all share in the history of Jesus; for example, besides the Gospel of the Infancy, the details of the temptation: several of the miracles of Jesus; the rising of the saints from their graves at his crucifixion: the guard at the sepulchre; etc. Particularly since the opinion, that the three first Gospels originated from oral traditions, became firmly established, they have been found to contain a continually increasing number of mythi and mythical embellishments. On this account the authenticity of the Gospel of John, and consequently its historical credibility, is confidently maintained by most of the theologians of the present day: he only who, with Bretschneider, questions its apostolic composition, may cede in this Gospel also a considerable place to the mythical clement.

14. The possibility of mythi in the New Testament considered on internal grounds Seeing from what has already been said that the external testimony respecting the composition of our Gospels, far from forcing upon us the conclusion that they proceeded from eye-witnesses or well-informed contemporaries, leaves the decision to be determined wholly by internal grounds of evidence, that is, by the nature of the Gospel narratives themselves: we might immediately proceed from this introduction to the peculiar object of the present work, which is an examination of those narratives in detail. It may however appear useful, before entering upon this special inquiry, to consider the general question, how far it is consistent with the character of the Christian religion that mythi should be found in it, and how far the general construction of the Gospel narratives authorises us to treat them as mythi. Although, indeed, if the following critical examination of the details be successful in proving the actual existence of mythi in the New Testament, this preliminary demonstration of their possibility becomes superfluous. If with this view we compare the acknowledged mythical religions of antiquity with the Hebrew and Christian, it is true that we are struck by many differences between the sacred histories existing in these religious forms and those in the former. Above all, it is commonly alleged that the sacred histories of the Bible are distinguished from the legends of the Indians, Greeks, Romans, etc., by their moral character and excellence. In the latter, the stories of the battles of the gods, the loves of Krishna, Jupiter, etc., contain much which was offensive to the moral feeling even of enlightened heathens, and which is revolting to ours: whilst in the former, the whole course of

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the narration, offers only what is worthy of God, instructive, and ennobling.” To this it may be answered with regard to the heathens, that the appearance of immorality in many of their narratives is merely the consequence of a subsequent misconception of their original meaning: and with regard to the Old Testament, that the perfect moral purity of its history has been contested. Often indeed, it has been contested without good grounds, because a due distinction is not made between that which is ascribed to individual men, (who, as they are represented, are by no means spotless examples of purity), and that which is ascribed to God: nevertheless it is true that we have commands called divine, which, like that to the Israelites on their departure out of Egypt to purloin vessels of gold, are scarcely less revolting to an enlightened moral feeling, than the thefts of the Grecian Hermes. But even admitting this difference in the morality of the religions to its full extent, (and it must be admitted at least with regard to the New Testament), still it furnishes no proof of the historical character of the Bible; for though every story relating to God which is immoral is necessarily fictitious, even the most moral is not necessarily true. “But that which is incredible and inconceivable forms the staple of the heathen fables; whilst in the biblical history, if we only presuppose the immediate intervention of the Deity, there is nothing of the kind.” Exactly, if this be presupposed. Otherwise, we might very likely find the miracles in the life of Moses, Elias, or Jesus, the Theophany and Angelophany of the Old and New Testament, just as incredible as the fables of Jupiter, Hercules, or Bacchus: presuppose the divinity or divine descent of these individuals, and their actions and fate become as credible as those of the biblical personages with the like presupposition. Yet not quite so, it may be returned. Vishnu appearing in his three first avatars as a fish, a tortoise, and a boar; Saturn devouring his children; Jupiter turning himself into a bull, a swan, etc.—these are incredibilities of quite another kind from Jehovah appearing to Abraham in a human form under the terebinth tree, or to Moses in the burning bush. This extravagant love of the marvellous is the character of the heathen mythology. A similar accusation might indeed be brought against many parts of the Bible, such as the tales of Balaam, Joshua, and Samson; but still it is here less glaring, and does not form as in the Indian religion and in certain parts of the Grecian, the prevailing character. What however does this prove? Only that the biblical history might be true, sooner than the Indian or Grecian fables; not in the least that on this account it must be true, and can contain nothing fictitious. “But the subjects of the heathen mythology are for the most part such, as to convince us beforehand that they are mere inventions: those of the Bible such as at once to establish their own reality. A Brahma, an Ormusd, a Jupiter, without doubt never existed; but there still is a God, a Christ, and there have been an Adam, a Noah, an Abraham, a Moses.” Whether an Adam or a Noah, however, were such as they are represented, has already been doubted, and may still be doubted. Just so, on the other side, there may have been something historical about Hercules, Theseus, Achilles, and other heroes of Grecian story. Here, again, we come to the decision that the biblical history might be true sooner than the heathen mythology,

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but is not necessarily so. This decision however, together with the two distinctions already made, brings us to an important observation. How do the Grecian divinities approve themselves immediately to us as non-existing beings, if not because things are ascribed to them which we cannot reconcile with our idea of the divine? whilst the God of the Bible is a reality to us just in so far as he corresponds with the idea we have termed of him in our own minds. Besides the contradiction to our notion of the divine involved in the plurality of heathen gods, and the intimate description of their motives and actions, we are at once revolted to find that the gods themselves have a history; that they are born, grow up, marry, have children, work out their purposes, suffer difficulties and weariness, conquer and are conquered. It is irreconcileable with our idea of the Absolute to suppose it subjected to time and change, to opposition and suffering; and therefore where we meet with a narrative in which these are attributed to a divine being, by this test we recognize it as unhistorical or mythical. It is in this sense that the Bible, and even the Old Testament, is said to contain no mythi. The story of the creation with its succession of each day’s labour ending in a rest after the completion of the task; the expression often recurring in the farther course of the narrative, God repented of having done so and so;—these and similar representations cannot indeed be entirely vindicated from the charge of making finite the nature of the Deity, and this is the ground which has been taken by mythical interpreters of the history of the creation. And in every other instance where God is said to reveal himself exclusively at any definite place or time, by celestial apparition, or by miracle wrought immediately by himself, it is to be presumed that the Deity has become finite and descended to human modes of operation. It may however be said in general, that in the Old Testament the divine nature does not appear to be essentially affected by the temporal character of its operation, but that the temporal shows itself rather as a mere form, an unavoidable appearance, arising out of the necessary limitation of human, and especially of uncultivated powers of representation. It is obvious to every one, that there is something quite different in the Old Testament declarations, that God made an alliance with Noah, and Abraham, led his people out of Egypt, gave them laws, brought them into the promised land, raised up for them judges, kings, and prophets, and punished them at last for their disobedience by exile;—from the tales concerning Jupiter, that he was born of Rhea in Crete, and hidden from his father Saturn in a cave; that afterwards he made war upon his father, freed the Uranides, and with their help and that of the lightning with which they furnished. him, overcame the rebellious Titans, and at last divided the world amongst his brothers and children. The essential difference between the two representations is, that in the latter, the Deity himself is the subject of progression, becomes another being at the end of the process from what he was at the beginning, something being effected in himself and for his own sake: whilst in the former, change takes place only on the side of the world; God remains fixed in his own identity as the I AM, and the temporal is only a superficial reflection cast back upon his acting energy by that course of mundane events which he both originated and guides. In the heathen mythology the gods have a history: in the Old Testament, God himself has none, but

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only his people: and if the proper meaning of mythology be the history of gods, then the Hebrew religion has no mythology. From the Hebrew religion, this recognition of the divine unity and immutability was transmitted to the Christian. The birth, growth, miracles, sufferings, death, and resurrection of Christ, are circumstances belonging to the destiny of the Messiah, above which God remains unaffected in his own changeless identity. The New Testament therefore knows nothing of mythology in the above sense. The state of the question is however somewhat changed from that which it assumed in the Old Testament: for Jesus is called the Son of God, not merely in the same sense as kings under the theocracy were so called, but as actually begotten by the divine spirit, or from the incarnation in his person of the divine lógoV. Inasmuch as he is one with the Father, and in him the whole fullness of the godhead dwells bodily, he is more than Moses. The actions and sufferings of such a being are not external to the Deity: though we are not allowed to suppose a theopaschitic union with the divine nature, yet still, even in the New Testament, and more in the later doctrine of the Church, it is a divine being that here lives and suffers, and what befalls him has an absolute worth and significance. Thus according to the above accepted notion of the mythus, the New Testament has more of a mythical character than the Old. But to call the history of Jesus mythical in this sense, is as unimportant with regard to the historical question as it is unexceptionable; for the idea of God is in no way opposed to such an intervention in human affairs as does not affect his own immutability; so that as far as regards this point, the gospel history, notwithstanding its mythical designation, might be at the same time throughout, historically true. Admitting that the biblical history does not equally with heathen mythology offend our idea of Deity, and that consequently it is not in like manner characterized by this mark of the unhistorical, however far it be from bearing any guarantee of being historical,—we are met by the further question whether it be not less accordant with our idea of the world, and whether such discordancy may not furnish a test of its unhistorical nature. In the ancient world, that is, in the east, the religious tendency was so preponderating, and the knowledge of nature so limited, that the law of connexion between earthly finite beings was very loosely regarded. At every link there was a disposition to spring into the Infinite, and to see God as the immediate cause of every change in nature or the human mind. In this mental condition the biblical history was written. Not that God is here represented as doing all and every thing himself:—a notion which, from the manifold direct evidence of the fundamental connexion between finite things, would be impossible to any reasonable mind:—but there prevails in the biblical writers a ready disposition to derive all things down to the minutest details, as soon as they appear particularly important, immediately from God. He it is who gives the rain and sunshine; he sends the east wind and the storm; he dispenses war, famine, pestilence; he hardens hearts and softens them; suggests thoughts and resolutions. And this is particularly the case with regard to his chosen instruments and beloved people. In the history of the Israelites we find traces of his immediate agency at every step:

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through Moses, Elias, Jesus, he performs things which never would have happened in the ordinary course of nature. Our modern world, on the contrary, after many centuries of tedious research, has attained a conviction, that all things are linked together by a chain of causes and effects, which suffers no interruption. It is true that single facts and groups of facts, with their conditions and processes of change, are not so circumscribed as to be unsusceptible of external influence; for the action of one existence or kingdom in nature intrenches on that of another: human freedom controls natural development, and material laws react on human freedom. Nevertheless the totality of finite things forms a vast circle, which, except that it owes its existence and laws to a superior power, suffers no intrusion from without. This conviction is so much a habit of thought with the modern world, that in actual life, the belief in a supernatural manifestation, an immediate divine agency, is at once attributed to ignorance or imposture. It has been carried to the extreme in that modern explanation, which, in a spirit exactly opposed to that of the Bible, has either totally removed the divine causation, or has so far restricted it that it is immediate in the act of creation alone, but mediate from that point onwards;—i.e. God operates on the world only in so far as he gave to it this fixed direction at the creation. From this point of view, at which nature and history appear as a compact tissue of finite causes and effects, it was impossible to regard the naratives of the Bible, in which this tissue is broken by innumerable instances of divine interference, as historical. It must be confessed on nearer investigation, that this modern explanation, although it does not exactly deny the existence of God, yet puts aside the idea of him, as the ancient view did the idea of the world. For this is, as it has been often and well remarked, no longer a God and Creator, but a mere finite Artist, who acts immediately upon his work only during its first production, and then leaves it to itself; who becomes excluded with his full energy from one particular sphere of existence. It has therefore been attempted to unite the two views so as to maintain for the world its law of sequence, and for God his unlimited action, and by this means to preserve the truth of the biblical history. According to this view, the world is supposed to move in obedience to the law of consecutive causes and effects bound up with its constitution, and God to act upon it only mediately: but, in single instances, where he finds it necessary for particular objects, he is not held to be restricted from entering into the course of human changes immediately. This is the view of modern Supranaturalism; evidently a vain attempt to reconcile two opposite views, since it contains the faults of both, and adds a new one in the contradiction between the two ill-assorted principles. For here the consecutiveness of nature and history is broken through as in the ancient biblical view; and the action of God limited as in the contrary system. The proposition that God works sometimes mediately, sometimes immediately, upon the world, introduces a changeableness, and therefore a temporal element, into the nature of his action, which brings it under the same condemnation as both the other systems; that, namely, of distinguishing the maintaining power, in the one case from individual instances of the divine agency, and in the other from the act of creation.

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Since then our idea of God requires an immediate, and our idea of the world a mediate divine operation; and since the idea of combination of the two species of action is inadmissible:—nothing remains for us but to regard them both as so permanently and immovably united, that the operation of God on the world continues for ever and everywhere twofold, both immediate and mediate; which comes just to this, that it is neither of the two, or this distinction loses its value. To explain more closely: if we proceed from the idea of God, from which arose the demand for his immediate operation, then the world is to be regarded in relation to him as a Whole: on the contrary, if we proceed from the idea of the finite, the world is a congeries of separate parts, and hence has arisen the demand for a merely mediate agency of God:—so that we must say—God acts upon the world as a Whole immediately, but on each part only by means of his action on every other part, that is to say, by the laws of nature. This view brings us to the same conclusion with regard to the historical value of the Bible as the one above considered. The miracles which God wrought for and by Moses and Jesus, do not proceed from his immediate operation on the Whole, but presuppose an immediate action in particular cases, which is a contradiction to the type of the divine agency we have just given. The supranaturalists indeed claim an exception from this type on behalf of the biblical history; a presupposition which is inadmissible from our point of view, according to which the same laws, although varied by various circumstances, are supreme in every sphere of being and action, and therefore every narrative which offends against these laws, is to be recognized as so far unhistorical. The result, then, however surprising, of a general examination of the biblical history, is that the Hebrew and Christian religions, like all others, have their mythi. And this result is confirmed, if we consider the inherent nature of religion, what essentially belongs to it and therefore must be common to all religions, and what on the other hand is peculiar and may differ in each. If religion be defined as the perception of truth, not in the form of an idea, which is the philosophic perception, but invested with imagery; it is easy to see that the mythical element can be wanting only when religion either falls short of, or goes beyond, its peculiar province, and that in the proper religious sphere it must necessarily exist. It is only amongst the lowest and most barbarous people, such as the Esquimanx, that we find religion not yet fashioned into an objective form, but still confined to a subjective feeling. They know nothing of gods, of superior spirits and powers, and their whole piety consists in an undefined sentiment excited by the hurricane, the eclipse, or the magician. As it progresses however, the religious principle loses more and more of this indefiniteness, and ceasing to be subjective, becomes objective. In the sun, moon, mountains, animals, and other objects of the sensible world, higher powers are discovered and revered; and in proportion as the significance given to these objects is remote from their actual nature, a new world of mere imagination is created, a sphere of divine existences whose relations to one another, actions, and influences, can be represented only after human analogy, and therefore as temporal and historical. Even when the mind has raised itself to the conception of the Divine

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unity, still the energy and activity of God are considered only under the form of a series of acts: and on the other hand, natural events and human actions can be raised to a religious significance only by the admission of divine interpositions and miracles. It is only from the philosophic point of view that the world of imagination is seen again to coincide with the actual, because the thought of God is comprehended to be his essence, and in the regular course itself of nature and of history, the revelation, of the divine idea is acknowledged. It is certainly difficult to conceive, how narratives which thus speak of imagination as reality can have been formed without intentional deceit, and believed without unexampled credulity; and this difficulty has been held an invincible objection to the mythical interpretation of many of the narratives of the Old and New Testament. If this were the case, it would apply equally to the Heathen legends; and on the other hand, if profane Mythology have steered clear of the difficulty, neither will that of the Bible founder upon it. I shall here quote at length the words of an experienced inquirer into Grecian mythology and primitive history, Otfried Müller, since it is evident that this preliminary knowledge of the subject which must be derived from general mythology, and which is necessary for the understanding of the following examination of the evangelic mythus, is not yet familiar to all theologians.“How,” says Müller, “shall we reconcile this combination of the true and the false, the real and ideal, in mythi, with the fact of their being believed and received as truth? The ideal, it may be said, is nothing else than poetry and fiction clothed in the form of a narration. But a fiction of this kind cannot be invented at the same time by many different persons without a miracle, requiring, as it does, a peculiar coincidence of intention, imagination, and expression. It is therefore the work of one person:—but how did he convince all the others that his fiction had an actual truth? Shall we suppose him to have been one who contrived to delude by all kinds of trickery and deception, and perhaps allied himself with similar deceivers, whose part it was to afford attestation to the people of his inventions as having been witnessed by themselves? Or shall we think of him as a man of higher endowments than others, who believed him upon his word; and received the mythical tales under whose veil he sought to impart wholesome truths, as a sacred revelation? But it is impossible to prove that such a caste of deceivers existed in ancient Greece (or Palestine); on the contrary, this skilful system of deception, be it gross or refined, selfish or philanthropic, if we are not misled by the impression we have received from the earliest productions of the Grecian (or Christian) mind, is little suited to the noble simplicity of those times. Hence an inventer of the mythus in the proper sense of the word is inconceivable. This reasoning brings us to the conclusion, that the idea of a deliberate and intentional fabrication, in which the author clothes that which he knows to be false in the appearance of truth, must be entirely set aside as insufficient to account for the origin of the mythus. Or in other words, that there is a certain necessity in this connexion between the ideal and the real, which constitutes the mythus; that the mythical images were formed by the influence of sentiments common to all mankind; and that the different elements grew together without the author’s being

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himself conscious of their incongruity. It is this notion of a certain necessity and unconsciousness in the formation of the ancient mythi, on which we insist. If this be once understood, it will also be perceived that the contention whether the mythus proceed from one person or many, from the poet or the people, though it may be started on other grounds, does not go to the root of the matter. For if the one who invents the mythus is only obeying the impulse which acts also upon the minds of his hearers, he is but the mouth through which all speak, the skilful interpreter who has the address first to give form and expression to the thoughts of all. It is however very possible that this notion of necessity and unconsciousness, might appear itself obscure and mystical to our antiquarians (and theologians), from no other reason than that this mythicising tendency has no analogy in the present mode of thinking. But, is not history to acknowledge even what is strange, when led to it by unprejudiced research? As an example to allow that even very complicated mythi, in the formation of which many apparently remote circumstances must have combined, may yet have arisen in this unconscious manner, Müller then refers to the Grecian mythus of Apollo and Marsyas.“It was customary to celebrate the festivals of Apollo with playing on the lyre, and it was necessary to piety, that the god himself should be regarded as its author. In Phrygia, on the contrary, the national music was the flute, which was similarly derived from a demon of their own, named Marsyas. The ancient Grecians perceived that the tones of these two instruments were essentially opposed: the harsh shrill piping of the flute must be hateful to Apollo, and therefore Marsyas his enemy. This was not enough: in order that the lyre-playing Grecian might flatter himself that the invention of his god was the more excellent instrument, Apollo must triumph over Marsyas. But why was it necessary in particular that the unlucky Phrygian should be flayed? Here is the simple origin of the mythus. Near the castle of Celoene in Phrygia, in a cavern whence flowed a stream or torrent named Marsyas, was suspended a skin flask, called by the Phrygians, the bottle of Marsyas; for Marsyas was, like the Grecian Silenus, a demi-god symbolizing the exuberance of the juices of nature. Now where a Grecian, or a Phrygian with Grecian prepossessions, looked on the bottle, he plainly saw the catastrophe of Marsyas; here was still suspended his skin, which had been torn off and made into a bottle:—Apollo had flayed him. In all this there is no arbitrary invention: the same ideas might have occurred to many, and if one first gave expression to them, he knew well that his auditors, imbued with the same prepossessions, would not for an instant doubt his accuracy.” “The chief reason of the complicated character of mythi in general, is their having been formed for the most part, not at once, but successively and by degrees, under the influence of very different circumstances and events both external and internal. The popular traditions, being orally transmitted and not restricted by any written document, were open to receive every new addition, and thus grew in the course of long centuries to the form in which we now find them. (How far this applies to a great part of the New Testament mythi, will be shown hereafter.) This is an important and luminous fact, which however is very frequently overlooked in the explanation of

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mythi; for they are regarded as allegories invented by one person, at one stroke, with the definite purpose of investing a thought in the form of a narration.” The view thus expressed by Müller, that the mythus is founded not upon any individual conception, but upon the more elevated and general conception of a whole people (or religious community), is said by a competent judge of Müller’s work to be the necessary condition for a right understanding of the ancient mythus, the admission or rejection of which henceforth ranges the opinions on mythology into two opposite divisions. It is not however easy to draw a line of distinction between intentional und unintentional fiction. In the case where a fact lay at the foundation, which, being the subject of popular conversation and admiration, in the course of time formed itself into a mythus, we readily dismiss all notion of wilful fraud, at least in its origin. For a mythus of this kind is not the work of one man, but of a whole body of men, and of succeeding generations; the narrative passing from mouth to mouth, and like a snowball growing by the involuntary addition of one exaggerating feature from this, and another from that narrator. In time however these legends are sure to fall into the way of some gifted minds, which will be stimulated by them to the exercise of their own poetical, religious, or didactic powers. Most of the mythical narratives which have come down to us from antiquity, such as the Trojan, and the Mosaic series of legends, are presented to us in this elaborated form. Here then it would appear there must have been intentional deception: this however is only the result of an erroneous assumption. It is almost impossible, in a critical and enlightened age like our own, to carry ourselves back to a period of civilization in which the imagination worked so powerfully, that its illusions were believed as realities by the very minds that created them. Yet the very same miracles which are wrought in less civilized circles by the imagination, are produced in the more cultivated by the understanding. Let us take one of the best didactic historians of ancient or modern times, Livy, as an example.“Numa,” he says, “gave to the Romans a number of religious ceremonies, ne luxuriarentur otio animi, and because he regarded religion as the best means of bridling multitudinem imperitam et illis seculis rudem. Idem,” he  continues, “nefastos dies fastosque fecit, quia, aliquando nihil cum populo agi utile futurum erat.” How did Livy know that these were the motives of Numa? In point of fact they certainly were not. But Livy believed them to be so. The inference of his own understanding appeared to him so necessary, that he treated it with full conviction as an actual fact. The popular legend, or some ancient poet, had explained this fertility of religious invention in Numa otherwise; namely, that it arose from his communication with the nymph Egeria, who revealed to him the forms of worship that would be most acceptable to the gods. It is obvious, that the case is pretty nearly the same with regard to both representations. If the latter had an individual author, it was his opinion that the historical statement could be accounted for only upon the supposition of a communication with a superior being; as it was that of Livy, that its explanation must be in political views. The one mistook the production of his imagination, the other the inference of his understanding, for reality. Perhaps it may be admitted that there is a possibility of unconscious fiction, even

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when an individual author is assigned to it, provided that the mythical consists only in the filling up and adorning some historical event with imaginary circumstances: but that where the whole story is invented, and not any historical nucleus is to be found, this unconscious fiction is impossible. Whatever view may be taken of the heathen mythology, it is easy to show with regard to the New Testament, that there was the greatest antecedent probability of this very kind of fiction having arisen respecting Jesus without any fraudulent intention. The expectation of a Messiah had grown up amongst the Israelitish people long before the time of Jesus, and just then had ripened to full maturity. And from its beginning this expectation was not indefinite, but determined, and characterized by many important particulars. Moses was said to have promised his people a prophet like unto himself (Deut. xviii. 15), and this passage was in the time of Jesus applied to the Messiah (Acts iii. 22; vii. 37). Hence the rabbinical principle; as the first redeemer (Goël ), so shall be the second; which principle was carried out into many particulars to be expected in the Messiah after his prototype Moses. Again, the Messiah was to come of the race of David, and as a second David take possession of his throne (Matt. xxii. 42; Luke i. 32; Acts ii. 30): and therefore in the time of Jesus it was expected that he, like David, should be born in the little village of Bethlehem (John vii. 42; Matt. ii. 5 f.). In the above passage Moses describes the supposed Messiah as a prophet; so in his own idea, Jesus was the greatest and last of the prophetic race. But in the old national legends the prophets were made illustrious by the most wonderful actions and destiny. How could less be expected of the Messiah? Was it not necessary beforehand, that his life should be adorned with that which was most glorious and important in the lives of the prophets? Must not the popular expectation give him a share in the bright portion of their history, as subsequently the sufferings of himself and his disciples were attributed by Jesus when he appeared as the Messiah, to a participation in the dark side of the fate of the prophets (Mt. xxiii. 29ff.; Lk. xiii. 33ff.; compare Mt, v. 12)? Believing that Moses and all the prophets had prophesied of the Messiah (Jn v. 46; Lk iv. 21; xxiv. 27), it was as natural for the Jews, with their allegorizing tendency, to consider their actions and destiny as types of the Messiah, as to take their sayings for predictions. In general the whole Messianic era was expected to be full of signs and wonders. The eyes of the blind should be opened, the ears of the deaf should be unclosed, the lame should leap, and the tongue of the dumb praise God (Isa. xxxv. 5f.; xlii. 7; comp. xxxii. 3, 4). These merely figurative expressions, soon came to be understood literally (Mt. xi. 5; Lk vii. 21f.), and thus the idea of the Messiah was continually filled up with new details, even before the appearence of Jesus. Thus many of the legends respecting him had not to be newly invented; they already existed in the popular hope of the Messiah, having been mostly derived with various modifications from the Old Testament, and had merely to be transferred to Jesus, and accommodated to his character and doctrines. In no case could it be easier for the person who first added any new feature to the description of Jesus, to believe himself its genuineness, since his argument would be: Such and such things must have happened to the Messiah; Jesus was the Messiah; therefore such and such things happened to him.

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Truly it may be said that the middle term of this argument, namely, that Jesus was the Messiah, would have failed in proof to his contemporaries all the more on account of the common expectation of miraculous events, if that expectation had not been fulfilled by him. But the following critique on the Life of Jesus does not divest it of all those features to which the character of miraculous has been appropriated: and besides we must take into account the overwhelming impression which was made upon those around him by the personal character and discourse of Jesus, as long as he was living amongst them, which did not permit them deliberately to scrutinize and compare him with their previous standard. The belief in him as the Messiah extended to wider circles only by slow degrees; and even during his lifetime the people may have reported many wonderful stories of him (comp. Mt. xiv. 2). After his death, however, the belief in his resurrection, however that belief may have arisen, afforded a more than sufficient proof of his Messiahship; so that all the other miracles in his history need not be considered as the foundation of the faith in this, but may rather be adduced as the consequence of it. It is however by no means necessary to attribute this same freedom from all conscious intention of fiction, to the authors of all those narratives in the Old and New Testament which must be considered as unhistorical. In every series of legends, especially if any patriotic or religious party interest is associated with them, as soon as they become the subject of free poetry or any other literary composition, some kind of fiction will be intentionally mixed up with them. The authors of the Homeric songs could not have believed that every particular which they related of their gods and heroes had really happened; and just as little could the writer of the Chronicles have been ignorant that in his deviation from the books of Samuel and of the Kings, he was introducing many events of later occurrence into an earlier period; or the author of the Book of Daniel that he was modelling his history upon that of Joseph, and accommodating prophecies to events already past; and exactly as little may this be said of all the unhistorical narratives of the Gospels, as for example, of the first chapter of the third, and many parts of the fourth Gospel. But a fiction, although not undesigned, may still be without evil design. It is true, the case is not the same with the supposed authors of many fictions in the Bible, as with poets properly so called, since the latter write without any expectation that their poems will be received as history: but still it is to be considered that in ancient times, and especially amongst the Hebrews, and yet more when this people was stirred up by religious excitement, the line of distinction between history and fiction, prose and poetry, was not drawn so clearly as with us. It is a fact also deserving attention that amongst the Jews and early Christians, the most reputable authors published their works with the substitution of venerated names, without an idea that they were guilty of any falsehood or deception by so doing. The only question that can arise here is whether to such fictions, the work of an individual, we can give the name of mythi? If we regard only their own intrinsic nature, the name is not appropriate; but it is so when these fictions, having met with faith, come to be received amongst the legends of a people or religious party, for this is

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always a proof that they were the fruit, not of any individual conception, but of an accordance with the sentiments of a multitude. A frequently raised objection remains, for the refutation of which the remarks above made, upon the date of the origin of many of the gospel mythi, are mainly important: the objection, namely, that the space of about thirty years, from the death of Jesus to the destruction of Jerusalem, during which the greater part of the narratives must have been formed; or even the interval extending to the beginning of the second century, the most distant period which can be allowed for the origin of even the latest of these gospel narratives, and for the written composition of our gospels;—is much too short to admit of the rise of so rich a collection of mythi. But, as we have shown, the greater part of these mythi did not arise during that period, for their first foundation was laid in the legends of the Old Testament, before and after the Babylonish exile; and the transference of these legends with suitable modifications to the expected Messiah, was made in the course of the centuries which elapsed between that exile and the time of Jesus. So that for the period between the formation of the first Christian community and the writing of the Gospels, there remains to be effected only the transference of Messianic legends, almost all ready formed, to Jesus, with some alterations to adapt them to Christian opinions, and to the individual character and circumstances of Jesus; only a very small proportion of mythi having to be formed entirely new.

15. Definition of the Evangelical mythus and its distinctive characteristics The precise sense in which we use the expression mythus, applied to certain parts of the gospel history, is evident from all that has already been said; at the same time the different kinds and gradations of the mythi which we shall meet with in this history may here by way of anticipation be pointed out. We distinguish by the name evangelical mythus a narrative relating directly or indirectly to Jesus, which may be considered not as the expression of a fact, but as the product of an idea of his earliest followers; such a narrative being mythical in proportion as it exhibits this character. The mythus in this sense of the term meets us, in the Gospel as elsewhere, sometimes in its pure form, constituting the substance of the narrative, and sometimes as an accidental adjunct to the actual history. The pure mythus in the Gospel will be found to have two sources, which in most cases contributed simultaneously, though in different proportions, to form the mythus. The one source is, as already stated, the Messianic ideas and expectations existing according to their several forms in the Jewish mind before Jesus, and independently of him; the other is that particular impression which was left by the personal character, actions, and fate of Jesus, and which served to modify the Messianic idea in the minds of his people. The account of the Transfiguration, for example, is derived almost exclusively from the former source; the only amplification taken from the latter source

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being—that they who appeared with Jesus on the Mount spake of his decease. On the other hand, the narrative of the rending of the veil of the temple at the death of Jesus seems to have had its origin in the hostile position which Jesus, and his church after him, sustained in relation to the Jewish temple worship. Here already we have something historical, though consisting merely of certain general features of character, position, etc.; we are thus at once brought upon the ground of the historical mythus. The historical mythus has for its groundwork a definite individual fact which has been seized upon by religious enthusiasm, and twined around with mythical conceptions culled from the idea of the Christ. This fact is perhaps a saying of Jesus such as that concerning “fishers of men” or the barren fig-tree, which now appear in the Gospels transmuted into marvellous histories; or, it is perhaps a real transaction or event taken from his life; for instance, the mythical traits in the account of the baptism were built upon such a reality. Certain of the miraculous histories may likewise have had some foundation in natural occurrences, which the narrative has either exhibited in a supernatural light, or enriched with miraculous incidents. All the species of imagery here enumerated may justly be designated as mythi, even according to the modern and precise definition of George, inasmuch as the unhistorical which they embody—whether formed gradually by tradition, or created by an individual author—is in each case the product of an idea. But for those parts of the history which are characterized by indefiniteness and want of connexion, by misconstruction and transformation, by strange combinations and confusion,—the natural results of a long course of oral transmission; or which, on the contrary, are distinguished by highly colored and pictorial representations, which also seem to point to a traditionary origin;—for these parts the term legendary is certainly the more appropriate. Lastly. It is requisite to distinguish equally from the mythus and the legend, that which, as it serves not to clothe an idea on the one hand, and admits not of being referred to tradition on the other, must be regarded as the addition of the author, as purely individual, and designed merely to give clearness, connexion, and climax, to the representation. It is to the various forms of the unhistorical in the Gospels that this enumeration exclusively refers; it does not involve the renunciation of the historical which they may likewise contain.

16. Criteria by which to distinguish the unhistorical in the gospel narrative Having shown the possible existence of the mythical and the legendary in the Gospels, both on extrinsic and intrinsic grounds, and defined their distinctive characteristics, it remains in conclusion to inquire how their actual presence may be recognized in individual cases?

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The mythus presents two phases; in the first place it is not history; in the second it is fiction, the product of the particular mental tendency of a certain community. These two phases afford the one a negative, the other a positive criterion, by which the mythus is to be recognized. I. Negative. That an account is not historical—that the matter related could not have taken place in the manner described is evident. First. When the narration is irreconcileable with the known and universal laws which govern the course of events. Now according to these laws, agreeing with all just philosophical conceptions and all credible experience, the absolute cause never disturbs the chain of secondary causes by single arbitrary acts of interposition, but rather manifests itself in the production of the aggregate of finite causalities, and of their reciprocal action. When therefore we meet with an account of certain phenomena or events of which it is either expressly stated or implied that they were produced immediately by God himself (divine apparitions—voices from heaven and the like), or by human beings possessed of supernatural powers (miracles, prophecies), such an account is in so far to be considered as not historical. And inasmuch as, in general, the intermingling of the spiritual world with the human is found only in unauthentic records, and is irreconcileable with all just conceptions; so narratives of angels and of devils, of their appearing in human shape and interfering with human concerns, cannot possibly be received as historical. Another law which controls the course of events is the law of succession, in accordance with which all occurrences, not excepting the most violent convulsions and the most rapid changes, follow in a certain order of sequence of increase and decrease. If therefore we are told of a celebrated individual that he attracted already at his birth and during his childhood that attention which he excited in his manhood; that his followers at a single glance recognized him as being all that he actually was; if the transition from the deepest despondency to the most ardent enthusiasm after his death is represented as the work of a single hour; we must feel more than doubtful whether it is a real history which lies before us. Lastly, all those psychological laws, which render it improbable that a human being should feel, think, and act in a manner directly opposed to his own habitual mode and that of men in general, must be taken into consideration. As for example, when the Jewish Sanhedrin are represented as believing the declaration of the watch at the grave that Jesus was risen, and instead of accusing them of having suffered the body to be stolen away whilst they were asleep, bribing them to give currency to such a report. By the same rule it is contrary to all the laws belonging to the human faculty of memory, that long discourses, such as those of Jesus given in the fourth Gospel, could have been faithfully recollected and reproduced. It is however true that effects are often far more rapidly produced, particularly in men of genius and by their agency, than might be expected; and that human beings frequently act inconsequently, and in opposition to their general modes and habits; the two last mentioned tests of the mythical character must therefore be cautiously applied, and in conjunction only with other tests.

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Secondly. An account which shall be regarded as historically valid, must neither be inconsistent with itself, nor in contradiction with other accounts. The most decided case falling under this rule, amounting to a positive contradiction, is when one account affirms what another denies. Thus, one gospel represents the first appearance of Jesus in Galilee as subsequent to the imprisonment of John the Baptist, whilst another Gospel remarks, long after Jesus had preached both in Galilee and in Judea, that “John was not yet cast into prison.” When on the contrary, the second account, without absolutely contradicting the first, differs from it, the disagreement may be merely between the incidental particulars of the narrative; such as time, (the clearing of the Temple,) place, (the original residence of the parents of Jesus;) number, (the Gadarenes, the angels at the sepulchre;) names, (Matthew and Levi;) or it may concern the essential substance of the history. In the latter case, sometimes the character and circumstances in one account differ altogether from those in another. Thus, according to one narrator, the Baptist recognizes Jesus as the Messiah destined to suffer; according to the other, John takes offence at his suffering condition. Sometimes an occurrence is represented in two or more ways, of which one only can be consistent with the reality; as when in one account Jesus calls his first disciples from their nets whilst fishing on the sea of Galilee, and in the other meets them in Judea on his way to Galilee. We may class under the same head instances where events or discourses are represented as having occurred on two distinct occasions, whilst they are so similar that it is impossible to resist the conclusion that both the narratives refer to the same event or discourse. It may here be asked: is it to be regarded as a contradiction if one account is wholly silent respecting a circumstance mentioned by another? In itself, apart from all other considerations, the argumentum ex silentio is of no weight; but it is certainly to be accounted of moment when, at the same time, it may be shown that had the author known the circumstance he could not havc failed to mention it, and also that he must have known it had it actually occurred. II. Positive. The positive characters of legend and fiction are to be recognized sometimes in the form, sometimes in the substance of a narrative. If the form be poetical, if the actors converse in hymns, and in a more diffuse and elevated strain than might be expected from their training and situations, such discourses, at all events, are not to be regarded as historical. The absence of these marks of the unhistorical do not however prove the historical validity of the narration, since the mythus often wears the most simple and apparently historical form: in which case the proof lies in the substance. If the contents of a narrative strikingly accords with certain ideas existing and prevailing within the circle from which the narrative proceeded, which ideas themselves seem to be the product of preconceived opinions rather than of practical experience, it is more or less probable, according to circumstances, that such a narrative is of mythical origin. The knowledge of the fact, that the Jews were fond of representing their great men as the children of parents who had long been childless, cannot but make us doubtful of the historical truth of the statement that this was the

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case with John the Baptist; knowing also that the Jews saw predictions everywhere in the writings of their prophets and poets, and discovered types of the Messiah in all the lives of holy men recorded in their Scriptures; when we find details in the life of Jesus evidently sketched after the pattern of these prophecies and prototypes, we cannot but suspect that they are rather mythical than historical. The more simple characteristics of the legend, and of additions by the author, after the observations of the former section, need no further elucidation. Yet each of these tests, on the one hand, and each narrative on the other, considered apart, will rarely prove more than the possible or probable unhistorical character of the record. The concurrence of several such indications, is necessary to bring about a more definite result. The accounts of the visit of the Magi, and of the murder of the innocents at Bethlehem, harmonize remarkably with the Jewish Messianic notion, built upon the prophecy of Balaam, respecting the star which should come out of Jacob; and with the history of the sanguinary command of Pharaoh. Still this would not alone suffice to stamp the narratives as mythical. But we have also the corroborative facts that the described appearance of the star is contrary to the physical, the alleged conduct of Herod to the psychological laws; that Josephus, who gives in other respects so circumstantial an account of Herod, agrees with all other historical authorities in being silent concerning the Bethlehem massacre; and that the visit of the Magi together with the flight into Egypt related in the one Gospel, and the presentation in the temple related in another Gospel, mutually exclude one another. Wherever, as in this instance, the several criteria of the mythical character concur, the result is certain, and certain in proportion to the accumulation of such grounds of evidence. It may be that a narrative, standing alone, would discover but slight indications, or perhaps, might present no one distinct feature of the mythus; but it is connected with others, or proceeds from the author of other narratives which exhibit unquestionable marks of a mythical or legendary character; and consequently suspicion is reflected back from the latter, on the former. Every narrative, however miraculous, contains some details which might in themselves be historical, but which, in consequence of their connexion with the other supernatural incidents, necessarily become equally doubtful. In these last remarks we are, to a certain extent, anticipating the question which, is, in conclusion, to be considered: viz., whether the mythical character is restricted to those features of the narrative, upon which such character is actually stamped; and whether a contradiction between two accounts invalidate one account only, or both? That is to say, what is the precise boundary line between the historical and the unhistorical?—the most difficult question in the whole province of criticism. In the first place, when two narratives mutually exclude one another, one only is thereby proved to be unhistorical. If one be true the other must be false, but though the one be false the other may be true. Thus, in reference to the original residence of the parents of Jesus, we are justified in adopting the account of Luke which places it at Nazareth, to the exclusion of that of Matthew, which plainly supposes it to have been at Bethlehem; and, generally speaking, when we have to choose between two

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irreconcilcable accounts, in selecting as historical that which is the least opposed to the laws of nature, and has the least correspondence with certain national or party opinions. But upon a more particular consideration it will appear that, since one account is false, it is possible that the other may be so likewise: the existence of a mythus respecting some certain point, shows that the imagination has been active in reference to that particular subject; (we need only refer to the genealogies); and the historical accuracy of either of two such accounts cannot be relied upon, unless substantiated by its agreement with some other well authenticated testimony. Concerning the different parts of one and the same narrative: it might be thought for example, that though the appearance of an angel, and his announcement to Mary that she should be the Mother of the Messiah, must certainly be regarded as unhistorical, still, that Mary should have indulged this hope before the birth of the child, is not in itself incredible. But what should have excited this hope in Mary’s mind? It is at once apparent that that which is credible in itself is nevertheless unhistorical when it is so intimately connected with what is incredible that, if you discard the latter, you at the same time remove the basis on which the former rests. Again, any action of Jesus represented as a miracle, when divested of the marvellous, might be thought to exhibit a perfectly natural occurrence; with respect to some of the miraculous histories, the expulsion of devils for instance, this might with some limitation, be possible. But for this reason alone: in these instances, a cure, so instantaneous, and effected by a few words merely, as it is described in the Gospels, is not psychologically incredible; so that, the essential in these narratives remains untouched. It is different in the case of the healing of a man born blind. A natural cure could not have been effected otherwise than by a gradual process; the narrative states the cure to have been immediate; if therefore the history be understood to record a natural occurence, the most essential particular is incorrectly represented, and consequently all security for the truth of the otherwise natural remainder is gone, and the real fact cannot be discovered without the aid of arbitrary conjecture. The following examples will serve to illustrate the mode of deciding in such cases. According to the narrative, as Mary entered the house and saluted her cousin Elizabeth, who was then pregnant, the babe leaped in her womb, she was filled with the Holy Ghost, and she immediately addressed Mary as the Mother of the Messiah. This account bears indubitable marks of an unhistorical character. Yet, it is not, in itself, impossible that Mary should have paid a visit to her cousin, during which every thing went on quite naturally. The fact is however that there are psychological difficulties connected with this journey of the betrothed; and that the visit, and even the relationship of the two women, seem to have originated entirely in the wish to exhibit a connexion between the mother of John the Baptist, and the mother of the Messiah. Or when in the history of the transfiguration it is stated, that the men who appeared with Jesus on the Mount were Moses and Elias; and that the brilliancy which illuminated Jesus was supernatural; it might seem here also that, after deducting the marvellous, the presence of two men and a bright morning beam might be retained as the historical facts. But the legend was predisposed, by virtue of the current idea

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concerning the relation of the Messiah to these two prophets, not merely to make any two men (whose persons, object, and conduct, if they were not what the narrative represents them, remain in the highest degree mysterious) into Moses and Elias, but to create the whole occurrence; and in like manner not merely to conceive of some certain illumination as a supernatural effulgence (which, if a natural one, is much exaggerated and misrepresented), but to create it at once after the pattern of the brightness which illumined the face of Moses on Mount Sinai. Hence is derived the following rule. Where not merely the particular nature and manner of an occurrence is critically suspicious, its external circumstances represented as miraculous and the like; but where likewise the essential substance and groundwork is either inconceivable in itself, or is in striking harmony with some Messianic idea of the Jews of that age, then not the particular alleged course and mode of the transaction only, but the entire occurrence must be regarded as unhistorical. Where on the contrary, the form only, and not the general contents of the narration, exhibits the characteristics of the unhistorical, it is at least possible to suppose a kernel of historical fact; although we can never confidently decide whether this kernel of fact actually exists, or in what it consists; unless, indeed, it be discoverable from other sources. In legendary narratives, or narratives embellished by the writer, it is less difficult,—by divesting them of all that betrays itself as fictitious imagery, exaggeration, etc.—by endeavouring to abstract from them every extraneous adjunct and to fill up every hiatus—to succeed, proximately at least, in separating the historical groundwork. The boundary line, however, between the historical and the unhistorical, in records, in which as in our Gospels this latter element is incorporated, will ever remain fluct­ uating and unsusceptible of precise attainment. Least of all can it be expected that the first comprehensive attempt to treat these records from a critical point of view should be successful in drawing a sharply defined line of demarcation. In the obscurity which criticism has produced, by the extinction of all lights hitherto held historical, the eye must accustom itself by decrees to discriminate objects with precision; and at all events the author of this work, wishes especially to guard himself, in those places where he declares he knows not what happened, from the imputation of asserting that he knows that nothing happened.

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3 Søren Kierkegaard Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Vol. 1. Chapter 1, “The Historical Point of View”

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øren Kierkegaard (1813–55) was a Danish philosopher who stands as one of the leading modern figures in the discipline. His career was marked by a growing interest in religion and specifically Christianity. He wrote a few works on the interpretation of the Bible and many others that demonstrate how deeply he had internalized the text. This selection from Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments was originally published in Dutch in 1846 under the name Johannes Climacus, a pseudonym of Kierkegaard. The text raises the question of how one knows what genuine Christianity is and, more importantly, how one knows whether Christianity is true. Kierkegaard considers three possible arguments that might provide an inquirer with certainty on these issues. First, can scholarly investigation of the Bible render an accurate presentation of Christianity and vouchsafe it? This section of the text is of greatest interest for the topic of this reader. Second, might the church serve in this role? Third, can one who is dubious about Christianity receive assurance from the long career of the church, its many adherents, and the historical influence it has had from its birth to the present day? As he examines each of these three arguments in turn, Kierkegaard draws his readers’ attention to the same point. Everything turns on the stance that the inquirer takes in his approach to Christianity. On the one hand, Christianity can be considered from the standpoint of an observer who is keen to understand it with strict accuracy in every detail, but who is not interested, in the first instance, in whether or not he

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should appropriate Christian teaching for himself. Alternatively, one might approach Christianity with the question of its relationship to oneself foremost in mind. Kierkegaard calls the first approach objective and the second subjective. Throughout this piece, he pushes the point that no amount of knowledge acquired in an objective mode can, by itself, compel one to move from being an outsider to being an insider. That is, no amount of information about the Bible, the church, or its history can make one a Christian. A decision is required. The pervasive emphasis in Kierkegaard’s writing on the indispensability of decision has caused some to term him a proto-existentialist. Kierkegaard’s text contains a number of imaginative thought experiments by which he make his points, together with a fair amount of sarcastic derision for what he regards as the pretensions of objective thinking about what it can ultimately deliver. Kierkegaard had an influence on both Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth. Barth cites Kierkegaard a number of times in his chapter in this reader. Kierkegaard says in this selection that, even though historical-critical study of the Bible cannot confer faith on anyone, he still values this way of studying the text. What purpose does this type of study fulfill for him? Kierkegaard wrote before the publication of many of the influential historical-critical studies of the nineteenth century, such as Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis regarding the Pentateuch. How might they have affected his views? If one’s grasp of the truth is by nature direct, immediate, and personal, precisely how does this process occur?

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If Christianity is viewed as a historical document, the important thing is to obtain a completely reliable report of what the Christian doctrine really is. If the inquiring subject were infinitely interested in his relation to this truth, he would here despair at once, because nothing is easier to perceive than this, that with regard to the historical the greatest certainty is only an approximation, and an approximation is too little to build his happiness on and is so unlike an eternal happiness that no result can ensue. Since, however, the inquiring subject is merely historically interested (whether he as a believer is also infinitely interested in the truth of Christianity, whereby his entire striving could easily involve him in various contradictions, or whether he stands on the outside, yet without any impassionedly negative decision as an unbeliever), he takes the work in hand, the enormous studies, to which he himself makes new contributions until his seventieth year. A fortnight before his death, to be exact, he is looking forward to a new publication that will shed light upon an entire aspect of the discussion. Such an objective state of mind is an epigram (unless its opposite is an epigram on it) on the restlessness of the infinitely interested subject, who must indeed have an answer to such a question, which pertains to the decision about his eternal happiness, and who in any case would not at any price dare to forego his infinite interest until the very last moment. When the truth of Christianity is asked about historically, or what is and what is not Christian truth, Holy Scripture immediately presents itself as a crucial document. Therefore, the historical point of view focuses first on the Bible.

1. Holy Scripture Here the important thing for the research scholar is to secure for himself the greatest possible reliability; for me, however, it is not a matter of exhibiting any knowledge or of showing that I have none. For my deliberation, it is more important that it be understood and borne in mind that even with the most stupendous learning and perseverance, and even if the heads of all the critics were mounted on a single neck, one would never arrive at anything more than an approximation, and that there is an essential misrelation between that and a personal, infinite interestedness in one’s own eternal happiness.1 If Scripture is viewed as the secure stronghold that decides what is Christian and what is not, the important thing is to secure Scripture historically-critically.2 Here the canonicity of particular books is dealt with, their authenticity and integrity, the author’s axiopisty, and a dogmatic guarantee is posited: inspiration.3 When one thinks of the work of the English on the tunnel, the enormous expenditure of energy, and how a minor accident can interrupt the entire project for a long time—one has an appropriate notion of this entire critical enterprise. What time, what diligence, what superb abilities, what exceptional knowledge have been requisitioned from generation to generation for the sake of this marvel. And nevertheless a little dialectical doubt suddenly touching the presuppositions here can disturb the entire project for a long

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time, disturb the subterranean way to Christianity that one has wanted to construct objectively and scientifically instead of permitting the issue to arise as it is—subjective. One occasionally hears uneducated or half-educated individuals or pompous geniuses scoff at critical work with ancient writings. They belittle the learned researcher’s scrupulousness about the most insignificant detail, which is precisely to his credit, that scientifically he does not consider anything to be insignificant. No, philological scholarship is wholly legitimate, and the present author certainly has respect, second to none, for that which scholarship consecrates. On the other hand, one gets no unalloyed impression of critical theological scholarship. Its entire effort suffers from a certain conscious or unconscious duplexity. It always looks as if something for faith, something pertaining to faith, should suddenly result from this criticism. Therein lies the dubiousness. When, for example, a philologist publishes a book by Cicero and does it with great acumen, with scholarly apparatus in noble obedience to the supremacy of the mind; when his ingenuity and his intimate knowledge of antiquity, obtained by indefatigable diligence, help his ferreting sensibility to remove difficulties, to prepare the way for the process of thought amid a confusion of variant readings, etc.—then it is safe to abandon oneself to admiration, for when he has completed his work, nothing follows from it except the admirable feat that through his skill and competence an ancient text has been made available in the most reliable form. But it in no way follows that I am now supposed to build my eternal happiness on this book, because I certainly admit that with regard to my eternal happiness his amazing acumen is too little for me; I certainly admit that my admiration for him would be downcast rather than cheerful if I thought he had something like that in mente [in mind]. But that is precisely what critical theological scholarship does; when finished—and until then it holds us in suspenso, but with this very prospect in mind—it concludes: ergo, now you can build your eternal happiness on these writings. Anyone who as a believer posits inspiration must consistently regard every critical deliberation—whether for or against—as something dubious, a kind of temptation. And anyone who, without having faith, ventures out into critical deliberations cannot possibly want to have inspiration result from them. To whom, then, is it all really of interest? But the contradiction goes unnoticed because the matter is treated purely objectively. Indeed, it is not even there when the research scholar himself forgets what he has up his sleeve, except insofar as he once in a while uses it lyrically to encourage himself in the work or lyrically polemicizes with the aid of eloquence. Have an individual appear; have him with infinite, personal interest impassionedly want to attach his eternal happiness to this result, to the expected result—he will easily see that there is no result and none to expect, and the contradiction will bring him to despair. Luther’s rejection of the Letter of James is alone enough to bring him to despair. In relation to an eternal happiness and an impassioned, infinite interest in this (the former can be only in the latter), an iota is of importance, of infinite importance; or conversely: despair over the contradiction will teach him precisely that it is of no avail to press forward along this road.

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And yet that is how things have gone on. One generation after the other has died; new difficulties have arisen, have been conquered, and new difficulties have arisen. As an inheritance from generation to generation, the illusion has persisted that the method is the correct one, but the learned research scholars have not yet succeeded etc. All seem to feel comfortable; they all become more and more objective. The subject’s personal, infinite, impassioned interestedness (which is the possibility of faith and then faith, the form of eternal happiness and then eternal happiness) fades away more and more because the decision is postponed, and is postponed as a direct result of the results of the learned research scholar. That is to say, the issue does not arise at all. One has become too objective to have an eternal happiness, because this happiness inheres precisely in the infinite, personal, impassioned interestedness, and it is precisely this that one relinquishes in order to become objective, precisely this that one lets oneself be tricked out of by objectivity. With the aid of the clergy, who occasionally display some scholarship, the congregation learns about it. The communion of believers finally becomes an honorific title, since the congregation becomes objective merely by looking at the clergy and then looks forward to an enormous result etc. Then an enemy dashes forth against Christianity. Dialectically he is just as equipped as the research scholars and the bungling congregation. He attacks a book in the Bible, a group of books. Instantly the learned emergency choir rushes in etc. etc. Wessel has said that he stays out of jostling crowds. Likewise, it is not suitable for a pamphlet writer to come lickety-split with his respectful supplication on behalf of a few dialectical deliberations. He would be just like a dog in a bowling alley. Likewise, it is not suitable for a stark-naked dialectician to enter into a scholarly dispute in which, despite all the talent and learning pro et contra, it is nevertheless, in the last resort, not dialectically decided what the dispute is about. If it is a purely philological controversy, then let learning and talent be honored with admiration, as they deserve to be, but then it has no bearing on faith. If the disputants have something up their sleeves, let us get it out in order to think it through in all dialectical equanimity. Whoever defends the Bible with regard to faith must certainly have made clear to himself whether all his work, if it succeeded according to the highest expectations, would result in something in that respect, lest he become stuck in the parenthesis of his labor and, amid the difficulties of scholarship, forget the decisive dialectical claudatur [let it be closed]. Whoever attacks must likewise have reckoned whether the attack, if it succeeded on the largest possible scale, would result in something other than the philological result, or at most in a victory by contending e concessis, in which, please note, one can lose everything in a different way, that is, if the mutual agreement is illusory. In order to do justice to the dialectical and, undisturbed, just think the thoughts, let us assume first the one and then the other. I assume, then, that with regard to the Bible there has been a successful demonstration of whatever any theological scholar in his happiest moment could ever have wished to demonstrate about the Bible. These books, no others, belong to the

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canon; they are authentic, are complete; their authors are trustworthy—one may say that it is as if every letter was inspired (more cannot be said, because inspiration is indeed an object of faith, is qualitatively dialectical, not attainable by means of quantification). Furthermore, there is not a trace of contradiction in the sacred books. Let us be circumspect in our hypothesis. If only as much as a single word is rumored about such a thing, the parenthesis appears again and the philological-critical busy trifling will promptly lead one astray. On the whole, what is needed here to make the issue easy and simple is merely a dietetic precaution, a renunciation of every learned inter­mediate clause, which one, two, three could develop into a hundredyear-old parenthesis. Perhaps this is not so easy, and just as a person walks in danger wherever he walks, so the dialectical development walks in danger everywhere, walks in danger of slipping into a parenthesis. It is the same with both great and small, and what generally makes debates boring listening for a third party is that in the second round the debate has already entered a parenthesis and now with growing intensity proceeds in the wrong direction away from the real topic. Accordingly, a fencing trick is used to tempt the opponent a little in order to find out whether one is encountering a dialectical parade horse or one that runs riot in parentheses, that goes giddap and gallop as soon as it is a matter of the parenthetical. How many an entire human life has passed in this way, so that from early youth it has moved incessantly in parentheses! But here I shall break off these moralizing observations aimed at the common good, whereby I intended to compensate for my lack of historical-critical competence. Thus everything is assumed to be in order with regard to the Holy Scriptures—what then? Has the person who did not believe come a single step closer to faith? No, not a single step. Faith does not result from straightforward scholarly deliberation, nor does it come directly; on the contrary, in this objectivity one loses that infinite, personal, impassioned interestedness, which is the condition of faith, the ubique et nusquam [everywhere and nowhere] in which faith can come into existence. Has the person who did believe gained anything with regard to the power and strength of faith? No, not in the least; in this prolix knowledge, in this certainty that lurks at faith’s door and craves for it, he is rather in such a precarious position that much effort, much fear and trembling will be needed lest he fall into temptation and confuse knowledge with faith. Whereas up to now faith has had a beneficial taskmaster in uncertainty, it would have its worst enemy in this certainty. That is, if passion is taken away, faith no longer exists, and certainty and passion do not hitch up as a team. Let an analogy illustrate this. Whoever believes that there is a God and also a providence has an easier time (in preserving the faith), an easier time in definitely gaining the faith (and not an illusion) in an imperfect world, where passion is kept vigilant, than in an absolutely perfect world. In such a world, faith is indeed inconceivable. Therefore it is also taught that faith is abolished in eternity. How fortunate, then, that this wishful hypothesis, this most noble desire of critical theology, is an impossibility, because even its most consummate fulfillment would still remain an approximation. And in turn how fortunate for the scholars that the fault

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is by no means theirs! If all the angels united, they would still be able to produce only an approximation, because in historical knowledge an approximation is the only certainty—but also too little on which to build an eternal happiness. So I assume the opposite, that the enemies have succeeded in demonstrating what they desire regarding the Scriptures, with a certainty surpassing the most vehement desire of the most spiteful enemy—what then? Has the enemy thereby abolished Christianity? Not at all. Has he harmed the believer? Not at all, not in the least. Has he won the right to exempt himself from the responsibility for not being a believer? Not at all. That is, because these books are not by these authors, are not authentic, are not integri [complete], are not inspired (this cannot be disproved, since it is an object of faith), it does not follow that these authors have not existed and, above all, that Christ has not existed. To that extent, the believer is still equally free to accept it, equally free, please note, because if he accepted it by virtue of a demonstration, he would be on the verge of abandoning the faith. If matters ever go that far, the believer will always have some guilt if he himself has invited it and started with giving victory into the hands of disbelief by himself wanting to demonstrate. Here lies the difficulty, and I am again led back to learned theology. For whose sake is the demonstration conducted? Faith does not need it, indeed, must even consider it its enemy. When faith, however, begins to feel ashamed of itself, when, like a young woman in love who is not satisfied with loving but subtly feels ashamed of the beloved and consequently must have it substantiated that he is something exceptional, that is, when faith begins to lose passion, that is, when faith begins to cease to be faith, then the demonstration is made necessary in order to enjoy general esteem from unbelief. “Alas, and let us not mention what on this point is perpetrated by a confusion of categories in the rhetorical stupidities of eccesiastical speakers. Faith taken in vain (a modern substitute—how can they believe who receive glory from one another, Jn 5.44) will not and cannot, of course, bear the martyrdom of faith, and in our day an address informed by real faith is perhaps the address most rarely heard in all Europe. Speculative thought has understood everything, everything, everything! The ecclesiastical speaker still exercises some restraint; he admits that he has not yet understood everything; he admits that he is striving (poor fellow, that is a confusion of categories!).“If there is anyone who has understood everything,” he says, “then I admit (alas, he is sheepish and is not aware that he should use irony toward the others) that I have not understood it and cannot demonstrate everything, and we lesser ones (alas, he senses his lowliness in the wrong place) must be content with faith.” (Poor, misunderstood, supreme passion: faith—that you have to be content with such a defender; poor preacher-fellow, that you do not know what the question is! Poor intellectual pauper Per Eriksen, who cannot quite make it in scholarship and science but who has faith, because that he has, the faith that turned fishermen into apostles, the faith that can move mountains—if one has it!) When the matter is treated objectively, the subject cannot impassionedly relate himself to the decision, can least of all be impassionedly, infinitely interested. To be infinitely interested in relation to that which at its maximum always remains only an

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approximation is a self-contradiction and thus is comical. If passion is posited nevertheless, zealotism ensues. Every iota is of infinite value for the infinitely interested passion.4 The fault inheres not in the infinitely interested passion but in this, that its object has become an approximation-object. The objective view, however, continues from generation to generation precisely because the individuals (the observers) become more and more objective, less and less infinitely, passionately interested. On the assumption that one would in this way continue to demonstrate and to seek a demonstration of the truth of Christianity, something remarkable would finally emerge, that just as one was finished with the demonstration of its truth, it would have ceased to exist as something present; it would have become something historical to such a degree that it would be something past, whose truth, that is, whose historical truth, had now been brought to the point of reliability. In this way the concerned prophecy of Luke 18:8 could be fulfilled: Nevertheless, when the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth? The more objective the observer becomes, the less he builds an eternal happiness, that is, his eternal happiness, on his relation to his observation, because an eternal happiness is a question only for the impassioned, infinitely interested subjectivity. The observer (whether he is an inquiring [forskende] scholar or a dabbling [fuskende] member of the congregation) now understand himself objectively in the following valedictory at the boundary of life: when I was young, such and such books were in doubt. Their authenticity has now been demonstrated, but then in turn doubt has arisen lately about some books never previously held in doubt. But I am sure that a scholar will come along etc. With applauded heroism, the modest objective subject keeps himself aloof; he is at your service and willing to accept the truth as soon as it has been obtained. Yet the goal to which he aspires is a distant one (undeniably so, since an approximation can continue as long as it pleases)—and while the grass grows, the observer dies, calm, for he was objective. Objectivity, you are not praised for nothing. You are capable of everything; not even the firmest believer has been so certain of his eternal happiness, and above all so sure of not losing it, as the objective subject has been! It must then be that this objectivity and this modesty were out of place, were un-Christian. Then it certainly would be dubious to enter the truth of Christianity in this manner. Christianity is spirit; spirit is inwardness; inwardness is subjectivity; subjectivity is essentially passion, and at its maximum an infinite, personally interested passion for one’s eternal happiness. As soon as subjectivity is taken away, and passion from subjectivity, and infinite interest from passion, there is no decision whatever, whether on this issue or any other. All decision, all essential decision, is rooted in subjectivity. At no point does an observer (and that is what the objective subject is) have an infinite need for a decision, and at no point does he see it. This is the falsum [falsehood] of objectivity and the meaning of mediation as a passing through in the continuous process in which nothing abides and in which nothing is infinitely decided either, because the movement turns back on itself and turns back again, and the movement itself is a

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chimera, and speculative thought is always wise afterward.5 Objectively understood, there are more than enough results everywhere, but no decisive result anywhere. This is quite in order, precisely because decision is rooted in subjectivity, essentially in passion, and maxime [maximally] in the infinitely interested, personal passion for one’s eternal happiness.

2. The church The protection against the encroachment of dialectics that the Catholic Church enjoys in the visible presence of the pope will be omitted from the discussion.6 But also within Protestantism, after the Bible has been abandoned as a secure stronghold, there has been recourse to the Church. Although attacks are still being made on the Bible, although learned theologians defend it linguistically and critically, this entire procedure is now partly antiquated; and above all, precisely because one becomes more and more objective, one does not have in mind the crucial conclusions with regard to faith. Letter-zealotry, which did have passion, has vanished. Its merit was that it had passion. In another sense, it was comic. And just as the age of chivalry actually concluded with Don Quixote (the comic conception is always the concluding one), a poet, by comically eternalizing such an unfortunate servant of the letter in his tragic-comic romanticism, could still make it plain that literalist theology is something of the past. Wherever there is passion, there is also romanticism, and the one who has flexibility and a sense of passion and has not learned by rote what poetry is will see in such a figure a beautiful infatuation, just as when a loving maiden embroiders an artistic border for the Gospel in which she reads of the joyousness of her erotic love, or just as when a loving maiden counts the written characters in the letter he has written to her—but then he would also see the comic. Such a figure would undoubtedly become a laughingstock. With what right one would laugh is another question, because the fact that the whole age has become devoid of passion does not entitle it to laugh. The ludicrous aspect of the zealot was that his infinite passion thrust itself upon a wrong object (an approximation-object), but the good aspect of him was that he did have passion. Turning the matter so as to relinquish the Bible and resort to the Church is indeed a Danish idea. Nevertheless, I cannot in the name of compatriotism either rejoice personally over this “matchless discovery” (which is the official designation of this idea among the ingenious persons concerned: the originator and Messrs. Admirers) or find it desirable for the govemment to order a Te Deum [We praise thee, O God] from the entire population in pious thanksgiving for the “matchless discovery.” It is better and, at least for me, indescribably easy to let Grundtvig keep what is his: the matchless discovery. To be sure, at one time it was rumored, especially when a similar little movement had started in Germany with Delbrück and others, that Grundtvig actually owed the idea to Lessing, yet without owing him the matchlessness of it. Then it would be Grundtvig’s merit to have transformed a little Socratic moot point, problematically

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formulated with ingenious sagacity and rare skeptical craftsmanship and superb dialectic, into an eternal, matchless, world-historical, absolute, heaven-reaching, sunlit truth. But even assuming that there was a connection on Grundtvig’s part, which I do not assume at all, since the matchless discovery in its matchless absoluteness bears the unmistakable imprint of Grundtvigian originality, it would nevertheless be an injustice, to say it was a borrowing from Lessing, since in everything Grundtvigian there is nothing whatever that calls Lessing to mind or that the grand master of the understanding could, without matchless resignation, claim as his property. If it had at least been said that the sagacious, dialectical Magister Lindberg, the gifted attorney general and guardian of the matchless discovery, was possibly indebted to Lessing, that would be something. In any case, the discovery is much indebted to Lindberg’s talent, inasmuch as through him it was given form and was forced into a dialectical stance, became less hiatic, less matchless—and more accessible to sound common sense. Grundtvig had correctly perceived that the Bible could not possibly withstand the invading doubt, but he did not perceive that the reason for this was that the attack and the defense were both rooted in a method of approximation, which in its perpetually continued striving is not dialectically adequate for an infinite decision on which an eternal happiness is built. Since he was not dialectically aware of this, it must have been a stroke of sheer luck that he actually went outside the presuppositions within which the Bible theory has its great merit, its venerable scholarly significance. But a stroke of luck is inconceivable in relation to the dialectical. As far as that goes, it was more probable that with his theory of the Church he would eventually remain within the same presuppositions. Abusive language against the Bible, with which he at one time really offended the older Lutherans, abusive language and dictates instead of thoughts, can of course satisfy only devotees, and then of course to an extraordinary extent. When thought is lacking in the boisterous talk, everyone else will readily perceive that thoughtlessness has a fling in the looseness of the expression. Just as previously the Bible was supposed to decide objectively what is the essentially Christian and what is not, now the Church was supposed to be the secure objective stronghold. More specifically, it is the Living Word in the Church, the Creed, and the Word with the sacraments. It is now clear for the first time that the issue is to be treated objectively. The modest, immediate, totally unreflective subject remains naively convinced that if only the objective truth stands firm, the subject will be ready and willing to slip it on. Here we instantly witness the youthfulness (the elderly Grundtvig also prides himself on this) that has no inkling of that subtle little Socratic secret: that the relation of the subject is precisely the knotty difficulty. If truth is spirit, then truth is inward deepening and is not an immediate and utterly uninhibited relation of an immediate Geist [spirit, mind] to a sum total of propositions, even though this relation is confusingly given the name of the most decisive expression of subjectivity: faith. The direction of unreflectiveness is always oriented outward, thereunto, toward, in striving to reach its goal, toward the objective. The Socratic secret—which, unless Christianity is to be an infinite retrogression, can be infinitized in Christianity only by an even deeper inwardness—is

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that the movement is inward, that the truth is the subject’s transformation within himself. The genius who foretells a matchless future for Greece is simply not familiar with Greek culture. A study of Greek skepticism is much to be recommended. There one learns thoroughly what will always require time and practice and discipline to understand (a narrow way for careless speech!), that sensate certainty, to say nothing of historical certainty, is uncertainty, is only an approximation, and that the positive and an immediate relation to it are the negative. The first dialectical difficulty with the Bible is that it is a historical document, that as soon as it is made the stronghold an introductory approximation commences, and the subject is diverted into a parenthesis, the conclusion of which one awaits for all eternity. The New Testament is something of the past and is thus historical in a stricter sense. This is the beguiling aspect that prevents making the issue subjective and treats it objectively, whereby it never comes into existence at all.—Philosophical Fragments focuses on this difficulty in chapters IV and V by canceling the difference between the contemporary follower and the latest follower, who are presumed to be separated by 1800 years. This is of importance lest the issue (the contradiction that the god has existed in human form) be confused with the history of the issue, that is, with the summa summarum [sum total] of 1800 years of opinions etc. Imaginatively constructing in this way, Fragments emphasized the issue. The difficulty with the New Testament as something past now seems to be canceled by the Church, which is indeed something present. On this point Grundtvig’s theory has merit. It has been developed, particularly by Lindberg, with skilled, juridical keenness, that the Church eliminates all the proving and demonstrating that was required in connection with the Bible, since that is something past, whereas the Church is something present. To demand from it a demonstration that it exists [er til], says Lindberg correctly, is nonsense, like demanding from a living person a demonstration that he exists. Lindberg is entirely right in this matter and has the merit of the imperturbability and clarifying assurance with which he sticks to a point. Thus the Church exists [er til ]; from the Church (as present to, as contemporary with the inquirer, whereby the issue is endowed with the equality of contemporaneity), it is possible to learn what is essentially Christian, since that is indeed what the Church professes. Correct. But not even Lindberg has been able to restrict the matter to this point (and I much prefer to face a dialectician and leave the matchless to Grundtvig). That is, after it has been said about the Church that it exists and that one can learn from it what the essentially Christian is, it is in turn asserted that this Church, the present Church, is the apostolic Church, that it is the same Church that has persisted for eighteen centuries. Consequently, the predicate “Christian” is more than a predicate of the present Church; predicated of the present Church, it designates pastness, consequently a historicity in quite the same sense as that of the Bible. Now all merit has amounted to nothing. The only historicity superior to proof is contemporary existence; every qualification of pastness requires demonstration. Thus, if someone

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says, to a man: Demonstrate that you exist, the latter will quite properly reply: That is nonsense. If, on the other hand, he says: I, who now exist, existed essentially as the same person more than four hundred years ago, the former would properly respond: Here a demonstration is needed. It is indeed peculiar that this has gone unnoticed by such a seasoned dialectician as Lindberg, who is so very capable of pushing a point to its logical conclusion. As soon as continuity is advanced with the aid of the Living Word, the issue has been brought to the very same point where it was in the Bible theory. Objections are like the nisse: a man moves his residence—the nisse moves with him. At times this is deceptive for a moment. By suddenly changing the plan of operation, if one is also so fortunate that no one attacks the new line of defense, a genius like Grundtvig can easily be made blissfully happy in the opinion that now everything is fine with the aid of his matchless discovery. But let the Church theory bear the brunt just as the Bible had to do, let all objections try to kill it, what then? Then, quite consistently, an introductory scholarly discipline again becomes necessary (any other procedure would demolish the Church theory itself and translate the issue into the realm of subjectivity, where it most certainly belongs, but this is not assumed by the objective Grundtvig). This scholarly discipline is to demonstrate the originality of the Creed, its synonymity everywhere and at every moment through eighteen centuries (where the critical task would encounter difficulties completely unknown to the Bible theory),8 and then there will be ferreting around in old books. The Living Word does not help, and, of course, neither will it help to point this out to Grundtvig. Therefore, this is done not in any sort of hope, but rather in wan hope. The Living Word proclaims the Church’s existence [Tilvrelse]. Correct, even Satan himself cannot deprive anyone of that, but the Living Word does not proclaim that the Church has existed for eighteen centuries, that it is essentially the same, that it has existed completely unchanged, etc.; even a dialectical novice can perceive this. The Living Word as a manifestation of existence corresponds to the immediate undemonstrable existence [Tilvoer] of what is contemporaneously present, but as little as pastness is demonstrable (that is, it is superior to demonstration), so little does the Living Word correspond to it, inasmuch as the added predicate indicates only an immediate presence. A Grundtvigian anathema upon those who might not understand the beatific or decisive power of the Living Word with regard to the category of the historical past (a Living Word by those who have departed) demonstrates neither that Grundtvig is thinking nor that the opponent is not thinking. Magister Lindberg, who has too good a head to be content with sounding the alarm year after year, is himself the very one who has given the matter this turn. Once when a dispute arose about whether it is more correct to say “I believe in a Christian Church” or “I believe that there is a Christian Church,” he himself had recourse to old books in order to demonstrate when the faulty variant had appeared. There is, of course, nothing else to be done, unless a new renunciation is added to the Christian creed, namely, the renunciation of all sound thinking with regard to the matchless discovery and the abracadabra of the Living Word.9

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Along this path the approximation process commences again. The parenthesis is posited, and no one can say when it will end, for this is and remains merely an approximating, and this approximating has the curious quality of being able to continue as long as it pleases. Accordingly, the Church theory, compared with the Bible theory, had the merit of eliminating turning the historical into the present. But this merit promptly disappears as soon as the more specific qualifications enter the picture. Whatever else has occasionally been said about the superiority of the Creed to the Bible as a safeguard against attack is rather obscure. That the Bible is a large book and the Creed a few lines is an illusory consolation and holds true only for people who fail to discover that copiousness of thought is not always proportionate to copiousness of words. Indeed, the attackers merely need to shift the attack, that is, to direct it against the Creed, and then everything will again be in full swing. If the attackers, in order to deny the personality of the Holy Spirit, can try their hand at New Testament exegesis, they can just as well adhere to the distinction expounded by Lindberg— whether the Creed should read “the holy spirit [den hellige Aand ],” or “the Holy-Spirit [den Hellig-Aand].” This is merely an example, for with regard to historical issues it is of course impossible to reach an objective decision of such a nature that no doubt would be able to insinuate itself. This also indicates that the issue is to be formulated subjectively and that it is indeed a misunderstanding to want to assure oneself objectively and thereby avoid the risk in which passion chooses and in which passion continues upholding its choice. It would also be a gross injustice if any later generation would safely, that is, objectively, be able to insinuate itself into Christianity and thus partake of what an earlier generation had purchased in the utmost danger of subjectivity and had spent a lifetime acquiring in this very danger. If someone says that a briefer statement is easier to hold fast and harder to attack, he suppresses something, namely, how many thoughts are contained in the brief statement. Accordingly, someone else could with equal right say (when, as in casu [in this case], both are by the same, here the apostles) that a more copious elaboration is clearer and thus easier to hold fast and harder to attack. But everything said in this vein, pro et contra, is again only approximation-skepticism. The Church theory has been sufficiently lauded as objective, a word that in our age has become a way of making honorable amends by which thinkers and prophets believe they are telling one another something of great importance. It is just too bad that where one should be objective, in strict scholarship, objectivity is rare, because a savant equipped with expert autopsy is a great rarity. In relation to Christianity, however, objectivity is an extremely unfortunate category, and the one who has objective Christianity and nothing else is eo ipso [precisely thereby] a pagan, because Christianity is precisely a matter of spirit and of subjectivity and of inwardness. Now, I shall not deny that the Church theory is objective but rather point it out in the following way. When an individual infinitely, impassionedly interested in his own eternal happiness is placed in relation to the Church theory in such a way that he intends to base his eternal happiness on it, he becomes comic. He becomes comic

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not because he is infinitely, impassionedly interested—this is indeed the good thing about him—but he becomes comic because the objectivity is incongruous with his interest. If the historical aspect of the Creed (that it is from the apostles etc.) is to be decisive, then every iota must be infinitely insisted upon, and since this can be attained only approximando [by approximation], the individual finds himself in the contradiction of tying, that is, wanting to tie his eternal happiness to it and not being able to do so because the approximation is never finished. From this it follows in turn that he will not manage in all eternity to tie his eternal happiness to it but will tie it to a less passionate something. If agreement could be reached on using the Creed instead of the Scriptures, phenomena would arise entirely analogous to the zealotry of a concerned biblical exegesis. The individual is tragic because of his passion and comic because of staking it on an approximation. If someone wants to emphasize the Sacrament of Baptism and base his eternal happiness on having been baptized, he again becomes comic, not because the infinitely interested passion is comic (far from it, precisely this is venerable), but because the object is only an approximation-object. We all live assured in the conviction of being baptized, but if Baptism is to be decisive, infinitely decisive for my eternal happiness. Then I—and consequently everyone who has not been made objectively blessed and has not dismissed passion as child’s play (and such a person indeed has no eternal happiness for which to seek a basis; so he can easily base it on little)—then I must ask for certainty. Alas, the trouble is that in relation to a historical fact I can obtain only an approximation. My father has said so; it says so in the parish register; I have a certificate10 and so forth. Yes, I am assured. But let a person have passion enough to grasp the meaning of his own eternal happiness, and then let him try to tie it to his having been baptized—he will despair. Along this path, the Church theory would have to lead directly to the Baptist movement or else to a repetition of Baptism and also of Holy Communion in order to be sure of its case, that is, provided the Church theory has had any influence at all and everything has not become very objective. Just because Grundtvig as poet is tossed about and moved in immediate passion, which is the magnificent thing about him, he feels a need, and in an immediate sense feels it deeply, for something firm with which the dialectical can be held at bay. But such a need is simply a need for a superstitious fixed point, because, as mentioned above, every boundary that wants to exclude the dialectical is eo ipso superstition. Just because Grundtvig is moved in immediate passion, he is not unfamiliar with temptations. With regard to these, a shortcut is now taken by obtaining something magical to hold on to, and then there will be plenty of time for being world-historically concerned. But this is precisely where the contradiction lies: to rely on something magical in relation to oneself and then to be busy with all of world history. When the temptation takes hold dialectically, when the victory also is continually construed dialectically, a human being will have enough to do with himself. Of course, then there will be no opportunity to make all humankind happy with matchless visions. On this question of one’s eternal happiness, I shall not undertake to decide whether in other respects it is not un-Christian to find repose in the certainty that one

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is baptized, just as the Jews appealed to circumcision and to their being Abraham’s children as a decisive demonstration of the God-relationship, that is, to find repose not in a spiritual relationship with God in freedom (and then we are indeed in the theory of subjectivity, where the authentic religious categories belong, where each person is supposed only to save himself and has his hands full with that, because the saving continually becomes more difficult—more intensive in inwardness—the more important the individuality is, and where playing the world-historical genius and fraternizing world-historically as an extraordinarius with God is much like flippancy in relation to the moral life) but in an external event, that is, to hold the temptation away by means of this magical Baptism11 and not to want to permeate it with faith. Here as everywhere I have no opinion of my own but, imaginatively constructing, simply present the issue. As far as the Bible theory is concerned, the present author, even if he became more and more convinced of the dialectical distortion concealed in it, nevertheless cannot but remember with gratitude and admiration the splendid accomplishments within the presupposition, remember those writings invested with rare learnedness and thoroughness, remember the salutary impression of the entire effort that is embodied in a literature of whose total range the present author in no way claims to have any special scholarly knowledge. As far as Grundtvig’s theory is concerned, the author does not exactly feel any pain in the moment of parting, nor does he exactly feel abandoned at the thought of being in disagreement with this thinker. No one wishing to know definitely where he stands could possibly wish to have Grundtvig for an ally, especially a person who does not wish to stand where there is commotion, especially when the commotion is the only more specific definition of where he stands. As for Magister Lindberg, he is such a richly knowledgeable man and such a seasoned dialectician that as an ally he is always a great gain and as a foe always makes the battle difficult for one—yet also enjoyable, because he is a skilled fencer who hits home but does not slay absolutely, so that the survivor readily convinces himself that it was not he who has been slain but rather some enormous absoluteness. It has always seemed to me an injustice to Lindberg that while Pastor Grundtvig receives a certain amount per annum in offerings of admiration and incidental income from the worshiping party membership, Lindberg, on the other hand, has had to stand in the shade. And yet it is in truth something, and something that can with truth be said of Lindberg, that he has a good head on his shoulders; however, what in truth all this is that is said about Grundtvig is highly dubious, that he is a seer, bard, skald, prophet, with an almost matchless outlook upon world history and with one eye for the profound.

3. The evidence of the centuries for the truth of Christianity The issue is raised objectively; the solid, sensible subject thinks this way: “Just let there be clarity and certainty about the truth of Christianity and I will surely be man enough to accept it; that will follow as a matter of course.” The trouble, however, is

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that in its paradoxical form12 the truth of Christianity has something in common with the nettle: the solid, sensible subject only stings himself when he wants to grasp it summarily this way, or rather (since it is a spiritual relationship, the stinging can be understood only in a figurative sense) he does not grasp it at all; he grasps its objective truth so objectively that he himself remains outside. This argument cannot be treated in a genuinely dialectical way, because with the very first word it changes into a hypothesis. And a hypothesis may become more probable by lasting three thousand years, but it does not on that account ever become an eternal truth that can be decisive for a person’s eternal happiness. Has not Mohammedanism survived for twelve hundred years? The reliability of the eighteen centuries, the fact that Christianity has permeated all relations of life, reshaped the world, etc., this reliability is just an illusion by which the resolving and choosing subject is trapped and he enters the perdition of the parenthesis. In relation to an eternal truth that is supposed to be decisive for an eternal happiness, eighteen centuries have no greater demonstrative weight than a single day. On the contrary, eighteen hundred years and everything, everything that can be told and said and repeated in that regard, have a diversionary power that is extremely distracting. Every human being is by nature designed to become a thinker (all honor and praise to the God who created man in his image!). God is not to be faulted if habit and routine and lack of passion and affectation and chatter with neighbors right and left gradually corrupt most people, so that they become thoughtless—and build their eternal happiness on one thing and another and a third something—and do not notice the secret that their talk about their eternal happiness is an affectation because it is devoid of passion, and therefore it might as well be built on matchstick arguments. The argument can, therefore, be treated only rhetorically.13 True eloquence is certainly a rarity now; true eloquence would undoubtedly think twice before using it—perhaps that is why the argument is heard so often. At best, then, the argument does not seek to proceed dialectically (only dabblers begin that way and only later seize upon the rhetorical); it seeks to impress. The speaker isolates the observing or the doubting subject from all association with others and confronts the poor sinner with countless generations and millions upon millions upon millions. Then he says to him; Do you now dare to be brazen enough to deny the truth? Do you dare, do you dare to imagine that you possess the truth and that for eighteen centuries those countless generations and millions upon millions upon millions have lived on and on in error? Do you dare, you miserable solitary fellow, do you dare to want, as it were, to plunge [styrte] all those millions upon millions upon millions, indeed all humankind, into perdition? See, they rise from their graves. See, they parade, as it were, past my thought, generation after generation of all those believers who found repose in the truth of Christianity, and their looks judge you, you brazen rebel, until the separation of judgment day keeps you from seeing them, because you were found wanting and were shut out in the darkness, far from that eternal happiness, etc. Yet behind this enormous barrage (of millions upon millions upon millions), the cowardly speaker

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trembles at times when using the argument because he suspects that there is a contradiction in his entire approach. But he does the sinner no harm. Such a rhetorical shower bath [Styrtebad] from an altitude of eighteen centuries is very bracing. The speaker is beneficial, although not in exactly the way he thinks; he is beneficial by singling out the subject over against all other people—alas, that is a great service, because only a few are capable of doing that by themselves, and yet testing in this position is an absolute condition for entering Christianity. The eighteen centuries are indeed supposed to instill terror. As a demonstration pro, they = 0 for the individual subject in the moment of decision, but as a terror contra, they are superb. The question is only whether the rhetorician will succeed in bringing the sinner in under the shower bath; that is, he does him an injustice inasmuch as the sinner by no means affirms or denies the truth of Christianity but simply and solely ponders his own relation to it. Just as the Icelander in the story told the king, “That is too much. Your Reverence,” so the sinner could say, “That is too much, Right Reverend; what is the use of these millions and millions upon millions? A person gets so mixed up in his head that he does not know right from left.” As noted above, it is Christianity itself that attaches an enormous importance to the individual subject; it wants to be involved with him, him alone, and thus with each one individually. It is in a way an un-Christian use of eighteen centuries to intend with them to entice the single individual into Christianity or to frighten him into it: he still does not enter into it. And if he does enter into it, he does so whether he has eighteen centuries for him or against him. What has been intimated here has been emphasized in Fragments frequently enough, namely, that there is no direct and immediate transition to Christianity, and that therefore all those who in that way want to give a rhetorical push in order to bring one into Christianity or even help one into it by a thrashing—they are all deceivers— no, they know not what they do.

Notes 1

In emphasizing this contradiction, the pamphlet Philosophical Fragments stressed or set forth the issue: Christianity is something historical (in relation to which the highest knowledge is only an approximation, the most masterly historical deliberation only the most masterly “as-good-as,” “almost”), and yet qua historical and precisely by means of the historical, it proposes to have decisive significance for a person’s eternal happiness. It follows as a matter of course that the humble achievement of the pamphlet was always only to present the issue, to extricate it from all prattling and speculative attempts at explanation, which indeed explain that the explainer does not know at all what the question is.

2

The dialectical still cannot be excluded. It may be that one generation, or perhaps two, can pass its years in the presumption of having found a stockade that is the end of the world and of dialectics. It is of no use. Thus for a long time it was deemed possible to exclude dialectics from faith by saying that its conviction was upheld by virtue of authority. Then if someone wanted to question the believer, that is, to

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3

The misrelation between inspiration and critical research is like that between eternal happiness and critical deliberations, because inspiration is an object only of faith. Or are people so critically zealous because the books are inspired? Consequently, the believer who believes that the books are inspired is not cognizant of which books he believes to be inspired. Or does inspiration ensue as a result of the critique, so that when it has done its job it has also demonstrated that the books are inspired? In that case, one will never come to accept inspiration, because the critical work is at its maximum only an approximation.

4

The objective point of view is hereby also reduced in absurdum, and subjectivity is posited. If we were to ask why the smallest iota is of infinite importance, the answer would have to be: because the subject is infinitely interested. Consequently, the subject’s infinite interestedness is what tips the scale.

5

This must also be the way to understand the skepticism of Hegelian philosophy, much promoted for its positivity. According to Hegel, the truth is the continuous world-historical process. Each generation, each stage of this process, is legitimated and yet is only an element in the truth. Short of resorting to a bit of charlatanry, which helps by assuming that the generation in which Hegel lived or the one after him is imprimatur, that this generation is the last and world history is past, we are all implicated in skepticism. The passionate question of truth does not even come up, because philosophy has first tricked the individuals into becoming objective. The positive Hegelian truth is just as deceptive as happiness was in paganism. Not until afterward does one come to know whether or not one has been happy,and thus the next generation comes to know what truth was in the preceding generation. The great secret of the system (yet this remains unter uns [between us] just like the secret among the Hegelians) is close to Protagoras’s sophism “Everything is relative” except that here everything is relative in the continuous progress. But no living soul is served by that, and if he happens to be familiar with an anecdote by Plutarch (in Moralia) about the Lacedaimonian Eudamidas, he will certainly come to think of it. When Eudamidas in the academy saw the senescent Xenocrates seeking the truth together with his followers, he asked: Who is this old man? And when the reply was given that he was a wise man, one of those seeking after virtue, he exclaimed, “When, then, will he use it?” Presumably, this continuous progress has also given rise to the misunderstanding that it takes a devil of a fellow in speculative thought to free himself from Hegelianism. Far from it; only sound common sense is needed, a pithy sense of the comic, a little Greek ataraxia. Apart from logic, and also somewhat in logic because of an ambiguous light that Hegel has not excluded, Hegel and Hegelianism are a venture in the comic. By now, the late Hegel has presumably met his master in the deceased Socrates, who undoubtedly has something to laugh about, that is, if Hegel has remained unchanged. Yes, there Socrates has found a man worth talking with and especially worth asking (something Socrates intended to do with all the dead) in Socratic fashion whether or not he knows something. Socrates must have changed considerably if he would be even remotely impressed

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if Hegel were to begin to reel off paragraphs and promise that everything would become clear at the end.—Perhaps this note is an appropriate place for something I have to complain about. In Paul Meilers Lernet there is only a single reference that conveys any idea of how he in his last years viewed Hegel. In this restraint, the distinguished editor has presumably permitted himself to be guided by partiality and reverence for the deceased, by an uneasy regard for what certain people would say, what a speculative and almost Hegelian public might judge. Nevertheless, precisely when he thought he was acting out of partiality for the deceased, the editor perhaps damaged the impression of him. It is more noteworthy than many an aphorism included in the printed collection, and just as noteworthy as many a youthful episode preserved by the careful and tasteful biographer in his lovely and noble presentation, that P.M., when everything here at home was Hegelian, judged quite differently, that for some time he first spoke of Hegel almost with indignation, until his wholesome, humorous nature made him smile, especially at Hegelianism, or, to recall P. M. even more clearly, made him laugh at it heartily. Who has been enamored of P. M. and forgotten his humor; who has admired him and forgotten his wholesomeness; who has known him and forgotten his laughter, which did one good even when it was not entirely clear what he was laughing at, because his absentmindedness occasionally left one perplexed. 6

On the whole, the infinite reflection in which the subjective individual is first able to become concerned about his eternal happiness is immediately recognizable by one thing, that it is everywhere accompanied by the dialectical. Whether it is a word, a sentence, a book, a man, a society, whatever it is, as soon as it is supposed to be a boundary, so that the boundary itself is not dialectical, it is superstition and narrowmindedness. In a human being there is always a desire, at once comfortable and concerned, to have something really firm, and fixed that can exclude the dialectical, but this is cowardliness and fraudulence toward the divine. Even the most certain of all, a revelation, to eo ipso [precisely thereby] becomes dialectical when I am to appropriate it; even the most fixed of all, an infinite negative resolution, which is the individuality’s infinite form of God’s being within him, promptly becomes dialectical. As soon as I take away the dialectical, I am superstitious and defraud God of the moment’s strenuous acquisition of what was once acquired. It is, however, far more comfortable to be objective and superstitious, boasting about it and proclaiming thoughtlessness.

7

More precisely defined, dialectically-metaphysically, this is because existence [Tilvoerelse] is a higher concept than all demonstration on its behalf, and it is therefore foolishness to demand a demonstration, whereas it is, inversely, a leap to draw an inference from essence [Voersen] to existence.

8

As a precaution, I must here repeat the dialectic. It is not inconceivable that someone with enough imagination to become really aware of the prolixity of these difficulties would say: No, then the Bible works better. Yet we must not absentmindedly forget that this more or less, this better or not better, lies within the essential imperfection of an approximation that is incommensurate with the decision of an eternal happiness.

9

On the other hand anyone whose imagination is not completely inflexible, if he happens to recall that dispute, will certainly not deny that Lindberg’s approach was a vivid reminder of the learned efforts of a concerned biblical exegesis. I have never been able to detect anything sophistical in Lindberg’s procedure, provided, as is reasonable and just, that one does not, inspired, presume to judge the heart, a judgment with which Lindberg has always been pestered.

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10 God knows whether Pastor Grundtvig assumes that there is also a Living Word that demonstrates that one is actually baptized. 11 When it is said that the safeguard against all temptation in thinking about Baptism is that in it God does something with us, it is of course only an illusion that intends to hold the dialectical away by means of such a qualification, because the dialectical promptly returns with the inward deepening of this thought, with the appropriation. Each and every genius, even the greatest who has ever lived, is to use all of his strength exclusively on this, on inward deepening within himself. But people wish to be free from temptation once and for all, and therefore faith does not attend to God in the moment of temptation but faith becomes faith in one’s actually having been baptized. If much masquerading were not concealed here, there would long since have emerged psychologically noteworthy cases of concern about getting to know for certain that one is actually baptized. If a mere ten thousand rix-dollars were at sake, the matter would scarcely be permitted to sand with the sort of certainty we now all have in our having been baptized. 12 On this, see Fragments. 13 Perhaps most aptly with a humorous twist, as when Jean Paul says that if all demonstrations of the truth of Christianity were abandoned or disproved, one demonstration would nevertheless remain, namely, that it has survived for eighteen hundred years.

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4 Ernst Troeltsch “On the Historical and Dogmatic Methods in Theology”

E

rnst Troeltsch (1865–1923) was a German theologian and philosopher. He broke ground by applying sociological theory to the study of theology, by considering more deeply than many of his predecessors the claims to truth made by religions other than Christianity, and by further developing a model of biblical study that situates the Bible historically. Troeltsch was a leading theologian in the History of Religions School, a group of prominent German biblical critics in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. They sought to minimize the role that the doctrinal claims of the Christian faith played in shaping how the enterprise of interpretation was understood. Correlatively, they sought to understand the texts of the Bible as part of an intricate web of different religious communities (not only Christianity) that each have a history and are accessible to empirical study. This school of thought had broad influence within the field of biblical studies. This essay, originally published in 1898, is transparently an occasional piece. Troeltsch’s point of departure is a work by Niebergall, whom Troeltsch chides for being methodologically muddled. What Niebergall fails to see, according to Troeltsch, is that the historical and dogmatic approaches are two distinct, self-consistent paradigms that operate according to different sets of first principles, and whose elements cannot simply be mixed blithely together. Instead, every scholar must make a choice. For most of the piece, Troeltsch speaks of the historical option in such positive terms that it seems to be his preferred option. He contends that his method is the option that works according to publicly-accessible criteria, that consistently produces solid results, and that can be counted on to make progress over time. Yet, as he concludes the essay, and discusses the place of Jesus, he seems to be trying to marry the two approaches, at least to some degree.

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The most well-known aspect of the essay is Troeltsch’s three-point characterization of historical method. His points are the following: 1 Criticism: The only sorts of judgment that are possible with respect to

historical phenomena are judgments of probability, not certainty. This rules out beginning with any certainty held in faith about religiously important events. 2 Analogy: The events that are referred to in historical sources are not

fundamentally different in principle from those that we can observe happening today. 3 Interconnection: All the events that a historian might study are interconnected

with one another. History is a single fabric of events that does not admit of breaks or ruptures. The precise meaning of all of these points has been debated by subsequent scholars. For Troeltsch, however, what is important is that they hang together to form a coherent approach to the study of theology. Each of these principles is negated within the dogmatic method of study. Troeltsch insists repeatedly that his method does not depend for its rationale on any large-scale philosophical system, such as Hegelianism. Instead, what justifies the method is simply its explanatory power, its ability to illuminate the problems to which it is applied. Is Troeltsch’s approach really neutral with respect to such largescale issues? How might a consistent follower of the dogmatic approach respond to Troeltsch? Do Troeltsch’s contemporary followers employ the same triumphalistic rhetoric that he does in expounding his view? Why or why not?

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In compliance with the kind request of Professor Niebergall and the wishes of the editorial board, I am taking the liberty of adding a few remarks to the essay of this theologian. They are intended to shed additional light on the controversy, and not only to clarify those of my views which he has attacked but also to defend my total position in the philosophy of religion and theology against his strictures. Since Niebergall is essentially espousing the ideas of his teacher, Julius Kaftan, the following remarks also represent my final word in my exchange with that distinguished Berlin theologian and member of the High Consistory.1 I shall let this be my final word because further discussion would be of little avail in view of the fact that the opposition between us is one of principle. I have deliberately spoken of my “theological method.” For our primary concern here involves methodology rather than apologetics or any particular point of dogma. Apparently Niebergall, because of his presuppositions, has not quite perceived this point; for he takes the authoritarian concept of revelation for granted and regards anything beyond Christianity as merely “natural decor.” He and others who share his view do not regard theology as such as problematical; they see only minor problems that can be patched over, and consequently they assume the same attitude on the part of everyone else. Admittedly, such an attitude has its merits and even a certain practical importance, since it reflects a common need. But it is also possible to take an entirely different approach, starting from basic principles, and my labors have more and more led me to this approach. I have not borrowed “grounds against our supernaturalism” from any scholar in order then to meet them by my “view of the history of religion as a continuing revelation.” For some two hundred years these grounds have been readily available. It was not necessary for me to borrow them. Nor was my starting point the competing claims of various revelations or some “pantheistic” concept of evolution. Such vistas are fairly obvious and have been treated often enough—however superficially—in theological apologetics. Instead, I have explicitly called attention to the much deeper ground where the disintegration of the Christian world of ideas actually originates. Though related to these other matters, this ground is still relatively independent and in any case absolutely decisive, I am referring to the historical method as such, to the problem of “Christianity and history,” which is to be understood not as the defense of Christianity against particular results of historical criticism but rather as the effect of modern historical methodology on the interpretation of Christianity itself. Once applied to the scientific study of the Bible and church history, the historical method acts as a leaven, transforming everything and ultimately exploding the very form of earlier theological methods. I have clearly indicated that this was the starting point of my labors and I have developed in detail the consequences of this position. Significantly, my efforts in this direction have made no impression whatever upon Niebergall. He proceeds as though no difficulty at all existed in this connection, and as though, with the admission that the historical context played a conditioning role, all difficulties were solved and the old dogmatic method substantially saved. He is astonishingly insensitive to the consequences flowing from the historical method. In

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comparison, the older apologists of the eighteenth century and the few rigid supernaturalists of the present may well be found to have attained a deeper insight. Yet Niebergall’s stance is a common one, perhaps more characteristic of contemporary theology than any other. Only particular problems raised by historical criticism are considered; one by one, they are then either rejected or designated as harmless, as the case may be. When Christianity is treated systematically, the historical-critical approach is abandoned. By focusing only on various needs, postulates, claims, theories of knowledge, or other intangible generalities, contemporary theologians attempt to validate the old authoritarian concept of revelation; and with the help of this concept they weave together a tolerable dogmatic system. Exegetes and historians are left to see for themselves how they may authenticate these purely dogmatic postulates in relation to their research. Historians, for their part, generally prefer to confine themselves to the conditioning role of the historical context and leave the theoretical questions to the dogmatists. In this sort of theology one is constantly being shuttled back and forth between the two groups In contrast to the foregoing, I wish most emphatically to call attention to what is signified by the historical method, the historical mode of thought, and the historical sense. I am not thinking here of the earlier historiography, which limited its criticsm to particular fragments of history, providing information about interesting foreign lands or accumulating archival material. What I have in mind is the genuine historical scholarship of the present, which involves a definite approach to the whole sphere of culture, constitutes a method of representing the past and the present, and therefore implies some extraordinary consequences. Here we are concerned principally with three essential aspects: the habituation on principle to historical criticism; the importance of analogy; and the mutual interrelation of all historical developments. The first of these three items indicates that in the realm of history there are only judgments of probability, varying from the highest to the lowest degree, and that consequently an estimate must be made of the degree of probability attaching to any tradition. Accordingly, our overall attitude to the enormous body of material our civilization derives from memory and tradition is fundamentally changed, even when our attitude toward the particular contents of this material has not yet undergone any correction. But the latter, too, is subjected by historical criticism to analysis, correction, and transformation in a thousand ways, with the final result being never more than probably correct. It is obvious that the application of historical criticism to religious tradition must result in a profound change in one’s inward attitude to it and in one’s understanding of it. Indeed, such a change has actually taken place. But the operation of historical criticism in this area signifies above all the definitive inclusion of the religious tradition with all traditions that require preliminary critical treatment. If the manner of operation of various traditions is thus shown to be in principle the same, the traditional objects and events (which must first be ascertained critically) will hardly fail to show a corresponding similarity.

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The second basic postulate of the historical method is that the instrumentality that makes historical criticism possible is the employment of analogy. Analogous occurrences that we observe both without and within ourselves furnish us with the key to historical criticism. The illusions, distortions, deceptions, myths, and partisanships we see with our own eyes enable us to recognize similar features in the materials of tradition. Agreement with normal, customary, or at least frequently attested happenings and conditions as we have experienced them is the criterion of probability for all events that historical criticism can recognize as having actually or possibly happened. The observation of analogies between similar events in the past provides the possibility of imputing probability to them and of interpreting what is unkown about the one by reference to what is known about the other. But this omnipotence of analogy implies the similarity (in principle) of all historical events—which does not, of course, mean identity. While leaving all possible room for differences, however, the analogical method always presupposes a common core of similarity that makes the differences comprehensible and empathy possible. Hence, the acceptance of historical criticism entails recognition of the significance of this analogical approach for the investigation of the history of Christianity. Biblical criticism itself is based on analogies to the ways of tradition in which other vestiges of antiquity have come down to us. Similarly, the conditions assumed by historical criticism were in numberless cases ascertainable only through the seeking out of analogies. Jewish and Christian history are thus made analogous to all other history. Actually, fewer and fewer historical “facts” are regarded as exempt from the exigencies of the analogical principle; many would content themselves with placing Jesus’ moral character and the resurrection in this category. We have already seen that the importance of analogy as a method leveling all historical phenomena rests on the assumption of a basic consistency of the human spirit and its historical manifestations. The consequence of this position is the third basic concept of history, namely, the interaction of all phenomena in the history of civilization. This concept implies that there can be no change at one point without some preceding and consequent change elsewhere, so that all historical happening is knit together in a permanent relationship of correlation, inevitably forming a current in which everything is interconnected and each single event is related to all others. Now, the principles of historical explanation and understanding are implicit in this position. At every point there do indeed emerge unique and autonomous historical forces that, by virtue of our capacity for empathy, we perceive to be related to our common humanity. At the same time, however, these unique forces also stand in a current and context comprehending the totality of events, where we see everything conditioned by everything else so that there is no point within history which is beyond this correlative involvement and mutual influence. There is no need for us to demonstrate that this approach constitutes the foundation of all principles of historical explanation. The historian’s craft combines the art of intuiting the original import of the sources with the discovery of correlative and mutually determinative changes. The historian’s ultimate problems arise from the

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attempt to understand the nature and basis of the whole historical context and to arrive at value judgments regarding its various forms. The scholarly investigation of the Bible has accordingly become involved with the general political, social, and intellectual history of antiquity, and the investigation and evaluation of Christianity has at last been placed within the framework of the history of religion and culture. The exigencies of their own research have gradually compelled the scholars to elucidate the beginnings of the religion of Israel by analogies from the religions of other Semitic peoples and to relate the profound and original transformation of the religion of Yahweh to the general conditions prevailing in Western Asia, especially to its great catastrophes and its general intellectual horizon. Judaism had to be interpreted by reference to the conditions of the Exile and its institutional reorganization, and its profoundly altered conceptual framework had to be explained in terms of ideas absorbed during the Exile. The rise of Christianity had to be related to the disintegration of Judaism, to the political movements and the apocalyptic ideas of the time; and the establishment of the Christian church had to be studied in the light of the interaction of primitive Christianity with the surrounding world of the Roman empire. Indeed, no comprehensive view can any longer fail to see in the mighty movement of Christianity the culmination of antiquity. Major developments in the Near East and the West prepared the way for this culmination. Very different lines of development finally converged in it. Now, all these necessities were entailed by the historical method itself, which, once admitted at any one point, necessarily draws everything into its train and weaves together all events into one great web of correlated effects and changes. It is not at all necessary here to adopt the distinctly Hegelian notion of Strauss that the Idea does not like to pour all its fullness into a single individual. No general philosophical theory is required to arrive at this result. The historical method itself, by its use of criticism, analogy, and correlation, produces with irresistible necessity a web of mutually interacting activities of the human spirit, which are never independent and absolute but always interrelated and therefore understandable only within the context of the most comprehensive whole. In its origin, of course, this method was not independent of general theories. No method is. But the decisive test is the usefulness and fruitfulness of a method, its perfection through application, and its contribution to the achievement of continuity and understanding. No one can deny that wherever the historical method has been applied it has produced surprisingly illuminating results, and that confidence in its ability to illuminate previously obscure areas has been consistently vindicated. Such success is its sole—but wholly sufficient—validation. Give the historical method an inch and it will take a mile. From a strictly orthodox standpoint, therefore, it seems to bear a certain similarity to the devil. Like the modern natural sciences, it represents a complete revolution in our patterns of thought vis-à-vis antiquity and the Middle Ages. As these sciences imply a new attitude toward nature, so history implies a new attitude toward the human spirit and its productions in the realm of ideas. Everywhere the older absolutistic or dogmatic approach, which regarded particular conditions and ideas as simply “given” and therefore absolutized

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them into unchangeable norms, is being supplanted by the historical approach, which regards even those matters that are alleged to be most obviously “given” and those powers that control the largest number of people as having been produced by the flow of history. Jurisprudence, ethics, sociology, political theory, and aesthetics have been affected to their very depths by the historical approach and have been aligned with historical viewpoints and methods. Whether this historicizing of our entire thinking should be regarded as a boon is not the question here. On this point, Nietzche’s brilliant essay, “On the Use and Abuse of History,” contains observations worth heeding. In any case, we are no longer able to think without this method or contrary to it. All our investigations regarding the nature and goals of the human spirit must be based on it. Goethe’s words still apply: Those who will not account to themselves for the past thirty centuries may continue to live in the dark, day-by-day, grossly ignorant. Thus, the historical method has also penetrated theology, first subtly and piecemeal with all sorts of limitations and reservations, then ever more energetically and comprehensively, with the result that here also it accomplished what it had done everywhere else, namely, a transformation in principle of our entire mode of thought and our whole attitude toward the subject. To be sure, at first only particular results entered the general consciousness, and with them an uncomfortable insecurity. But subconsciously, the fundamental significance of the historical method is all-pervasive, driven by the logic of an inner necessity. The success of the method in the solution of particular problems urges its extension to the whole field, to the way the subject itself is approached. Here again, direction is not given by some theory or system but by the exigencies of the objects of historical investigation, which seem to come alive and are rendered comprehensible as soon as they are approached with the historical method. Those who expressed objections or reservations about it were compelled to retreat step by step until they were reduced to invoking, as a defense, the uncertainties engendered by deficiencies in the sources and the tradition. The particular views that resulted from the historical treatment of Jewish and Christian religious traditions are not, however, the most decisive aspect of the development, their intrinsic importance notwithstanding. What is crucial are the consequences of the method as such, which in the nature of the case are two. In the first place, historical criticism brings a measure of uncertainty to every single fact and shows that certainty attaches only to its effects upon the present; the historical link between original fact and present influence must remain at least partly obscure. But this is to loosen the connection between religious faith and all particular facts. To be sure, the connection is not broken, but its character is changed. Now it becomes impossible to base religious faith on any single fact: faith and fact are linked by large and broad connections; their relationship is mediate, not direct.

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In the second place, these connections between faith and fact are themselves not isolated and unconditioned but are most closely correlated with a much larger historical context; they arise out of this context, they share its substance, and they must be understood in relation to it. It does not follow, however, that the originality of the particular historical fact is thereby denied. What does follow is that its originality is analogous to others emerging from the common context and is neither more nor less mysterious than these. The creative significance of the personages who dominate the great life-complexes need not be denied. But the personages of Judaeo-Christian history are neither more nor less irrational than those of Greek and Persian history. One implication of the historical method is extremely important. It follows from the univocity and the total interconnection of historical events that their evaluation and judgment no less than their explanation and description must begin with the total context. Although numerous theologians seek to persuade us that the proper starting point is the isolated claim and judgment of the Christian community, no just estimate of Christianity can be formed except by reference to the total context—even as the self-judgment of the Greeks or the Romans cannot be allowed to determine our estimate of their permanent contribution to the human spirit. Obviously, this is how the historical method works. It relativizes everything, not in the sense that it eliminates every standard of judgment and necessarily ends in a nihilistic skepticism, but rather in the sense that every historical structure and moment can be understood only in relation to others and ultimately to the total context, and that standards of values cannot be derived from isolated events but only from an overview of the historical totality. This relativism and respect for the historical totality belong together, as indeed they are always conjoined in the practical application of the method. This spirit of historical investigation has gradually permeated every facet of historical theology; Christianity, too, must be regarded as an entity to be explained and evaluated in relation to the total context of which it forms a part. Indeed, only the investigations carried out in this spirit have produced authentic historical knowledge; all the animadversions against the historical method have represented only checks upon it or corrections of particular results, but no viable alternative. For these reasons the old dogmatic method has become untenable for anyone who has become historically sensitive. This fact, and it alone, is the starting point of all theories like the one I am proposing. Once employed, the inner logic of the method drives us forward; and all the counter-measures essayed by the theologians to neutralize its effects or to confine them to some limited area have failed, despite eager efforts to demonstrate their validity. Indeed, no one is in a position to see these consequences more clearly than the biblical scholar, particularly in the concrete work of his speciality. Even someone who is unable to accept any of our theories is bound to be aware, after the discussions of the idea of the kingdom of God or of Jesus’ messianic consciousness, that it is impossible to arrive at some supra-historical core with a method that necessarily raised such problems as these and, precisely through them, has advanced our historical understanding. Conversely, one need only survey the enormously complicated

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apparatus that Zahn has constructed for the purpose of annulling the results of the historical method to become aware that nothing has been accomplished in behalf of his approach; he has merely matched results with results, rather than method with method. Moreover, it will be apparent that his tortuous deductions can scarcely provide a basis for the old naively secure relationship to tradition that was the presupposition of the old dogmatic method. If this is the situation, only one consequence appears possible. The historical method must be consistently applied. This implies not only recognition of the relative uncertainty of all historical knowledge (and consequently the awareness that the connection of religious belief with particular historical events is only mediate and relative) and the resolute subjection of the Judaeo-Christian tradition to all the consequences of a purely historical method (without fearing or seeking to bypass the results). Most importantly, it implies that Christianity should be seen in its involvement with general history. The scholarly investigation and evaluation of Christianity must begin with the general context of universal history. Now, to apply the historical method to theology with utter, uncompromising consistency means to base theology on the historical method, which is oriented to universal history; and since our concern is with Christianity as both religion and ethic, the method will have to be that of the history of religion (religionsgeschichtliche Methode). This idea of a theology based upon the history of religion, which was envisaged from the very beginning of historical criticism (first by the Deists and then in various forms by Lessing, Kant, Herder, Schleiermacher, DeWette, and Hegel, and finally by Baur and Lagarde), I have sought to sketch in my previous works, attempting to give it the form required since the elimination of the rationalistic concept of religion-in-general and of the Hegelian dialectic of the Absolute. I cannot now enter again into the details. That task will have to wait for a more comprehensive work. I only desire to stress that, although many of these specific studies are important, what is decisive for me is the method. I have no doubt that even a presentation of the Christian life-world based on the method of the history of religion will fail to convince the atheist and the religious skeptic. This is not, however, my concern, which is limited to attempting to satisfy the intellectual need for consistency and uniformity of view and approach. Nor do I doubt that this method—only the details of which are my own—wili attract but few followers at first, either on the right or on the left; nor does this fact concern me. What is of primary importance is that the scholar should attain a firm conviction by means of the exposition. I have the greatest confidence, however, that the implication of the historical method will necessarily lead through the present confusion and derangement of biblical studies to its full and resolute application. Only then will the worst of our fears (regarding apologetics) be lifted from our hearts, and we shall be able to behold with greater detachment and freedom the glory of God in history. The need for a consistency that makes possible such detachment and freedom is bound to lead an increasing number of theologians, or at least people who are intellectually concerned about religion, in the direction indicated. The simple result will be, as I have already written, the following:

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All human religion is rooted in religious intuition or divine revelation, which in specifically religious personalities achieves the power to establish new communities; the faithful subsequently enter into this experience, though with diminished originality. The belief in God contained in this intuition (which is concealed in nature religion at the beginning of religious history, when the religious consciousness takes naturalistic forms) decisively breaks through these limits in the religion of Yahweh—notwithstanding many comparable beginnings elsewhere—and in the preaching of Jesus, which, emerging out of the religion of Yahweh, undergoes an infinitely rich development that was impossible to predict at the outset. But in this development the concern was always with life oriented to faith in the living God and with the interpretation of the particular situation in the light of this faith. This new method in theology would not be adequately characterized, however, unless I contrasted it with the old method, consistently and authentically interpreted. This comparison is especially necessary in view of the remarks of Niebergall and the theologians close to him, who have claimed this method as their own even though they were not very clear about its essential nature. If the new method is to be termed the history-of-religion method, since its subjects all tradition to criticism first and, where a question of principle is involved, always starts from the total historical reality in order to derive its standards of value from this totality, the older one is to be termed the dogmatic method. It starts from a firm point of origin completely beyond the relativity of historical scholarship and thence arrives at absolutely certain positions that, at best, may subsequently be related to the insights and opinions governing the rest of human life. By its principles this method is absolutely opposed to the historical one. Its essence is that it possesses an authority that, by definition, is separate from the total context of history, not analogous to other happenings, and therefore not subject to historical criticism and the uncertainty attaching to its results. The dogmatic method seeks to commit persons to certain particular facts of history, especially insofar as these attest the authority and destroy all historical analogy to it. The dogmatic method can bring about such a commitment because its facts are not those of ordinary history and hence can be neither established nor demolished by historical criticism; they are safeguarded, rather, by a miraculous transmission and sealed by an inward testimony in the heart. The dogmatic method accordingly lacks the main features of the method of secular historical scholarship, namely, criticism, analogy, and correlation. Indeed, it combats these features most energetically and admits them, at best, only in regard to the most immaterial details. It cannot abide historical criticism, not because it is narrowminded but because it cannot suffer the uncertainty of results that is connected with such criticism, and because its facts possess a character that contradicts every critical presupposition—indeed, the very possibility of criticism. The dogmatic method cannot admit analogies or make use of them because it would then have to surrender its own innermost nature, which consists in the denial of any analogical similarity between Christianity and other forms of religious development. It cannot submerge itself in

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the total historical context because its monopoly on dogmatic truth can be recognized only in its antithesis to this context, in the assertion that its own constitutive causality is “wholly other.” To be sure, the dogmatic method also claims to be based upon “history.” But this is not the ordinary, secular history reconstructed by critical historiography. It is rather a history of salvation (Heilsgeschichte), a nexus of saving facts which, as such, are knowable and provable only for the believer. These facts have precisely the opposite characteristics of the facts that secular, critical historians can regard, on the basis of their criteria, as having actually taken place. When dogmatic apologetics stresses the “historical” character of Christianity in order to appeal to the secular appreciation of historical and social forces (which generally prevails among us, as over against purely individual efforts and discoveries), this is pure obscurantism. Such apologetics has already caused enough confusion in theology. Today all kinds of things are labeled as “historical” and as “facts” which are nothing of the kind, and which ought not to be so labeled, since they are miraculous in nature and can only be apprehended by faith. The miracles of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are often assigned a label that sounds general and obscures their difference from the secular world. This camouflage is dropped only when the discussion has safely passed to the sphere of theology. Even Niebergall has followed this approach quite freely. Yet, it is apparent that genuine dogmatics is poorly served by such a “historical” force that ultimately is merely fortuitous. It has need, rather, of a history that, by concentrating the necessary absolute truth at one point, sets itself apart from ordinary history, which relativizes all truths by showing their mutual interdependence. To safeguard its own uniqueness, the dogmatic method requires an open rupture with this kind of history: otherwise it would become subject to all of its conditions, the mutual limitations of its phenomena, and the continuing possibility of change. In all these matters the traditional dogmatic method operates quite consistently and correctly. It claims an authority that is dogmatic rather than historical, intrinsic rather than based on comparison, immutable rather than sharing the conditions of historical existence. It does not seek historical greatness, based on actual strength and influence or on philosophical reflection, but rather a foundation for dogmatic truths, characterized as supernatural by special marks and thus essentially non-historical. Consequently, everything depends on the evident demonstration of this supernatural character that establishes dogma even as it vitiates history. Whether greater emphasis be placed on the internal or the external manifestations or supernaturalism, ultimately, its internal manifestation in the operations of grace always serves to prove the credibility of the external manifestation, which alone vitiates historicity. The miraculous is truly decisive, and, since a miracle confined to the psychological sphere is not sufficiently different from the life of the soul as we encounter it universally in history, such a delicate miracle only becomes useful when solid “physical” miracles can be deduced from it. Ultimately, everything depends on this external manifestation of supernaturalism. It would be better honestly to take one’s stand on it rather than to talk of a “history” that is not history at all but rather its opposite.

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Only this proof by miracle provides the dogmatic method with a firm foundation and a methodological principle. It will be recalled that the historical method issued from the metaphysical assumption that all things, including the activities of the human mind, are totally interconnected; that it achieved autonomy through elaboration; and that it then had yet again to formulate general theories regarding the essence of history and the principles by which it formed its historical judgments. Similarly, the dogmatic method possesses a general metaphysical principle that was originally only rather implicitly present but which became clearly and precisely explicit in the course of its elaboration. Only the proof for the supernatural character of its authority or for the miraculous provides the decisive metaphysical foundation for the dogmatic method, without which it could be, regarded as a knife lacking both handle and blade. The division of the domain of history into one area devoid of miracles and subject to the normal working of historical criticism and another area permeated by miracles and accessible to study only through methods based on inner experiences and the humble subjection of reason is the primary theoretical basis of the dogmatic method. The construction of such a concept of history and the establishment of a separate methodology for the history of dogma or the history of salvation, with special conditions independent of ordinary history, is the basic presupposition of the dogmatic method in theology. Consequently, the theological investigations of recent centuries are replete with this special methodology geared to the history of salvation, which vitiates and distorts the methodology of secular history in various ways, and with distinctive Christian theories of knowledge supposedly based either on the principle of ecclesiastical obedience or on regeneration and inner experience. Only fatigue caused by such fruitless apologetics can excuse the astonishing habit of contemporary dogmatists who believe that they are able to pluck fruit without having a tree or who, after cutting a small, dry twig from an old trunk, expect fruit to grow from this twig. But ultimately the essence of the problem is not exhausted by this great distinction between two realms of history and between two opposite methods corresponding to these realms. For the duality of the realms of history must be derived from a necessary ground both in the nature of God and in human nature. In the final analysis the duality of history is related to a duality in the divine nature. This duality is therefore regarded and maintained by the dogmatic method as the foundational and primary support of its concepts. God is not part of the nexus of interrelated forces continually affecting one another, nor is God involved in every vital movement only as the purposive will that produces the motion of the total system. God is also capable, rather, of extraordinary activities (as compared to regular modes of operation) which break through and abrogate the ordinary operation of the system. Everything depends on this concept of God. No less fundamental, however, is the concept of humanity necessitating such a distinctive mode of divine operation, that is, the concept of a hereditary sinfulness due to a fall from the regular, normal, and uniform cosmic order and the concept of a salvation that requires a restoration of this order by extraordinary means. These dualistic concepts of the human and the divine are indispensable presuppositions

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of the dogmatic method with its dualism of two historical methods—one critical and relativistic, operative in secular history; and the other absolute and apodictically certain, appropriate to the history of salvation. Here, too, weariness with the labors of apologetics has induced many modern theologians to neglect or abandon these theories. In particular, the remarkable discovery of the irrelevance of metaphysics to theology has led to a renunciation of the proof of this dualism, even though the dualism itself necessarily continued to be recognized as valid. As though a non-metaphysical theology were not bound to eliminate this dualism and its consequences! The result would be that theology would turn into the phenomenological and historical study of religion, in which the truth-content of the religious phenomenon must first be ascertained; while a new, more cautious, and more limited metaphysics would emerge, characterized by abandonment of the miracle-dualism and based on moral certitude or sensitivity (Gefühl ). For the young theologian beginning to study, nothing is more astounding than the contradiction between the alleged indifference of such fundamental concepts as God, the primal state, original sin, and miracles, on the one hand, and the working assumption of their entire validity (except for some accommodating concessions regarding the influence of the pre-modern worldview), on the other. One can become accustomed to anything and make a virtue out of every necessity; but with any sense for clarity, consistency, and intellectual precision, one can hardly resign oneself to such a virtue with equanimity. For this reason most young theologians will ultimately return to the old metaphysical bases of the dogmatic method; from all their studies they will only retain the impression that the proof of these bases is a matter of no particular importance. The dogmatic method is thus pushed forward by an inner necessity towards the type of theology suggested above, just as the historical method necessarily leads to a theology that is fundamentally based on the history of religion. It is not my intention to develop in detail the scope of the dogmatic method, but only to sketch it in its essence and to contrast it with the historical method. One might term the old method “Catholic” because it was created by Catholic theologians and received its classic formulation from them; and one might term the new method “Protestant” because in the last analysis it grew out of the Protestant criticism of the Catholic doctrine of authority. Yet, on the one hand, the old method is so deeply imbedded in the inclinations of human nature to dogmatism and is so necessary a product of historically unsophisticated periods that it would not make sense to term this method specifically Catholic; for it is also employed in Jewish and Muslim theology. On the other hand, Protestant historical criticism was only partial and apologetic in intent; Protestantism arose in an era that was by no means historical in its outlook. It was not until the Enlightenment that an essentially historical outlook emerged; the allegedly unhistorical outlook of the Enlightenment belongs to the realm of legend. To be sure, the Enlightenment began by critically emancipating itself from the recognized authorities and thus its first task was to put everything on one level. But its leveling efforts immediately led to a new task, the task of differentiation and graduation, which required that all the phenomena dealt with be first transformed into

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purely historical ones. In this transitional stage the Enlightenment made supernatural dogmatism, in part, rational; and where this was not possible, it worked out a new worldview based on history. The latter, of course, had to weave together historical data and materials of general validity, and is entitled to be termed “historical” only a posteriori. At this very point the difference between the two methods becomes plain. Thus, the only appropriate terms are the dogmatic and the historical method. Each has its own foundation and problems; each is consistent within itself. My concern, however, is not to detail the particular problems of each, but only, because of their respective consistencies, to insist on their incompatibility. With this insistence, the main objective of this paper is attained. I only wish to add a few remarks concerning my position in this methodological controversy. These comments will serve to defend my position against some objections of Niebergall and, incidentally, to illuminate the distorted manner in which he himself espouses the dogmatic method. His first objection to my method is on the score of its difficulty and the subjective conditions of its implementation. It goes without saying that the production of a scale of values among the great cultural types (Geistestypen) of history depends on subjective judgments and can never be fully conclusive. I have always stressed this point explicitly. Nevertheless, I am convinced that, given a sharp and penetrating analysis of the nature of these types, people who are seriously concerned about ethical and religious matters—neither frivolous nor trying to be merely clever but really in earnest about finding meaning in life—may arrive at a relative degree of consensus. This conviction is based on a belief that is both religious and ethical, namely, that ultimately the essential uniformity of human nature provides a foundation for consensus in recognizing supreme standards of value and that, because of this foundation, the consensus will prevail. As for Niebergall’s strictures concerning the difficulties of implementing my approach, I can say only that no amount of emphasis upon the difficulties in a method that is inherently possible can justify the adoption of a method that is inherently impossible. It only challenges us to greater devotion to the task. Niebergall also criticizes me for connecting the scale of values I have constructed with a metaphysics of history that makes it possible to deduce values, in a logically progressive and increasingly profound sequence, from the nature of the human spirit or rather from its transcendent ground as it operates in the spirit. I am unable here to consider in detail his remarks about intellectualism and practical reason, which are completely incomprehensible to me in their present form. I only note that no one who considers history to be pure chaos will undertake to derive a scale of values from it by the exercise of reason. For the deduction of such a scale of values it is indispensable to believe in reason as operative in history and as progressively revealing itself. This belief, too, is primarily of ethical and religious origin; but it is a belief that is confirmed, in my judgment, by the deepening of personal life which is constantly taking place in history. The third objection adduced by Niebergall is the danger of self-deception to which one is exposed in such a production of a scale of values. I do not intend to inquire

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whether the danger resulting from the application of the historical approach is greater than that arising from the special apologetic conditions of the dogmatic method, geared as it is to the history of salvation, whose practitioners feel no obligation to warn against such a hazard. The point I would emphasize, rather, is that I do not regard the danger as wholly insuperable. Actually, one does not always endeavor to demonstrate a preconceived thesis with all the devices of cunning, yet with the greatest possible appearance of impartiality, as many theologians believe who are absolutely unable to think otherwise. In such an intricately complex and extremely individualistic culture as our own, it is often difficult to know where to take one’s stand; and it is actually possible, without any preconceived preference for Christianity, to desire to orient oneself through a comparative survey. If as a consequence one reaches the judgment that Christianity is the highest ethical and religious force, this result need not at all have been antecedently present—not even where there was a relative appreciation for Christianity from the outset, such as any serious person naturally would feel. The ultimate avowal of Christianity as the supreme religious force of history, which is the outcome for me, is something quite different from a relative and preliminary appreciation that is connected, moreover, with a serious intent not necessarily to commit oneself to this initial and immediate judgment. Finally, Niebergall attacks me for inconsistency inasmuch as I, while ostensibly oriented to historical relativism, yet emerge at the end with the recognition of the “absoluteness” of Christianity, a conclusion that in his judgment is quite impossible for me. It must be admitted that Niebergall has here pointed correctly to vacillations not only in my mode of expression but also in my way of thinking as they appear in various essays spread over several years. It would have been possible for him to observe that I have actually tended to draw the consequences of the historical method ever more strictly and that I have finally come to characterize the term “absoluteness” as only a rationalized and disguised vestige of the dogmatic method. I believe, in fact, that the term is not terribly important—but only because its opposite, the muchmaligned “relativism,” is not so important to me as it would appear to be from the dogmatic point of view. Indeed, I would say that it is the essence of my view that it thoroughly combats historical relativism, which is the consequence of the historical method only within an atheistic or a religiously skeptical framework. Moreover, my view seeks to overcome this relativism through the conception of history as a disclosure of the divine reason. It is here that we see the undeniable merits of the Hegelian doctrine, which needs only to be freed of its metaphysics of the absolute, its dialectic of opposites, and its specifically logical conception of religion. The point is that history is not a chaos but issues from unitary forces and aspires towards a unitary goal. For the believer in religion and ethics, history is an orderly sequence in which the essential truth and profundity of the human spirit rise from its transcendent ground—not without struggle and error, but with the necessary consistency of a development that has had a normal beginning. The contrasts are rather superficial and incidental. In essence, the differences among the great historical structures are not very great, and the actual ideas

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and values in the world are infinitely rarer than is supposed, although their manifestations and ramifications are innumerable. With the great idealists, I believe that in this apparent chaos the divine depth of the human spirit reveals itself from different directions, and that the belief in God, provided only that it is actually belief in God and not self-seeking magic, is at its core identical in all its forms. Moreover, I hold that this belief in God, by the internal consistency of the divine force that empowers it, continues to increase in energy and depth to the degree permitted by the original tie of the human spirit to nature. Only at one point was this limitation broken through. This point, however, was located at the center of great contemporary and subsequent religious developments, namely, in the religion of the prophets of Israel and in the person of Jesus. Here a God distinct from nature produced a personality superior to nature with eternally transcendent goals and the willpower to change the world. Here a religious power manifests itself, which to anyone sensitive enough to catch its echo in one’s own soul, seems to be the conclusion of all previous religious movements and the starting point of a new phase in the history of religion, in which nothing has yet emerged. Indeed, even for us today it is unthinkable that something higher should emerge, no matter how many new forms and combinations this purely inward and personal belief in God may yet enter. Clearly, this position constitutes neither dogmatic absolutism nor the confrontation of historical scholarship by Christianity, nor the exemption of Christianity from the flux, the conditioning, and the mutability of history. But it provides a stopping point that is attainable through a historical mode of thought geared to the philosophy of history, and that is adequate for the religious person. More we do not need, and more we cannot achieve. Here we find the religious support for our life and thought that has constituted the dynamic center of our European civilization, and which remains a vital power capable of further development. It is true that the relationship of this European religion to the religions of the Orient is still a great and dark question for the future. But insofar as we recognize in the transcendence of nature, which constitutes the faith of the prophets, and in the active and lively love of God and humanity which constitutes the faith of Jesus, the decisive and elevating forces of religion, we can persevere in our traditional faith and leave further developments to the future. In this connection also, Niebergall has measured me by needs that are taken for granted by him. He has not put himself into a religious mood that really finds its rest and support in such thoughts. To his opinion that the reader of my work has to ride through a very cold land and then pass through a dark tunnel before emerging into the smiling fields of home, I might reply that the distant land is not so cold, the tunnel not so dark, nor the ultimate point of arrival so inviting as he supposes. For my part, I have considerable misgivings about the position of Niebergall. Here again I shall forgo consideration of the epistemological explanations with which he supports his position and the formulation of which he regards as constituting the major part of difference from my own work. These matters are not crucial for the problem as a whole. For if the question to be decided is whether the scale of values

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in the spiritual life is to be derived from a philosophy of history or from an authoritarian judgment based on supernatural considerations, then it is quite pointless to stress factors of sentiment and will, which naturally enter into every value judgment. One can never base authoritarian supernaturalism on the practical character of all values, since this same practical character applies also to non-Christian and non-religious values. Rather, we are dealing exclusively with the basis of the authority that the dogmatic method requires as its starting point. In this regard there is no doubt that Niebergali agrees with the intentions of the traditional dogmatic method. He desires the doctrine of a supernaturalistic authority: not a “historical absolute but one that is dogmatic and apologetic,” an “absolute apart from and opposed to the history of religion”; that is, apart from and opposed to the views of historical criticism in general. He wants a “realm lying beyond the history of religion”; that is, a realm lying quite beyond secular history. He is concerned with “absoluteness as an immediate derivation from God” in contrast to the merely mediate derivation from God of ordinary history and the history of non-Christian religions, which is based on a “merely natural endowment.” He conceives of the absolute as a “faith that absolute values have been supernaturally revealed at one point in history”; that is, values having an absoluteness that is primarily authenticated by their supernatural mode of revelation. Despite all Niebergall’s talk about his respect for history and the practical motivation of all faith, one must not permit oneself to be deceived: what he wants is outside of and contrary to history. He wants a history of a higher order, which has different presuppositions from ordinary history and events that are distinguishable by criteria not provided by ordinary history. When he speaks of the “autonomy of Christianity,” “practical motivation,” or “historical character,” such terms are euphemisms for the miraculous, which theologians of his type prefer not to call by its correct name. The intentions of Niebergall are never fulfilled, however. His mode of thought falls far short of what he aspires to achieve, namely, a “pure and bright supernaturalism,” One hears next to nothing from Niebergali concerning a consistent foundation for supernaturalism in the concept of God, the primal state, the Fall, and redemption. His work contains only pitiful vestiges of any other demonstration of supernaturalism actually derived from history, that is, from the miraculous character of sacred history. He intends to establish the biblical revelation as his starting point, a priori authentic and normative for his approach to history. This intention, which he emphatically proclaims, is constantly being crossed, however, by the contrary procedure of starting from general history and searching it for the possible disclosure of absolute values corresponding to human need. He acts as though he knew nothing of Christianity and were seeking, as a universal human postulate, for some absolute, redemptive revelation. From this stance he discovers the historical “fact” of Christianity and rejoices to find it satisfying all his requirements. The historical mode of thought has here produced a deep impression after all. What should have been the starting point of the dogmatist now appears as the contingent result of a search of history. The result has been that, instead of being deduced from the concept of God and Adam’s

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fall, theology is being authenticated by reference to human needs. Everything now depends on the legitimacy of these needs and the fact of their satisfaction, which is no more automatically guaranteed for these needs than for any others. I do not wish to expatiate further upon these needs—the need (ostensibly demonstrated by Kant) of theoretical doubt for supernatural revelation, or the need of morality for authority, for a guarantee of victory, and for the atonement of sins. All these needs may be legitimate, but it cannot be denied that these needs themselves are in the first instance purely historical forms which do not lead beyond history. Of greater importance is the question why the satisfaction of these needs should be regarded as taking place in Christianity in an absolute manner. Here again the emphasis is not placed upon an inner necessity that enables Christianity alone to satisfy these needs, but recourse is taken—with an apparent objectivity that is very popular in contemporary theology—to the purely factual “claim” of Christianity. Here we meet the same dialectical comedy as before. One comes upon the “historical fact” of a tremendous claim and appears completely surprised by this fact, as though it were something astounding and overwhelming. The claim of Christianity is made into its essence, and the erstwhile theology of miracle now becomes a theology of claim. Christianity claims to be absolute truth and redemption. Without recognition of this claim Christianity is unattainable. But the assertion of claims, of course, no more proves their validity than the existence of needs guarantees their satisfaction— all the less so as various religions advance competing claims that require decision on the basis of some kind of criterion. In all of these expositions a dread of the real roots of the dogmatic method and a superficial accommodation to purely historical arguments are the only operative factors. Actually existing needs and claims are said to form the basis of the theory. But needs and claims are themselves products of history. They are to be understood in their historical context, to be illuminated, and possibly to be corrected, as have a hundred other needs and claims. By no means do needs and claims indicate some higher reality removed from historical relativity and criticism. Thus everything depends on whether these needs are satisfied not merely by a claim but by a higher reality. In the last analysis Niebergall’s views necessarily affirm this position. But how feeble and cautious is his assertion of a higher supernatural reality and causality as opposed to secular history! He stresses “supernaturalism” and “immediacy” as appropriate to revelation, in order to support a distinctive causality that would give special status to Christianity as the means-oriented natural causality would not. But even this emphasis is expressed only in the most general terms. To be absolute, “Christianity must be based upon a special revelation that must somehow be made comprehensible as revelation.” This “somehow” is typical of contemporary theology, which in its refinement disdains the concerns of the older apologetics and disposes of them “somehow.” If one seeks clues to this “somehow” in Niebergall, only one attempt at more precise definition will be found, along with the crude manipulation of some famous models. The personality of Jesus must be such as to break through the ordinary historical causality. But even in this context Niebergall speaks

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primarily of the mysterious and underivable essence of the personality, as though the same observations were not true of every personality. Here in the ground of the soul there remains a gap in the causal nexus which is the greater, the more unique and developed is the personality. It is this gap that provides full scope for the operation of a higher power. We believe that the revelation that we religiously apprehend and revere sets in at this point, which resists all analysis … Starting with Jesus, the reservoir of revelation fed both from heaven and by terrestrial streams, we proceed upwards along the course of these tributaries. And at another point he says, “We resolve to attribute beneficent powers that come to our assistance in deepest need to the intervention of God, because we know of no earthly source from which they could have been derived.” What should one say to such remarks? Should one admire the modesty of a theology that has come to the point of finding its foundation ultimately in a gap? Or should one stress the uncertainty with which even this gap is asserted, in view of the fact that no clear distinction is made between the gaps in the causal nexus which characterize the personal life of ordinary human beings and the particular gap within the personality of Jesus, which is the only one that concerns us at this point? I think that one can only say that such a doctrine of authority and revelation has been deeply affected by the spirit of historical criticism, analogy, and relativity. Indeed, it has been almost destroyed. All that remain are some pathetic and quite general claims. In this respect, the older dogmatic doctrine was better and more understandable. This judgment is made entirely from a scholarly perspective and refers only to the consistency of the ideas. Practically, such an enervation and edentulation of the old authoritarian doctrine may be a very good thing. In practical life, it is impossible to get along without such mediating positions; and in church affairs, the mediating groups may constitute a very desirable transitional form. In closing these observations, we may stress that sub specie aeternitatis all the differences we have noted may be quite unimportant. Consequently, they need not excessively disunite us in our earthly pilgrimage.

Note 1

See my essays “Die Selbständigkeit der Religion” and “Geschichte und Metaphysik” in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche; as well as Kaftan’s essay “Die Selbständigkeit des Christentums,” by which he means its supernatural revelation and redemptive power.

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5 Karl Barth The Epistle to the Romans Prefaces 1–6

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arl Barth (1886–1968) was a Swiss pastor and systematic theologian who produced the most significant work in Reformed theology since the Reformation itself. He also wrote numerous biblical commentaries, of which his work on Romans was the first. This selection consists of the prefaces to each of the six editions of Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans. The first edition was published in 1918, the final edition a decade later. The value of the prefaces for this reader is that, in them, Barth explains his goals in his commentary, and he responds to the wide variety of criticism that his commentary provoked. There was, to be sure, no shortage of adverse reaction: Barth catalogues objections to his work from almost every point on the theological compass, and provides at least a brief response to each critic. All of the prefaces are telling in one respect or another, but the second is the most significant for the theme of the relationship between theology and history. The major objection that Barth has heard from the historical-critical guild is that his “commentary” is not really a commentary at all. The charge is that Romans is not, in fact, a sequential exposition of the apostle Paul’s line of thought, but rather an imposition of Barth’s own developing theological point of view upon the text. This critique is far more severe than the claim that Barth has read this or that passage from the epistle incorrectly, misunderstanding a certain word or phrase or even the thrust of a whole chapter. The historical critics are essentially saying that Barth is a ventriloquist who speaks his own words and pretends that they are Paul’s. What emerges from Barth’s response, albeit in piecemeal fashion rather than systematically, is that he differs from them in how he understands what the task of exegesis entails. What does it really mean to understand Paul? Barth insists that he has failed, on his own grounds, if he has not come to understand the apostle. Crucial to Barth’s response is that he understands the nature of the biblical text differently, and

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therefore he reads it differently than do some of his critics. In more material terms, Barth understands the text’s status as apostolic testimony to be utterly essential to understanding what it actually is. As such, Barth always tries to grasp how the words of the apostle testify to the Word of God, to whom they ultimately point. The text’s status as an ancient document is something that Barth wants to affirm, but to count as of secondary importance. Barth seeks to reassure the historical-critical guild that he is not an enemy of historical-criticism, despite the complaints that he lodges against their commentaries. His statement that historical critics need to be more critical is intended to block the idea that he rejects the enterprise. Barth states that he values many aspects of what they do, and that his own work depends on historical criticism as a prolegomenon. But if this is so, this dependence is almost invisible in much of Romans. Why is that? What should we make of the notion that different views of the text generate different styles of reading? Is Barth right that it is possible to read a biblical text as speaking into the present without slipping into “eisegesis” (reading into a text one’s own ideas)? What should we make of Barth’s interaction with his other critics?

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The preface to the first edition Paul, as a child of his age, addressed his contemporaries. It is, however, far more important that, as Prophet and Apostle of the Kingdom of God, he veritably speaks to all men of every age. The differences between then and now, there and here, no doubt require careful investigation and consideration. But the purpose of such investigation can only be to demonstrate that these differences are, in fact, purely trivial. The historical-critical method of Biblical investigation has its rightful place: it is concerned with the preparation of the intelligence—and this can never be superfluous. But, were I driven to choose between it and the venerable doctrine of Inspiration, I should without hesitation adopt the latter, which has a broader, deeper, more important justification. The doctrine of Inspiration is concerned with the labour of apprehending, without which no technical equipment, however complete, is of any use whatever. Fortunately, I am not compelled to choose between the two. Nevertheless, my whole energy of interpreting has been expended in an endeavour to see through and beyond history into the spirit of the Bible, which is the Eternal Spirit. What was once of grave importance, is so still. What is today of grave importance—and not merely crotchety and incidental—stands in direct connexion with that ancient gravity. If we rightly understand ourselves, our problems are the problems of Paul; and if we be enlightened by the brightness of his answers, those answers must be ours. Long, long ago the Truth was found, A company of men it bound. Grasp firmly then—that ancient Truth! The understanding of history is an uninterrupted conversation between the wisdom of yesterday and the wisdom of tomorrow. And it is a conversation always conducted honestly and with discernment. In this connexion I cannot fail to think with gratitude and respect of my father, Professor Fritz Barth. For such discernment he signally displayed throughout his whole active life. It is certain that in the past men who hungered and thirsted after righteousness naturally recognized that they were bound to labour with Paul. They could not remain unmoved spectators in his presence. Perhaps we too are entering upon such a time. Should this be so, this book may even now be of some definite, though limited, service. The reader will detect for himself that it has been written with a joyful sense of discovery. The mighty voice of Paul was new to me: and if to me, no doubt to many others also. And yet, now that my work is finished, I perceive that much remains which I have not yet heard and into which I have not as yet penetrated. My book is therefore no more than a preliminary undertaking. Further co-operation is necessary. If only many, better equipped than I, would appear on the scene and set to work to bore for water at the same source! However, should I be mistaken in this hope of a

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new, questioning investigation of the Biblical Message, well, this book must—wait. The Epistle to the Romans waits also. Safenwil, August, 1918.

The preface to the second edition οὐδὲ ἀνῆλθον εἰς ἱεροσόλυμα …ἀλλὰ ἀπῆλθον εἰς ἀραβίαν.—Gal i. 17. This book was described in the preface to the first edition as a “preliminary investigation.” If as great attention had been paid to this description as to the much-abused final sentence—”this book must wait …”—, no justification would be necessary for presenting a new edition in which the original has been so completely rewritten that it may be claimed that no stone remains in its old place. What I hardly dared to hope has been fulfilled. The book brought Paul and the Bible to the notice of some who had thought little about them. That was indeed the “definite, though limited,” purpose for which it was written. Whatever its merits and failings, the first edition can now disappear from the scene. The work has been continued, and the reader is now offered further tentative results. New advance positions have been occupied, and, as a result, the original position has been completely reformed and consolidated. Consequently the position as a whole has an entirely different aspect. And yet identity of historical subject-matter as well as of the theme of which both editions treat, guarantees a definite continuity between the old and the new. In this second “preliminary investigation” the co-operation of the serious reader is once again required, for the new edition also is concerned only with prolegomena. This does not mean that a third revision is promised, still less that the work may some day be completed. There can be no completed work. All human achievements are no more than prolegomena; and this is especially the case in the field of theology. I emphasize this, in order that those who saw in my previous commentary the appearance of the horrible spectre of a new orthodoxy may not so misunderstand the situation as to be led to blame me now for too great flexibility of opinion. Such contradictions of criticism are not impossible in certain quarters! Of the relation between the two editions it is unnecessary for me to speak. The book provides its own evidence of the nature of the revision. Strangely enough, the chief weakness of the original edition seems to have passed altogether unnoticed by those who criticized it, at least in public. And it is surely not for me to provide my readers, and certainly not my reviewers, with the formula for the damaging criticism which might have, and indeed ought to have, been made upon it.1 Some reference must, however, be made here to the circumstances which have led to an advance and to a change of front. First, and most important: the continued study of Paul

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himself. My manner of working has enabled me to deal only with portions of the rest of the Pauline literature, but each fresh piece of work has brought with it new light upon the Epistle to the Romans. Secondly: the man Overbeck. Elsewhere, Edward Thurneysen and I have drawn attention, at some length, to the warning addressed by Overbeck to all theologians.2 This warning I have first applied to myself, and then directed upon the enemy. Whether I have dealt at all adequately with the questions raised by this eminent and pious man I must leave to the judgment of those who are able to perceive the nature of the riddle he has formulated so precisely, and are willing at least to attempt its solution. To the judgment of men like Eberhart Vischer I cannot submit myself! He sees in the riddle no more than a biographical and psychological problem. Thirdly: closer acquaintance with Plato and Kant. The writings of my brother Heinrich Barth have led me to recognize the importance of these philosophers. I have also paid more attention to what may be culled from the writings of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky that is of importance for the interpretation of the New Testament. The latter I owe more particularly to hints given me by Edward Thurneysen. Fourthly: a careful consideration of the manner in which the first edition of this book has been received. I am bound to say that the more favourable reviews have been most valuable in compelling me to criticize myself. Their praise has caused me such dismay that I have had sometimes to express the matter otherwise, sometimes even to adopt an entirely different position.—These four circumstances I have set out in order that those who are unhappy until they have exposed the immediate cause of this or that occurrence may at least be put upon the right road. Everything in this world has its immediate cause. How indeed could it be otherwise? More important, however, are those fundamental matters which are common to both editions. The book does not claim to be more than fragments of a conversation between theologians. It is quite irrelevant when Jülicher and Eberhard Vischer announce triumphantly that I am—a theologian! I have never pretended to be anything else. The point at issue is the kind of theology which is required. Those who urge us to shake ourselves free from theology and to think—and more particularly to speak and write—only what is immediately intelligible to the general public seem to me to be suffering from a kind of hysteria and to be entirely without discernment. Is it not preferable that those who venture to speak in public, or to write for the public, should first seek a better understanding of the theme they wish to propound? Ragaz and his friends reply hurriedly that this proceeds from callous theological pride. But this cannot be granted for one moment. Those who are genuinely convinced that the question is at present trivial must be permitted to go their way. Some of us, however, are persuaded that the question, What are we to say? is an important one, particularly when the majority are prepared at any moment to lift up their voices in the street. I do not want readers of this book to be under any illusions. They must expect nothing but theology. If, in spite of this warning, it should stray into the hands of some who are not theologians, I shall be especially pleased. For I am altogether persuaded that the matters of which it treats and the questions which it raises do in fact concern every

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one. I could not make the book more easily intelligible than the subject itself allows. And I must beg my untheological readers to be indulgent when they are confronted with citations in a foreign language, which defy translation without loss of meaning; or when I have from time to time made use of philosophical or theological abracadabra. If I be not mistaken—and here I must contradict Arthur Bonus—we theologians serve the layman best when we refuse to have him especially in mind, and when we simply live of our own, as every honest labourer must do. A friend of Ragaz has thought fit to dismiss me with one of the elder Blumhardt’s aphorisms: “Simplicity is the mark of divinity.” My answer is, that it has never entered my head to suppose that what I say or write is “divine.” So far as I am aware, divinity is set out in no book. Not being the elder Blumhardt, we have undertaken rather to ask the question, “What is divinity?” The simplicity which proceeds from the apprehension of God in the Bible and elsewhere, the simplicity with which God Himself speaks, stands not at the beginning of our journey but at its end. Thirty years hence we may perhaps speak of simplicity, but now let us speak the truth. For us neither the Epistle to the Romans, nor the present theological position, nor the present state of the world, nor the relation between God and the world, is simple. And he who is now concerned with truth must boldly acknowledge that he cannot be simple. In every direction human life is difficult and complicated. And, if gratitude be a consideration that is at all relevant, men will not be grateful to us if we provide them with short-lived pseudo-simplifications. Does the general demand for simplicity mean more than a desire—intelligible enough, and shared by most theologians—that truth should be expressed directly, without paradox, and in such a way that it can be received otherwise than by faith alone? I am thinking here of an experience in relation to that earnest and upright man, Wernle. As a modern man he is deeply hurt when I say, for example, plainly and simply—Christ is risen! He complains that I have made use of an eschatological phrase, and have ridden rough-shod over very, very difficult problems of thought. However, when I endeavour to say the same thing in the language of thought, that is, in dialectical fashion, he protests in the name of the simple believer that the doctrine of the Resurrection is wonderful, spiritual, and hard to understand How can I answer him? He would be satisfied only if I were to surrender the broken threads of faith, and to speak directly, concretely, and without paradox. This means that the wholly childlike and the wholly unchildlike belong within the realm of truth, but that everything between must be excluded. I earnestly desire to speak simply of those matters with which the Epistle to the Romans is concerned; and, were some one competent to do this to appear, my work would at once be superseded. I am in no way bound to my book and to my theology. As yet, however, those who claim to speak simply seem to me to be—simply speaking about something else. By such simplicity I remain unconvinced. Turning now to another matter. I have been accused of being an “enemy of historical criticism.” Such language seems to me nervous and high-strung. Would it not be better to discuss the point at issue quite calmly? I have, it is true, protested against recent commentaries upon the Epistle to the Romans. The protest was directed not

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only against those originating in the so-called “critical” school but also, for example, against the commentaries of Zahn and Kühl. I have nothing whatever to say against historical criticism. I recognize it, and once more state quite definitely that it is both necessary and justified. My complaint is that recent commentators confine themselves to an interpretation of the text which seems to me to be no commentary at all, but merely the first step towards a commentary. Recent commentaries contain no more than a reconstruction of the text, a rendering of the Greek words and phrases by their precise equivalents, a number of additional notes in which archaeological and philological material is gathered together, and a more or less plausible arrangement of the subject-matter in such a manner that it may be made historically and psychologically intelligible from the standpoint of pure pragmatism. Jülicher and Lietzmann know far better than I do how insecure all this historical reconstruction is, and upon what doubtful assumptions it often rests. Even such an elementary attempt at interpretation is not an exact science. Exact scientific knowledge, so far as the Epistle to the Romans is concerned, is limited to the deciphering of the manuscripts and the making of a concordance. Historians do not wish, and rightly do not wish, to be confined within such narrow limits. Jülicher and Lietzmann, not to mention conservative scholars, intend quite clearly to press beyond this preliminary work to an understanding of Paul. Now, this involves more than a mere repetition in Greek or in German of what Paul says; it involves the reconsideration of what is set out in the Epistle, until the actual meaning of it is disclosed. It is at this point that the difference between us appears. There is no difference of opinion with regard to the need of applying historical criticism as a prolegomenon to the understanding of the Epistle. So long as the critic is occupied in this preliminary work I follow him carefully and gratefulfy. So long as it is simply a question of establishing what stands in the text, I have never dreamed of doing anything else than sit attentively at the feet of such learned men as Jülicher, Lietzmann, Zahn, and Kühl, and also at the feet of their predecessors, Tholuck, Meyer, B. Weiss, and Lipsius. When, however, I examine their attempts at genuine understanding and interpretation, I am again and again surprised how little they even claim for their work. By genuine understanding and interpretation I mean that creative energy which Luther exercised with intuitive certainty in his exegesis; which underlies the systematic interpretation of Calvin; and which is at least attempted by such modern writers as Hofmann, J. T. Beck, Godet, and Schlatter. For example, place the work of Jülicher side by side with that of Calvin: how energetically Calvin, having first established what stands in the text, sets himself to rethink the whole material and to wrestle with it, till the walls which separate the sixteenth century from the first become transparent! Paul speaks, and the man of the sixteenth century hears. The conversation between the original record and the reader moves round the subjectmatter, until a distinction between yesterday and today becomes impossible. If a man persuades himself that Calvin’s method can be dismissed with the old-fashioned motto, “The Compulsion of Inspiration,” he betrays himself as one who has never worked upon the interpretation of Scripture. Taking Jülicher’s work as typical of much modern exegesis, we observe how closely he keeps to the mere deciphering of words

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as though they were runes. But, when all is done, they still remain largely unintelligible. How quick he is, without any real struggling with the raw material of the Epistle, to dismiss this or that difficult passage as simply a peculiar doctrine or opinion of Paul! How quick he is to treat a matter as explained, when it is said to belong to the religious thought, feeling, experience, conscience, or conviction,—of Paul! And, when this does not at once fit, or is manifestly impossible, how easily he leaps, like some bold William Tell, right out of the Pauline boat, and rescues himself by attributing what Paul has said, to his “personality,” to the experience on the road to Damascus (an episode which seems capable of providing at any moment an explanation of every impossibility), to later Judaism, to Hellenism, or, in fact, to any exegetical semi-divinity of the ancient world! Orthodox commentators are, it is true, better placed than their more liberal colleagues. For orthodoxy, or any other form of Christianity which retains a sense for the importance of history, does at least offer a safer shore on which to alight after they have left the Pauline boat than does the cultured conscience of modern Protestantism. But, in the end, they have no greater advantage than this—that they are the better able to conceal their lack of any tenacious determination to understand and to interpret. The whole procedure assuredly achieves no more than the first draft of a paraphrase of the text and provides no more than a point of departure for genuine exegesis. The matter contained in the text cannot be released save by a creative straining of the sinews, by a relentless, elastic application of the “dialectical” method. The critical historian needs to be more critical. The interpretation of what is written requires more than a disjointed series of notes on words and phrases. The commentator must be possessed of a wider intelligence than that which moves within the boundaries of his own natural appreciation. True apprehension can be achieved only by a strict determination to face, as far as possible without rigidity of mind, the tension displayed more or less clearly in the ideas written in the text. Criticism (κρίνειν) applied to historical documents means for me the measuring of words and phrases by the standard of that about which the documents are speaking—unless indeed the whole be nonsense. When documents contain answers to questions, the answers must be brought into relation with the questions which are presupposed, and not with some other questions. And moreover, proper concentration of exegesis presses behind the many questions to the one cardinal question by which all are embraced. Everything in the text ought to be interpreted only in the light of what can be said, and therefore only in the light of what is said. When an investigation is rightly conducted, boulders composed of fortuitous or incidental or merely historical conceptions ought to disappear almost entirely. The Word ought to be exposed in the words. Intelligent comment means that I am driven on till I stand with nothing before me but the enigma of the matter; till the document seems hardly to exist as a document; till I have almost forgotten that I am not its author; till I know the author so well that I allow him to speak in my name and am even able to speak in his name myself. What I have just said will, I know, be severely handled. But I cannot prevent myself asking what comment and intepretation really mean. Have men like Lietzmann ever seriously put this question to themselves? Can scientific investigation ever really triumph so long as

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men refuse to busy themselves with this question, or so long as they are content to engage themselves with amazing energy upon the work of interpretation with the most superficial understanding of what interpretation really is? For me, at any rate, the question of the true nature of interpretation is the supreme question—or is it that these learned men, for whose learning and erudition I have such genuine respect, fail to recognize the existence of any real substance at all, of any underlying problem, of any Word in the words? Do they not perceive that there are documents, such as the books of the New Testament, which compel men to speak at whatever cost, because they find in them that which urgently and finally concerns the very marrow of human civilization?—let the last word stand for the moment. Do they not see that their students’ future in the Church presents a problem which lies at the heart of the whole matter, and which cannot be dismissed as though it were merely a matter for “Pastoral Theology”? I myself know what it means year in year out to mount the steps of the pulpit, conscious of the responsibility to understand and to interpret, and longing to fulfil it; and yet, utterly incapable, because at the University I had never been brought beyond that well-known “Awe in the presence of History” which means in the end no more than that all hope of engaging in the dignity of understanding and interpretation has been surrendered. Do the historians really suppose that they have exhausted their responsibility towards their readers, when, re bene gesta, they permit Niebergall to speak—in the fifth volume?3 It was this miserable situation that compelled me as a pastor to undertake a more precise understanding and interpretation of the Bible. Is the whole learned society of New Testament scholars really satisfied that this work can be left to what is called “Practical Theology,” as Jülicher in attacking me has reasserted with intolerable and old-fashioned assurance? Jülicher calls me an “esoteric personage,” but I am not that, nor am I a “bitter enemy of historical criticism.” I am quite aware of the difficulty of the problem. But no agreement with regard to the difficulties and dangers inherent in what I understand by “critical” theology is possible, nor can there be any discussion as to how they may be avoided, unless my opponents acknowledge that there is a problem, and show some signs of penitence. Otherwise, nothing can be done. What, then, do I mean when I say that a perception of the “inner dialectic of the matter” in the actual words of the text is a necessary and prime requirement for their understanding and interpretation? It has been asserted—a Swiss reviewer has said it peculiarly roughly—that I mean, of course, my own “system.” I know that I have laid myself open to the charge of imposing a meaning upon the text rather than extracting its meaning from it, and that my method implies this. My reply is that, if I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the “infinite qualitative distinction” between time and eternity, and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: “God is in heaven, and thou art on earth.” The relation between such a God and such a man, and the relation between such a man and such a God, is for me the theme of the Bible and the essence of philosophy. Philosophers name this krisis of human perception—the Prime Cause: the Bible beholds at the same crossroads—the figure of Jesus Christ. When

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I am faced by such a document as the Epistle of Paul to the Romans, I embark on its interpretation on the assumption that he is confronted with the same unmistakable and unmeasurable significance of that relation as I myself am confronted with, and that it is this situation which moulds his thought and its expression. Nor am I unique in making an assumption at the outset. Other commentators do the same, though their assumptions are more pragmatic: as, for example, when they assume that the Epistle was written by Paul in the first century a.d. Whether these assumptions are justified or not becomes clear in the course of the investigation, when each verse comes to be examined and interpreted. That the assumptions are certainly justified is at the end only a relative certainty. They cannot be proven. In this uncertainty my fundamental assumption is, of course, included. For the present, however, I assume that in the Epistle to the Romans Paul did speak of Jesus Christ, and not of someone else. And this is as reputable an assumption as other assumptions that historians are wont to make. The actual exegesis will alone decide whether this assumption can be maintained. If Paul was not primarily concerned with the permanent krisis of the relation between time and eternity, but was dealing with some other theme, the absurdity of a false assumption will become clear in the course of a detailed examination of the text. Questioned as to the ground of my assumption that this was, in fact, Paul’s theme, I answer by asking quite simply whether, if the Epistle is to be treated seriously at all, it is reasonable to approach it with any other assumption than that God is God. If the complaint is made that I have done violence to the author, I shall maintain the counter-complaint that the real violence is done to him by those who suppose that, in speaking of Jesus Christ, he is referring to some anthroposophical chaos—to some relative-absolute, or to some absolute-relative. Surely it is precisely of this kind of chaos that Paul stands in such evident horror in all his Epistles. I do not, of course, for one moment claim to have provided an adequate interpretation of the Epistle. But, even so, I am persuaded that there is no reason whatever for me to abandon my prime assumption. Paul knows of God what most of us do not know; and his Epistles enable us to know what he knew. It is this conviction that Paul “knows” that my critics choose to name my “system,” or my “dogmatic presupposition,” or my “Alexandrianism,” and so on and so forth. I have, however, found this assumption to be the best presupposition, even from the point of view of historical criticism. Modern pictures of Paul seem to me—and not to me only—simply incredible. It is true that their creators do frequently refer to modern problems in order to fill in the picture. But they do so only by way of illustration. I, however, wish to understand and to explain the Epistle to the Romans, not to provide it with a series of illustrations. Moreover, judged by what seems to me to be the fundamental principle of true exegesis, I entirely fail to see why parallels drawn from the ancient world—and with such parallels modern commentators are chiefly concerned—should be of more value for an understanding of the Epistle than the situation in which we ourselves actually are, and to which we can therefore bear witness. The attitude that I have adopted towards the text has been called “Biblicist.” For this some have blamed and some have praised me. The word is not mine, but I

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accept it, provided I am allowed to explain what I mean by “Biblicism.” Wernle wrote of me with some bitterness: “No single aspect of Paul’s teaching seems to cause Barth discomfort … . There remain for him no survivals of the age in which Paul lived—not even trivial survivals.” Wernle then proceeds to enumerate what he finds to be “uncomfortable points” or “survivals” which should be permitted to “remain” relics of the past. They are: the Pauline “depreciation” of the earthly life of Jesus— Christ the Son of God—Redemption by the blood of Christ—Adam and Christ—Paul’s use of the Old Testament—his so-called “Baptismal-Sacramentalism”—the Double Predestination—his attitude to secular authority. Now, imagine a commentary on the Epistle to the Romans which left these eight points unexplained; which allowed them to “remain uncomfortable points”; and in which a maze of contemporary parallels did duty for an explanation of them. Could such a commentary really be called an interpretation? In contrast with this comfortable dismissal of uncomfortable points it has been my “Biblicism” which has compelled me to wrestle with these “scandals to modern thought” until I have found myself able to undertake the interpretation of them, because I have discovered precisely in these points the characteristic and veritable discernment of Paul. Whether I have interpreted them correctly is, of course, another matter. There are passages in the Epistle which I still find very hard to understand. But I concede much more to Wernle than this. Strictly speaking, no single verse seems to me capable of a smooth interpretation. There “remains” everywhere, more or less in the background, that which subtly escapes both understanding and interpretation, or which, at least, awaits further investigation. But this cannot be thought of as a “residuum” simply to be put on one side or disregarded. It is my so-called “Biblicism” and “Alexandrianism” which forbid me to allow the mark of competent scholarship to be that the critic discloses fragments of past history and then leaves them—unexplained . I have, moreover, no desire to conceal the fact that my “Biblicist” method—which means in the end no more than “consider well”—is applicable also to the study of Lao-Tse and of Goethe. Nor can I deny that I should find considerable difficulty in applying the method to certain of the books contained in the Bible itself. When I am named “Biblicist,” all that can rightly be proved against me is that I am prejudiced in supposing the Bible to be a good book, and that I hold it to be profitable for men to take its conceptions at least as seriously as they take their own. Turning now to what is contained in my commentary on the Epistle to the Romans: I must confess that after all these years I am still concerned with the veritable rather than with the whole Gospel. This is because only by laying hold of the veritable Gospel does it seem to me to be possible to reach out towards the whole Gospel. No one has yet comprehended the whole in a single perspective. The normal practice of speaking or writing fluently and comprehensively of the whole—of faith, hope, and love, of earth, heaven, and hell, each playing its noble and proper part in the balance of the whole—seems to me an unedifying procedure. I do not complain, however, if others, speaking in the name of Christianity, think differently. I only beg them not to pass by what is said here, as though it were totally irrelevant. Paulinism has stood always on the brink of heresy. This being so, it is strange how utterly harmless and

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unexceptionable most commentaries on the Epistle to the Romans and most books about Paul are. Why should this be so? Perhaps because the uncomfortable points are treated according to Wernle’s recipe. May I be permitted, out of deference to Wernle, a word of warning to those who are babes in the study of theology, that is, to any undergraduates who may chance to read this book? Read it, please, carefully and not too quickly. Check it by referring to the Greek text and to other commentaries. Above all, do not be “enthusiastic.” This is a critical work in the full and most serious meaning of the word “critical.” K. Müller of Erlangen has rightly pointed out that the book may exercise a fatal influence upon immature minds. And yet, the man who makes this criticism ought seriously to reflect whether the persistent covering up of the dangerous element in Christianity is not to hide its light under a bushel. Perhaps Spengler was right when he told us that we were entering upon an “iron age.” If this be so, theology and the theologians are bound to bear the marks of it. Harnack’s book on Marcion appeared whilst I was immersed in the writing of my commentary. Those who are familiar with both books will understand why I am bound to refer to it. I was puzzled, on reading the earlier reviews of Harnack’s book, by the remarkable parallels between what Marcion had said and what I was actually writing. I wish to plead for a careful examination of these agreements before I be praised or blamed hastily as though I were a Marcionite. At the crucial points these agreements break down. Even before the appearance of Harnack’s book, Jülicher had already bracketed my name with Marcion’s. Harnack joined me to—Thomas Münzer; Walter Koepler, I think, to Kaspar Schwenckfeld. Before these learned theologians made up their minds to throw me to some ancient and venerable heresiarch they would have done better if they had agreed in their choice. As it is, I remain unscathed, and can only wonder at the varied selection the three theologians have made. And now, a word concerning a matter of detail. A quite unforeseen importance has been attached to the translation of πίστις by—the faithfulness of God. Jülicher selects this as an illustration of that “joyful sense of discovery” of which I spoke—rather romantically it is true—in the preface to the first edition. As a matter of fact, Rudolf Liechtenhan was the spiritual father of this innovation. He had first drawn my attention in a private letter to the possibility of translating it thus. He has now put it into print. The protest has been so general that I have cut down the number of passages in which the rendering occurs. My critics will note, however, that I have retained it with uncomfortable frequency in Ch. III. My purpose in retaining the translation at certain points is to direct attention to a particular nuance of the word, which would be missed were it rendered monotonously by faith, just as it would were I sufficiently pedantic to translate it always by faithfulness. That the latter meaning is suggested can hardly be denied in view of Rom. iii. 3, of the well known variant in the LXX Version of Hab. ii. 4, and of similar nuances attached to such words as ἀγάπη, γνῶσις, ἐλπίς, χάρις, δικαιοσύνη, εἰρήνη. For various reasons I have omitted to provide a bibliography. I should like, however, to call attention to the verbal agreement, from Chapter III onwards, between the commentary on the Episitle by C. H. Rieger (1726–91) published in 1828 amongst his Considerations upon the New Testament, and the commentary by Fr. Chr. Steinhofer

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(1706–61), edited for publication in 1851. The plagiarism cannot be charged to the worthy Rieger. Perhaps some Tübingen specialist can throw light upon this puzzling affair. Jülicher has endeavoured to exclude me from the scholarly world and to set me firmly in the harmless world of practical theology by pointing out my aberrations in the field of textual criticism. It is true that I have sometimes ventured to disagree with Nestle’s text, which is the text used by most theological students. I had, however, no intention of claiming any authority in a field in which I am obviously incompetent. And yet, in spite of my incompetence, I could not avoid attempting to justify my adoption of certain variant readings in important passages. I only did this—pending further instruction. May I, in conclusion, utter a warning to some of my reviewers? I wish to impress upon them that, in reviewing the second edition, it is even more dangerous than before to write about this book either with enthusiasm or with peevishness. I beg them to consider what is implied if the book be wholly accepted or wholly rejected. I beg them to consider what it means to mingle in friendly fashion praise and blame. Nevertheless, I know that it is beyond my power to put this so that they will understand what I mean. Safenwil, September, 1921.

The preface to the third edition Details apart, the third edition is a reprint of the second. A time may come when it will be necessary for me once again to rewrite the whole. I hardly know whether I ought to fear or to desire this. Our modern life is subject to strange and rapid changes. Whether this is a symptom of decay, or whether it is a sign that we are moving towards momentous spiritual decisions, who can say? At all events, the situation alters from day to day, conference succeeds conference, men instruct and are instructed, a man says something, and then, finding it echoed in the mouths of others, fears to say it again lest its meaning be altogether lost in the noise of its echo, and yet, side by side with all this dangerous applause, fresh, valuable criticism makes itself heard, and requires most careful consideration. “We can never plunge a second time into the same river, for now it narrows, now it broadens out, but always it flows on and on.” How then can such a living and responsible undertaking as a commentary on the Epistle to the Romans ever remain stationary? Nevertheless I do not at present feel myself obliged to rewrite the book. This being so, I have no alternative but to sanction the reprinting of what I wrote a year ago. I have caused the preface to the second edition to be reprinted, because otherwise this book would be incomplete. I do not, however, regard its repetition as of very great importance, certainly not the repetition of the polemic contained in it. The strangest episode in the history of the book since the appearance of the second edition has been its friendly reception by Bultmann and its equally friendly

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rejection by Schlatter. From the one I conclude to my very great satisfaction that the original outcry against the book as being an incitement to a Diocletian persecution of historical, critical theology was not demanded; from the other that the course I have taken is independent of that positive theology to which I feel myself most nearly related. For the present I have simply noted carefully and gratefully the criticisms and questions put to me by Bultmann and Schlatter, and also by Kolfhaus. Some of their criticisms are new to me; of others I have been long aware. I should like, however, to take this opportunity of adding something to what was said in the preface to the second edition about “Historical Criticism” about the “Dialectic of the Matter” and about “Biblicism,” because they affect the general method of approach. Bultmann complains that I am too conservative. He agrees with me that criticism must begin with the subject-matter, but thinks that this must lead, on to the criticism of some of Paul’s opinions, because even he fails at times to retain his grip upon what is, in fact, his subject. Bultmann writes: “Other spirits make themselves heard, as well as the Spirit of Christ.” I do not wish to engage in a controversy with Bultmann as to which of us is the more radical. But I must go farther than he does and say that there are in the Epistle no words at all which are not words of those “other spirits” which he calls Jewish or Popular Christian or Hellenistic or whatever else they may be. Is it really legitimate to extract a certain number of passages and claim that there the veritable Spirit of Christ has spoken? Or, to put it another way, can the Spirit of Christ be thought of as standing in the Epistle side by side with “other” spirits and in competition with them? It seems to me impossible to set the Spirit of Christ—the veritable subject-matter of the Epistle—over against other spirits, in such a manner as to deal out praise to some passages, and to depreciate others where Paul is not controlled by his true subject-matter. Rather, it is for us to perceive and to make clear that the whole is placed under the krisis of the Spirit of Christ. The whole is litera, that is, voices of those other spirits. The problem is whether the whole must not be understood in relation to the true subject-matter which is—The Spirit of Christ. This is the problem which provides aim and purpose to our study of the litera. The commentator is thus presented with a clear “Either—Or” The question is whether or no he is to place himself in a relation to his author of utter loyalty. Is he to read him, determined to follow him to the very last word, wholly aware of what he is doing, and assuming that the author also knew what he was doing? Loyalty surely cannot end at a particular point, and certainly cannot be exhausted by an exposure of the author’s literary affinities. Anything short of utter loyalty means a commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, not a commentary so far as is possible with him—even to his last word. True exegesis involves, of course, much sweat and many groans. Even so, the extent to which the commentator will be able to disclose the Spirit of Christ in his reading of Paul will not be everywhere the same. But he will know that the responsibility rests on his shoulders; and he will not let himself be bewildered by the voices of those other spirits, which so often render inaudible the dominant tones of the Spirit of Christ. He will, moreover, always be willing to assume that, when he fails to understand, the blame is his and not Paul’s. Nor will he rest content

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until paradoxically he has seen the whole in the fragments, and has displayed the fragments in the context of the veritable subject-matter, so that all the other spirits are seen in some way or other to serve the Spirit of Christ. It may be, on the other hand, that the commentator is unable to accept the presupposition which such fidelity requires. This may be because he does not perceive, or at least does not perceive sufficiently clearly, what is the veritable subjectmatter of such a document as the Epistle to the Romans. Or it may be because, so noisy are those other spirits which shriek at him from every verse, he despairs of ever being able to detect the dominant tones. If this be so, for whatever reason, he must content himself with writing a commentary on Paul. He cannot speak with him, except perchance when Paul says something which even he can understand. Such a commentator will only discover the Spirit of Christ “here and there”; and he may not attribute to the Spirit of Christ even those fragments which he finds illuminating. He stands irresponsibly before the text, confronted, as a spectator, with a mixture of Spirit and spirits. Though he may here and there follow his author, he does not feel bound to wrestle with the understanding of him, for the simple reason that he has never made up his mind to stand or fall with him. I cannot, for my part, think it possible for an interpreter honestly to reproduce the meaning of any author unless he dares to accept the condition of utter loyalty. To make an oration over a man means to speak over his body, and that is to bury him finally, deeper and without hope, in his grave. No doubt despair leaves no other course open. Indeed, there are many historical personages whom it is possible only to speak about. Even so, it is still open to question whether the riddle they propound is really due to their obscurity or to our lack of apprehension. In any case, I am completely unable to understand Bultmann’s demand that I should mingle fire and water. He asks me to think and write with Paul, to follow him into the vast unfamiliarity of his Jewish, Popular-Christian, Hellenistic conceptions; and then suddenly, when the whole becomes too hopelessly bizarre, I am to turn round and write “critically” about him and against him—as though, when all is strange, this or that is to be regarded as especially outrageous. Is Bultmann incapable of understanding that, even were we concerned with an author’s literary style, such a method of procedure would be illegitimate? His demands seem to me, therefore, to involve not merely a return to the older theory of “relics of a bygone age” and “uncomfortable points,” but also an error in literary taste. Bultmann further goes on to hint that there lurks behind my whole method of exegesis a “modern form of the dogma of Inspiration.” Schlatter also noticed the same tendency with disapproval. But, from the preface to the first edition onwards, I have never attempted to conceal the fact that my manner of interpretation has certain affinities with the old doctrine of Verbal Inspiration. As expounded by Calvin, the doctrine seems tome at least worthy of careful consideration as capable of leading to spiritual apprehension, and I have already made it clear how I have, in fact, made use of it. Is there any way of penetrating the heart of a document—of any document!—except on the assumption that its spirit will speak to our spirit through the actual written words? This does not exclude a criticism of the letter by the spirit, which is, indeed, unavoidable. It is precisely a strict faithfulness which compels us to

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expand or to abbreviate the text, lest a too rigid attitude to the words should obscure that which is struggling to expression in them and which demands expression. This critical freedom of exegesis was used by Calvin in masterly fashion, without the slightest disregard for the discipline by which alone liberty is justified. The attentive reader will perceive that I have employed this method, believing it to be demanded by the text. I can only hope that I have not fallen into the snare of indiscipline which inevitably threatens those who employ it. I have resolutely determined not to make use of the method in order to criticize Paul; and it is my serious intention always to avoid this temptation. The Spirit of Christ is not a vantage-point from which a ceaseless correction of Paul—or of any one else—may be exercised schoolmaster-wise. We must be content if, despite other spirits, we are not wholly bereft of the Spirit; content if, standing by Paul’s side, we are able to learn and to teach; content with a readiness to discern in spiritual fashion what is spiritually intended; and satisfied also to recognize that the voice with which we proclaim what we have received is primarily nothing but the voice of those other spirits. No human word, no word of Paul, is absolute truth. In this I agree with Bultmann—and surely with all intelligent people. But what does the relativity of all human speech mean? Does relativity mean ambiguity? Assuredly it does. But how can I demonstrate it better than by employing the whole of my energy to disclose the nature of this ambiguity? More than one reader of my book has learned from it to understand the uncertainty of Paulinism. I do not object to the book being so used. But nevertheless, we must learn to see beyond Paul. This can only be done, however, if, with utter loyalty and with a desperate earnestness, we endeavour to penetrate his meaning. It may help those who find much that is contained in the second edition of my commentary strangely unfamiliar, if I quote, in passing, the opening sentences of Calvin’s interpretation of the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews—”Grace,” he writes, “has always the appearance of contradiction. The foundation is faith. For faith is the pillar and possession upon which we are able to plant our feet. But what, in fact, do we possess? Not things that are present, but what is set far distant under our feet— nay more, what is beyond the comprehension of our spirit. Faith is therefore named the evidence of things not seen. But evidence means that things emerge into appearance, and is applicable only to what concerns our senses. In the realm of faith the two apparent opposites—evidence and things not seen—struggle with one another and are united. It is precisely the hidden things, inaccessible to sensible perception, that are displayed by the Spirit of God. He promises eternal life—to those who are dead. He speaks of the blessedness of resurrection—to those who are compassed about with corruption. He pronounces those in whom sin dwells—to be righteous. He calls those oppressed with ceaseless tribulation—blessed. He promises abundance of riches—to those abounding only in hunger and thirst. God cries out to us that He is coming quickly to our aid—and yet He seems deaf to every human cry for help. What, then, would be our fate, were we not powerful in hope, were we not hurrying through the darkness of the world along the road which is enlightened by the Spirit and by the Word of God?” I must again thank those who have assisted me so loyally. Georg Merz corrected

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the proofs and compiled the index. Lukas Christ of Pratteln has smoothed out the roughness of my style in many passages—a very necessary piece of work. Göttingen, July, 1922.

The preface to the fourth edition Since the appearance of the last edition, further work and further reflection have made it obvious that the book needs to be rewritten. It requires clarification; and other improvements are necessary also. But it is no use patching it up, and for a long time to come I shall have no opportunity of recasting the whole. Further, I do not, as yet, see my way through those difficult passages which ought to be the starting-point of a new revision. Could I see my way clearly, I should have to find time to rewrite the whole book. I must therefore send the book out once more unaltered. This, however, need not inconvenience those familiar with current theological discussions. They tend, in one form or another, to revolve round the Epistle to the Romans. The reader will therefore be in a position to make for himself the necessary reservations and amplifications. As regards the external history of the book: it should be noted that Jülicher has reviewed it for a second time. He pronounces it to have proceeded from the “arrogance of a spiritual enthusiast”; and this, he says, is his final word. On the other hand, the literary organ of the Dutch Reformed Church is outraged by the “negative” character of the book, and its readers are warned to “exercise great care in using it,” since it is “foreign to their piety.” Of greater interest to me personally are the appreciations which have reached me from the Catholic side. Catholic reviewers have, for the most part, displayed a genuine understanding of the point at issue. They have, moreover, conducted the discussion in a proper atmosphere of theological controversy—an atmosphere seemingly foreign to most of my reviewers on the other side of the great gulf. Now, what is the meaning of this fundamental, and to me quite unexpected, understanding? Erich Przywara, S. J, contrasts our “school” with that of Otto and Heller, judging it to be a “genuine rebirth of Protestantism” a reappearance of the “passionate fervour of the old Reformers.” Joseph Engert, on the other hand, brings forward evidence to show that, apart from the doctrine of the Church elaborated in Chapters IX–XI, my commentary does not differ from the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, of the Council of Trent, and of the Roman Catechism; only my formulation of it is far more obscure and complicated. The two reviewers are clearly not saying quite the same thing. Should they agree together as to what it is precisely they wish to say to us, we should be bound to answer them. Meanwhile, I cannot help saying that I regard it as a most hopeful sign for both sides that an opportunity should now be provided of entering into genuine theological, as opposed to merely historical, discussion with theologians of the Old Church. Those, like ourselves, who are moving

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in the world of the theology of the Reformation, for this very reason, ought not—and indeed do not—cast in the teeth of others that they are moving with conviction in the world of medieval theology. When that is said, we must, however, own to a horror of mystical, High-Church, Evangelical-Catholic, dilettantism. Göttingen, February, 1924.

The preface to the fifth edition This book continues to be read and to exert influence, but its very “success” is such as to compel its author to pause and consider. In his thoughts about his success, it is right that his readers should share. Two reflections jostle one another in my mind. When I wrote the book, did I simply put into words what was everywhere in the air—especially in Germany after the War? Did I say what was readily acceptable to the “rulers of the world” in our generation, and what men’s ears itched to hear? And, in becoming fashionable and in the appearance of “proper Barthians,” like the “Ritschlians” of the Bismarck era!—am I suffering an inevitable punishment? Every word I wrote against human—too human—vapourings, everything I wrote especially against religious vapourings, everything I said about their various causes and effects, seems now to be turned back upon myself. I had set out to please none but the very few, to swim against the current, to beat upon doors which I thought were firmly bolted. Was I altogether deceived? Perhaps I was. For who is able to know even himself accurately, or to gauge his contemporaries? Who knows whether we are not being moved, just when we imagine that we are moving others? My readers can well understand how startling it was for me to note the kind of theological books which at the present time have made a like impression. Was I deceived about the world and about myself? Am I after all merely one of those bad theologians who are no more than servants of public opinion? And are my readers also deceived in supposing a thing to be relevant today which was, in fact, relevant only for Paul and for Luther and Calvin? Have they been presented with what is really no more than a rehash, resurrected out of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Cohen? If this be what has actually occurred I must accept judgment and recognize that I am just the author of—a bestseller. But why should not this be the truth? And even if it were not true, no credit would be due to me or to my book. When I wrote in the Preface to the first edition that this book could “wait,” it was treated as a piece of arrogance. If this were pride on my part, perhaps I have had to be punished for it, since, unlike so many other better books, it did not have to wait. In common with much else that is empty show, it has gained the applause by which it is condemned. All flesh is as grass—the truth of these words is exhibited in this world far more surely by precarious success than by a correspondingly precarious failure. This is the first of my reflections; and I beg my friendly readers to perceive that it is directed against them as well as against myself. They must bear its weight with me. They will then be no more surprised than I shall

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be, should it one day become apparent that here too—the grass withereth, and the flower fadeth. The second reflection is more serious. It may be that every criticism implied in the former reflection is justified, and yet that nevertheless, in spite of much arrogance and wrong-headedness, aye, even in the midst of it, something has been brought out into the open through what has been observed and said in this book—as it were by forensic justification (justificatio forensis). And this applies to what others have also observed and said who are in no way dependent upon my book. It is to this whole situation that the Church and the theologians of today are bound to pay attention. But what then is my personal responsibility in all this? And what is the responsibility of my friendly readers? If, perhaps quite apart from me and even in opposition to me, there has emerged something true and right, what am I to say, when, because at the critical moment I sounded the alarm, I am now supposed— to my horror I must acknowledge it—to be in some special way responsible for continuing and deepening and cariying through what has been begun? I can only say that, when I was working at this book in my peaceful parsonage in the distant valley of the Aar, I was convinced, like any other vigorous and keen author, that I was producing something good and valuable. But it never crossed my mind to think that the apostle Paul, as I seemed to hear him, would awaken such an echo that with the publication of this book I should give many earnest men the right to drive me into a corner by asking me questions concerning further implications, consequences, and applications, or even by asking me to repeat what had been brought to light. As though I were competent for all this! In his “Reminiscences” Admiral Tirpitz says that, whereas it is easy to hoist your flag, it is difficult to strike it honourably. I would add that it is even more difficult—at any rate when there is no question of hauling it down—to continue to fly it honourably. And this is my situation. As it becomes more and more clear how much there remained to be done after the book was written, I often wish that I had never written it. And I feel this even more acutely now that I have been suddenly appointed, in spite of my light equipment, to the responsible position of professor at a university. It is now demanded of me that I should definitely put my hand to the plough every day; and every day I am reminded how difficult it is to plough the field of Christian doctrine, remembering that each furrow is—of bitter necessity—a new furrow. Should this more favourable explanation of the “success” of my book also be justified, then, whatever can be rightly said to the contrary, it does mark the moment when a breach, however small, has been made in the inner and outer afflictions of Protestantism. It is, however, oppressively humiliating both for me and for my readers—at least, for my friendly, understanding, and sympathetic readers—to reflect that, when quick speech and action is necessary to do justice both to the misery and to the hope of the Church, we should remain so incompetent—unless indeed the whole present situation be merely a Fata Morgana. I have just come across the following lines written by a pastor in Hessen, who is personally unknown to me.4 They fit my position so well, that they might have been addressed to me:

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God needs men, not creatures Full of noisy, catchy phrases. Dogs he asks for, who their noses Deeply thrust into—To-day, And there scent Eternity. Should it lie too deeply buried. Then go on, and fiercely burrow. Excavate until—To-morrow. Yes, God needs …! I wish I could be such a Hound of God—Domini canis—and could persuade all my readers to enter the Order. Understood thus, these lines make the best review of my book that has yet appeared. And no review could be more critical. No man can add a cubit to his stature, and so the “success” of the book, even according to the second reflection, is a judgment under which we stand. It is necessary therefore to keep in mind both reflections upon the uncertainty of our position. For I wish my understanding reader—I am not now speaking of or to the others—to apprehend with me the severity and the goodness which together press upon our memory the fact that we have a Master. We must not expect to escape some equivalent of the concrete threatenings and tribulations which Protestant Christians and theologians were compelled to endure for their faith in the sixteenth century. We of the twentieth century must not shrink from being the Church Militant. I am able to understand something of what this equivalent is, when I think of the paradox or dialectic which is contained in the word “success.” That is what I wished to say. And now I can send forth this book once more. Münster in Westphalia, February, 1926.

The preface to the sixth edition The two years and a half which have passed since the publication of the fifth edition of this book have increased the distance separating me from what I had originally written. Not that, in expounding the Pauline Epistles, or indeed any part of Holy Scripture, I should now wish to say anything materially different from what I then said. I should still retain that which gave so serious and so severe offence; and so long as it still remains unrecognized that such offence had to be given and that the giving of it was justifiable, or until I am myself persuaded that I was wrong in giving it, there seems no reason why I should cease giving offence, and if so, why I should not continue to do so in its original form. However, I do not wish the book to go forth once more without saying that, were I to set to work again upon the exposition of the Epistle, and were I determined to repeat the same thing, I should certainly have to express it quite

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differently. I have, in the meantime, learnt that in Paul there is on the one hand a far greater variety and on the other hand a far greater monotony than I had then attributed to him. Much would therefore have to be drastically curtailed, and much expanded. Much would have to be expressed more carefully and with greater reserve; much, however, with greater clarity, and more emphatically. A great deal of the scaffolding of the book was due to my own particular situation at the time and also to the general situation. This would have to be pulled down. Many threads, on the other hand, which I had not then noticed in the Epistle, would now have to be brought to light. Those who read the book must also bear in mind the quite simple fact that I am now seven years older, and that all our exercise books obviously require correcting. Moreover, since the appearance of the fifth edition, I have embarked upon the publication of my Prolegomena to Christian Dogmatics. This means that a certain weight has been lifted from the earlier book, inasmuch as any serious criticism of it has at least to take also into consideration what is said in the second and more comprehensive book, where I have attempted a greater breadth of treatment and also greater precision. Similarly, those who, after reading the earlier book, still retain confidence in me and desire further treatment of the questions which it raises, should also take into account both the later book and other writings of mine, which are, in fact, continuations of the original work. At Neuendettelsau5 the following statement appeared the other day: “Of Karl Barth it may now be said that he is already slipping into the position of a man of yesterday.” (The Freimund of 8 November 1928.) Yes, no doubt! Dead men ride fast, but successful theologians ride faster (cf. the Preface to the fifth edition). How could I have written this book at all, had I not been both in theory and in practice prepared before I became a “man of to-day”? Do I—as I am accused of doing—treat “time” and “history” so lightly as to be hurt when I am told that my day has an evening and will, indeed, become a past yesterday? Warned of this, I am, however, glad of the opportunity of still making some corrections and of adding some explanations; glad to be able to beg my friendly readers, even if they think (perhaps rightly) that it would be better for me to make no corrections, not to write my obituary notice until what I have said is proved to have been exhausted and the “yesterday” which exists sub specie aeterni has also been manifested in time. Münster in Westphalia, The First Sunday in Advent, 1928.

Notes 1

On the eve of publication there has come into my hands an essay by Ph. Bachmann which appeared in the Neue Kirchl. Zeitschrift (October 1921). The essay contains some friendly criticisms which I recognize to be justified and far-reaching. The author will notice that I too have recently been concerned with the same points.

2

Franz Overbeck (1837–1905) was from 1872 to 1897 Professor of Critical Theology in the University of Basel. The reference is to two polemical pamphlets in which he

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THEOLOGY, HISTORY, AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION launched an attack upon his theological contemporaries, conservative and liberal alike. The first pamphlet appeared in 1873 under the title Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie; the second—Christentum und Kultur—was published in 1919 from Overbeck’s literary remains. According to Overbeck all Christian theology, from the Patristic Age onward, is unchristian and satanic, for it draws Christianity into the sphere of civilization and culture, and thereby denies the essentially eschatological character of the Christian religion. In their brochure, Zur inneren Lage des Christentums, 1920, Barth and Thurneysen drew attention to Overbeck and especially to his pamphlet Christentum und Kultur, and asserted that the questions he had addressed to all theologians still remained unanswered. See Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd edn, vol. iv, pp. 183/4. [Tf.]

3

The reference is to the critical commentary on the Books of the New Testament published in four volumes under the title, Handbuch zum Neuen Testament, and edited by Prof. Hans Leitzmann. Finally, a fifth volume with the title “A Practical Commentary,” was entrusted to Pastor Niebergall. Niebergall was killed in the War, and in the second edition of the commentary his work has been replaced by a volume containing an exegesis of the Lutheran Epistles and Gospels for the liturgical year, planned as an aid to preachers: Die alten Pericopen für die Theologische Praxis, erlaütert von Dr. L. Fendt, 1931. [Tr.]

4

Printed in Kirche und Welt, January 1926.

5

Neuendettelsau is a small village in Bavaria, lying south-west of Nuremburg. It was the scene of the pastorate of Wilhelm Löhe (1808–72. See Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd edn, vol. iii, p. 1707). Since then it has become the active centre of the home and foreign missionary work of the Lutheran Church. The mother-house of the Lutheran Deaconesses is located there. The Movement has at Neuendettelsau its own press, and from it is issued a weekly paper entitled Freimund. Kirchlich-Politisches Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land, with the subtitle “Organ einer öffentlichen Mission vom Standpunkt ev.-luth. Christentums.” [Tr.]

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6 Rudolf Bultmann “New Testament and Mythology”

R

udolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was a German biblical scholar and theologian who was arguably the twentieth century’s most influential interpreter of the New Testament. Among his many notable publications are a commentary on John’s Gospel, a synthetic theology of the whole New Testament, and many attempts to discern the existentialist meaning that lies at the heart of the New Testament by stripping away from its basic message the accompanying categories that he considered outmoded. This essay, published in German in 1941, picks up on the final theme just mentioned, the need to interpret biblical materials so as to remove their magical and cosmological trappings, an enterprise that Bultmann describes as “demythologizing.” Modern readers of the New Testament engage with a text that is written in a primitive, mythological language that does not comport at all with the customary modes of thinking today. The essay opens with examples, including a famous one—that the world consists of a three-story structure, with earth in the middle, heaven above, and hell below. Science has shown that this picture is not literally, physically true: this is not the way the world actually is. The reader’s task is to penetrate to the true message of the text, and not to be distracted by the mythical world picture in which it is couched. In essence, recognizing the Bible as a text written in mythical language means that the reality of which it speaks is not so much “out there”—much of what it says about the world is not really a description of something that has objective reality, and much of what it says about Jesus Christ really pertains to how he was received by his earliest followers—as it is about ourselves and the stance that we assume toward the world. Mythological constructs symbolize for modern readers a way that they might inhabit the world. Bultmann’s interpretive effort was “existentialist” in the sense that it sees the language of the New Testament as pertaining to the existence that human beings might have now; he views the text as making far fewer claims than it first appears to be making about things like heaven, hell, the cross as the site of substitutionary atonement, and the birth of Jesus Christ to a virgin. A text having a theological

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meaning is, thus, not closely tied to the historical reliability of the New Testament’s account of key events, such as the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Bultmann mentions explicitly the History of Religions School. How is he building on their conclusions? Bultmann’s popularity declined markedly in the last quarter of the twentieth century, as later New Testament scholars moved away from him on a number of the key points of detail. But in what ways can many theologies, even conservative ones, be seen as taking forward the basic impulses that lie behind his work, such as rendering the text comprehensible for modern audiences so that they can decide to follow its teaching? Bultmann’s work displays a quite different orientation to modernity than do the selections in this reader from De Lubac and Steinmetz. Which is more convincing, Bultmann’s willingness to alter traditional tenets of the faith because progress in understanding has been made in recent history, or De Lubac’s and Steinmetz’s continuing to indwell a tradition that they see as outstripping the offerings of the present scene?

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1. Demythologizing the New Testament proclamation as task: the problem Mythical world picture and mythical salvation occurrence in the New Testament The world picture of the New Testament is a mythical world picture. The world is a three-story structure, with earth in the middle, heaven above it, and hell below it. Heaven is the dwelling place of God and of heavenly figures, the angels; the world below is hell, the place of torment. But even the earth is not simply the scene of natural day-to-day occurrences, of foresight and work that reckon with order and regularity; rather, it, too, is a theater for the working of supernatural powers, God and his angels, Satan and his demons. These supernatural powers intervene in natural occurrences and in the thinking, willing, and acting of human beings; wonders are nothing unusual. Human beings are not their own masters; demons can possess them, and Satan can put bad ideas into their heads. But God, too, can direct their thinking and willing, send them heavenly visions, allow them to hear his commanding or comforting word, give them the supernatural power of his Spirit. History does not run its own steady, lawful course but is moved and guided by supernatural powers. This age stands under the power of Satan, sin, and death (which are precisely “powers”). It is hastening toward its imminent end, which will take place in a cosmic catastrophe. It stands before the “woes” of the last days, the coming of the heavenly judge, the resurrection of the dead, and the final judgment to salvation or damnation. The presentation of the salvation occurrence, which constitutes the real content of the New Testament proclamation, corresponds to this mythical world picture. The proclamation talks in mythological language: the last days are at hand; “when the time had fully come” God sent his Son. The Son, a preexistent divine being, appears on earth as a man (Gal. 4.4; Phil. 2.6ff.; 2 Cor. 8.9; Jn 1.14, etc.); his death on the cross, which he suffers as a sinner (2 Cor. 5.21; Rom. 8.3), makes atonement for the sins of men (Rom. 3:23–6; 4.25; 8.3; 2 Cor. 5.14,19; Jn 1.29; 1 Jn 2.2, etc.). His resurrection is the beginning of the cosmic catastrophe through which the death brought into the world by Adam is annihilated (1 Cor. 15.21–2; Rom. 5.12ff.); the demonic powers of the world have lost their power (1 Cor. 2.6; Col. 2.15; Rev. 12.7ff., etc.). The risen one has been exalted to heaven at the right hand of God (Acts 1.6ff.; 2.33; Rom. 8.34, etc.); he has been made “Lord” and “King“ (Phil. 2.9–11; 1 Cor. 15.25). He will return on the clouds of heaven in order to complete the work of salvation; then will take place the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment (1 Cor. 15.23–4, 50ff., etc.); finally, sin, death, and all suffering will be done away (Rev. 21:4, etc.). And this will all happen at any moment; Paul supposes that he himself will live to experience this event (1 Thess. 4.15ff.; 1 Cor. 15.51–2; see also Mk 9.1). Anyone who belongs to Christ’s community is bound to the Lord by baptism and the Lord’s Supper and is certain of being raised to salvation provided he or she does

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not behave unworthily (Rom. 5.12ff.; 1 Cor. 15.21ff., 44bff.). Believers already have the “first fruits“ (ἀπαρχή; Rom. 8:23) or the “guarantee“ (άρραβών; 2 Cor. 1.22; 5.5), that is, the Spirit, which works in them, bearing witness that they are children of God (Rom. 8.15; Gal. 4.6) and guaranteeing their resurrection (Rom. 8.11).

The impossibility of repristinating the mythical world picture All of this is mythological talk, and the individual motifs may be easily traced to the contemporary mythology of Jewish apocalypticism and of the Gnostic myth of redemption. Insofar as it is mythoogical talk it is incredible to men and women today because for them the mythical world picture is a thing of the past. Therefore, contemporary Christian proclamation is faced with the question whether, when it demands faith from men and women, it expects them to acknowledge this mythical world picture of the past. If this is impossible, it then has to face the question whether the New Testament proclamation has a truth that is independent of the mythical world picture, in which case it would be the task of theology to demythologize the Christian proclamation. Can Christian proclamation today expect men and women to acknowledge the mythical world picture as true? To do so would be both pointless and impossible. It would be pointless because there is nothing specifically Christian about the mythical world picture, which is simply the world picture of a time now past that was not yet formed by scientific thinking. It would be impossible because no one can appropriate a world picture by sheer resolve, since it is already given with one’s particular historical situation. Naturally, it is not unalterable, and even an individual can work to change it. But one can do so only insofar as, on the basis of certain facts that impress one as real, one perceives the impossibility of the prevailing world picture and either modifies it or develops a new one. Thus, the world picture can be changed, for example, as a result of Nicolaus Copernicus’s discovery or as a result of atomic theory; or, again, because romanticism discovers that the human subject is richer and more complicated than the world view of the Enlightenment and of idealism allowed for; or, yet again, because there is a new consciousness of the significance of history and nationality. It is entirely possible that in a past mythical world picture truths may be rediscovered that were lost during a period of enlightenment; and theology has every reason to ask whether this may be possible in the case of the world picture of the New Testament. But it is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work, as Wilhelm Herrmann made clear, one would have thought, once and for all. Any satisfaction of the demand would be a forced sacrificium intellectus, and any of us who would make it would be peculiarly split and untruthful. For we would affirm for our faith or religion a

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world picture that our life otherwise denied. Criticism of the New Testament is simply a given with modern thinking as it has come to us through our history. Experience and control of the world have developed to such an extent through science and technology that no one can or does seriously maintain the New Testament world picture. What sense does it make to confess today “he descended into hell“ or “he ascended into heaven,“ if the confessor no longer shares the underlying mythical world picture of a three-story world? Such statements can be confessed honestly only if it is possible to divest their truth of the mythological representations in which it is expressed—provided there is such a truth, which is the very thing theology has to ask. No mature person represents God as a being who exists above in heaven; in fact, for us there no longer is any “heaven“ in the old sense of the word. And just as certainly there is no hell, in the sense of a mythical underworld beneath the ground on which we stand. Thus, the stories of Christ’s descent and ascent are finished, and so is the expectation of the Son of man’s coming on the clouds of heaven and of the faithful’s being caught up to meet him in the air (1 Thess. 4.15ff.). Also finished by knowledge of the forces and laws of nature is faith in spirits and demons. For us the stars are physical bodies whose motion is regulated by cosmic law; they are not demonic beings who can enslave men and women to serve them. If they have any influence on human life, it takes place in accordance with an intelligible order and is not due to their malevolence, likewise, illnesses and their cures have natural causes and do not depend on the work of demons and on exorcising them.1 Thus, the wonders of the New Testament are also finished as wonders; anyone who seeks to salvage their historicity by recourse to nervous disorders, hypnotic influences, suggestion, and the like only confirms this. Even occultism pretends to be a science. We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.2 And if we suppose that we can do so ourselves, we must be clear that we can represent this as the attitude of Christian faith only by making the Christian proclamation unintelligible and impossible for our contemporaries. Mythical eschatology is finished basically by the simple fact that Christ’s parousia did not take place immediately as the New Testament expected it to, but that world history continues and—as every competent judge is convinced—will continue. Anyone who is convinced that the familiar world will end in time pictures this end as the result of natural development, as a natural catastrophe, and not as the mythical occurrence that the New Testament talks about; and if one interprets this occurrence in terms of natural scientific theories, like the probationer in the parsonage at Nöddebo, one thereby criticizes the New Testament without knowing it. What is involved here, however, is not only the criticism that proceeds from the world picture of natural science, but also—and even more so—the criticism that grows out of our self-understanding as modern persons. Interestingly enough, we moderns have the double possibility of understanding ourselves either completely as nature or as spirit as well as nature, in that we

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distinguish our true selves from nature. In either case, we understand ourselves as unified beings who ascribe their feeling, thinking, and willing to themselves.3 We do not understand ourselves to be as peculiarly divided as the New Testament represents us, so that alien powers can intervene in our inner life. We ascribe to ourselves an inner unity of states and actions, and we call any person who imagines this unity to be split by the intervention of divine or demonic powers a schizophrenic. Even if we understand ourselves as natural beings dependent to the highest degree, as in biology or psychoanalysis, we do not look upon our dependence as being given over to alien powers from which we distinguish ourselves. Rather, we look upon it as our true being, over which we are in turn able to take dominion by understanding, so that we can rationally organize our life. If, on the other hand, we understand ourselves as spirits, we do indeed know that we are always conditioned by our physical bodies, but we distinguish our true selves from them and know ourselves to be independent and responsible for our dominion over nature. In both cases what the New Testament has to say about the “Spirit“ (πνεῦμα) and the sacraments is absolutely alien and unintelligible to us. Those of us who understand ourselves in purely biological terms do not understand how a supernatural something or other like the πνεῦμα could intervene in the closed context of natural forces and be effective in us. Those of us who are idealists do not understand how a πνεῦμα that works like a natural force could affect and influence our spiritual attitude. We know ourselves to be responsible for our own existence and do not understand how through water baptism a mysterious something or other could be communicated to us that would then become the subject of our intentions and actions. We do not understand that a meal is supposed to mediate a spiritual power to us and that an unworthy reception of the Lord’s Supper is to result in physical illness and death (1 Cor. 11.30), unless, of course, we have recourse to suggestion to explain it. We do not understand how anyone can permit him or herself to be baptized on behalf of the dead (1 Cor. 15.29). There is no need to go into details about the special forms that the modern world view assumes in idealism and naturalism. For the only criticism of the New Testament that can be theologically relevant is that which arises necessarily out of our modern situation. A biological world view, for example, is not necessary in the present situation, because its choice is a question of decision within this situation. The only question that is relevant for theology is what can justify the decision for a consistent biological world view, what is the common basis on which the question of decision can arise. But this is, in the first place, the world picture formed by modern natural science and, in the second place, our own self-understanding, according to which we each understand our self to be a closed inner unity that is not open to the interference of supernatural powers. It is also the case that neither naturalists nor idealists can understand death as the punishment for sin; for them, death is a simple and necessary natural process. If it is no problem at all for naturalists, it is a problem for idealists precisely because it is a natural process. For, being natural, it does not grow out of my true, spiritual self but

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rather destroys my self. The problem is that human beings are spiritual selves who are different from plants and animals, and yet they, too, are caught in nature, in that they are bom, grow up, and die like any animal. But we cannot understand this fact to be a punishment for our sin; for even prior to our having become guilty we were already subject to death. Nor can we understand that in consequence of the guilt of our ancestors we should be condemned to the death of a natural being, because we know of guilt only as a responsible act and therefore regard original sin, in the sense of a quasi-natural hereditary illness, as a submoral and impossible concept. Just for this reason we also cannot understand the doctrine of substitutionary atonement through the death of Christ. How can my guilt be atoned for by the death of someone guiltless (assuming one may even speak of such)? What primitive concepts of guilt and righteousness lie behind any such notion? And what primitive concepts of God? If what is said about Christ’s atoning death is to be understood in terms of the idea of sacrifice, what kind of primitive mythology is it according to which a divine being who has become man atones with his blood for the sins of humanity? Or if it is to be understood in legal terms, so that in the transactions between God and human beings God’s demands are satisfied by the death of Christ, then sin can only be understood juristically as outward transgression of a divine command, and ethical standards are simply excluded. Moreover, if the Christ who suffered death was God’s Son, a pre-existent divine being, what could it mean to him to assume death? Clearly, death does not mean very much to someone who knows that after three days he will rise again! Likewise, we moderns cannot understand Jesus’ resurrection as an event whereby a power to live is released that we can now appropriate through the sacraments. For those who think biologically such talk is utterly pointless, because the problem of death does not even arise. And while for idealists it is meaningful to speak of a life that is not subject to death, the possibility that such a life should be created by a dead person’s being brought back to physical life is unimaginable. If God creates life for human beings by any such means, God’s action is evidently tied up with natural occurrences in some completely unintelligible way. We can see God’s act only in an occurrence that enters into the reality of our own true life, transforming us ourselves. But we cannot understand a miraculous natural event such as the resuscitation of a dead man—quite apart from its being generally incredible—as an act of God that is in this sense of concern to us. As for the Gnostic scheme of ideas, it is only with great effort that we can even put ourselves into a way of thinking according to which the dead and risen Christ was not simply a man, but a God-man, whose dying and rising again were not an isolated fact occurring only to him as an individual person but rather a cosmic occurrence into which we all are drawn (Rom. 5.12ff.; 1 Cor. 15.21ff., 44b). We certainly cannot think this way ourselves because it represents the human self as nature and the salvation occurrence as a natural process. This is also to say that the idea of a preexistent heavenly Christ and the correlative idea of our own translation into a heavenly world of light, in which the self is supposed to receive heavenly garments and a pneumatic

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body, are not only rationally incredible but also say nothing to us. For we do not understand that our salvation, in which we would find the fulfillment of our life, our authenticity, should consist in such a condition.

The task Not picking and choosing Does it follow from such a critical dismantling of New Testament mythology that the proclamation of the New Testament in general is critically set aside? One thing is certain: it cannot be saved by reducing the amount of mythology through picking and choosing. We cannot, for example, reject the notions of the physical ill-effects of unworthily receiving the Lord’s Supper and baptism on behalf of the dead and yet retain the idea that physical food has a pneumatic effect. For one mode of representation underlies all New Testament assertions about baptism and the Lord’s Supper; and it is precisely this mode of representation in general, not any one notion in particular, that we can no longer accept. One can, indeed, point to the fact that within the New Testament not all mythological assertions are equally emphasized or occur with the same regularity in all of the writings. The legends of the virgin birth and of Jesus’ ascension are encountered only occasionally; Paul and John know nothing of them. But even if one looks upon them as later accretions, this in no way changes the fact that the salvation occurrence still has a mythical character. And where are the limits of such choosing? We can only completely accept the mythical world picture or completely reject it. Here theologians and preachers owe it to themselves and to the community as well as to anyone whom they would win for the community to be absolutely clear and honest. No sermon may leave its hearers uncertain about what they do and do not have to hold to be true. Above all, it may not leave them uncertain about what the preacher secretly eliminates, nor may the preacher be uncertain about this. In Karl Barth’s book, Die Auferstehung der Toten, cosmic eschatology in the sense of a “history of the conclusion” is eliminated in favor of a “history of the end” that is not meant mythologically. Barth can deceive himself about this being a criticism of Paul and of the New Testament only because he eliminates everything mythological from 1 Corinthians by forced interpretation. But this is an impossible procedure. If the New Testament proclamation is to retain its validity, there is nothing to do but to demythologize it. Of course, we cannot set out on this path on the basis of a postulate that the New Testament proclamation must under all circumstances be made viable in the present. On the contrary, we simply have to ask whether it really is nothing but mythology or whether the very attempt to understand it in terms of its real intention does not lead to the elimination of myth. This way of asking the question, however, is made pressing from two sides: by what we know about the nature of myth in general as well as by the New Testament itself.

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The task of demythologizing as posed by the nature of myth The real point of myth is not to give an objective world picture; what is expressed in it, rather, is how we human beings understand ourselves in our world. Thus, myth does not want to be interpreted in cosmological terms but in anthropological terms—or, better, in existentialist terms.4 Myth talks about the power or the powers that we think we experience as the ground and limit of our world and of our own action and passion. It talks about these powers in such a way, to be sure, as to bring them within the circle of the familiar world, its things and forces, and within the circle of human life, its affections, motives, and possibilities. This is the case, say, when it talks about a world egg or a world tree in order to portray the ground and source of the world in a graphic way or when it talks about the wars of the gods from which the arrangements and circumstances of the familiar world have all arisen. Myth talks about the unworldly as worldly, the gods as human.5 What is expressed in myth is the faith that the familiar and disposable world in which we live does not have its ground and aim in itself but that its ground and limit lie beyond all that is familiar and disposable and that this is all constantly threatened and controlled by the uncanny powers that are its ground and limit. In unity with this myth also gives expression to the knowledge that we are not lords of ourselves, that we are not only dependent within the familiar world but that we are especially dependent on the powers that hold sway beyond all that is familiar, and that it is precisely in dependence on them that we can become free from the familiar powers. Therefore, the motive for criticizing myth, that is, its objectifying representations, is present in myth itself, insofar as its real intention to talk about a transcendent power to which both we and the world are subject is hampered and obscured by the objectifying character of its assertions. For this reason the mythology of the New Testament, also, is not to be questioned with respect to the content of its objectifying representations but with respect to the understanding of existence that expresses itself in them. What is at issue is the truth of this understanding, and the faith that affirms its truth is not to be bound to the New Testament’s world of representations.

The task of demythologizing as posed by the New Testament itself The New Testament already invites criticism because some of its representations are mutually disharmonious and, in fact, contradictory. Thus, the views of Christ’s death as a sacrifice and as a cosmic occurrence or the interpretations of his person as the Messiah and as the second Adam simply stand alongside one another. But there is actual contradiction between representing the kenosis of the preexistent one (Phil. 2:6ff.) and reporting the wonders through which he shows himself to be the

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Messiah. Likewise, representing Jesus as born of a virgin contradicts the idea of his preexistence. So, too, does faith in creation contradict the notion of the world rulers (1 Cor. 2.6ff.), or “the god of this age” (2 Cor. 4.4), or “the elemental spirits of the world“ (στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου; Gal. 4:3); and the view of the law as given by God contradicts the view that it comes from angels (Gal. 3.19–20). Criticism is especially called for, however, by a peculiar contradiction that runs throughout the New Testament: on the one hand, human beings are cosmically determined, and, on the other hand, they are summoned to decision; on the one hand, sin is fate, and, on the other hand, it is guilt; alongside of the Pauline indicative there is the imperative, and so on. In short, human beings are understood, on the one hand, as cosmic beings and, on the other hand, as independent persons who can win or lose themselves by their own decisions. Hence the fact that many words in the New Testament directly speak to us today, while yet others are unintelligible and remain closed to us. Finally, we must add that within the New Testament itself demythologizing has here and there already been carried out. Of this more will be said presently.

Earlier attempts at demythologizing The question, then, is how demythologizing is to be carried out. It is not a new task at which theology today is the first to work. On the contrary, everything that has been said up to this point, or something like it, could have been said thirty or forty years ago; and it is really a testimonium paupertatis for our theological situation that it has to be said again today. That this is necessary is clearly due to the fact that the demythologizing undertaken by the critical theology of the nineteenth century was carried out in an inappropriate way—namely, in such a way that with the elimination of the mythology the kerygma itself was also eliminated. And the question is precisely whether this is appropriate. If for the last twenty years we have been called back from criticism to simple acceptance of the New Testament kerygma, theology and the church have run the risk of uncritically repristinating New Testament mythology, thereby making the kerygma unintelligible for the present. The critical work of earlier generations cannot be simply thrown away but must be positively appropriated. If this does not happen, sooner or later—provided church and theology continue to exist at all—the old battles between orthodoxy and liberalism will have to be fought all over again. If we may say schematically that during the epoch of critical research the mythology of the New Testament was simply eliminated, the task today—also to speak schematically—is to interpret New Testament mythology. This does not mean that there may not also be mythologumena that are to be eliminated; it only means that the criterion for any such elimination must not be derived from the modern world view but from the understanding of existence of the New Testament itself.6 We may orient ourselves for this task by considering earlier attempts to carry it out. In this connection only a brief word is needed about the attempt throughout the

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whole history of the church to interpret New Testament mythology allegorically, in such a way that mythical events are spiritualized into processes within the soul. This is naturally the most convenient way of evading the critical question, because one leaves everything as it is for a literal understanding, even while dispensing oneself personally from being bound by it and saving oneself in the domain of the soul. For the epoch of the older “liberal” theology, it is characteristic that mythological representations are simply eliminated as time conditioned and inessential while the great basic religious and moral ideas are explained to be essential. One thus distinguishes between husk and kernel. What, according to Adolf von Harnack, is the kernel of Jesus’ preaching of the reign of God and its coming? “First, that this reign is something otherworldly, a gift from above, not a product of natural life; second, that it is a purely religious good—inner unity with the living God; third, that it is the most important, indeed, the decisive, thing that we can experience, that it permeates and dominates the whole sphere of our existence, because sin is forgiven and our wretchedness banished.“ Everything mythical is here eliminated: “The reign of God comes in that it comes to individuals, makes its entry into their souls, and they lay hold of it.“7 The kerygma is here reduced to certain basic religious and moral ideas, to an idealistic ethic that is religiously motivated. But the truth of the matter is that the kerygma is eliminated as kerygma, that is, as the message of God’s decisive act in Christ. The great religious and moral ideas are eternal, timeless truths, which first come to consciousness in the course of history and are clarified by concrete historical processes. But knowledge of these truths and acknowledgment of them are not bound to the knowledge or acknowledgment of historical epochs or of the historical persons through whom we first become conscious of them: we can recognize their validity and claim at any time. Thus, reflection on history can have a pedagogical importance but it cannot be decisive. The New Testament, however, talks about an event through which God has brought about our salvation. It does not proclaim Jesus primarily as the teacher who has indeed said things of decisive importance and whom we therefore continue to revere, but whose person is in principle indifferent to anyone who has understood his teaching. Rather, it proclaims precisely Jesus’ person as the decisive event of salvation. It talks about his person mythologically. But can this be a reason for setting the proclamation of his person aside as sheer mythology? That is the question. For the history-of-religions school, which first recognized the full extent of New Testament mythology, the essential thing in the New Testament is not its religious and moral ideas but rather its religion or piety, in relation to which everything dogmatic, and hence also all objectifying mythological representations are secondary and ­indifferent. The essential thing is religious life, which has as its high point a mysticism that knows itself to be one with Christ, in whom God has taken symbolic form. Actually, this view correctly sees something essential, namely, that Christian faith is not a religious idealism, that Christian life is not realized in developing the personality or in shaping human community and somehow changing the world but in turning away from the world and becoming free from it. To be sure, this becoming free from

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the world is not understood eschatologically as it is in the New Testament but rather in terms of a mystical concept of religion: religion is the human longing for something beyond the world, the discovery of another sphere where only the soul can abide, freed from everything worldly. In religion we are alone with God, filled with the powers of a higher, truer world. And religion is expressed, not practically, in somehow shaping life and the world, but in the impractical action of cult. Just such a religious life is evident in the New Testament, not only as an example but as something catching, arousing, and empowering. Thus, the New Testament is an enduring source of power for one’s own religious life, and Christ is the imperishable cultic symbol of the Christian community.8 The community is here understood purely as a cultic community. And if it is of no mean importance that the community is once again recognized in its religious significance—it could play no role at all in the idealistic interpretation—still the question is whether the meaning of the New Testament ecclesia is fully discovered, for it is an eschatological phenomenon of the history of salvation. Through such interpretation, also, the New Testament proclamation loses its character as kerygma. Here, too, there is no talk of a decisive act of God in Christ which is proclaimed as the salvation event. The decisive question, therefore, is whether precisely this salvation event, which is presented in the New Testament as a mythical occurrence, or whether the person of Jesus, which is viewed in the New Testament as a mythical person, is nothing but mythology. Can there be a demythologizing interpretation that discloses the truth of the kerygma as kerygma for those who do not think mythologically?

The demand for an existentialist interpretation of the mythological conceptuality The theological work that such interpretation requires can be presented here only in its basic features and by means of a few examples. Nor may any impression be given that such work can be done easily and, once one has the recipe, so to speak, in no time at all. On the contrary, it is a difficult and far-reaching task that requires not the work of one individual but the full time and energy of a theological generation. The mythology in whose conceptuality the New Testament talks is, in all essentials, that of Jewish apocalypticism and of the Gnostic myth of redemption. Both agree in the basic dualistic view according to which the present world and the men and women living in it are under the dominion of demonic, satanic powers and in need of redemption, a redemption that they themselves cannot provide and that can be given them only through divine intervention. And both talk about just such a redeeming act of God: apocalypticism, by talking about the imminent turn of the age that puts an end to this old age and ushers in the new one through God’s sending the Messiah; and Gnosticism, by talking about the redemption brought by the Son of God who is sent from the world of light disguised as a man and who, through his destiny and his doctrine, frees his own and makes a way for them to their heavenly home.

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These mythologies, also, do not have their point in their objectifying representations, but have to be interpreted in terms of their understanding of existence, that is, in existentialist terms, after the example of Hans Jonas’s interpretation of Gnosticism.9 The task, then, is also to interpret the dualistic mythology of the New Testament in existentialist terms. Thus, when the New Testament talks about demonic powers that rule the world and under whose power we human beings have fallen, is there in such talk a view of human existence that offers even to us today, who no longer think mythologically, a possibility for understanding ourselves? Of course, this does not mean that we are thereby offered anything like a scientific anthropology, whose correctness could be disputed and whose general validity could be demonstrated by certain facts. Scientific anthropologies always already presuppose a certain understanding of existence, which is—consciously or unconsciously—a matter of decision. Therefore, the issue is whether the New Testament offers us an understanding of ourselves that constitutes for us a genuine question of decision.

2. Demythologizing in its basic features: The Christian understanding of being Human being outside of faith What does the New Testament mean by “the world,” “this world” (ὁ κόσμος οὗτος), “this age“ (οὗτος ὁ αἰῶν)? The New Testament can talk about “this world“ and its princes, prince, or god just like Gnosticism. But there is an unmistakable difference. Although in the New Testament, as in Gnosticism, human beings are fallen under the world and its powers, the one power that plays no role is matter, our bodies as material and therefore sensual. Nowhere is there the complaint that we, our souls or selves, are imprisoned in material bodies or that sense has power over spirit. Therefore, there is also never any doubt about our responsibility and guilt. God is always taken to be the Creator of the world and therewith of our bodily existence; God is also the Judge before whom we are responsible. Consequently, the role of Satan as the lord of this world has to be peculiarly restricted, or if Satan is indeed its lord or god, “this world” stands in a peculiar dialectical relation to the world as God’s creation. “This world” is the world of transience and of death. It is clearly not this as God’s creation, for death has come into the world only as a consequence of Adam’s fall (Rom. 5.12). Therefore, transience and death are traced back, not to matter but to sin. It is not, as in Gnosticism, that some tragic destiny has imprisoned the purely heavenly soul in the body; rather, death is the wages of sin (Rom. 6.23; see also 1 Cor. 15.56). To be sure, Paul ascribes an effect to the fall of our ancestor Adam that is similar to that talked about by Gnosticism. But he evidently wants to make individuals responsible once again when he says—disharmoniously with his Adam theory—that death spread

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to all men “because all men sinned” (Rom. 5.12). Is it only the possibility of death, then, and not its necessity that has come into the world through Adam? Whatever the answer, equally disharmonious with the Adam theory is the constantly repeated assertion that sin together with death goes back to the “flesh” (Rom. 8.13; Gal. 6.8, etc.). But what is meant by “flesh” (σάρξ)? It is not what is corporal or sensual but rather the whole sphere of what is visible, available, disposable, and measurable, and as such the sphere of what is transient. This sphere becomes a power over us insofar as we make it the foundation of our lives by living “according to it,” that is, by succumbing to the temptation to live out of what is visible and disposable instead of out of what is invisible and nondisposable—regardless of whether we give ourselves to the alluring possibilities of such a life imprudently and with desire or whether we lead our lives reflectively and with calculation on the basis of our own accomplishments, “the works of the law.” “Flesh” embraces not only material things but also all of our creating and accomplishing insofar as it is concerned with achieving something demonstrable such as fulfilling the demands of the law (Gal. 3.3); to “flesh” belongs every achieved quality and every advantage that we can have within the sphere of what can be seen and disposed of (Phil. 3.4ff.). Paul sees that human life is burdened with “care”; (μεριμνᾶν; 1 Cor. 7.32ff.). Everyone cares about something. By nature our care is directed toward securing our life.“ We put confidence in the flesh” (Phil. 3.3–4), depending on our possibilities and successes in the sphere of what is visible, and consciousness of our security finds expression in “boasting“ (καυχᾶσθαι). This attitude is incongruous, however, given our actual situation, for we are not really secure at all. It is just so that we lose our “life,” our authentic existence, and fall subject to the sphere that we suppose we can dispose of in order to achieve security. Precisely this attitude gives the world that could be God’s creation for us the character of “this world,” the world that is opposed to God. Precisely this attitude first allows the powers on which we are dependent to arise and, because they have now become powers over us, to be represented as mythical realities.10 What is visible and disposable is transient, and consequently whoever lives on the basis of it falls subject to transience and death. Whoever lives out of what can be disposed of is given over to dependence on it. This is already clear from the fact that each of us, by wanting to secure ourselves by means of what is disposable, comes into conflict with everyone else and must secure his or her existence over against theirs. Thus arise, on the one hand, envy, anger, jealousy, and strife and, on the other hand, compacts and conventions, everyday judgments and standards. And it all creates an atmosphere that always already encompasses each of us and guides our judgments, that each of us again and again acknowledges, and that we each help to constitute ever anew. Out of this also grows the slavery of anxiety that oppresses all of us (Rom. 8.15)—the anxiety in which we each seek to hold on to ourselves and what is ours in the secret feeling that everything, including our own life, is slipping away from us.

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Human being in faith By contrast, a genuine human life would be one in which we lived out of what is invisible and nondisposable and, therefore, surrendered all self-contrived security. This is life “according to the Spirit“ or life “in faith.” Such a life becomes a possibility for us through faith in God’s “grace,” that is, through trust that precisely what is invisible, unfamiliar, and nondisposable encounters us as love, gives us our future, means life for us and not death. The grace of God is the grace that forgives sin, that is, it frees us from our past, which holds us in bondage. The attitude in which we seek to secure ourselves and therefore grasp at what can be disposed of, clinging to what is perishing or has always already perished, such an attitude is sin, because it is closure against what is invisible, against the future of God that gives itself to us. They who open themselves to grace receive the forgiveness of sin, that is, become free from the past. And just this is what is meant by “faith“: to open ourselves freely to the future. Such faith is simultaneously obedience, because it is our turning away from ourselves, our surrendering all security, our renouncing any attempt to be acceptable, to gain our life, to trust in ourselves, and our resolving to trust solely in God who raises the dead (2 Cor. 1.9) and who calls into existence the things that do not exist (Rom. 4:17). It is radical submission to God, which expects everything from God and nothing from ourselves; and it is the release thereby given from everything in the world that can be disposed of, and hence the attitude of being free from the world, of freedom. This freedom from the world is, in principle, not asceticism, but rather a distance from the world for which all participation in things worldly takes place in the attitude of “as if not“ (ὡς μή; 1 Cor. 7.29–31). Believers are lords over all things (1 Cor. 3.21–3); they have the “authority“ (ἐξουσία) of which the Gnostic also boasts. But, as Paul says, “I have authority over everything, but I will not give anything authority over me” (1 Cor. 6.12; see also 10.23–4). Believers can rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep (Rom. 12.15), but they no longer fall subject to anything in the world (1 Cor. 7.17–24). Everything in the world has receded for them into the indiff­ erence of things that have no significance in themselves.“For though I am free from all, I have made myself a slave to all” (1 Cor. 9.19–23).“I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound; in any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want“ (Phil. 4.12). The world has been crucified to believers, and they to the world (Gal. 6.14). In fact, the power of their new life comes into its own precisely in their weakness, in suffering and in death (2 Cor. 4.7–11; 12.9–10). Precisely when they become conscious of their own nothingness, when they are nothing in themselves, they can be and have everything from God (2 Cor. 12.9–10; 6.8–10). Thus to exist, however, means to exist eschatologically, to be “a new creation“ (2 Cor. 5.17). Apocalyptic and Gnostic eschatologies are demythologized insofar as the day of salvation has already dawned for believers and the life of the future has already

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become present. This conclusion is drawn most radically by John, who eliminates apocalyptic eschatology altogether. The judgment of the world is not a cosmic event that is still to happen but is the fact that Jesus has come into the world and issued the call to faith (Jn 3.19; 9.39; 12.31). Those who believe already have life, they have passed from death to life (5.24–5, etc.). Outwardly, nothing has changed for believers, but their relation to the world has changed: the world can no longer concern them; faith is the victory that overcomes the world (1 Jn 5.4). Even as the mythological eschatology of Jewish apocalypticism is overcome, so also is Gnostic eschatology. Believers have not received a new “nature“ (φύσις), or their preexistent “nature“ has not now become free, nor do they have any guarantee that their souls will now make their heavenly journey. What they are in faith is not something simply given, a condition, of which they can be so certain that libertinism is the result or which they must guard so anxiously that asceticism is the result. Life in faith is not a condition at all such that it could be described unambiguously in the indicative; rather, the imperative must also be used in addition to the indicative, because the decision of faith is not made once and for all but must be confirmed in each concrete situation by being made anew. It is by being made genuinely anew that it maintains itself. Freedom does not mean being released from the demand under which we stand as human beings, but rather it means the freedom to obey this demand (Rom. 6.11ff.). Faith is not having laid hold of but having been laid hold of, and so it is constantly on the way between the “already“ and the “not yet“ constantly pressing on toward the goal (Phil. 3.12–14). In Gnosticism redemption is understood as a cosmic process; participation in it by the redeemed has to be realized in the world, their otherworldly existence as believers thereby becoming something given. This happens in demonstrating their “freedom“ (ἐλευθερία) or “authority“ (ἐξουσία) and in pneumatic phenomena, especially ecstasy. The New Testament in principle knows of no phenomena in which what is otherworldly can become something given in the world. To be sure, Paul knows of ecstasy (2 Cor. 5.13; 12.1ff.), but he struggles against valuing it as proof of possessing the “Spirit.“ Nowhere in the New Testament is the cultivation of psychical experiences set up as a goal; nowhere does ecstasy appear as the high point of Christian existence for which one ought to strive. It is not psychical phenomena but the attitude of faith that characterizes Christian life. Of course, Paul shares the popular conviction that the “Spirit“ manifests itself in wondrous deeds, and he takes abnormal psychical phenomena to be effects of the Spirit. But in face of the charismatic movement in Corinth he becomes aware of the ambiguity of pneumatic phenomena, and by insisting that the “gifts of the Spirit“ are all given “for edification” (1 Cor. 14.26), he breaks out of the view of the Spirit as working like a natural force. He does indeed represent the “Spirit“ as a mysterious something or other whose possession guarantees resurrection (Rom. 8.11), and he can indeed speak of the “Spirit“ as some kind of supernatural matter (1 Cor. 15.44ff.). But it is clear that in the final analysis he understands the “Spirit” to be the possibility in fact of the new life that is disclosed in faith. The “Spirit“ does not work like a natural

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force nor does it become the possession of believers. It is rather the possibility of life that they must lay hold of by resolve. Hence the paradoxical injunction “If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit“ (Gal. 5.25). So, too, “being led by the Spirit“ (Rom. 8.14) is not a natural process but is an obeying of the imperative not to live “according to the flesh,“ for the imperative stands in unity with the indicative. We are not relieved of decision: “But I say, walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Gal. 5.16). So it is that the concept of the “Spirit“ is demythologized. In that the fruit of the Spirit is enumerated as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control“ (Gal. 5.22), it becomes clear that the attitude of faith, of being delivered from the world, also makes us open for our fellow human beings. In that we are freed from anxiety, from frantically clinging to what is available and disposable, we are open for others. Paul characterizes faith as “working through love“ (Gal. 5.6), and it is just this attitude that he means by being “a new creation“ (compare Gal. 5.6 with 6.15).

The salvation occurrence Christian understanding of being without Christ? What has happened in the course of this discussion? The Christian understanding of being has been interpreted nonmythologically, in existentialist terms. But has it really been interpreted in the sense of the New Testament? There is one thing that the interpretation has not taken into account, namely, that, according to the New Testament, “faith” is also faith in Christ. The New Testament not only claims that “faith” as the attitude of new and genuine life is first available after a certain time—faith was “revealed,” or has “come“ (Gal. 3.23, 25)—for that could be merely a finding of intellectual history; it also claims that faith has first become a possibility after a certain time as the result of an occurrence, the Christ occurrence. Faith as obedient surrender to God and as inner freedom from the world is possible only as faith in Christ. But now the decisive question is whether this claim is a mythological remainder that must be eliminated or demythologized by critical interpretation. It is the question whether the Christian understanding of being can be realized without Christ. Earlier, in connection with the interpretations proposed by idealism and by the history-of-religions school, the question was whether they did justice to the New Testament in eliminating the Christ occurrence that it takes to be fundamental. This question also arises in connection with our existentialist interpretation. Does it lie among its consequences to eliminate the Christ occurrence or so to interpret it as to divest it of its scandalous character as an occurrence? It might appear that what is involved is indeed a mythological remainder that needs to be eliminated. And this question needs to be faced in all seriousness if Christian faith is to be certain of itself. For it can achieve self-confidence only if it consistently thinks through the possibility that it is either impossible or unnecessary.

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It might indeed appear that the Christian understanding of being can be realized without Christ, that what we find in the New Testament is simply an understanding of being that is discovered for the first time and more or less clearly expressed. Veiled in the garments of mythology, it is fundamentally our natural self-­understanding as it is raised to clarity by philosophy, which not only strips it of its mythology but also works over its formulation in the New Testament, correcting and rendering it more consistent. In that case theology would be the predecessor of philosophy—something that can certainly be understood as a matter of intellectual history—which, having been surpassed by philosophy, is now only its unnecessary and tiresome competitor. So it might well appear when we take a look at what has been done in modern philosophy. Can we say, then, that what is discovered in the New Testament is what philosophy calls “the historicity of human existence“? Graf Yorck von Wartenburg writes to Wilhelm Dilthey on 15 December 1892: “Dogmatics was an attempt at an ontology of the higher, historical life. Christian dogmatics had to be this contradictory outcome of an intellectual struggle to live because the Christian religion is a matter of the highest life.”11 Dilthey agrees with him: All dogmas must be reduced to their universal value for every human life. They were formulated once under a historically conditioned restriction. If they are freed from this restriction, they are … indeed the consciousness of the nature of historicity as such, which is beyond both sense and understanding. … Hereafter the primary dogmas that are contained in the symbols of the Son of God, atonement, sacrifice, etc. are untenable in their restriction to the facts of Christian history, although in their universal meaning they refer to the most vital content of all history. But in this meaning these concepts lose their reference to the person of Jesus, which in its rigid exclusiveness transforms everything into a special facticity and expressly excludes all other references.12 Yorck gives examples of such an interpretation by referring to Christ’s sacrificial death and original sin, which are understandable to him because he knows of the “virtual connection“ that exists in history: Jesus is not someone totally other but a human being and a historical power. A child benefits from the sacrifice of its mother, which is for its good. There is no history at all without such virtual reckoning and transmission of power [footnote: all history is such a transmission of power, not merely Christianity]—as when rationalism does not know the concept of history. And sinfulness—not sin as an individual act—is something immemorial to the religious on the basis of their experience. Is it not less “loathsome and disgraceful“ [as Dilthey had called the dogma of original sin] when we see, as we can see daily, how illness and misery are passed down? The symbols are drawn from the very depths of nature, because religion—I mean the Christian religion—is supernatural, not unnatural.13

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In the work done in philosophy since Dilthey this appears to be confirmed. Karl Jaspers could transport Søren Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Christian being into the sphere of philosophy. Above all, Martin Heidegger’s existentialist analysis of human existence seems to be only a profane philosophical presentation of the New Testament view of who we are: beings existing historically in care for ourselves on the basis of anxiety, ever in the moment of decision between the past and the future, whether we will lose ourselves in the world of what is available and of the “one,” or whether we will attain our authenticity by surrendering all securities and being unreservedly free for the future. Is this not how we are also understood in the New Testament? When critics have occasionally objected that I interpret the New Testament with the categories of Heidegger’s philosophy of existence, I fear they have missed the real problem. What ought to alarm them is that philosophy all by itself already sees what the New Testament says. Recently this question of whether the Christian understanding of being is not possible without Christ as a natural, philosophical understanding has been raised anew by Wilhelm Kamlah in Christentum und Selbstbehauptung. To be sure, there is an express polemic here against the Christian understanding of being as eschatological that rests on a misunderstanding; because the Pauline “as if not“ is not taken into account, the freedom from the world that faith involves is understood undialectically as an unambiguously negative relation to the world. But the understanding of being that Kamlah develops as philosophical turns out to be a secularized Christian understanding. His word for the attitude of genuine historicity is not “faith“ but “submission,“ in the sense of submission to the whole of being or to its source, to God. Such submission, which stands in opposition to all highhandedness, is first able to discover the meaning of being by submitting to it in trust. This submission is described as the “release“ in which those who submit free themselves by becoming free from everything to which they might cling. Kamlah himself sees that the structure of this submission is akin to the structure of faith when he says: The paradoxical nature of being able to trust has again and again been noticed in theology in connection with the beginning of faith. The question has arisen how the individual can come to faith if faith, being the gift of God’s grace, is not to be earned by any kind of highhanded striving, and how, therefore, faith can be demanded if it eludes all human efforts. This question has often been left unanswered because it has been overlooked that this is by no means a special problem of Christianity but a basic structure of our natural being.14 Thus, in its real essence Christian faith would be natural submission.“As the true understanding of being, philosophy frees natural submission for its complete truth.”15 Therefore, there is no need for revelation. Even the love through which faith works can be interpreted philosophically in this way as submission to our intimate neighbors. In fact, at this point philosophy is able to correct the New Testament understanding of love insofar as it holds that Christian love destroys “the course of what is lasting in history“ and, by breaking the priority

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of those who are historically near to us in favor of a love that is directed uniformly to all, does not even notice our true “neighbors.”16 By teaching us to recognize our true neighbors as those with whom we are bound together historically, philosophy alone exposes what is truly natural.17 Is it really the case, then, that the human attitude that the New Testament calls “faith“ is fundamentally our natural attitude as human beings? Obviously, “natural“ in this context does not mean what is always already given and can be taken for granted but rather what is appropriate to our authentic nature. If it must indeed be somehow exposed as such, what is needed to expose it is not revelation but only philosophical reflection. Is “faith“ in this sense, then, our natural attitude? Yes and no. Yes, because faith is not, in fact, some mysterious, supernatural quality but is rather the attitude of genuine humanity. And love, also, is no mysterious, supernatural praxis but is rather our “natural’ way of acting. The New Testament to some extent confirms the claim of philosophy that faith and love are our “natural” attitude when it understands believers as “a new creation,” that is, as those who have been restored to the authentic human existence that is appropriate to creation. The decisive question, however, is whether human beings as they in fact are, are “natural” in this sense, whether they are quite so free to dispose of their nature. The question is not whether human nature could have been discovered without the New Testament. Of course, as a matter of fact it has not been discovered without the New Testament; there would not be any modern philosophy without the New Testament, without Martin Luther, without Kierkegaard. But this is simply to note a certain connection in intellectual history, and the understanding of existence of modern philosophy is not justified materially by its historical origin. Conversely, the fact that the New Testament concept of faith can be secularized proves that Christian existence is nothing mysterious or supernatural. The question, then, is whether our “nature” as human beings can be realized, that is, whether we are already brought to ourselves simply in being shown what our authentic “nature” is (or in reflecting on it ourselves). That we have become lost or gone astray to some degree, or, at least, are constantly in danger of doing so by misunderstanding ourselves, obviously is and always has been presupposed by philosophy as well as theology. Even idealism seeks to open our eyes to what we really are, reminding us that we are spirit and that we ought not to lose ourselves in sensuality. Become what you are! Heidegger’s philosophy calls us back to ourselves from our lostness in the “one,” and even Kamlah knows that genuine historical existence can be completely covered and buried under and that it is especially buried under today by the aftereffects of the Enlightenment that so dominates our modern thinking; even he knows that submission is not an attitude that can be taken for granted, but that we stand under the commandment to submit and that the release that comes through submission is also always obedience.18 But philosophy is convinced that all that is needed to bring about the realization of our “nature” is that it be shown to us. “As the true understanding of being, philosophy frees natural submission for its complete truth,” which is to say, obviously, that

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philosophy frees us for true submission.19 Philosophy seeks to “expose” what is truly natural in us.20 Is this self-confidence on philosophy’s part justified? In any case, here is its difference from the New Testament, which claims that we can in no way free ourselves from our factual fallenness in the world but are freed from it only by an act of God. And the proclamation of the New Testament is not a doctrine about our “nature,” about our authentic existence as human beings, but rather precisely the proclamation of this liberating act of God, of the salvation occurrence that is realized in Christ. The New Testament says, then, that without this saving act of God the human situation is desperate, while philosophy by no means does or can look upon it as a desperate situation. How is this difference to be understood? The New Testament and philosophy agree that we can always be and become only what we already are. For idealism we can lead lives as spirits only because we, in fact, are spirits: Become what you are! Heidegger can call each of us to the resolution of existing as a self in face of death because he makes clear that our situation is one of being thrown into nothing; thus we only have to accept being what we already are. For Kamlah the submission that brings release is a meaningful demand because, in fact, we always already find ourselves submitting insofar as we are members of some historical community in which we share through care and service. The New Testament also sees that we can only be who we already are. And this is just why Paul commands believers to be holy, because they already are holy (1 Cor. 6.11; see also 5.7); to walk by the Spirit, because they already live by the Spirit (Gal. 5.25); and to do away with sin, because they are already dead to sin (Rom. 6.11ff.). In Johannine terms, it is because believers are not “of the world” (τοῦ κόσμου) that they can overcome it (Jn 17.16), and it is because they are bom of God that they cannot sin (1 Jn 3.9). Eschatological existence can be realized because “the time had fully come’ and God sent his Son “to deliver us from the present evil age” (Gal. 4.4; 1.4). Thus, the New Testament and philosophy agree that we can lead an authentic life only because we are already standing in it and it is already ours. But the New Testament speaks this way only to believers who have allowed God’s liberating act to take place in their existence, not to all human beings as such. It disputes the claim that life already belongs to all men and women, and it holds the human situation in general to be desperate. Why? Precisely because it knows that we can only be and become what we already are and because human beings as such, before and outside of Christ, are not already in their authentic being—in life—but are rather in death. At issue is understanding the fallenness of life in which all human beings first find themselves—a fact that is not concealed even from philosophy. But while philosophy views such fallenness as a condition that we are able to avoid once we understand our situation, and hence as a condition that does not extend to our very selves, the New Testament claims to the contrary that we ourselves are utterly and completely fallen.

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Does this claim about the fallenness of our very selves contradict the fact, clearly attested by philosophy, that we can know about our fallenness? How could we know about it if we were completely fallen, even in our very selves? In truth, the converse is the case: we can know about our fallenness only if we ourselves are fallen, only if we know that we are not who we authentically should be and want to be. Knowledge of our authenticity belongs to our existence as such; we would not exist as human beings at all—even in our fallenness—if we did not know about it, if we were not concerned with what we authentically are. But our authenticity does not belong to us like some natural property, and we do not dispose of it. Naturally, philosophy does not think we do either, but knows that authenticity must constantly be laid hold of by resolve. But philosophy is of the opinion that knowledge of our authenticity already gives us control over it. Although our authenticity is not something that we constantly realize, it is something that we can realize at any time. You can because you ought! Philosophy thus takes a possibility in principle to be already a possibility in fact. But in the opinion of the New Testament, human beings generally have lost the possibility in fact; indeed, their knowledge of their authenticity is falsified by being tied up with the opinion that they have control over it. Why have human beings in their fallenness lost the possibility in fact of realizing their authentic life? Because in their fallenness any movement is a movement of fallen human beings. Paul makes this clear by showing that and why the Jews who seek “righteousness” lose the very thing they seek—namely, because they want to be “justified” by their own works, because they want to “boast” in the presence of God. This reveals the very human attitude that governs the fallenness under the “flesh” from which the Jews want to escape: the arbitrariness and highhandedness of human beings who are trying to live out of themselves. If genuine life is a life of submission, it is missed not only by those who live by disposing of what can be disposed of instead of by submitting but also by those who understand even submission to be an aim that they can dispose of and do not see that their authentic life can only be an absolute gift. In the “boasting” of Jews who are faithful to the law, just as in the boasting of Gnostics who are proud of their wisdom, it becomes clear that the basic human attitude is the highhandedness that tries to bring within our own power even the submission that we know to be our authentic being, and so finally ends in self-­ contradiction. In idealism this leads to talk about “deus in nobis:” Accept the deity into your own will. And it descends from its throne above the worlds. With Heidegger the sacrilege is not so apparent because he does not characterize the attitude of resolution as submission; it is clear, however, that accepting one’s thrownness by resolving to die is an act of radical highhandedness. With Kamlah the proximity to Christianity is relatively great when he says that the commandment to submit can be fulfilled only because God gives Godself to be understood, because being makes trusting submission possible by disclosing its meaning to us, and

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because submission perceives the hint of meaningfulness in being itself.21 But the claim that being is meaningful seems to me to be a desperate claim. Is it not desperate highhandedness when Kamlah says, “It is not possible to doubt that being in general is meaningful”?22 Does this really settle whether the only appropriate attitude for human beings without Christ is to despair of the possibility of their being? In any case, this is what the New Testament says. Naturally, it cannot prove its claim anymore than philosophy can prove its claim that being is meaningful. It is a question of decision. The New Testament addresses us on the supposition that we are highhanded through and through and that, while we can therefore very well know that we do not in fact have an authentic life, we are also powerless to lay hold of it because we are fallen through and through in our highhandedness. This means, in the language of the New Testament, that we are sinners; for this highhandedness is sin, rebellion against God. High-handedness, or “boasting,” is sin, because no human being is to boast in the presence of God; let anyone who boasts, boast of the Lord” (1 Cor. 1.29, 31; 2 Cor. 10.17). Is this simply an unnecessary mythological interpretation of an ontological statement? Is the character of highhandedness as guilt and thus our responsibility before God something that we can understand simply as human beings? Is the concept of sin a mythological concept or not? The answer to this question depends on whether or how radically not only a Christian but any human being whatever can understand what Paul says to the Christians at Corinth: “What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” (1 Cor. 4.7). In any case, this much is clear: highhandedness can be understood as something of which we are guilty only if it can be understood as ingratitude. If the radical highhandedness in which we close ourselves against our authentic possibility of living in submission is to be understood as sin, then, clearly, it must be possible for us to understand our existence in general as a gift. But it is precisely this possibility against which we have closed ourselves in our radical highhandedness; for in it we understand our existence as a task that we must assume and carry out. How much we have closed ourselves against this possibility can also become clear in a pessimism that regards life as a burden laid upon us against our will or in talk about a “right” to life, in the claim to be “happy,” and so forth. Thus, in our radical highhandedness we are blind to our sin, and just this betrays our radical fallenness. As a consequence, talk about sin seems to us to be mythological. But this does not mean that it really is so. Talk about sin no longer seems mythological in the moment in which the love of God encounters us as the power that encompasses and upholds us, that upholds us even in our highhandedness and fallenness, that accepts us for what we are not, and thus frees us from ourselves as we are. If it is the case that we are utterly and completely fallen in our highhandedness, that we can indeed know that we have our authentic life only in submission, and yet cannot realize such submission because for all of our efforts we remain our highhanded selves, then our authentic life becomes a possibility in fact for us only when we are freed from ourselves. But just this is what the New Testament proclamation says to

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us; just this is the meaning of the Christ occurrence. It says that where we cannot act God acts and has acted for us. That this is the meaning of the Christ occurrence is perfectly clear. In Pauline terms it means canceling sin and making “righteous,” with the “righteousness“ that is given by God and not earned by our own “works.” Through Christ God has reconciled the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them (2 Cor. 5.19); God has made Christ to be sin so that through him we might stand before God as righteous (2 Cor. 5.21). For all who believe this, the past, what they have been hitherto, is finished. They are new persons who come into every now as new. They have freedom. This makes quite clear that the forgiveness of sin is not meant in the juristic sense merely as remission of punishment, so that for the rest the human situation would remain the same.23 Rather, what is given through forgiveness is freedom from the sin by which we have hitherto been held captive. And this freedom, in turn, is not understood as a natural quality but as freedom for obedience. Alongside of the indicative there stands the imperative. And insofar as all the demands under which we stand are summed up in the demand of love, those of us who are freed from ourselves by God’s forgiveness are freed for submission to others (Rom. 13.8–10; Gal. 5.14). Thus, eschatological existence has become a possibility for us through the fact that God has acted and made an end of the world as “this world,” by making us ourselves new.“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away; behold, the new has come“ (2 Cor. 5.17). So it is according to Paul. John says the same thing in his language by saying that knowledge of the “truth“ of God revealed in Jesus makes us free (8.32), namely, from slavery to sin (8.34). Through Jesus we are called from death to life (5.25), from the darkness of being blind into the light (9.39). Those who believe are “born anew“ (3.3ff.) and receive a new origin; they no longer come from the “world“ or belong to it, but in faith have overcome it (1 Jn 5.4). The occurrence that takes place in Christ, then, is the revelation of the love of God, which frees us from ourselves for ourselves by freeing us for a life of submission in faith and in love. Faith as freedom from ourselves and openness for the future is possible only as faith in the love of God. But faith in the love of God is itself highhandedness as long as God’s love is merely a wish or an idea and has not been revealed. Christian faith is faith in Christ because it is faith in the revealed love of God. Only those who are already loved are able to love; only those to whom trust has been given are able to trust; only those who have experienced submission are themselves able to submit. We are freed to submit to God because God has already submitted to us.“In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins“ (1 John 4:10).“We love, because he first loved us“ (1 Jn 4.19). The submission of God that grounds our submission is expressed in the Pauline statement that God “did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all; will he not also give us all things with him?“ (Rom. 8.32). Or in the Johannine statement that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life“ (Jn 3.16). It is also expressed by saying that Jesus has submitted himself for us, “who gave himself for our sins to free us from

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the present evil age“ (Gal. 1.4).“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me“ (Gal. 2.19–20). This, then, is the decisive point that distinguishes the New Testament from philosophy, Christian faith from “natural“ self-understanding: the New Testament talks and Christian faith knows about an act of God that first makes possible our submission, our faith, our love, our authentic life. The question now is whether a limit is thereby set to demythologizing the New Testament proclamation, whether we here stand before a myth or before an event that has a mythical character. What the New Testament says in mythological language about human existence before faith can be demythologized, just as what it says about the existence of believers can also be demythologized. But the question remains whether the claim that the transition from the first kind of existence to the second, our liberation from ourselves for our authentic life, is conceivable only as an act of God, and that faith can be actual only as faith in the love of God revealed in Christ—whether this claim is a mythological claim.*

The Christ occurrence Anyone who claims that all talk about an act of God is mythological talk must indeed say that talk about the act of God in Christ is a myth. But whether this is so is here deferred. Even Kamlah holds “mythical talk” about God’s act to be also justified philosophically.24 The question that concerns us now is whether the event in which the New Testament sees the act of God, the revelation of God’s love, namely, the Christ occurrence, is a mythical event.

The problem of demythologizing the Christ occurrence There is no question that the New Testament represents the Christ occurrence as a mythical occurrence. The only question is whether it has to be thus represented or whether the New Testament itself provides us with a demythologizing interpretation. It is clear, first of all, that the Christ occurrence is not a myth like the cult myths of the Greek or Hellenistic gods. The Jesus Christ who is God’s Son, a preexistent divine being, is at the same time a certain historical person, Jesus of Nazareth; and his destiny as a person is not only a mythical occurrence but at the same time a human The translation of this sentence is based on an emendation approved by Rudolf Bultmann himself in a letter of 23 July 1956. “I must be grateful,” he wrote, “for your letter of the 15th, for it brought to my attention that I have been guilty of an oversight in formulating an important sentence. In the short form [sc. of the sentence as it stands in the published text] I intended to say what you have expressed in the longer form; but my short form is wrong, and I am amazed that neither I myself nor my other readers have previously noticed it. I rejoice all the more, therefore, that you have caught the mistake. The sentence must read as you have written,” whereupon follows the emended formulation here translated.

*

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destiny that ends with crucifixion. The historical and the mythical here are peculiarly intertwined: the historical Jesus whose father and mother are well known (John 6.42) is at the same time supposed to be the preexistent Son of God, and alongside of the historical event of the cross stands the resurrection, which is not a historical event. Certain contradictions indicate how the combination of the mythical and the historical creates difficulties. Alongside of the claim for preexistence (Paul, John) stands the legend of the virgin birth (Matthew, Luke). Alongside of the statement “he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being bom in human likeness“ (Phil. 2.7) stand the portrayals in the Gospels, in which Jesus’ divine being manifests itself in his performing wonders and being omniscient and intangible, as well as the character­ ization in Acts 2.22, which speaks of “Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst.“ Alongside of representations of the resurrection as exaltation from the cross or from the grave stand the legends of the empty tomb and of the ascension. Thus, the question becomes pressing whether the point of such mythological talk is not simply to express the significance of the historical figure of Jesus and his story, namely, their significance as saving figure and salvation occurrence. If this were their point, their content as objectifying representations could be given up. It seems clear enough that the point of statements about preexistence or virgin birth is indeed to express the significance of the person of Jesus for faith. What he is for us is not exhausted by, in fact, does not even appear in what he seems to be for ordinary historical observation. We are not to ask about his historical origin, because his real meaning becomes evident only when this way of asking questions is set aside. We are not to ask for the historical reasons for his story, his cross; the significance of his story lies in what God wants to say to us through it. Thus, his significance as a figure is not to be understood in an innerworldly context; in mythological language he comes from eternity, and his origin is not human or natural But I shall not now pursue such individual motifs any further. In the final analysis everything is concentrated in the chief question about cross and resurrection.

The cross Is the cross of Christ, insofar as it is the salvation event, to be understood only as a mythical event, or can it be understood as a historical event that is the salvation event insofar as it is seen, not in an objectifiable world-historical context but in its significance? If we follow the objectifying representations of the New Testament, the cross is indeed understood as a mythical event: the crucified one is the preexistent Son of God who becomes man and who as such is sinless. He is the sacrifice whose blood atones for our sin; he bears the sin of the world vicariously, and by taking upon himself the death that is the punishment for sin, he frees us from it. We can no longer accept this mythological interpretation in which notions of sacrifice are mixed together with a juristic theory of satisfaction. But even within the view of the New Testament it does

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not at all say what it is supposed to say. The most it can say by way of forgiveness is only that the punishment for the sins we have already committed—and are still to commit in the future—has now been remitted. In fact, however, much more should be said, namely, that through the cross of Christ believers have become free from sin as the power that dominates them and hence are also free from sinning. Thus, for example, in addition to the statement “God forgave us all our trespasses and canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross,” there is the further statement “He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him” (Col. 2.13–15). The historical event of the cross is raised to cosmic dimensions. And precisely because the cross is spoken of as a cosmic event its significance as a historical event is made clear in accordance with the peculiar mode of thinking in which historical events are represented as cosmic events, historical contexts as cosmic contexts. If the cross is the judgment of the “world” through which the rulers of this age are brought to nothing (1 Cor. 2.6ff.), this means that what takes place in the cross is the judgment against us ourselves, as those who have fallen under the powers of the “world.” By allowing Jesus to be crucified God has established the cross for us. Thus, to believe in the cross of Christ does not mean to look to some mythical process that has taken place outside of us and our world or at an objectively visible event that God has somehow reckoned to our credit; rather, to believe in the cross of Christ means to accept the cross as one’s own and to allow oneself to be crucified with Christ. As the salvation occurrence the cross is not an isolated event that has happened to Christ as some mythical person but rather in its significance this event has “cosmic” dimensions. And its decisive, history-transforming meaning is expressed by representing it as the eschatological event, that is, it is not an event of the past to which one looks back, but it is the eschatological event in time and beyond time insofar as it is constantly present wherever it is understood in its significance, that is, for faith. It is present, first of all, in the sacraments: in baptism one is baptized into Christ’s death (Rom. 6.3) or is crucified with him (Rom. 6.6); in the Lord’s Supper the death of Christ is ever and again proclaimed (1 Cor. 11.26); whoever partakes of the Supper participates in the crucified body and the shed blood (1 Cor. 10.16). But then the cross of Christ is also present in the concrete living of believers: “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh, with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5.24). And so Paul speaks of the “cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6.14). So, too, he strives to share Christ’s sufferings, “becoming like him in his death” (Phil. 3.10). Crucifying the “passions and desires” also includes overcoming fear of suffering and flight from it and carrying out one’s freedom from the world by accepting suffering. Therefore, voluntary acceptance of suffering, in which death is always already at work in us, effects “carrying in the body the death of Jesus” and “being given up to death for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor. 4.10–11). Thus, Christ’s cross and sufferings are present, and how little they can be limited to the past event of his crucifixion is shown when one of Paul’s disciples has Paul say:

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“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what remains of Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, the church” (Col. 1.24). As the salvation occurrence, then, the cross of Christ is not a mythical event but a historical occurrence that has its origin in the historical event of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. In its historical significance this event is the judgment of the world, the liberating judgment of us ourselves as human beings. And insofar as this is what it is, Christ is crucified “for us”—but not in the sense of some theory of satisfaction or sacrifice. It is precisely not to mythological but to historical understanding that the historical event discloses itself as the salvation event, insofar as genuine historical understanding understands a historical event in its significance. Basically, the mythological talk seeks to do nothing other than to express the significance of the historical event. In the significance that belongs to it, the historical event of the cross has created a new historical situation; the proclamation of the cross as the salvation event asks its hearers whether they are willing to appropriate this meaning, whether they are willing to be crucified with Christ. But is the meaning of the historical event of the cross to be seen in it, to be read off from it, so to speak? Does not the fact that the cross of Christ has this meaning lie precisely in its being the cross of Christ? Would not one first have to be convinced of Christ’s significance and believe in Christ before one could believe in the saving meaning of the cross? Would not one have to understand it as the cross of the historical Jesus in order to understand it in its meaning? Would not we then have to have recourse to the historical Jesus? For the first proclaimers this was the case. They experienced the cross of the one with whom they had been bound in the living present. Out of this personal bond, in which the cross was an event in their own lives, it became a question for them and disclosed its point. For us this personal bond cannot be reproduced, and it is not out of it that the point of the cross can be disclosed to us. As an event of the past it is no longer an event of our own lives, and we know about it as a historical event only through historical reports. But this is not at all the way in which the crucified one is proclaimed in the New Testament, so that the point of the cross would be disclosed by his historical life, which is to be reproduced by historical research. On the contrary, he is proclaimed as the crucified one who is at the same time the risen one. Cross and resurrection belong together as a unity.

The resurrection But what about the resurrection of Christ? Is it not an utterly mythical event? In any case, it is not a historical event that is to be understood in its significance. Can talking about Christ’s resurrection be anything other than an expression of the significance of the cross? Does it say anything else than that Jesus’ death on the cross is not to be seen as a human death but rather as God’s liberating judgment of the world, the judgment that as such robs death of its power? Is it not precisely

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this truth that is expressed by the statement that the crucified one is not dead but risen? In fact, cross and resurrection are a unity as “cosmic” occurrence, as is expressed, for example, by the statement “who was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification“ (Rom. 4.25). Thus, it is not as though the cross could be seen in itself as Jesus’ death and defeat, upon which, then, the resurrection ensued, nullifying his death. He who suffers death is already the Son of God, and his death itself is already the overcoming of death’s power. This finds its strongest expression in John when he presents Jesus’ passion as the “hour“ of his “glorification,” and thus understands his “being lifted up“ in a double sense, as his being lifted up on the cross and as his exaltation to glory. Cross and resurrection are a unity in that together they are the one “cosmic“ event through which the world is judged and the possibility of genuine life is created. But then the resurrection cannot be an authenticating miracle which one could securely establish so as to convince a doubter that the cross really does have the cosmiceschatological meaning ascribed to it. Of course, it is not to be denied that the resurrection of Jesus is often viewed in the New Testament as just such an authenticating miracle. Thus, it is said that God has provided proof of Christ’s claim by raising him from the dead (Acts 17.31). Or, again, there are the legends of the empty tomb and the Easter stories that report demonstrations of the risen one’s corporality (especially Lk. 24.39–43). But these are undoubtedly later formulations of which Paul still knows nothing. To be sure, even Paul himself once tries to guarantee the wonder of the resurrection as a historical event by enumerating eyewitnesses (1 Cor. 15.3–8). Karl Barth unintentionally shows how fatal Paul’s argument is when he tries to interpret away the real point of Paul’s statements. According to Barth, Paul’s intention in enumerating the eyewitnesses is not to make the resurrection credible as an objective historical fact but only to say that he proclaims Jesus as the risen one in the same way as the earliest community. Thus, the witnesses are intended to be witnesses for the Pauline gospel, not for the fact of the resurrection. For what kind of a historical fact could it be whose reality is connected with the resurrection of the dead? What kind, indeed! The resurrection of Jesus cannot be an authenticating miracle on the basis of which a doubter can be secure in believing in Christ. This is so not because as a mythical event—a dead person’s returning to life in this world (and this is what is involved, since the risen one is perceived with the physical senses)—it is incredible, or because the resurrection cannot be established as an objective fact by ever so many witnesses, so that it could be unhesitatingly believed in and faith would have a secure guarantee. It is so because the resurrection itself is an object of faith; and one cannot secure one faith (faith in the saving meaning of the cross) by another (faith in the resurrection). But the resurrection of Christ is an object of faith because it says much more than that a dead person has returned to life in this world. It is an object of faith because it is an eschatological event. And it is for this reason that it cannot be an authenticating miracle. A miracle, whether or not it is credible, does not

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attest the eschatological fact of annihilating death’s power in general; especially in the sphere of mythical thinking, it is nothing unheard of. It is clear, however, that throughout the New Testament the resurrection of Christ is the eschatological fact through which Christ abolished death and brought life and immortality to light (2 Tim. 1.10). This is why Paul has recourse to the conceptuality of the Gnostic myth in order to clarify the meaning of Christ’s resurrection: as in Jesus’ death all have died (2 Cor. 5.14–15), so also through his resurrection all have been raised, only this cosmic occurrence takes place in phases over the course of time (1 Cor. 15.21–2). But as he can say, “in Christ shall all be made alive,” so he can also speak of being raised with Christ, just like being crucified with him, as a present occurrence. The sacrament of baptism brings one into communion with Christ’s resurrection even as into communion with his death. We not only will walk with him in newness of life and be “united with him” in his resurrection (Rom. 6.4–5), but we also already are.“ So you must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus“ (Rom. 6.11). Sharing in Jesus’ resurrection, like sharing in his cross, proves itself in concrete living: in struggling freedom from sin (Rom. 6.11ff.), and in putting off the “works of darkness,” in which the approaching day that will end the darkness is already anticipated: “Let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day“ (Rom. 13.12–13).“We do not belong to the night or to darkness… . Since we belong to the day, let us be sober …“ (1Thess. 5.5–8). As Paul wants to share in Christ’s sufferings, so he also wants to know “the power of his resurrection“ (Phil. 3.10). Thus, he carries in his body the death of Jesus “so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies“ (2 Cor. 4.10–11). And to the Corinthians who desire proof that Christ is speaking in him he threatens: “Christ is not weak in dealing with you, but is powerful in you. For he was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God. For we are weak in him, but in dealing with you we shall live with him by the power of God“ (2 Cor. 13.3–4). Thus, the resurrection is no mythical event that makes the meaning of the cross credible, but it is also believed even as the meaning of the cross is believed. In fact, faith in the resurrection is nothing other than faith in the cross as the salvation event, as the cross of Christ. Hence, one cannot first believe in Christ and then on that ground believe in his cross. Rather, to believe in Christ means to believe in the cross as Christ’s cross. It is not because it is the cross of Christ that it is the salvation event; it is because it is the salvation event that it is the cross of Christ. Otherwise it is the tragic end of a noble man. But then we are once again thrown back on the question, How is it to be seen from the cross that it is Christ’s cross, that it is the eschatological event? How do we come to believe in the cross as the salvation occurrence? Here there seems to me to be only one answer: because it is proclaimed as such, because it is proclaimed together with the resurrection. Christ the crucified and risen one encounters us in the word of proclamation, and nowhere else. And faith in this word is the true faith of Easter.

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It would be a mistake, in other words, if one were here to inquire back behind the proclamation to its historical origin as if this could somehow justify it. This would mean that one was trying to justify faith in God’s word by historical investigation. The word of proclamation encounters us as God’s word, in relation to which we cannot raise the question of legitimation, but which rather asks us whether we are willing to believe it. It asks us this in such a way, however, that in calling us to believe in the death and resurrection of Christ as the eschatological event, it opens up to us the possibility of understanding ourselves. Faith and unfaith, therefore, are matters not of blind, arbitrary resolve but of understanding affirmation or denial. Such understanding faith in the word of proclamation is the genuine faith of Easter; it is faith that the word being proclaimed is the legitimated word of God. The event of Easter, insofar as it can be referred to as a historical event alongside of the cross, is nothing other than the emergence of faith in the risen one in which the proclamation has its origin. The event of Easter as the resurrection of Christ is not a historical event; the only thing that can be comprehended as a historical event is the Easter faith of the first disciples. The historian can make the emergence of their faith intelligible to some degree by reflecting on their erstwhile personal bond with Jesus; for the historian the event of Easter is reduced to the disciples’ visionary experiences. Christian faith, however, is not interested in the historical question; for it—as for the first disciples—the historical event of the emergence of the faith of Easter means the self-manifestation of the risen one, the act of God in which the salvation occurrence of the cross is completed.25 The Easter faith of the first disciples, then, is not a fact on the ground of which we believe insofar as it could relieve us of the risk of such faith but itself belongs to the eschatological occurrence that is the object of faith. In other words, the word of proclamation that arises in the event of Easter itself belongs to the eschatological salvation occurrence. With the judging and liberating death of Christ, God has also established the “ministry of reconciliation” or the “word of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5.18–19). It is this word that is “added” to the cross and makes it understandable as the salvation occurrence by demanding faith, putting to each of us the question whether we are willing to understand ourselves as crucified with Christ and as thereby also risen with him. In the sounding forth of the word, cross and resurrection become present and the eschatological now takes place. The eschatological promise of Isa. 49:8 is fulfilled: “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6.2). For this reason judgment takes place in the preaching of the apostle, who to one is “a fragrance from death to death,” to the other “a fragrance from life to life” (2 Cor. 2.16). So, too, the resurrection life is at work in the faith mediated by his preaching (2 Cor. 4.12). And of the sermon that preaches Christ, the word of the Johannine Jesus holds good: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life; he does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. The hour is coming and now is when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live” (Jn 5.24–5). In the preached word, and only in it, is the risen one to be encountered. “Thus faith

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comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ” (Rom. 10.17). Just as the word and the apostle who preaches it belong to the eschatological occurrence, so also does the church in which the word continues to be proclaimed and within which believers gather as those who are “holy,” that is, as those who have made the transition to eschatological existence.“Church” (ἐκκλησία) is an eschatological concept, and when it is called the “body of Christ,” this is to express its “cosmic” meaning: it is not a historical phenomenon in the sense of world history but in the sense that it is in history that it is realized.

Conclusion We have sought to carry out the demythologizing of the New Testament proclamation. Is there still a mythological remainder? For anyone who speaks of mythology as soon as there is any talk of God’s act, of God’s decisive eschatological act, there certainly is. But such mythology is no longer mythology in the old sense, so that it would have now become obsolete with the passing away of the mythical world picture. For the salvation occurrence about which we talk is not some miraculous, supernatural occurrence but rather a historical occurrence in space and time. And by presenting it as such, stripping away the mythological garments, we have intended to follow the intention of the New Testament itself and to do full justice to the paradox of its proclamation—the paradox, namely, that God’s eschatological emissary is a concrete historical person, that God’s eschatological act takes place in a human destiny, that it is an occurrence, therefore, that cannot be proved to be eschatological in any worldly way. It is the paradox formulated in the words “he emptied himself” (Phil. 2.7), or “he who was rich became poor“ (2 Cor. 8.9), or “God sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh“ (Rom. 8.3), or “he was manifested in the flesh“ (1 Tim. 3:16), or, finally and classically, “the word became flesh“ (John 1:14). Just as he in whom God presently acts, through whom God has reconciled the world, is a real historical human being, so the word of God is not the mysterious word of some oracle but sober proclamation of the person and destiny of Jesus of Nazareth in their significance as history of salvation. As such it can be understood as a phenomenon of intellectual history and, with respect to its content of ideas, it is a possible world view; and yet this proclamation makes the claim to be the eschatological word of God. The preachers, the apostles, are human beings who can be understood historically in their humanity. The church is a historical, sociological phenomenon, whose history can be understood historically as a part of the history of culture. And yet they are all eschatological phenomena, eschatological occurrence. All of these claims are a “scandal” (σκάνδαλον) that is not to be overcome in philosophical dialogue but only in obedient faith. They are all phenomena that are subject

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to historical, sociological, and psychological examination, and yet for faith they are all eschatological phenomena. It is precisely the fact that they cannot be proved that secures the Christian proclamation against the charge that it is mythology. The transcendence of God is not made immanent as it is in myth; rather, the paradox of the presence of the transcendent God in history is affirmed: “the word became flesh.“

Notes 1

Certainly, one can say that there are persons today whose confidence in the traditional scientific world picture has been shaken, as well as others whose primitiveness qualifies them for an age of mythological thinking. Certainly, there is superstition on every hand. But a faith in spirits and wonders that has sunk to the level of superstition is something completely different from what it once was as a faith. The question is not what ideas and speculations are present here and there in unstable minds nor even to what extent an antiscientific attitude has become prevalent under the domination of slogans. The question is what world picture people actually live in. This, however, is determined by science, and it dominates us through the school, the press, the radio, the movies, and technology generally.

2

One thinks of Paul Schütz‘s observations about how mythical religion died out in the Orient as a result of modern hygienic and medical equipment.

3

See G. Krüger, Einsicht und Leidenschaft, Das Wesen des platonischen Denkens (1939), 11–12.

4

Ibid., 17–18, 56–7

5

Thus, myth is spoken of here in the sense in which it is understood by research in the history of religions. That mode of representation is mythology in which what is unworldly and divine appears as what is worldly and human or what is transcendent appears as what is immanent, as when, for example, God’s transcendence is thought of as spatial distance. Mythology is a mode of representation in consequence of which cult is understood as action in which nonmaterial forces are mediated by material means.“Myth“ is not used here, then, in that modern sense in which it means nothing more than ideology.

6

On the critical interpretation of myth, see also the important discussion of the hermeneutical structure of dogma in H. Jonas, Augustin und das paulinische Freiheitsproblem (1930), 66–76.

7

Adolf von Hamack, Das Wesen des Christentums (1905), 40, 36.

8

See, for example, E. Troeltsch, Die Bedeutung der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu für den Glauben (1911).

9

Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, Die mythologische Gnosis (1934).

10 One thinks of expressions like “the spirit of the times“ or “the spirit of technology.“ 11 Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck van Wartenburg 1877–97 (1923), 154. 12 Ibid., 158. 13 Ibid. 14 Wilhelm Kamlah, Christentum und Selbstbehauptung (1940), 321.

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15 Ibid., 326. 16 Ibid., 335. 17 Ibid., 337. 18 Ibid., 403. 19 Ibid., 326. 20 Ibid., 337. 21 Ibid., 341, 353, 298, 330. 22 Ibid., 358. 23 Besides, Paul never uses the formula ἄφεσις τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν, which subsequently appears in the Deutero-Pauline literature (Col. 1.14; Eph. 1.7). 24 Kamlah, Christentum und Selbstbehauptung (1940), 353. 25 With these and the following comments I also intend to reply to the questions and reservations about me that have been voiced by Paul Althaus in Die Wahrheit des kirchlichen Osterglaubens (2nd edn., 1941), 90ff. See my review of E. Hirsch, Die Auferstehungsgeschichten und der christliche Glaube (1940) in Theologische Literaturzeitung 65 (1940): 242–6.

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7 Pope Pius XII Divino Afflante Spiritu

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ivino Afflante Spiritu (“Inspired by the Holy Spirit”) is an encyclical letter issued by Pope Pius XII in 1943. Papal encyclicals are pedagogical letters issued by the head of the Roman Catholic Church; they deal with pressing contemporary issues—in this case, the propriety of modern biblical criticism for Roman Catholic interpretation of the Bible. This encyclical was the church’s strongest affirmation to date of many aspects of historical criticism. Though not nearly as detailed in its discussion of historical criticism, Dei Verbum (“Word of God,” 1965), the second Vatican Council’s teaching on Scripture, re-affirms the line that Divino Afflante Spiritu takes, in that it gives historical research a clear, positive role, while at the same time contextualizing it in a theological framework. This statement seeks to lay out a non-competitive vision of the relationship between key historical-critical interpretive practices and a Roman Catholic ecclesial approach to the Bible. Pope Pius acknowledges many advances that have been made recently in the study of the Bible due to historical research. For instance, he credits archaeology with illuminating the text’s ancient background. Likewise, he appreciates that many ancient versions of biblical texts have been found and carefully edited. Some steps forward are credited to the church’s previous support for biblical research, but Pius also acknowledges that this is not the only reason that fruitful research has taken place. The statement also strongly endorses study of the Bible in its original languages, and, indeed, prioritizes these texts above any later translations. These recommendations receive grounding in the authority of church fathers, such as Augustine and Jerome, who placed a premium on the original languages, and the statement carefully contends that underlining the value of the original languages is not a retreat from the church’s earlier teaching on the value of the Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Bible. But the text also points to and commends recent progress in knowledge of ancient languages. Having stressed that interpreters need to establish the text they study so that it reflects the original as faithfully as possible, the statement continues by giving a

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robust defense of the priority of the literal sense, together with a relatively cautious statement on the abiding value of its spiritual import. Modern historical study can contribute to the endeavor of grasping the meaning the author intended because it is able to show how language worked at different points in time. Roman Catholic readers should both draw on the best insights of modern study and be informed by the leading lights of their tradition, thus effecting a “happy and fruitful union between the doctrine and spiritual sweetness of expression of the ancient authors and the greater erudition and maturer knowledge of the modern.” The statement explores the implications of its embrace of modern biblical study for preaching, education of church leaders, and so on. This statement encouraged many Roman Catholics to become biblical scholars. In addition, after Divino Afflante Spiritu, Roman Catholic translations of the Bible made greater use of biblical texts in the original Hebrew and Greek. Which elements of historical-critical practice does this statement affirm? Does it omit or even criticize others? If historical-critical methods are taken within the scope of a theological framework and deployed to serve theological ends, do the methods themselves change in the process? If so, how? Are there ways in which a Protestant or an Orthodox Christian would be likely to object to the encyclical’s teaching? In other words, does its endorsement of historical research depend on specifically Roman Catholic theological positions?

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Inspired by the Divine Spirit, the Sacred Writers composed those books, which God, in His paternal charity towards the human race, deigned to bestow on them in order “to teach, to reprove, to correct, to instruct injustice: that the man of God may be perfect, furnished to every good work.”1 This heaven-sent treasure Holy Church considers as the most precious source of doctrine on faith and morals. No wonder herefore that, as she received it intact from the hands of the Apostles, so she kept it with all care, defended it from every false and perverse interpretation and used it diligently as an instrument for securing the eternal salvation of souls, as almost countless documents in every age strikingly bear witness. In more recent times, however, since the divine origin and the correct interpretation of the Sacred Writings have been very specially called in question, the Church has with even greater zeal and care undertaken their defense and protection. The sacred Council of Trent ordained by solemn decree that “the entire books with all their parts, as they have been wont to be read in the Catholic Church and are contained in the old vulgate Latin edition, are to be held sacred and canonical.”2 In our own time the Vatican Council, with the object of condemning false doctrines regarding inspiration, declared that these same books were to be regarded by the Church as sacred and canonical “not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority, nor merely because they contain revelation without error, but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God for their author, and as such were handed down to the Church herself.“3 When, subsequently, some Catholic writers, in spite of this solemn definition of Catholic doctrine, by which such divine authority is claimed for the “entire books with all their parts” as to secure freedom from any error whatsoever, ventured to restrict the truth of Sacred Scripture solely to matters of faith and morals, and to regard other matters, whether in the domain of physical science or history, as “obiter dicta” and—as they contended—in no wise connected with faith, Our Predecessor of immortal memory, Leo XIII in the Encyclical Letter Providentissimus Deus, published on November 18 in the year 1893, justly and rightly condemned these errors and safe-guarded the studies of the Divine Books by most wise precepts and rules 2.  Since then it is fitting that We should commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of this Encyclical Letter, which is considered the supreme guide in biblical studies, We, moved by that solicitude for sacred studies, which We manifested from the very beginning of Our Pontificate,4 have considered that this may most opportunely be done by ratifying and inculcating all that was wisely laid down by Our Predecessor and ordained by His Successors for the consolidating and perfecting of the work, and by pointing out what seems necessary in the present day, in order to incite ever more earnestly all those sons of the Church who devote themselves to these studies, to so necessary and so praiseworthy an enterprise. 3. The first and greatest care of Leo XIII was to set forth the teaching on the truth of the Sacred Books and to defend it from attack. Hence with grave words did he proclaim that there is no error whatsoever if the sacred writer, speaking of things of

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the physical order “went by what sensibly appeared” as the Angelic Doctor says,5 speaking either “in figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time, and which in many instances are in daily use at this day, even among the most eminent men of science.” For “the sacred writers, or to speak more accurately—the words are St. Augustine’s6—the Holy Spirit, Who spoke by them, did not intend to teach men these things—that is the essential nature of the things of the universe— things in no way profitable to salvation”; which principle “will apply to cognate sciences, and especially to history,”7 that is, by refuting, “in a somewhat similar way the fallacies of the adversaries and defending the historical truth of Sacred Scripture from their attacks.“8 Nor is the sacred writer to be taxed with error, if “copyists have made mistakes in the text of the Bible,” or, “if the real meaning of a passage remains ambiguous.” Finally it is absolutely wrong and forbidden “either to narrow inspiration to certain passages of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred,” since divine inspiration“ not only is essentially incompatible with error but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. This is the ancient and constant faith of the Church.“9 4. This teaching, which Our Predecessor Leo XIII set forth with such solemnity, We also proclaim with Our authority and We urge all to adhere to it religiously. No less earnestly do We inculcate obedience at the present day to the counsels and exhortations which he, in his day, so wisely enjoined. For whereas there arose new and serious difficulties and questions, from the wide-spread prejudices of rationalism and more especially from the discovery and investigation of the antiquities of the East, this same Our Predecessor, moved by zeal of the apostolic office, not only that such an excellent source of Catholic revelation might be more securely and abundantly available to the advantage of the Christian flock, but also that he might not suffer it to be in any way tainted, wished and most earnestly desired “to see an increase in the number of the approved and persevering laborers in the cause of Holy Scripture; and more especially that those whom Divine Grace has called to Holy Orders, should day-by-day, as their state demands, display greater diligence and industry in reading, meditating and explaining it.“10 5. Wherefore the same Pontiff, as he had already praised and approved the school for biblical studies, founded at St. Stephen’s, Jerusalem, by the Master General of the Sacred Order of Preachers—from which, to use his own words, “biblical science itself had received no small advantage, while giving promise of more”11—so in the last year of his life he provided yet another way, by which these same studies, so warmly commended in the Encyclical Letter Providentissimus Deus, might daily make greater progress and be pursued with the greatest possible security. By the Apostolic Letter Vigilantiae, published on October 30 in the year 1902, he founded a Council or Commission, as it is called, of eminent men, “whose duty it would be to procure by every means that the sacred texts may receive everywhere among us that more thorough exposition which the times demand, and be kept safe not only from every breath of error, but also from all inconsiderate opinions.“12 Following the example of

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Our Predecessors, We also have effectively confirmed and amplified this Council using its good offices, as often before, to remind commentators of the Sacred Books of those safe rules of Catholic exegesis, which have been handed down by the Holy Fathers and Doctors of the Church, as well as by the Sovereign Pontiffs themselves.13 6.  It may not be out of place here to recall gratefully the principal and more useful contributions made successively by Our Predecessors toward this same end, which contributions may be considered as the complement or fruit of the movement so happily initiated by Leo XIII. And first of all Pius X, wishing “to provide a sure way for the preparation of a copious supply of teachers, who, commended by the seriousness and the integrity of their doctrine, might explain the Sacred Books in Catholic schools …” instituted “the academic degrees of licentiate and doctorate in Sacred Scripture …; to be conferred by the Biblical Commission”;14 he later enacted a law “concerning the method of Scripture studies to be followed in Clerical Seminaries” with this end in view, viz.: that students of the sacred sciences “not only should themselves fully understand the power, purpose and teaching of the Bible, but should also be equipped to engage in the ministry of the Divine Word with elegance and ability and repel attacks against the divinely inspired books;”15 finally “in order that a center of higher biblical studies might be established in Rome, which in the best way possible might promote the study of the Bible and all cognate sciences in accordance with the mind of the Catholic Church” he founded the Pontifical Biblical Institute, entrusted to the care of the illustrious Society of Jesus, which he wished endowed “with a superior professorial staff and every facility for biblical research”; he prescribed its laws and rules, professing to follow in this the “salutary and fruitful project” of Leo XIII.16 7. All this in fine Our immediate Predecessor of happy memory Pius XI brought to perfection, laying down among other things “that no one should be appointed professor of Sacred Scripture in any Seminary, unless, having completed a special course of biblical studies, he had in due form obtained the academic degrees before the Biblical Commission or the Biblical Institute.” He wished that these degrees should have the same rights and the same effects as the degrees duly conferred in Sacred Theology or Canon Law; likewise he decreed that no one should receive “a benefice having attached the canonical obligation of expounding the Sacred Scripture to the people, unless, among other things, he had obtained the licentiate or doctorate in biblical science.” And having at the same time urged the Superiors General of the Regular Orders and of the religious Congregations, as well as the Bishops of the Catholic world, to send the more suitable of their students to frequent the schools of the Biblical Institute and obtain there the academical degrees, he confirmed these exhortations by his own example, appointing out of his bounty an annual sum for this very purpose.17 8. Seeing that, in the year 1907, with the benign approval of Pius X of happy memory, “to the Benedictine monks had been committed the task of preparing the investigations and studies on which might be based a new edition of the Latin version of the Scripture, commonly called the Vulgate,18 the same Pontiff, Pius XI, wishing to consolidate more firmly and securely this “laborious and arduous enterprise,”

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which demands considerable time and great expense, founded in Rome and lavishly endowed with a library and other means of research, the monastery of St. Jerome, to be devoted exclusively to this work.19 9.  Nor should We fail to mention here how earnestly these same Our Predecessors, when the opportunity occurred, recommended the study or preaching or in fine the pious reading and meditation on the Sacred Scriptures. Pius X most heartily commended the society of St. Jerome, which strives to promote among the faithful— and to facilitate with all its power—the truly praiseworthy custom of reading and meditating on the holy Gospels; he exhorted them to persevere in the enterprise they had begun, proclaiming it “a most useful undertaking, as well as most suited to the times,” seeing that it helps in no small way “to dissipate the idea that the Church is opposed to or in any way impedes the reading of the Scriptures in the vernacular.“20 And Benedict XV, on the occasion of the fifteenth centenary of the death of St. Jerome, the greatest Doctor of the Sacred Scriptures, after having most solemnly inculcated the precepts and examples of the same Doctor, as well as the principles and rules laid down by Leo XIII and by himself, and having recommended other things highly opportune and never to be forgotten in this connection, exhorted “all the children of the Church, especially clerics, to reverence the Holy Scripture, to read it piously and meditate it constantly”; he reminded them “that in these pages is to be sought that food, by which the spiritual life is nourished unto perfection,” and “that the chief use of Scripture pertains to the holy and fruitful exercise of the ministry of preaching”; he likewise once again expressed his warm approval of the work of the society called after St. Jerome himself, by means of which the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles are being so widely diffused, “that there is no Christian family any more without them and that all are accustomed to read and meditate them daily.“21 10.  But it is right and pleasing to confess openly that it is not only by reason of these initiatives, precepts and exhortations of Our Predecessors that the knowledge and use of the Sacred Scriptures have made great progress among Catholics; for this is also due to the works and labors of all those who diligently cooperated with them, both by meditating, investigating and writing, as well as by teaching and preaching and by translating and propagating the Sacred Books. For from the schools in which are fostered higher studies in theological and biblical science, and especially from Our Pontifical Biblical Institute, there have already come forth, and daily continue to come forth, many students of Holy Scripture who, inspired with an intense love for the Sacred Books, imbue the younger clergy with this same ardent zeal and assiduously impart to them the doctrine they themselves have acquired. Many of them also, by the written word, have promoted and do still promote, far and wide, the study of the Bible; as when they edit the sacred text corrected in accordance with the rules of textual criticism or expound, explain, and translate it into the vernacular; or when they propose it to the faithfiil for their pious reading and meditation; or finally when they cultivate and seek the aid of profane sciences which are useful for the interpretation of the Scriptures. From these therefore and from other initiatives which daily become more wide-spread and vigorous, as, for example, biblical societies, congresses,

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libraries, associations for meditation on the Gospels, We firmly hope that in the future reverence for, as well as the use and knowledge of, the Sacred Scriptures will everywhere more and more increase for the good of souls, provided the method of biblical studies laid down by Leo XIII, explained more clearly and perfectly by his Successors, and by Us confirmed and amplified—which indeed is the only safe way and proved by experience—be more firmly, eagerly and faithfully accepted by all, regardless of the difficulties which, as in all human affairs, so in this most excellent work will never be wanting. 11. There is no one who cannot easily perceive that the conditions of biblical studies and their subsidiary sciences have greatly changed within the last fifty years. For, apart from anything else, when Our Predecessor published the Encyclical Letter Providentissimus Deus, hardly a single place in Palestine had begun to be explored by means of relevant excavations. Now, however, this kind of investigation is much more frequent and, since more precise methods and technical skill have been developed in the course of actual experience, it gives us information at once more abundant and more accurate. How much light has been derived from these explorations for the more correct and fuller understanding of the Sacred Books all experts know, as well as all those who devote themselves to these studies. The value of these excavations is enhanced by the discovery from time to time of written documents, which help much towards the knowledge of the languages, letters, events, customs, and forms of worship of most ancient times. And of no less importance is papyri which have contributed so much to the knowledge of the discovery and investigation, so frequent in our times, of letters and institutions, both public and private, especially of the time of Our Savior. 12. Moreover ancient codices of the Sacred Books have been found and edited with discerning thoroughness; the exegesis of the Fathers of the Church has been more widely and thoroughly examined; in fine the manner of speaking, relating and writing in use among the ancients is made clear by innumerable examples. All these advantages which, not without a special design of Divine Providence, our age has acquired, are as it were an invitation and inducement to interpreters of the Sacred Literature to make diligent use of this light, so abundantly given, to penetrate more deeply, explain more clearly and expound more lucidly the Divine Oracles. If, with the greatest satisfaction of mind, We perceive that these same interpreters have resolutely answered and still continue to answer this call, this is certainly not the last or least of the fruits of the Encyclical Letter Providentissimus Deus, by which Our Predecessor Leo XIII, foreseeing as it were this new development of biblical studies, summoned Catholic exegetes to labor and wisely defined the direction and the method to be followed in that labor. 13. We also, by this Encyclical Letter, desire to insure that the work may not only proceed without interruption, but may also daily become more perfect and fruitful; and to that end We are specially intent on pointing out to all what yet remains to be done, with what spirit the Catholic exegete should undertake, at the present day, so great and noble a work, and to give new incentive and fresh courage to the laborers who toil so strenuously in the vineyard of the Lord.

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14. The Fathers of the Church in their time, especially Augustine, warmly recommended to the Catholic scholar, who undertook the investigation and explanation of the Sacred Scriptures, the study of the ancient languages and recourse to the original texts.22 However, such was the state of letters in those times, that not many—and these few but imperfectly—knew the Hebrew language. In the middle ages, when Scholastic Theology was at the height of its vigor, the knowledge of even the Greek language had long since become so rare in the West, that even the greatest Doctors of that time, in their exposition of the Sacred Text, had recourse only to the Latin version, known as the Vulgate. 15.  On the contrary in this our time, not only the Greek language, which since the humanistic renaissance has been, as it were, restored to new life, is familiar to almost all students of antiquity and letters, but the knowledge of Hebrew also and of their oriental languages has spread far and wide among literary men. Moreover there are now such abundant aids to the study of these languages that the biblical scholar, who by neglecting them would deprive himself of access to the original texts, could in no wise escape the stigma of levity and sloth. For it is the duty of the exegete to lay hold, so to speak, with the greatest care and reverence of the very least expressions which, under the inspiration of the Divine Spirit, have flowed from the pen of the sacred writer, so as to arrive at a deeper and fuller knowledge of his meaning. 16.  Wherefore let him diligently apply himself so as to acquire daily a greater facility in biblical as well as in other oriental languages and to support his interpretation by the aids which all branches of philology supply. This indeed St. Jerome strove earnestly to achieve, as far as the science of his time permitted; to this also aspired with untiring zeal and no small fruit not a few of the great exegetes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although the knowledge of languages then was much less than at the present day. In like manner therefore ought we to explain the original text which, having been written by the inspired author himself, has more authority and greater weight than any even the very best translation, whether ancient or modern; this can be done all the more easily and fruitfully, if to the knowledge of languages be joined a real skill in literary criticism of the same text. 17. The great importance which should be attached to this kind of criticism was aptly pointed out by Augustine, when, among the precepts to be recommended to the student of the Sacred Books, he put in the first place the care to possess a corrected text.“The correction of the codices”—so says this most distinguished Doctor of the Church—“should first of all engage the attention of those who wish to know the Divine Scripture so that the uncollected may give place to the corrected.“23 In the present day indeed this art, which is called textual criticism and which is used with great and praiseworthy results in the editions of profane writings, is also quite rightly employed in the case of the Sacred Books, because of that very reverence which is due to the Divine Oracles. For its very purpose is to insure that the sacred text be restored, as perfectly as possible, be purified from the corruptions due to the carelessness of the copyists and be freed, as far as may be done, from glosses and omissions, from the

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interchange and repetition of words and from all other kinds of mistakes, which are wont to make their way gradually into writings handed down through many centuries. 18.  It is scarcely necessary to observe that this criticism, which some fifty years ago not a few made use of quite arbitrarily and often in such wise that one would say they did so to introduce into the sacred text their own preconceived ideas, today has rules so firmly established and secure, that it has become a most valuable aid to the purer and more accurate editing of the sacred text and that any abuse can easily be discovered. Nor is it necessary here to call to mind—since it is doubtless familiar and evident to all students of Sacred Scripture—to what extent namely the Church has held in honor these studies in textual criticism from the earliest centuries down even to the present day. 19. Today therefore, since this branch of science has attained to such high perfection, it is the honorable, though not always easy, task of students of the Bible to procure by every means that as soon as possible may be duly published by Catholics editions of the Sacred Books and of ancient versions, brought out in accordance with these standards, which, that is to say, unite the greatest reverence for the sacred text with an exact observance of all the rules of criticism. And let all know that this prolonged labor is not only necessary for the right understanding of the divinely-given writings, but also is urgently demanded by that piety by which it behooves us to be grateful to the God of all providence, Who from the throne of His majesty has sent these books as so many paternal letters to His own children. 20.  Nor should anyone think that this use of the original texts, in accordance with the methods of criticism, in any way derogates from those decrees so wisely enacted by the Council of Trent concerning the Latin Vulgate.24 It is historically certain that the Presidents of the Council received a commission, which they duly carried out, to beg, that is, the Sovereign Pontiff in the name of the Council that he should have corrected, as far as possible, first a Latin, and then a Greek, and Hebrew edition, which eventually would be published for the benefit of the Holy Church of God.25 If this desire could not then be fully realized owing to the difficulties of the times and other obstacles, at present it can, We earnestly hope, be more perfectly and entirely fulfilled by the united efforts of Catholic scholars. 21. And if the Tridentine Synod wished “that all should use as authentic” the Vulgate Latin version, this, as all know, applies only to the Latin Church and to the public use of the same Scriptures; nor does it, doubtless, in any way diminish the authority and value of the original texts. For there was no question then of these texts, but of the Latin versions, which were in circulation at that time, and of these the same Council rightly declared to be preferable that which “had been approved by its longcontinued use for so many centuries in the Church.” Hence this special authority or as they say, authenticity of the Vulgate was not affirmed by the Council particularly for critical reasons, but rather because of its legitimate use in the Churches throughout so many centuries; by which use indeed the same is shown, in the sense in which the Church has understood and understands it, to be free from any error whatsoever in matters of faith and morals; so that, as the Church herself testifies and affirms, it may

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be quoted safely and without fear of error in disputations, in lectures and in preaching; and so its authenticity is not specified primarily as critical, but rather as juridical. 22. Wherefore this authority of the Vulgate in matters of doctrine by no means prevents—nay rather today it almost demands—either the corroboration and confirmation of this same doctrine by the original texts or the having recourse on any and every occasion to the aid of these same texts, by which the correct meaning of the Sacred Letters is everywhere daily made more clear and evident. Nor is it forbidden by the decree of the Council of Trent to make translations into the vulgar tongue, even directly from the original texts themselves, for the use and benefit of the faithful and for the better understanding of the divine word, as We know to have been already done in a laudable manner in many countries with the approval of the Ecclesiastical authority. 23.  Being thoroughly prepared by the knowledge of the ancient languages and by the aids afforded by the art of criticism, let the Catholic exegete undertake the task, of all those imposed on him the greatest, that namely of discovering and expounding the genuine meaning of the Sacred Books. In the performance of this task let the interpreters bear in mind that their foremost and greatest endeavor should be to discern and define clearly that sense of the biblical words which is called literal. Aided by the context and by comparison with similar passages, let them therefore by means of their knowledge of languages search out with all diligence the literal meaning of the words; all these helps indeed are wont to be pressed into service in the explanation also of profane writers, so that the mind of the author may be made abundantly clear. 24. The commentators of the Sacred Letters, mindful of the fact that here there is question of a divinely inspired text, the care and interpretation of which have been confided to the Church by God Himself, should no less diligently take into account the explanations and declarations of the teaching authority of the Church, as likewise the interpretation given by the Holy Fathers, and even “the analogy of faith” as Leo XIII most wisely observed in the Encyclical Letter Providentissimus Deus.26 With special zeal should they apply themselves, not only to expounding exclusively these matters which belong to the historical, archaeological, philological and other auxiliary sciences—as, to Our regret, is done in certain commentaries—but, having duly referred to these, in so far as they may aid the exegesis, they should set forth in particular the theological doctrine in faith and morals of the individual books or texts so that their exposition may not only aid the professors of theology in their explanations and proofs of the dogmas of faith, but may also be of assistance to priests in their presentation of Christian doctrine to the people, and in fine may help all the faithful to lead a life that is holy and worthy of a Christian. 25.  By making such an exposition, which is above all, as We have said, theological, they will efficaciously reduce to silence those who, affirming that they scarcely ever find anything in biblical commentaries to raise their hearts to God, to nourish their souls or promote their interior life, repeatedly urge that we should have recourse to a certain spiritual and, as they say, mystical interpretation. With what little reason they

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thus speak is shown by the experience of many, who, assiduously considering and meditating the word of God, advanced in perfection and were moved to an intense love for God; and this same truth is clearly proved by the constant tradition of the Church and the precepts of the greatest Doctors. Doubtless all spiritual sense is not excluded from the Sacred Scripture. 26.  For what was said and done in the Old Testament was ordained and disposed by God with such consummate wisdom, that things past prefigured in a spiritual way those that were to come under the new dispensation of grace. Wherefore the exegete, just as he must search out and expound the literal meaning of the words, intended and expressed by the sacred writer, so also must he do likewise for the spiritual sense, provided it is clearly intended by God. For God alone could have known this spiritual meaning and have revealed it to us. Now Our Divine Savior Himself points out to us and teaches us this same sense in the Holy Gospel; the Apostles also, following the example of the Master, profess it in their spoken and written words; the unchanging tradition of the Church approves it; and finally the most ancient usage of the liturgy proclaims it, wherever may be rightly applied the well-known principle: “The rule of prayer is the rule of faith.” 27. Let Catholic exegetes then disclose and expound this spiritual significance, intended and ordained by God, with that care which the dignity of the divine word demands; but let them scrupulously refrain from proposing as the genuine meaning of Sacred Scripture other figurative senses. It may indeed be useful, especially in preaching, to illustrate, and present the matters of faith and morals by a broader use of the Sacred Text in the figurative sense, provided this be done with moderation and restraint; it should, however, never be forgotten that this use of the Sacred Scripture is, as it were, extrinsic to it and accidental, and that, especially in these days, it is not free from danger, since the faithful, in particular those who are well-informed in the sciences sacred and profane, wish to know what God has told us in the Sacred Letters rather than what an ingenious orator or writer may suggest by a clever use of the words of Scripture. Nor does “the word of God, living and effectual and more piercing than any two-edged sword and reaching unto the division of the soul and the spirit, of the joints also and the marrow, and a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart”27 need artificial devices and human adaptation to move and impress souls; for the Sacred Pages, written under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, are of themselves rich in original meaning; endowed with a divine power, they have their own value; adorned with heavenly beauty, they radiate of themselves light and splendor, provided they are so fully and accurately explained by the interpreter, that all the treasures of wisdom and prudence, therein contained are brought to light. 28.  In the accomplishment of this task the Catholic exegete will find invaluable help in an assiduous study of those works, in which the Holy Fathers, the Doctors of the Church and the renowned interpreters of past ages have explained the Sacred Books. For, although sometimes less instructed in profane learning and in the knowledge of languages than the scripture scholars of our time, nevertheless by reason of the office assigned to them by God in the Church, they are distinguished by a certain subtle

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insight into heavenly things and by a marvelous keenness of intellect, which enables them to penetrate to the very innermost meaning of the divine word and bring to light all that can help to elucidate the teaching of Christ and to promote holiness of life. 29.  It is indeed regrettable that such precious treasures of Christian antiquity are almost unknown to many writers of the present day, and that students of the history of exegesis have not yet accomplished all that seems necessary for the due investigation and appreciation of so momentous a subject. Would that many, by seeking out the authors of the Catholic interpretation of Scripture and diligently studying their works and drawing thence the almost inexhaustible riches therein stored up, might contribute largely to this end, so that it might be daily more apparent to what extent those authors understood and made known the divine teaching of the Sacred Books, and that the interpreters of today might thence take example and seek suitable arguments. 30.  For thus at long last will be brought about the happy and fruitful union between the doctrine and spiritual sweetness of expression of the ancient authors and the greater erudition and maturer knowledge of the modern, having as its result new progress in the never fully explored and inexhaustible field of the Divine Letters. 31.  Moreover we may rightly and deservedly hope that our time also can contribute something towards the deeper and more accurate interpretation of Sacred Scripture. For not a few things, especially in matters pertaining to history, were scarcely at all or not fully explained by the commentators of past ages, since they lacked almost all the information which was needed for their clearer exposition. How difficult for the Fathers themselves, and indeed well nigh unintelligible, were certain passages is shown, among other things, by the oft-repeated efforts of many of them to explain the first chapters of Genesis; likewise by the reiterated attempts of St. Jerome so to translate the Psalms that the literal sense, that, namely, which is expressed by the words themselves, might be clearly revealed. 32. There are, in fine, other books or texts, which contain difficulties brought to light only in quite recent times, since a more profound knowledge of antiquity has given rise to new questions, on the basis of which the point at issue may be more appropriately examined. Quite wrongly therefore do some pretend, not rightly understanding the conditions of biblical study, that nothing remains to be added by the Catholic exegete of our time to what Christian antiquity has produced; since, on the contrary, these our times have brought to light so many things, which call for a fresh investigation, and which stimulate not a little the practical zest of the present-day interpreter. 33. As in our age, indeed new questions and new difficulties are multiplied, so, by God’s favor, new means and aids to exegesis are also provided. Among these it is worthy of special mention that Catholic theologians, following the teaching of the Holy Fathers and especially of the Angelic and Common Doctor, have examined and explained the nature and effects of biblical inspiration more exactly and more fully than was wont to be done in previous ages. For having begun by expounding minutely the principle that the inspired writer, in composing the sacred book, is the living and reasonable instrument of the Holy Spirit, they rightly observe that, impelled by the

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divine motion, he so uses his faculties and powers, that from the book composed by him all may easily infer “the special character of each one and, as it were, his personal traits.“28 Let the interpreter then, with all care and without neglecting any light derived from recent research, endeavor to determine the peculiar character and circumstances of the sacred writer, the age in which he lived, the sources written or oral to which he had recourse and the forms of expression he employed. 34. Thus can he the better understand who was the inspired author, and what he wishes to express by his writings. There is no one indeed but knows that the supreme rule of interpretation is to discover and define what the writer intended to express, as St. Athanasius excellently observes: “Here, as indeed is expedient in all other passages of Sacred Scripture, it should be noted, on what occasion the Apostle spoke; we should carefully and faithfully observe to whom and why he wrote, lest, being ignorant of these points, or confounding one with another, we miss the real meaning of the author.”29 35.  What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East, as it is in the works of our own time. For what they wished to express is not to be determined by the rules of grammar and philology alone, nor solely by the context; the interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use. 36. For the ancient peoples of the East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today; but rather those used by the men of their times and countries. What those exactly were the commentator cannot determine as it were in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East. The investigation, carried out, on this point, during the past forty or fifty years with greater care and diligence than ever before, has more clearly shown what forms of expression were used in those far off times, whether in poetic description or in the formulation of laws and rules of life or in recording the facts and events of history. The same inquiry has also shown the special preeminence of the people of Israel among all the other ancient nations of the East in their mode of compiling history, both by reason of its antiquity and by reasons of the faithful record of the events; qualities which may well be attributed to the gift of divine inspiration and to the peculiar religious purpose of biblical history. 37. Nevertheless no one, who has a correct idea of biblical inspiration, will be surprised to find, even in the Sacred Writers, as in other ancient authors, certain fixed ways of expounding and narrating, certain definite idioms, especially of a kind peculiar to the Semitic tongues, so-called approximations, and certain hyperbolical modes of expression, nay, at times, even paradoxical, which even help to impress the ideas more deeply on the mind. For of the modes of expression which, among ancient peoples, and especially those of the East, human language used to express its thought, none is excluded from the Sacred Books, provided the way of speaking

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adopted in no wise contradicts the holiness and truth of God, as, with his customary wisdom, the Angelic Doctor already observed in these words: “In Scripture divine things are presented to us in the manner which is in common use amongst men.“30 For as the substantial Word of God became like to men in all things, “except sin,”31 so the words of God, expressed in human language, are made like to human speech in every respect, except error. In this consists that “condescension” of the God of providence, which St. John Chrysostom extolled with the highest praise and repeatedly declared to be found in the Sacred Books.32 38.  Hence the Catholic commentator, in order to comply with the present needs of biblical studies, in explaining the Sacred Scripture and in demonstrating and proving its immunity from all error, should also make a prudent use of this means, determine, that is, to what extent the manner of expression or the literary mode adopted by the sacred writer may lead to a correct and genuine interpretation; and let him be convinced that this part of his office cannot be neglected without serious detriment to Catholic exegesis. Not infrequently—to mention only one instance—when some persons reproachfully charge the Sacred Writers with some historical error or inaccuracy in the recording of facts, on closer examination it turns out to be nothing else than those customary modes of expression and narration peculiar to the ancients, which used to be employed in the mutual dealings of social life and which in fact were sanctioned by common usage. 39. When then such modes of expression are met within the sacred text, which, being meant for men, is couched in human language, justice demands that they be no more taxed with error than when they occur in the ordinary intercourse of daily life. By this knowledge and exact appreciation of the modes of speaking and writing in use among the ancients can be solved many difficulties, which are raised against the veracity and historical value of the Divine Scriptures, and no less efficaciously does this study contribute to a fuller and more luminous understanding of the mind of the Sacred Writer. 40. Let those who cultivate biblical studies turn their attention with all due diligence towards this point and let them neglect none of those discoveries, whether in the domain of archaeology or in ancient history or literature, which serve to make better known the mentality of the ancient writers, as well as their manner and art of reasoning, narrating and writing. In this connection Catholic laymen should consider that they will not only further profane science, but moreover will render a conspicuous service to the Christian cause if they devote themselves with all due diligence and application to the exploration and investigation of the monuments of antiquity and contribute, according to their abilities, to the solution of questions hitherto obscure. 41. For all human knowledge, even the nonsacred, has indeed its own proper dignity and excellence, being a finite participation of the infinite knowledge of God, but it acquires a new and higher dignity and, as it were, a consecration, when it is employed to cast a brighter light upon the things of God. 42. The progressive exploration of the antiquities of the East, mentioned above, the more accurate examination of the original text itself, the more extensive and

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exact knowledge of languages both biblical and oriental, have with the help of God, happily provided the solution of not a few of those questions, which in the time of Our Predecessor Leo XIII of immortal memory, were raised by critics outside or hostile to the Church against the authenticity, antiquity, integrity and historical value of the Sacred Books. For Catholic exegetes, by a right use of those same scientific arms, not infrequently abused by the adversaries, proposed such interpretations, which are in harmony with Catholic doctrine and the genuine current of tradition, and at the same time are seen to have proved equal to the difficulties, either raised by new explorations and discoveries, or bequeathed by antiquity for solution in our time. 43. Thus has it come about that confidence in the authority and historical value of the Bible, somewhat shaken in the case of some by so many attacks, today among Catholics is completely restored; moreover there are not wanting even non-Catholic writers, who by serious and calm inquiry have been led to abandon modern opinion and to return, at least in some points, to the more ancient ideas. This change is due in great part to the untiring labor by which Catholic commentators of the Sacred Letters, in no way deterred by difficulties and obstacles of all kinds, strove with all their strength to make suitable use of what learned men of the present day, by their investigations in the domain of archaeology or history or philology, have made available for the solution of new questions. 44.  Nevertheless no one will be surprised, if all difficulties are not yet solved and overcome; but that even today serious problems greatly exercise the minds of Catholic exegetes. We should not lose courage on this account; nor should we forget that in the human sciences the same happens as in the natural world; that is to say, new beginnings grow little by little and fruits are gathered only after many labors. Thus it has happened that certain disputed points, which in the past remained unsolved and in suspense, in our days, with the progress of studies, have found a satisfactory solution. Hence there are grounds for hope that those also will by constant effort be at last made clear, which now seem most complicated and difficult. 45.  And if the wished-for solution be slow in coming or does not satisfy us, since perhaps a successful conclusion may be reserved to posterity, let us not wax impatient thereat, seeing that in us also is rightly verified what the Fathers, and especially Augustine,33 observed in their time viz.: God wished difficulties to be scattered through the Sacred Books inspired by Him, in order that we might be urged to read and scrutinize them more intently, and, experiencing in a salutary manner our own limitations, we might be exercised in due submission of mind. No wonder if of one or other question no solution wholly satisfactory will ever be found, since sometimes we have to do with matters obscure in themselves and too remote from our times and our experience; and since exegesis also, like all other most important sciences, has its secrets, which, impenetrable to our minds, by no efforts whatsoever can be unraveled. 46.  But this state of things is no reason why the Catholic commentator, inspired by an active and ardent love of his subject and sincerely devoted to Holy Mother Church, should in any way be deterred from grappling again and again with these difficult problems, hitherto unsolved, not only that he may refute the objections of

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the adversaries, but also may attempt to find a satisfactory solution, which will be in full accord with the doctrine of the Church, in particular with the traditional teaching regarding the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture, and which will at the same time satisfy the indubitable conclusion of profane sciences. 47. Let all the other sons of the Church bear in mind that the efforts of these resolute laborers in the vineyard of the Lord should be judged not only with equity and justice, but also with the greatest charity; all moreover should abhor that intemperate zeal which imagines that whatever is new should for that very reason be opposed or suspected. Let them bear in mind above all that in the rules and laws promulgated by the Church there is question of doctrine regarding faith and morals; and that in the immense matter contained in the Sacred Books—legislative, historical, sapiential and prophetical—there are but few texts whose sense has been defined by the authority of the Church, nor are those more numerous about which the teaching of the Holy Fathers is unanimous. There remain therefore many things, and of the greatest importance, in the discussion and exposition of which the skill and genius of Catholic commentators may and ought to be freely exercised, so that each may contribute his part to the advantage of all, to the continued progress of the sacred doctrine and to the defense and honor of the Church. 48. This true liberty of the children of God, which adheres faithfully to the teaching of the Church and accepts and uses gratefully the contributions of profane science, this liberty, upheld and sustained in every way by the confidence of all, is the condition and source of all lasting fruit and of all solid progress in Catholic doctrine, as Our Predecessor of happy memory Leo XIII rightly observes, when he says: “unless harmony of mind be maintained and principle safeguarded, no progress can be expected in this matter from the varied studies of many.“34 49. Whosoever considers the immense labors undertaken by Catholic exegetes during well nigh two thousand years, so that the word of God, imparted to men through the Sacred Letters, might daily be more deeply and fully understood and more intensely loved, will easily be convinced that it is the serious duty of the faithful, and especially of priests, to make free and holy use of this treasure, accumulated throughout so many centuries by the greatest intellects. For the Sacred Books were not given by God to men to satisfy their curiosity or to provide them with material for study and research, but, as the Apostle observes, in order that these Divine Oracles might “instruct us to salvation, by the faith which is in Christ Jesus” and “that the man of God may be perfect, furnished to every good work.”35 50. Let priests therefore, who are bound by their office to procure the eternal salvation of the faithful, after they have themselves by diligent study perused the sacred pages and made them their own by prayer and meditations, assiduously distribute the heavenly treasures of the divine word by sermons, homilies and exhortations; let them confirm the Christian doctrine by sentences from the Sacred Books and illustrate it by outstanding examples from sacred history and in particular from the Gospel of Christ Our Lord; and—avoiding with the greatest care those purely arbitrary and far-fetched adaptations, which are not a use, but rather an abuse of the divine

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word—let them set forth all this with such eloquence, lucidity and clearness that the faithful may not only be moved and inflamed to reform their lives, but may also conceive in their hearts the greatest veneration for the Sacred Scripture. 51.  The same veneration the Bishops should endeavor daily to increase and perfect among the faithful committed to their care, encouraging all those initiatives by which men, filled with apostolic zeal, laudably strive to excite and foster among Catholics a greater knowledge of and love for the Sacred Books. Let them favor therefore and lend help to those pious associations whose aim it is to spread copies of the Sacred Letters, especially of the Gospels, among the faithful, and to procure by every means that in Christian families the same be read daily with piety and devotion; let them efficaciously recommend by word and example, whenever the liturgical laws permit, the Sacred Scriptures translated, with the approval of the Ecclesiastical authority, into modern languages; let them themselves give public conferences or dissertations on biblical subjects, or see that they are given by other public orators well versed in the matter. 52.  Let the ministers of the Sanctuary support in every way possible and diffuse in fitting manner among all classes of the faithful the periodicals which so laudably and with such heartening results are published from time to time in various parts of the world, whether to treat and expose in a scientific manner biblical questions, or to adapt the fruits of these investigations to the sacred ministry, or to benefit the faithful. Let the ministers of the Sanctuary be convinced that all this, and whatsoever else an apostolical zeal and a sincere love of the divine word may find suitable to this high purpose, will be an efficacious help to the cure of souls. 53. But it is plain to everyone that priests cannot duly fulfill all this unless in their Seminary days they have imbibed a practical and enduring love for the Sacred Scriptures. Wherefore let the Bishops, on whom devolves the paternal care of their Seminaries, with all diligence see to it that nothing be omitted in this matter which may help towards the desired end. Let the professors of Sacred Scripture in the Seminaries give the whole course of biblical studies in such a way, that they may instmct the young aspirants to the Priesthood and to the ministry of the divine word with that knowledge of the Sacred Letters and imbue them with that love for the same, without which it is vain to hope for copious fruits of the apostolate. 54. Hence their exegetical explanation should aim especially at the theological doctrine, avoiding useless disputations and omitting all that is calculated rather to gratify curiosity than to promote true learning and solid piety. The literal sense and especially the theological let them propose with such definiteness, explain with such skill and inculcate with such ardor that in their students may be in a sense verified what happened to the disciples on the way to Emmaus, when, having heard the words of the Master, they exclaimed: “Was not our heart burning within us, whilst He opened to us the Scriptures?”36 55. Thus the Divine Letter will become for the future priests of the Church a pure and never failing source for their own spiritual life, as well as food and strength for the sacred office of preaching which they are about to undertake. If the professors of

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this most important matter in the Seminaries accomplish all this, then let them rest joyfully assured that they have most efficaciously contributed to the salvation of souls, to the progress of the Catholic faith, to the honor and glory of God, and that they have performed a work most closely connected with the apostolic office. 56.  If these things which We have said, Venerable Brethren and beloved sons, are necessary in every age, much more urgently are they needed in our sorrowful times, when almost all peoples and nations are plunged in a sea of calamities, when a cruel war heaps ruins upon ruins and slaughter upon slaughter, when, owing to the most bitter hatred stirred up among the nations, We perceive with greatest sorrow that in not a few has been extinguished the sense not only of Christian moderation and charity, but also of humanity itself. Who can heal these mortal wounds of the human family if not He, to Whom the Prince of the Apostles, full of confidence and love, addresses these words: “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.“37 57. To this Our most merciful Redeemer we must therefore bring all back by every means in our power; for He is the divine consoler of the afflicted; He it is Who teaches all, whether they be invested with public authority or are bound in duty to obey and submit, true honesty, absolute justice and generous charity; it is He in fine, and He alone, Who can be the firm foundation and support of peace and tranquillity: “For other foundation no man can lay, but that which is laid: which is Christ Jesus.“38 This author of salvation, Christ, will men more fully know, more ardently love and faithfully imitate in proportion as they are more assiduously urged to know and meditate the Sacred Letters, especially the New Testament, for, as St. Jerome the Doctor of Stridon says: “To ignore the Scripture is to ignore Christ;”39 and again: “If there is anything in this life which sustains a wise man and induces him to maintain his serenity amidst the tribulations and adversities of the world, it is in the first place, I consider, the meditation and knowledge of the Scriptures.“40 58. There those who are wearied and oppressed by adversities and afflictions will find true consolation and divine strength to suffer and bear with patience; there—that is in the Holy Gospels—Christ, the highest and greatest example of justice, charity and mercy, is present to all; and to the lacerated and trembling human race are laid open the fountains of that divine grace without which both peoples and their rulers can never arrive at, never establish, peace in the state and unity of heart; there in fine will all learn Christ, “Who is the head of all principality and power”41 and “Who of God is made unto us wisdom and justice and sanctification and redemption.“42 59.  Having expounded and recommended those things which are required for the adaptation of Scripture studies to the necessities of the day, it remains, Venerable Brethren and beloved sons, that to biblical scholars who are devoted sons of the Church and follow faithfully her teaching and direction, We address with paternal affection, not only Our congratulations that they have been chosen and called to so sublime an office, but also Our encouragement to continue with ever renewed vigor with all zeal and care, the work so happily begun. Sublime office, We say; for what is more sublime than to scrutinize, explain, propose to the faithful and defend from

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unbelievers the very word of God, communicated to men under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit? 60. With this spiritual food the mind of the interpreter is fed and nourished “to the commemoration of faith, the consolation of hope, the exhortation of charity.”43 “To live amidst these things, to meditate these things, to know nothing else, to seek nothing else, does it not seem to you already here below a foretaste of the heavenly kingdom?“44 Let also the minds of the faithful be nourished with this same food, that they may draw from thence the knowledge and love of God and the progress in perfection and the happiness of their own individual souls. Let, then, the interpreters of the Divine Oracles devote themselves to this holy practice with all their heart.“Let them pray, that they may understand”;45 let them labor to penetrate ever more deeply into the secrets of the Sacred Pages; let them teach and preach, in order to open to others also the treasures of the word of God. 61.  Let the present-day commentators of the Sacred Scripture emulate, according to their capacity, what those illustrious interpreters of past ages accomplished with such great fruit; so that, as in the past, so also in these days, the Church may have at her disposal learned doctors for the expounding of the Divine Letters; and, through their assiduous labors, the faithful may comprehend all the splendor, stimulating language, and joy contained in the Holy Scriptures. And in this very arduous and important office let them have “for their comfort the Holy Books”46 and be mindful of the promised reward: since “they that are learned shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that instruct many unto justice, as stars for all eternity.“47 62.  And now, while ardently desiring for all sons of the Church, and especially for the professors in biblical science, for the young clergy and for preachers, that, continually meditating on the divine word, they may taste how good and sweet is the spirit of the Lord;48 as a presage of heavenly gifts and a token of Our paternal goodwill, We impart to you one and all, Venerable Brethren and beloved sons, most lovingly in the Lord, the Apostolic Benediction.

Notes 1

Tim. 3.16–17.

2

Session IV, deer. 1; Ench. Bibl. n. 45.

3

Session III, Cap. 2; Ench. Bibl. n. 62.

4

Address to the Ecclesiastical students in Rome (June 24, 1939); Acta Ap. Sedis XXXI (1939), p. 245–51.

5

Cf. Ia, q. 70, art. I ad 3.

6

De Gen. ad litt. 2, 9, 20; PL 34, col. 270 s.; CSEL 28 (Sectio III, pars. 2), p. 46.

7

Leonis XIII acta XIII, p. 355; Ench. Bibl. n. 106; supra, p. 22.

8

Cf. Benedictas XV, Enc. Spiritus Paraclitus, Acta Ap. Sedis XII (1920), p. 396; Ench. Bibl. n. 471; supra p. 53.

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10 Leonis XIII Acta XIII, p. 328; Ench. Bibl. n. 67 sq. 11 Apostolic Letter Hierosolymae in coenobio. Sept. 17, 1892; Leonis XIII Acta XII, pp. 239–41; v. p. 240. 12 Cf. Leonis XIII Acta XXII, p. 232 ss.; Ench. Bibl. n. 130–41; v. nn. 130, 132; supra, p. 31. 13 Letter of the Pontifical Biblical Commission to their Excellencies the Archbishops and Bishops of Italy, Aug. 20, 1941; Acta Ap. Sedis XXXIII ( 1941 ), pp. 465–72; infra, pp. 129–38. 14 Apostolic Letter Scripturae Sanctae, Feb. 23, 1904; Pii X Acta I, pp. 176–9; Ench. Bibl. nn. 142–50; vim. 143–4. 15 Cf. Apostolic Letter Quoniam in re biblica, March 27, 1906; Pii X Acta III, p. 72–6; Ench. Bibl. nn. 155–73; v. n. 155; supra, pp. 36–9. 16 Apostolic Letter Vinea electa, May 7, 1909; Acta Ap., Sedis 1(1909), pp. 447–9; Ench. Bibl. nn. 293–306; v. nn. 296–306; v. nn. 296 et 294. 17 Cf. Motu proprio Bibliorum scientiam, April 27, 1924; Acta Ap. Sedis XVI (1924), pp. 180–2: Ench. Bibl. nn. 518–25. 18 Letter to the Most Rev. Abbot Aidan Gasquet, Dec. 3,1907; Pii X Acta IV, pp. 117–19, Ench. Bibl. n. 285 sq. 19 Apostolic Constitution Inter praecipuas, June 15,1933; Acta Ap. Sedis XXVI (1934), pp. 85–7. 20 Letter to the Most Eminent Cardinal Casetta Qui piam, January 21,1907; Pii X Acta IV, pp. 23–5. 21 Encyclical Letter Spiritus Paraclitus, Sept. 15, 1920; Acta Ap. Sedis XII (1920), pp. 385–422, Ench. Bibl. nn. 457–508; v. nn. 457, 495, 497, 491; supra, pp. 43–78. 22 Cf. ex. gr. St. Jerome, Praef. in IV Evang. ad Damasum; PL 29. col. 526–7; St. Augustine, De Doctr. christ. II, 16; PL 34, col. 42–3. 23 De doctr. christ. II, 21; PL 34, col. 40. 24 Deer, de editione et usu Sacrorum Librorum; Cone. Trid. ed. Soc. Goerres, t. V, p. 91 s. 25 Ib., t. X, p. 471; cf. t.V, pp. 29, 59, 65; t. X, p. 446 sq. 26 Leonis XIII Acta XIII, pp. 345–6; Ench. Bibl. n. 94–6; infra, pp. 15–16. 27 Hebr. 4:12. 28 Cf. Benedict XV, Encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus; Acta Ap. Sedis XII (1920), p. 390; Ench. Bibl. n. 461; supra, pp. 46–7. 29 Contra Arianos I, 54; PG 26, col. 123. 30 Comment, ad Hebr. cap. I, lectio 4. 31 Hebr. 4:15. 32 Cf. v. gr. In Gen. I, 4 (PG 53, col. 34–5); In Gen. II, 21 (ib. col. 121); In Gen. III, 8 (ib. col. 135); Hom. 15 in Joan., ad. I, 18 (PG 59, col. 97 sq.). 33 St. Augustine, Epist. 149 ad Paulinum, n. 34 (PL 33, col. 644); De diver sis quaestionibus, q. 53, n. 2 (ib. XL, col. 36); Enarr. in Ps. 146, n. 12 (ib. 37, col. 1907). 34 Apostolic letter Vigilantiae; Leonis XIII Acta XIII, p. 237; Ench. Bibl.n. 136; supra, p. 34.

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35 Cf. 2 Tim. 3.15, 17. 36 Luke 24.32. 37 John 6.69. 38 1 Cor. 3.11. 39 St. Jerome, In Isaiam, prologus; PL 24, col. 17. 40 Id., In Ephesios, prologus; PL 26, col. 439. 41 Col. 2.10. 42 1 Cor. 1.30. 43 Cf. St. Augustine, Contra Faustum XIII, 18; PL 42, col. 294; CSEL. XXV, p. 400. 44 St. Jerome, Ep. 53, 10; PL 22, col. 549; CSEL 54, p. 463. 45 St. Augustine, de doctr. christ. Ill, 56; PL 34, col. 89. 46 1 Mach. 12.9. 47 Daniel 12.3. 48 Cf. Wisd. 12.1.

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8 Gerhard Ebeling Selections from “The Significance of the Critical Historical Method for Church and Theology in Protestantism”*

G

erhard Ebeling (1912–2001) was a leading German New Testament scholar and theologian. He produced expositions of the Bible, work on the historical Jesus, an introduction to the theology of Martin Luther, and reflections on the task of interpretation. Ebeling is sometimes characterized as a right-wing Bultmannian. While this is certainly not a proper analytical category, it does allow us to get some purchase on Ebeling’s thought. He was, in fact, a student of Bultmann. And, like his teacher, he does a great deal to stress the hermeneutical imperative, the necessity of bringing the Bible, as a text whose home lies in a past context, into a quite different present age. But Ebeling does more than Bultmann to set the issue of hermeneutics in a recognizably traditional Christian doctrinal framework. In this wide-ranging essay from 1950, the theology of the Reformation does more to set the terms of the problem and to provide a solution. In Ebeling’s view, the task of hermeneutics is to reflect on the appropriation, or the making present, of revelation; revelation itself is the event in which Jesus Christ appears to human beings. How does Jesus Christ become known? By what means are people today linked to him? Roman Catholicism handles this question with its notion of the sacraments: partaking of the eucharist, the body and blood of Jesus Christ, is the way that people become and remain united to him. Of course, the

The footnotes and an excursus have not been reprinted in this version of the essay.

*

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Protestant approach is different. Because Protestants object to the mass and the ecclesial structure that guarantees it, the Protestant church leans more heavily on scriptural testimony as the sole point of connection between believers and Jesus Christ. On this view, faith in biblical preaching functions as the only way by which people encounter revelation. Yet, for Ebeling, while the Reformation gave textual actualization a crucial importance, it did not attain to the historical consciousness that arose later and highlighted the distance between the teaching of the Reformers and that of early Christianity, including the Bible itself. Only with historical consciousness did it become possible, and indeed necessary, to regard “historical events in their pure historicity, i.e. objectively, from the distance.” So taking a historical stance toward theological texts illuminates this issue as a problem. But, just the same, the historical stance also make a key contribution to the cause of Protestantism: by moving away from the assumption that one’s own beliefs align closely with the teaching of the Bible, it becomes possible to hear the text speak to oneself, as a discrete voice, even over against one’s own beliefs. When the text is read in a historical-critical manner, it becomes possible to move beyond oneself and to listen to its voice. So religious reasons justify reading the text historically. Interpreting the text historically comports, in broad terms, with the Reformation slogan of sola fide (“by faith alone”) because, in dealing with the issue of actualization, it does not rely on any extrinsic aids, such as the sacraments, and because it speaks of a genuinely personal encounter with the message of the text. Is it fair for Ebeling to portray Roman Catholicism as being essentially against biblical criticism, especially in light of statements like Divino Afflante Spiritu (chapter 7)? Is his treatment of Catholicism fair in general? In what ways does Ebeling portray historical criticism as secular? How does this relate to its use within a religious context? Has Ebeling managed to unite successfully the theological and historical?

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1 Protestant theology has for the last thirty years been marked by a passionate renunciation of Neo-Protestantism, i.e. of the development that took place in the churches of the Reformation from about the middle of the seventeenth century under the influence of the modern spirit. The aversion applies equally to the entire changing pattern of theological thinking and its results in the Church in the period of the Enlightenment, of Idealism, of Romanticism and of Liberalism. Indeed, it includes also the whole of Pietism, as a phenomenon sprung from the same roots, and even turns likewise against early Protestant Orthodoxy in so far as it is held to have already paved the way for the false developments of later days. Instead of this a radical return to the theology of the Reformers is sought. In regard to this basic tendency in contemporary Protestant theology the question arises whether, or in what sense, such a renunciation of the theological work of the last two or three centuries and a radical return to the theology of the Reformers is possible at all. Without discussing this question in detail, general historical considerations make it possible to say one thing right away: a mere refurbishing and repetition of the theology of the Reformers is as utterly impossible as the by-passing of the intervening history with its alterations in the statement of the problems and its new presentations of them. Even a theology which is ever so closely oriented towards the theology of the Reformers will be compelled to differ from it considerably, as surely as disregard of the historical difference between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries turns out in the end to be nothing but a piece of self-deception. If the change that has taken place between the age of the Reformation and ourselves may be provisionally characterized by saying that the rise of the critical historical method is one at least of the decisive features of so-called Neo-protestantism, then the question boils down to this: what is the relationship between the return to the theology of the Reformers which is now demanded and practised and the critical historical method which has meantime attained increasing, and in the second half of the nineteenth century wellnigh undisputed, dominance in theology? It is true that in contemporary theological literature there are occasionally statements to be found which advocate the fundamental rejection of the critical historical method. Examples of such radical disregard of the principles of historical method in the more recent Protestant theological literature could, it is true, be multiplied—especially from the field of Old Testament exegesis—yet they really form exceptions in the picture as a whole. We might ask whether troubling ourselves with them is not already doing them too much honour—or rather, whether pointing them out in public is not sufficient to make them impossible on their own showing. Of course, the fact that the publications cited are not obscure cases but that each of them, both through the name of the author and through the place of publication is intimately associated with the official Evangelical Church, must be a warning against taking their appearance all too

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lightly. We must ask ourselves if we are not here face to face with certain symptoms of a much more deep-seated sore in theology and the church, i.e. if it is not the case that here a widespread theological current, whose consequences are commonly veiled, suddenly emerges with all the clarity one could wish. For that reason we must first of all very much widen the scope of our observations and reflexions, and seek to grasp a few characteristic features of the theological and ecclesiastical situation in which we find ourselves. For the question of the critical historical method is far from being a formal, technical problem of methodology: it is a question which, from the historical and the factual point of view, touches on the deepest foundations and the most difficult interconnexions of theological thinking and of the church situation. To interpret one’s own age by setting it in its wider historical context is, owing to the all too short distance from the object, always a very risky and easily contested undertaking, to which the historian in particular has an understandable aversion. Yet to refrain entirely from doing so would—apart from our being really quite unable to help making ourselves some sort of picture of the history of our own times—be all the more noxious for the fact that reflexion of this kind, however defective it may be, constitutes a necessary element in responsible examination of our own position and action in the present. This sort of contemplation of the history of the times can on occasion become a not immaterial kind of direct participation in the events of the times. There is likely to be general agreement that the end of the First World War forms a milestone also in the history of the church and of theology. However much the general political and intellectual upheaval may have contributed to that, and however little fundamental changes took place at first in strictly ecclesiastical circles, there is still no mistaking the fact that since the beginning of the twenties a new power has arisen in the Protestant world which has a remarkable driving-force and moves in a direction of its own. It is characteristic of the nature of Protestantism that this new factor has proceeded from theology and has remained confined, in the first instance at least, to the work of the theologians. Authors and works so far apart to our way of thinking today as Rudolf Otto with his book on the Holy, Karl Barth with his Romans, Karl Holl with his collection of Luther Essays, Wilhelm Lütgert with his work on the Religion of German Idealism and its End, Emil Brunner with his Schleiermacher book Die Mystik und das Wort, Friedrich Gogarten with his controversy with cultural idealism in Illusionen, Rudolf Bultmann with his book on Jesus—they all form, in that more or less accidental chronological order, a chain of effective impulses towards a thoroughgoing new orientation of theological thinking. The right to join their names together like that at all certainly rests above all merely on the fact that at roughly the same time and in relative independence of each other they threw theology into a ferment. And yet surely more than that can be said of their mutual affinity, be it ever so limited. Even the one still most strongly indebted to the nineteenth century in his method and his way of thinking, Rudolf Otto, certainly also had his share in contributing from

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the religious-historical standpoint towards the unsettling of a popular theological liberalism, and in his own way likewise towards the pointing up of elements grown unfamiliar in the Reformers’ faith. For the consciousness of being unable simply to continue on the nineteenth century’s line of theological development, and of being called to subject church and theology to a thoroughgoing critical revision that takes, its bearings from the Reformation, is the basic tendency that has established itself since the end of the First World War with surprising speed and power of appeal. The fact that the theological and ecclesiastical party formations of left and right inherited from the nineteenth century have been broken through and are felt over a wide front to have been left behind, is the clearest sign of the change that has come over the situation. From now on one can hardly find another notable theological work that is not touched somehow or other by this change of situation. And yet it is very difficult to give more precise substance to the common factor which comes to expression here. Even the “dialectic theology” group, which to begin with rose up as a unity from among the multiplicity of forces participating in the upheaval, broke apart after only a short decade to become apparently irreconcilable opponents, although at first a specific common impulse had unquestionably been present and had proved itself the most effective in comparison with the motive forces at work alongside it. The premature split in the circle, which had its voice in the journal Zwischen den Zeiten, must not be interpreted as a sign of weakness, but rather as a result of the swift successes which accelerated the internal development, but therewith also the differentiation and complication of the problems. Yet no sharply definable groupings have resulted from this process. Only the immediate entourage of Karl Barth—though his actual influence extends far beyond it and indisputably sounds the dominant note in the present theological situation—forms a more or less firmly outlined unity. This state of affairs must not, however, prevent us from seeing that even the most violently conflicting standpoints of today possess a wide measure of agreement in their reaction against the nineteenth century. And this assertion again, though now almost a commonplace of theology, must not create any illusions about the fact that the relation of contemporary theology to that of the nineteenth century is really not after all simply one of radical breach, but there exist on the contrary manifold lines of communication which amid all the emphasizing of the contrast are all too easily forgotten. Examples that readily come to mind are Wilhelm Herrmann or Martin Kähler or the Neo-Lutheranism of the nineteenth century. It is a real question, however, whether the relationship to the nineteenth century does not require to be more carefully considered and reviewed also at the very points on which there is today a widespread conviction of having reached a final judgment. Bultmann’s formulation of the problem certainly points most sharply in that direction. Yet from a great variety of other quarters, too, the question forces itself ever more clearly upon us, whether the practice of all too quickly dismissing the problems which the theology of the nineteenth century wrestled with is not the increasingly discernible weakness of the theological situation today. This sketch, so far confined to a formal outline, will have to be filled in in the light of the essential theological problems. But before I proceed to that, it is necessary

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to touch on one more matter which came to be of considerable significance for the present theological and ecclesiastical situation. The commencement of the theological change after the First World War coincided with the task of reorganizing the Evangelical Church in Germany, occasioned by the collapse of the political system with which the Evangelical Church constitution in the form of the system of church government by the civil princes had been closely linked since the Reformation. This external impulse in the year 1918 of course only brought to its close a development which had already been going on in theory and practice since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Thus it is no wonder that the solution of the constitutional problem was in essence determined by the nineteenth-century beginnings. The theological change that was just in its initial stages came too late to carry any weight at all in the reorganizing of the Evangelical Church. Rather it took its effect in church life only slowly in the course of the twenties, on the one hand through inward renewal of the preaching and on the other through growing criticism of the structure of the Evangelical Church with its nineteenth-century features. The turbulent political upheaval in the year 1933, however, prevented the process of church renewal from ripening quietly. The tremendous task which arose for German Protestantism with the coming to a head simultaneously of the ecclesiastical and the political crisis naturally brought with it the possibility of a comprehensive consideration of all the problems of evangelical doctrine and evangelical life that had long been waiting for clarification. The story of the church struggle with its dual front inwards and outwards contains a veritably inexhaustible supply of theological illustrations of the formulation and multiplication of concrete problems. When we speak of the “experiences of the church struggle,” we must of course beware of isolating individual aspects. We must rather look soberly at the whole complex and keep in view among the so-called “experiences” primarily also all the variations on the theme of failure. It would be false to draw a line under what has happened and let it pass into oblivion. But it would be equally false to complete the urgently needed assimilation of the experiences of the church struggle while remaining rigidly in the battle order of the day, and to maintain the poisonous atmosphere that made clarification so tremendously difficult. For although here and there church existence was liberatingly reduced to essentials and its basic elements laid bare and given completely new life, yet at the same time there came also the temptation to safeguard this position by barring the doors to the outside world, and thereby to leave aside the problems which arose from the debate with the historical heritage of Protestantism. The result could therefore hardly fail to be that the reorganization of the church after 1945 only restored a shabby and in many respects unsatisfactory framework in which the struggle for church renewal must now go on. Starting from this position can be fruitful only when we succeed thereby in freeing the whole range of our field of vision. That, however, can only happen when a theology without blinkers maintains its indispensable critical function in the church. But that again depends on whether theology musters up the necessary measure of self-criticism in reviewing its own history.

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2 That changes in the history of theology always display close relations to contemporary variations in the history of thought in general, will appear out of place only to those who dream of the ideal of a theologia perennis, i.e. who fail to realize that the pursuit of theology is subject as such to the historicalness of existence and that theology, precisely in so far as it is not free speculation but is bound to a definite traditio, which for the Protestant mind means to holy scripture, is an ever new attempt at exposition, i.e. at translation. Thus theology, in so far as it remains true to its task, of its very nature moves with the times, i.e. it accepts the language, thought-forms and approach of the present. Now of course I need only recall the expression “conforming to the tunes,” which acquired such an ominous tone in the early days of the church struggle, in order to bring before us the full complexity of the problem here involved. Indeed it could actually be said that the question as to the rightness and limits of theology’s conforming to the times is really the basic problem of the theological situation today. It is of course an acute question in every age and demands renewed clarification from every generation. For indeed it belongs, as we have said, to the very nature of the theologian’s work. But today the question is of greater urgency, and must be set in the centre of the discussion, because the present dominant tendency in theology arose as a reaction against so-called Neo-Protestantism, i.e. against a period in the history of theology in which the motto of conformity to the times was trumps and obviously led to the severest crises in church and theology. For that reason the question as to the rightness and limits of theology’s conforming to the times has grown all the more urgent the more we—for the most part certainly with very good reason—contemplate the mistaken developments of two centuries and are therefore inclined in the sharpness of our contradiction of them to overlook the question itself altogether. For it is surely a case of mistaking the problem as such when we suppose that the question of theology’s conforming to the times can be met simply by demanding its conformity to scripture, or to the confessions, as if that were an end of the matter. For of course the very concept of conformity to scripture or confession contains itself the problem of exposition and therewith the problem of conformity to the times. And it contributes just as little towards clarification when we suppose that the problem can be eliminated by calling upon the fact that in virtue of the object it represents theology is at all times necessarily out of conformity with the times. For of course the whole point is precisely, how this lack of conformity with the times is attested at a given juncture in the history of thought. And that brings us again to the problem which we are trying to indicate by the concept of conformity to the times. That obviously brings us to the basic methodological problem of theology. If a moment ago I called the question as to the rightness and limits of theology’s conformity to the times the basic problem of the theological situation today, I could now also adopt a more general formulation: it is the problem of method that in the

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theological situation today has entered an extremely topical and critical stage. And this could again be formulated still more precisely by saying that the question of hermeneutics forms the focal point of the theological problems of today. A brief glance at the individual theological disciplines can elucidate this assertion. That Old Testament and New Testament scholars come up against the problem of hermeneutics in a special way, is obvious at once. But the same is true also of the discipline of church history— here, indeed, in two respects: first in so far as it is likewise continually concerned with the interpretation of sources, but then also and above all because of course the process of exposition of scripture that goes on in the history of the church presents the hermeneutical problem in its full compass, and thus the question of a theological grasp of the nature of church history opens straight into the basic problem of hermeneutics. The difficult problem of theology’s systematic method can be properly solved only when it is likewise set in the light of the question of hermeneutics. For resting on the exposition of scripture and the history of theology, dogmatics has the task of bringing the church’s teaching into contact and discussion with contemporary principles of thought, there to submit it to critical sifting and present it in its full inner coherence. Thus here the struggle for the momentarily required translation of the kerygma is brought to its issue in the most comprehensive way—whereby, however, the hermeneutical question in its basic methodological significance is also momentarily brought to a decision. And it is likewise plain that for so-called practical theology, above all in its teaching on sermon, inaction and pastoral care, the hermeneutic question presents the one central problem underlying all questions of detail, in so far as the applicatio must not stand unrelated and all on its own alongside the explicatio. More particularly also in the study of missions, with its difficult questions (so highly instructive for theological work as a whole) of translating the biblical message into the languages of totally different civilizations, the hermeneutic problem proves to be of fundamental significance. In view of the importance which thus attaches to the hermeneutic question it is necessary to trace out somewhat more closely its inner structure in the theological realm. Christianity stands or falls with the tie that binds it to its unique historical origin. That means first of all: Christianity is a historic phenomenon. It derives from a definite historical past and therefore stands in historical relation to that past. But the proposition that Christianity stands or falls with the tie that binds it to its unique historical origin means much more than that. It contains an assertion which is paradoxical in comparison with all other phenomena in history. For it not only means that the historical origin of Christianity has the peculiarity of a primum movens at the beginning of a process of development in history, but it ascribes to this historical origin once and for all abiding, normative, absolute significance for the whole historic phenomenon of Christianity in its entirety. That is, the historical origin of Christianity is assigned the character of revelation. It is thereby withdrawn from the relativity and transience of all historic events. It forms a realm which is once and for all defined, distinguished from all the other phenomena of history—a judgment which finds expression in the fixing of the canon of holy scripture.

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The bearing of that of course does not become plain until what is claimed to be revelation is more closely defined. What counts as revelation is not so much (I am purposely expressing myself vaguely, in order to leave room for the multiplicity of ways of understanding revelation that meet us in the history of Christianity) or at least not in the first instance holy scripture. For what counts as revelation is not so much, or at least not in the first instance, the disclosure and communication of general timeless truths. On the contrary, revelation is primarily and properly a definite event—namely, the event attested in holy scripture—which again, to define it still more closely and state its absolute peculiarity, is the appearance of Jesus Christ. To this event, then—the event of revelation in the most proper sense, and the one in which at the same time the historical origin of Christianity is concentrated—there belongs once and for all abiding, normative, absolute significance. The event in question is one which, although it is attested as a unique historical event and as such belongs to a definitely fixed past, nevertheless does not become a thing of the past but has a constant present quality. The historical Jesus of Nazareth is proclaimed as the present Lord exalted to the right hand of God, the work wrought in his suffering, dying and rising again is proclaimed as the salvation that is wrought for all time and therefore always present. These sentences, which have attempted to outline first of all in a purely descriptive way, and therefore as broadly and neutrally as possible, what for Christianity is the constitutive understanding of its origin and nature, have a very profound bearing on the hermeneutic question. If to begin with we disregard for a moment all the problems which have arisen in this respect since the dawning of modern times, then the result is the following picture of the ancient and medieval church’s view, over against which we shall set point for point the position of the Reformers and the early Protestants. 1. The question arises as to what are the ontological categories under which the event of revelation is to be comprehended. In this the two tendencies of fully preserving both its historicity and its revelational character have both had to be respected to the full. The ancient church attempted to do that by applying at one and the same time both physical and metaphysical, historical and metahistorical categories to the event of revelation. That found its classic outcome in the formulae of the Christological dogma, in the thought of the history of redemption, and also in the practice that became a model for all later dogmatics of combining the trinitarian and the redemptive-history structure in the Credo. With that a canon of exposition was set up which exercised the function of a bulwark, on the one hand to secure for the event of revelation its place in the world and its history, but on the other hand to isolate it at the same time from the world and its history. For the event of revelation so interpreted was in fact after all from the ontological point of view an event sui generis and therefore in principal inviolable. But precisely this attempt at an ontological interpretation of the event of revelation offered the possibility of linking up with a previous general metaphysical view, as taken over from Greek philosophy, surmounting it to be sure, but allowing its validity in principle and so reconciling natural thought and supernatural revelation.

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The Reformation upset this ontological interpretation of the event of revelation, but did not in principle surrender it. It is true that in shifting the accent from the metaphysical categories to the personalistic redemptive-history categories it destroyed the scholastic system, but for all that it still allowed a metaphysical and metahistorical common sense that remained within the framework of the traditional way of thinking. The revolutionary new element in its understanding of revelation was gained without departing from the traditional general principles of thought—a circumstance which again and again presents us with great difficulties in interpreting the theology of the Reformers, as could be shown for example with Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms. The revival of a modified scholasticism in early Protestant Orthodoxy is the historical proof of how easy it was to overlook, or not take at all seriously, the doubts the Reformers had cast on the ontological interpretation of the event of revelation. Thus the Reformation certainly altered radically the objective understanding of the meaning of the event of revelation, but not the general speculative presuppositions in which the event of revelation had become embedded and anchored by church tradition. 2. Bound up with the ontological interpretation of the event of revelation is the view of holy scripture. If revelation from the ontological point of view is an event sui generis, if by means of metaphysical and metahistorical categories a separate place is thus provided for it in the world and its history, then there belongs to it a certain definable sphere in which it shines and which is illumined by it in a special way. Then there is a historia sacra which exists alongside secular history and is to be assessed by different standards from it. Then too, however, the witness to this historia sacra is a literary genus of a wholly peculiar kind, in fact holy scripture. Since it is the sole way of approach to the revelation, it even comes to take the place of revelation. As communication of revelation it must be ontologically the same in kind as the event of revelation itself. The Christological dogma of the two natures is mirrored again in the doctrine of scripture. It, too, is of human and divine nature at the same time. It, too, stands in spite of its human nature so to speak outside the context of original sin. It is infallible. To the dogma of incarnation there corresponds the dogma of verbal inspiration. This duplication of the miracle of revelation inevitably brings with it an extension and multiplication of the content of revelation. The quality of revelation now belongs to every single communication in the Bible as such. Its picture of the world and of history supplies the unquestioned basis of the Christian world view. This idea of scripture, which in the ancient and medieval church in spite of its validity in principle was nevertheless (for reasons to be discussed under our next point) not the only determining factor in the understanding of revelation, was again deeply shaken, at the Reformation but in practice not subjected to thoroughgoing critical revision. The concentration of the scripture testimony upon Jesus Christ as the Word of God and the differentiation of law and Gospel as a rule for the exposition of scripture set up an extraordinarily critical canon within the canon. The preponderance, it is true, which in the opposition to the Catholic understanding of revelation was now accorded exclusively to scripture had at once the result that this sole surviving foundation amid the great collapse of authorities was brought into agreement after

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all with the traditional views by being safeguarded also in theory as an unassailable realm sui generis, while the critical pressure of the material principle was taken up and balanced out by the formal principle and the doctrine of verbal inspiration received an intensification and a fundamentalistic significance that were hitherto unknown. 3. The understanding of revelation and the concept of scripture are the presuppositions which lead to the heart of the hermeneutic question, to the problem of how revelation becomes a present actuality. Since the uniqueness, completedness and historicity of revelation is maintained in principle, the relation to revelation is essentially of a historical kind. Revelation’s claim to validity for the present is made room for by recognizing its content as unalterable truth. To that extent the distance in history from revelation is not seen as a hindrance to its significance for the present. Literal historical exegesis is therefore recognized as the foundation of the church’s exposition of scripture. Nevertheless the possibilities of conflict between the literal meaning and the requirements arising from the application to the present are not entirely excluded. They are indeed reduced to a minimum by the fact that the particular expositor shares the Bible’s picture of the world and of history from the start, naively and without conflict, as a presupposition that has become a traditional heritage of civilization. For the rest, however, any difficulties that may arise are cleared away by harmonizing, circumvented by an eclectic use of scripture, or explained with the help of a church tradition of doctrine that amplifies and develops revelation. Special, but yet supplementary rather than decisive, significance attaches to the method of using allegorical interpretation to turn to good account those passages also which are unproductive or offensive when it comes to relating them to the present. Yet these remarks on the technical aspect of the exposition of scripture bring us only to the beginning of what has to be said on the question of how revelation becomes a present actuality. If the identification of holy scripture and revelation is taken as the starting point, then the present actualization is effected by means of the binding force of the doctrinal and moral teaching derived from scripture, that is, via the law which finds its realization in the present life of the church and of the individual believer. But that already leads to certain difficulties for the actualization. Thus, for example, specific instructions of Jesus to his disciples that were conditioned by the situation are not susceptible of direct and general realization in the present. In this case the actualization can be achieved by imitative reconstruction of an exceptional situation, by assimilation of the present to the past. This procedure, which in the medieval sects, for example, became a danger to the church but was domesticated in monasticism, could be termed the method of actualization by imitative historizing. In the case of the doctrinal teachings, especially in so far as they affect the event of revelation, the aim of actualization can at the least be supported by the method of actualization by contemplative historizing. We transpose ourselves into the past so as thereby to become contemporaneous with it. Promoting contemplation of the event in the mind’s eye, meditative entering into the experience, intensified into sharing in it as if we were there ourselves, representation in which, but also repetition of the course of the events of revelation in the ordering of the Christian year, or immediate

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actualization of the past event by means of relics or pilgrimages to sites of the sacred history—all these are phenomena that must be seen in their conjunction with the basic hermeneutic problem of the present actualization of past revelation. But while in the actualization by imitative historizing and by contemplative historizing we have to do with methods in which the emphasis lies on the activity proceeding from man in the present, the Roman Catholic Church has always put the principal accent on those ways of actualizing revelation in which the revealing reality actively actualizes itself. As an intermediate form we must mention mystical actualization, which indeed historically often stands in closest connexion with the actualization by contemplative historizing. In mystical actualization, in which human activity and passivity hang peculiarly in the balance, direct contact with the revealing reality is provided in the sense of immediate experience, so that the time factor is excluded altogether. The encounter takes place in timeless eternity. That itself, it is true, points towards the fact that in mystical actualization the element of being related to the revelation in history all too easily vanishes altogether, the church’s concept of revelation is lost, and hence too holy scripture as a means of helping towards the actualization disappears. Indeed, with the pure form of mysticism there can be no more talk at all of the hermeneutic problem of actualization. While the relation to the church’s understanding of revelation and redemption here recedes, to say the least, entirely into the background, it is preserved in the case of another form in which it is now, also exclusively, the self-actualization of the revealing reality that is maintained. I should like to call this form realistic metaphysical actualization. If a moment ago in connexion with the actualization by contemplative historizing I mentioned relics, then there was only half a right to do so at that point. For—if I may put it so for once—the hermeneutic relevance of relics lies not so much in the fact that they stimulate the contemplative historizing actualization as rather in the fact that in them the unique past event of revelation is itself present. Relics do not only remind us of the past, nor are they present merely as dead remains of the past, but in them the saving power that derives from the unique historical saving event is still abidingly alive and present in direct continuity. Relics mediate, precisely by representing in the crassest way the historicity of the event of revelation, the immediate entry to the realm of the past distinguished by revelation. True, only so to speak to a tiny corner of that realm. But all the same, here actualization takes place without the detour via the literary testimony to the past in holy scripture. Here the past is directly present. Relics are of course only a special case of what I mean by realistic metaphysical actualization. The whole history of redemption indeed, although past in the historical sense, is in the realistic metaphysical sense present in the form of its outstanding representatives, the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and saints including Mary the Queen of Heaven. To them we have access not only in historic remembrance but as immediate contemporaries. We can turn to them for intercession and help, and they intervene actively in the events of the present. Sometimes, indeed, it even happens that the veil that hides from ordinary eyes this heavenly transfiguration of the historical past is lifted for a moment, say through an apparition of the Virgin. Let it not

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be said that that has nothing to do with the hermeneutic problem. Only think what it means for our relation to the Bible story when we believe, in its historical figures at the same time as existing in the real metaphysical present! But all that is of secondary importance compared with what Catholicism considers the central thing: the way the event of revelation actualizes itself, in sacramental actualization. Let us confine ourselves here to the sacrament in which the relation to the historically unique event of revelation, the decisive thing for the hermeneutic problem, is most clearly expressed: the sacrifice of the Mass. It is a false picture of the Catholic position when the repeatedly celebrated sacrifice of the Mass is understood as an amplificatory repetition of the sacrifice once for all on Golgotha. It is not that an infinite number of momentarily present sacrifices take their place alongside the one historical one, but the one historical sacrifice is sacramentally present in the many. And present, too, apart from any symbolical or spiritualistic interpretation: objectively, even extra usum sacramenti, in the transubstantiated host. The hermeneutic problem of the present actualization of the historically unique event is here solved in such a radical way that a hermeneutic question in the narrower sense really no longer exists at all. For the question that arises primarily in regard to the exposition of scripture— the question how far what is therein attested as the event of revelation has decisive significance for the present—is taken out of the context of scripture exposition and answered by the objective event of the sacrament. The real actualization of the event of revelation does not at all take place via scripture and its exposition in the sermon, but solely, via the sacrament. For through scripture exposition the revelation always becomes present only as law, solely in the sacrament on the other hand as grace. Yet now there is still one final step we must take if we wish to have a reasonably complete grasp of the solution found by the Catholic system to the question of the present actuality of the historically unique event of revelation. The crown and consummation is the actualization through a spiritual institution. At this stage, too, the tension between the historical and the present is grandiosely reconciled. The institution of the Roman Church, existing in unbroken episcopal succession from the days of the apostles to the present, is the continuing mystical body of Christ with the Vicarius Christi at its head. It possesses the Charisma veritatis, culminating in the infallible teaching office of the pope. It is the abiding representation of the incarnation. The revelation once for all in history has entered for all time into history. The perfect tense of the event of revelation is swallowed up by the continuous present of the church. The revolution which the Reformation produced in the complex of questions just sketched is so tremendous that it could be said: the antithesis between Catholicism and Protestantism rests on the different understanding of the present actualization of the historical ἅπαξ (once-for-all-ness) of revelation. The Reformation achieves the tremendous feat of reducing everything to this, that the historical ἅπαξ of revelation becomes present in faith alone. The sola fide of the Reformation is directed not only against justification by works and thereby against a legalistic exposition of scripture, not only against mysticism and against multiplication of the revealing reality in the form of saints and against materialization of the revealing reality in the form of sacred

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objects. But the sola fide has undoubtedly also an anti-sacramental and an anticlerical point. To the sola fide there corresponds solus Christus. Revelation and the present are separated from each other in such a way that only one bridge remains: the Word alone—and indeed, lest any misunderstanding should arise, the Word interpreted as salvation sola gratia, sola fide. All other bridges have been broken up. The whole system of Catholicism has thereby collapsed. There is no such thing as a simple, matter-of-fact presence of revelation. But the actualization of revelation, understood as the self-actualization of Christ, takes place in each individual case through the Word—sola fide, sola gratia. We will not dwell on the dearness of the price paid for this change in the understanding of the present actualization of the ἅπαξ of revelation. Humanly speaking the price was a frightful impoverishment of religious life and an alarming surrender of religious safeguards. We will only ask what was thereby gained in regard to the question that concerns us here. For one thing: did re-establishment of the ἅπαξ in all its stringency and exclusiveness, and therewith the purification of the content of revelation from amplifications, additions and adulterations. And for another: the assurance of salvation that lies in the pro me. For the actualization as Catholicism understands it is such in and for itself. The question of appropriation remains the great point of uncertainty. Whereas Christ’s becoming present in faith as the Reformers understand it takes place pro me. The question of appropriation can no longer be separated from it at all. This revolution brought about by the Reformers had far-reaching consequences for theology’s method. First of all this: that theology acquired growing significance for the church. In the clerical church of the sacrament, theology, however vast may be the resources expended on it, is a peripheral matter. Whereas in the church of the Word, theology serves the preaching which is the source of faith. Moreover: theology becomes primarily exegesis. And historical exegesis at that, which breaks through the accumulated rubble of tradition to the original text. Further—as is already indicated by the last remark—theology becomes critical theology. For the Reformation, that certainly does not yet mean critical historical theology in today’s sense, though there do exist notable first steps in that direction. Rather, the criticism takes its start from scripture as its centre, and to begin with becomes predominantly criticism of tradition. And finally: for theology in the Reformers’ sense the hermeneutic question acquires fundamental significance, and that precisely to the extent that it is theology of the Word. In the hermeneutic question is concentrated the whole problematical nature of theology whose full weight Protestantism has to bear. For it possesses no church tradition alongside scripture to relieve the problems set by the exposition of scripture. And it has no infallible teaching office over it, but enjoys the freedom of having to bear its own responsibility for its work, bound solely to the scriptures. And the very question as to what that bond implies is again part of the hermeneutic problem. But now, this sketch of the Reformers’ position is—it must be openly admitted— from the historical point of view a stylized one. I do not mean we have not caught its essential features. But that is not everything. The situation in detail is essentially more

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complicated. The relation to Catholicism is not exhausted by the plain, antithetical statements I have employed. The Reformers’ exposition of scripture, too, presupposed as self-evident the validity of the biblical picture of the world and of history. It, too, finds in metaphysical reality a bridge that joins past and present. The church of the Word also has sacraments. It, too, has an ordered ministry. It, too, takes over a part of the primitive church tradition. It, too, exists in historical continuity. That leads to a further element in the structure of the hermeneutic problem. 4. I began by saying that Christianity stands or falls with the tie that binds it to its unique historical origin. From that there arose the problems, first of the ontological interpretation of the event of revelation, secondly of the view of the testimony to this event of revelation, i.e. of holy scripture, and then thirdly of the present actualization of the event of revelation. But now there is still a fourth problem that presents itself—namely, the problem of the historic character of the present actualization of the event of revelation. Christianity is, in spite of the tie that binds it to its unique historical origin—which bond actualizes itself when the event of revelation becomes present, and is thus not only a postulate but a bond that again and again rises in actual fact—Christianity, I say, is for all that not a phenomenon that abides always identical and unchanged, but it exists in history, i.e. it is subject to the march of time. It can never simply remain precisely the same as it was at the start; for then it would not exist in history at all. But how, then, can it remain identical with itself in the absolute sense presupposed by the statement that Christianity stands or falls with the tie that binds it to its unique historical origin?—”in an absolute sense,” because this unique historical origin claims to be revelation in the utterly absolute sense. It is of course the basic structure of all historic being that it exists in the dialectic of constancy and change. Mutation can take place only in a thing that remains identical with itself. To the essence of the historic there belong not only the several variations of each new moment, but at the same time also continuity of being, not only change but also tradition. But now, does not transience likewise belong to the nature of historic existence? Is it not only the transitory, the relative that can vary? Christianity, however, makes the claim to exist in history as something absolute, intransitory. But what, then, is the relation of the historic mutation to the identity of the absolute? To this problem, which is presented to us by the simple fact of the history of the church and of theology, a solution has been sought in the formula that here the divine and the human, the eternal and the temporal, exist side by side. The human and temporal element is said to be the changing forms, the divine and eternal one the content that abides identical and unchanged. But to formulate it that way really only describes the problem here presented—and that, too, by applying the categories of form and content in a highly questionable way. For the distinction of form and content suggests the idea that the content can be separated from the form. But how can e.g. the content of a theological statement be separated from its form? That is in fact precisely the difficulty—that the content can be had only in a particular form. If it were desired to separate e.g. the content of the Credo from its particular form, then that could really only be done in a new form. There is certainly a problem here that

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presses for the making of a distinction. But it seems to me the proper distinction here is not one of form and content, but of word and exposition. The problem of how the church exists amid the mutations of history and yet is bound absolutely to its unique historical origin, constantly changing and yet remaining identical with itself, is thereby set in the light of the hermeneutic question. I consider the category of exposition the only proper one for coming to grips with the question of the nature of the history of church and theology. For the category of exposition embraces the historic character of the present actualization of the event of revelation. How does the Roman Catholic Church now come to terms with the fact of mutations in the history of church and theology? Again in a compelling way. As extension of the incarnation the church is, like the incarnation, ontologically a phenomenon sui generis. It is divine and human at once, not however in the sense of the distinction between form and content but by way of a juxtaposition of concrete, historically demonstrable factors of divine and human origin—which of course in practice are not always easy to distinguish from each other. But in principle the distinction is certainly maintained— in dogmatics for example between infallible statements de fide and discussible opiniones, or in ecclesiastical law between ius divinum and ins humanum. That leaves room for both things: there is a changing element and an unchanging one. The unchanging element exists in the history of the church from the beginning in unbroken continuity. The changing element varies according to the particular circumstances. To that extent all historic mutations affect the church only on the periphery. And even the changing element is, thanks to the principle of tradition, generally of astonishing stability. At bottom, however, the church goes through no historic changes. To be sure, the truth contained in it from the beginning can pass through stages of successive unfolding. Thus new dogmas can be proclaimed by the infallible teaching office of the church. But this process is not mutation, not change, but only generic growth. In this peculiar combination and interpenetration of the historic and the suprahistoric the Roman church has in history an astounding stability and elasticity at the same time. The Reformation broke with the presuppositions of this way of looking at church history and thereby surrendered also the historical advantages of this view. It knows no divine church law that can be defined and established as such. It knows no infallible ecclesiastical decisions on doctrine either. It knows no demonstrable institutional guarantee for the continuous existence of the church in history. In the distinction between the visible and the invisible church this lack of any guarantee for the church in history finds its crystallization. Church history presents itself as the story of apostasy, in which there shine a few scattered testes veritatis, until at last the Gospel was discovered anew at the Reformation. As a result of the Reformation the problem of the relation between church and history arose in an entirely new way. But in the Reformation itself this problem was not sufficiently worked out. That, if I am not mistaken, becomes especially clear at two points. For one thing, in the relation between the Reformation and early Christianity. The rediscovery of the right understanding of the Gospel, the recourse to scripture alone, and the abandonment of all interpolated human precepts in the doctrine and order

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of the church only too easily suggested the idea that the Reformation was simply a reduction of the church’s history to its historical origin. Certainly the one thing Luther can least of all be reproached with is a legalistic biblicism. And yet it is a simple fact that the Reformation was not sufficiently aware of its own distance from early Christianity. For that reason there was no reflexion upon the question of the historic mutations of Christianity. We could also say: the Reformation was not critical enough of itself. That can be seen from the fact that the question whether its theology conformed to scripture was one it was all too ready to answer directly in the affirmative, without seeing the distance that necessarily and rightly separates the interpreter’s exposition and assimilation of a text from its original historical meaning, to say nothing of direct errors of interpretation. And thus the question of what was to be the future relation to the Reformer’s theology and their exposition of scripture was also one that was not worked out clearly enough. The idea all too soon arose that the theology of the Reformers was of conclusive significance, at least in so far as it had crystallized itself in the Confessions, that the only task now still remaining for theology was to preserve this newly formed church tradition and expound the scriptures in its light. It was not sufficiently clearly realized that post-reformation theology must not be simply Reformed scholasticism, and that Reformed scholasticism in spite of its attempts at most loyal conservation is by no means identical with Reformation theology. It was therefore inevitable that one day the time should come when a mere conservation of Reformation theology was obviously no longer enough, when changed days with their changes in thought and language brought home to Protestant theology that it was obliged to use the means of the present and face the problems of the present in studying theology and expounding scripture. The other point at which it becomes clear that the problem of the relation between church and history which arose as a result of the Reformation was not sufficiently worked out by the Reformation, is the question of church order, i.e. of the church’s shape in history. It may have been entirely right that in this respect Lutheranism did not set to work with a purist’s biblicism, and in spite of the breakthrough to the New Testament left standing much of the heritage of early catholic tradition. But it was not really clearly realized what that implies for the fundamental problem of the relation between church and history. Likewise the path towards the system of church government by the civil princes may have been wholly unavoidable, and in sixteenthcentury Germany even entirely right. But again it was not realized plainly enough that such time-conditioned solutions must not be preserved indefinitely. And if in Lutheranism a certain magnanimity and indifference towards the so-called outward forms of the church justified that procedure, then at any rate the vindication of it by the argument about the neutrality of the form compared with the content is a sign that not enough attention was paid to the question of the historic character of the church.

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3 The development of the hermeneutic problem as a whole in all its general theological implications, but in the first instance without regard to the special questions of today, must be kept in view if we wish to assess the significance of the rise of the critical historical method. For the comparison of the Catholic position with that of the Reformers has shown how deeply the revolution of the sixteenth century affects the whole hermeneutic problem, yet how little on the other hand the Reformation itself was in a position to subject the questions that thereby arose, or was interested in subjecting them, to a comprehensive examination in respect of their methodological and material consequences. It would be short-sighted to make that a reproach to the Reformation. For the full effects of the Reformation on the history of thought could in the nature of the case develop only gradually. And the very fact that the theology of the Reformers was so deeply entwined in their medieval heritage proves that the upheaval of the Reformation primarily came not from without, from the general changes in the history of thought at the close of the Middle Ages, but from within, from the understanding of revelation allowing as far as possible the validity of the accepted principles of thought. But for that very reason it would likewise be short-sighted to seal up the testimony of the Reformation within what was, rightly understood, a traditional situation that could not possibly be preserved. There has doubtless been much mischief caused by the idea of permanent reformation. Nevertheless it must be taken seriously in two respects. Firstly, in so far as the Word of God must be left free to assert itself in an unflinchingly critical manner against distortions and fixations. But secondly—and on closer inspection this is included in the first—in so far as theology and preaching should be free to make a translation into whatever language is required at the moment and to refuse to be satisfied with correct, archaizing repetition of “pure doctrine.” And this very task of carrying on the heritage of the Reformation in a way that genuinely moves with the times necessarily led to the point where in regard to the general principles of thought certain problems that had very rightly remained untouched at the Reformation arose and demanded a decision such as was not to be gained from the utterances of the Reformers and from the Confessions. To these problems that necessarily emerged sooner or later there belonged, however, first and foremost the hermeneutic problem, which as a result of the Reformation had already in actual fact—though how far that was recognized is another question—been made central and set on a new theological basis, but only hesitatingly come to grips with in all its implications. The question therefore now arises, what the appearance of the critical historical method implies for the complex of problems we have described, and what connexion it has with the basic principle from which the Reformers set out and which inevitably made clarification of the whole hermeneutic problem a necessary step towards further progress. From all the many viewpoints that here force themselves on the mind I can select only a few.

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1.  It leads only to obscuring the nature of the problem when the critical historical method is held to be a purely formal scientific technique, entirely free of presuppositions, whose application to the historical objects in the theological realm provokes no conflicts and does no hurt to the dogmatic structure. Even though it will prove in a higher sense to be correct that the critical historical method does not destroy the truth of the Christian faith, yet we certainly must not make light of the difficulties that here arise. For historical criticism is more than lively historical interest. Even the early and medieval churches concerned themselves more or less with history and the study of its sources, and therefore also always provided a certain measure of criticism where legends and falsifications of history were concerned. At the close of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Humanism put new life into the historical, and therewith also the critical, sense. And the Reformation, however exclusively guided by essentially theological interests, arrived at surprisingly sharp and accurate verdicts on many individual historical questions. The demands of confessional apologetics and polemics then intensified the study of history in both camps under the discipline of keeping a sharp eye on each other. And yet that was all merely accompaniment, but was not of revolutionary significance for the church’s teaching and the generally recognized traditional picture of the world and of history. It was not what we know today as the critical historical method. For the latter is not concerned with the greatest possible refinement of the philological methods, but with subjecting the tradition to critical examination on the basis of new principles of thought. The critical historical method first arose out of the intellectual revolution of modern times. It is—not just, say, where it oversteps its legitimate limits, but by its very nature—bound up with criticism of content. In its concern with the past and its interpretation of the sources of the past it cannot simply set aside the understanding of reality as that has been acquired by the modern mind. It is therefore closely coupled with the advance of the sciences and with the development of philosophy. Certainly, it is thereby in danger of becoming uncritical in the other direction, of succumbing to the influences of what is modern for the moment and of employing improper standards in its historical criticism. But even where men have recognized this danger, they have not seen themselves compelled to abandon in principle the path they have taken, but only to be the more careful and the more critical of themselves in repeatedly testing also the appropriateness of their own presuppositions. 2.  In order to grasp the nature of the critical historical method it is thus necessary to take account of the intellectual change in the modern age. In doing so we can set aside the vexed question advanced (with at all events extraordinarily fruitful results) by Dilthey and Troeltsch—the question of the historical roots of the modern age and the precise time at which it began. It is doubtless correct that the great breach in the dam took place only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And this, too, is certain—nor indeed is it fundamentally denied by Troeltsch’s usually roughly-quoted thesis—that the Reformation has its place among the antecedents of the change in question, while on the other hand the view which is not only repeatedly advocated by Catholicism and the Eastern Church but also proudly championed in much of Neo-Protestantism, and according to which the modern outlook is directly or even

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exclusively descended from the Reformation, is certainly false. We naturally cannot enter either into the endless question of the inner development and change in modern thought itself. We must confine ourselves to the question whether there is a common factor that fundamentally and irrevocably marks off the modern age as a whole from all preceding Western history, and in what that common factor consists. First of all a negative point: in the modern age the Christian faith has forfeited the self-evident validity that was ascribed to it in Western history for more than a millennium. It is no longer accorded any formal authority that stands extra controversiam. Self-evident universal validity is now possessed only by what man as such with his rational and empirical faculties can know, perceive, prove and control. That, however, leads to a positive point: in the modern age there exists on a previously unknown scale a realm of new self-evident assumptions whose validity even the Christian cannot evade—and that not even when they stand in contradiction to the sort of views which before the dawn of the modern age belonged to the self-evident assumptions of the Christian worldview. But from this realm of the new self-evident assumptions we have now to distinguish the dimension of the problematical which is everywhere latent within it. It would be a serious mistake to suppose that modern thinking knows only the realm of the self-evident and that therefore one of the consequences of modern thinking would be to deny the dimension of the problematical altogether. It is quite true that the history of modern thought is full of examples to show that the attempt at such a denial has repeatedly been made, that the realm of the self-evident has thus been posited as absolute. But all these attempts prove to be illegitimate extension of the realm of the self-evident into the dimension of the problematical. The course of the history of modern thought, with its infinite variety of absolute systems succeeding and excluding each other, itself refutes the possibility of eliminating the dimension of the problematical, or expanding the realm of the selfevident to cover it. But now, the usefulness of this distinction between the self-evident and the problematical depends upon how it is possible to define them over against each other. It is not a case of distinguishing separate spheres of being or of reality. It is rather a case of an epistemological distinction. And with the introduction of this distinction it must not be held that the boundary can be certainly determined once and for all. For the realm of the self-evident manifestly changes in the course of history, and it would betray an unhistorical way of thinking if we were to consider the present self-evident assumptions as finally and unchangeably established. The boundaries between the self-evident and the problematical are much rather open, fluid boundaries. That, however, does not exclude the possibility that in the realm of the self-evident, verdicts and critical corrections can be arrived at that are universally binding and changes in thought made that can never be unmade again. I am aware of the great difficulty of the questions I am touching here, and the utter impossibility of mastering them in this short compass. Yet I consider it important to recognize and come to grips with the task here characterized. For the clarification of the question how far the selfevident assumptions are legitimate self-evident assumptions or illegitimate ones has

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a decisive bearing on our methods of exposition in general and hence on our methods in theological work in particular. If I may just venture one closer definition merely by way of a suggestion, then the fundamental change never again to be unmade which came over the self-evident assumptions with the dawn of the modern age seems to me to consist legitimately in the following: First in a restriction, namely in the elimination of all metaphysical statements from the realm of the self-evident. And then in an extension, namely in the relative autonomy of science and of social life. “Relative autonomy” is intended to mean that here, while respecting the proximity of the problematical and refraining from absolutism, i.e. refraining from taking the nonself-evident as self-evident—or we could also say, in a state of aporia where metaphysics is concerned—men can after all attain to an understanding that is universally binding. Or to put it more concretely: it is a legitimate self-evident assumption of the modern age, never again to be unmade, that neither the church nor any world-view that supposes itself absolute may impugn the relative autonomy of science and of social life. That the modern age is in actual fact full of repeated attempts to do that after all in one form or another, that in the modern age the self-evident assumption in question is thus not everywhere recognized and treated as self-evident, merely makes clear that in the so-called self-evident assumptions we have not to do with automatisms but with claims to validity. If the changed intellectual situation by which the modern age is dominated is worked out in the way I have tried at least to indicate, then the view must surely become untenable which sees the rise of the modern age as essentially revolt from the Christian faith, or something in the nature of a second Fall. The designation of the Enlightenment as the age of consummate sinfulness derives, as is well known, from Fichte, and in his case arises from a view that could hardly be agreeable to those who as Christians adopt the same judgment with regard not only to the Enlightenment but to the whole modern age and would dearly love to undo this Fall by means of a radical de-secularization of scientific and public life. Quite apart from the fact that even these fundamental opponents of the modern age are for the most part completely unable to avoid its self-evident assumptions and, when it comes right down to it, have no wish to avoid them either, and when in actual fact they do it, really only do it in illegitimate and inwardly false, or at least badly thought-out and inconsistent ways—quite apart from that, there is another thing that must be taken much more seriously: is this basic structure of the modern mind not something that is entirely in accordance with the Christian faith? Is it not of the essence of that faith that it is not found a place in the realm of the self-evident but for the natural man as such belongs entirely in the dimension of the problematical? Can it do any harm to the Christian faith if it can no longer be confused with a particular view of the world or a particular social or political plan for the shaping of the world, if faith can no longer pledge itself to take the place of responsible thinking, and if, as against any hybridizing tendencies, the world is discovered again in all its worldliness, i.e. is secularized? Indeed, is it not entirely in accordance with the Christian faith if in the undoubtedly existing tendency of the modern mind to take the realm

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of its own self-evident assumptions and—illegitimately and in violation of these selfevident assumptions—make it absolute, the godlessness of the world comes more plainly to light than when it clothes itself with the semblance of Christianity? And can there be anything more foolish than seeking to make capital for the Christian faith out of these tendencies to absolutism by pressing them into the service of the Christian cause and trying, say, to take advantage of such reactionary aspects of the modern age as e.g. the cry for authority from a world weary of thinking and of responsibility? Could the remarkable situation not indeed arise that the Christian faith is obliged, is perhaps even the only thing still able, to put up an energetic defence of the self-evident assumptions which the modern age brought into being but has itself denied, such as freedom of research, tolerance, etc.? Certainly, the relation to the basic structure of thought in the modern age is the decisive point for the understanding of the Christian faith. Here a deep gulf becomes visible between Catholicism and Protestantism. 3. What now is the inner connexion between the critical historical method and the modern mind’s principles of thought? They made it possible, because only with the collapse of traditional Western metaphysics, i.e. with the loss of its self-evident character, did men become fully aware of the historic character of existence. For it was only when the absoluteness of the hitherto dominant picture of the world and of history disappeared, when to prove a thing traditional was no longer to prove it true, when not only particular phenomena in history but history itself ceased in principle to have unconditionally binding and materially decisive authority as such, when men therefore discovered the fact of historic change, of the time-conditioned character of each event and of our distance from it in history—it was only then that there came the freedom, but also the sheer necessity, to regard historical events in their; pure historicity, i.e. objectively, from the distance. Only then came the extraordinary sharpening of the critical eye for the question of dependability and genuineness of sources, for cases of historical dependence, interconnexion and change. In short: only then could the whole apparatus of historical research, as it has become a matter of course for us today, be fully developed. But that is surely not yet all that can be said. The really decisive and revolutionary thing about the critical historical method came from the fact that the modern historian sees himself compelled to take the sources of the past and set them, too, in the light of the new self-evident assumptions. Not that he foists these new self-evident assumptions on to the witnesses of the past, as if they had been self-evident assumptions also for them, but he does examine the factual content of their testimony on the basis of these self-evident assumptions. Thus he will not accept the truth e.g. of statements which presuppose the Ptolemaic picture of the world, not even when for the rest the source has a high degree of historical dependability. The modern historian is rightly convinced that he knows certain things better. The fact that for the modern age all that is metaphysical and metahistorical has entered the dimension of the problematical is also a thing the modern historian cannot simply put out of his mind when reading sources which presuppose the self-evident character of the metaphysical and metahistorical. He cannot, for example, accept the self-evident validity of statements

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which introduce metaphysical beings in the sense of the older picture of the world as internal factors in the world and its history—just as of course he himself also oversteps the boundaries of scientific method if for his own part he tries to explain something historically problematical by means of metaphysical statements, i.e. to render it self-evident. He is therefore also unable to take over the recognition of a special historia sacra or scriptura sacra in the ontological sense as a self-evident intellectual presupposition influencing his method of research. He deals with all historic and literary phenomena of the past by the same method, viz.—the critical historical method, which can certainly undergo infinite modifications according to the nature of the particular historical object, but which cannot be put fundamentally out of currency by any historical object. In the circumstances in history in which the intellectual transition to the modern age took place, it was natural that theology was more especially affected by the awakening of the historical consciousness and that the battle very soon became hottest in the realm of scripture exposition. And the most amazing thing about the history of theology in modern times is, that it was above all the theologians themselves who dauntlessly and inexorably employed the critical historical method and in the field of research into Old and New Testament, Church History and the History of Dogma made way for startlingly new and unforsakable insights, yet—with very few exceptions—did not feel that gave them reason to turn their backs on the business of theology proper. But let us first leave out of account for the moment the effects of the critical historical method in the realm of theology. In the so-called secular realm, too, there came with the beginning of the modern age a tremendous upsurge of historical science, which, if at first variously hampered by the Enlightenment and by Idealism, presently came in the nineteenth century to dominate intellectual life. On the one hand it brought lasting achievements in the illumination of the past, yet on the other hand there arose unmistakable dangers in this process of historization. If at first the danger was more that of doing violence to history, whether by failing to maintain the necessary measure of self-criticism and making hasty judgments according to the limited standards of the present, or by venturing to systematize the course of history in ruthless disregard of the historically unique and contingent, or by heroification and glorification of particular epochs of the past, yet it was not long before the tables were turned and the present was in danger of being violated by history. The historian of the late nineteenth century, in which this development reached its peak, dragged all norms and values into a boundless relativism that made manifest the serious crisis into which the modern mind had found its way. It would be an illusion to hold that this crisis with its characteristic historism has been overcome. For all the many anti-historical reactions that have appeared are unserviceable attempts to settle the problem it has brought. Nevertheless, especially since Dilthey’s labours on the problem of the understanding of history, and as a direct result of them, new and promising ways have been adopted to ward off the danger of historism without surrendering the stringency of the critical historical method and evading the tasks it prescribes. The view has gained ground that a purely objective attitude to history, which takes the methods of natural

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science as its ideal and is content to establish how things once were, simply does not do justice to the task of understanding history and is also feasible only within very definite limits—that history then has nothing at all to say to us and the result is only an amassing of dead material instead of a living, personal encounter with history. In this situation it would, of course, be disastrous in the extreme if that were to give rise to a bifocal concern with history—if on the one hand professional historical science were to restrict itself to a formal, technical use of the critical historical method, while on the other hand attempts were made, quite apart from strictly methodical study of that kind, to explain the meaning of historic events and bring them vividly to life. Rather, everything depends on the critical historical method being freed from this mistaken curtailment to a mere technical tool and being understood in such a way as to include in itself the whole of the hermeneutic process. That does not imply the slightest prejudice to the stringent methods of historical research and their technical application. On the contrary, the very process of taking the historical source in all its historicity (and that means in its distance from the present) and making it luminous by means of a critical examination that penetrates to the uttermost limits of its explicability, and thereby at the same time also critically correcting the prejudices of the expositor himself and making clear to him the historical conditionedness of his own preconceptions—that very process creates the necessary basis for a genuine encounter with the text, and thereby also for the possibility of having it speak to us. Then the transformation and interpretation of historic events in order to illumine our own existence ceases to be arbitrarily and naively reading things into the source. Rather, the way is now open to genuinely historic, personal encounter and discussion, whereby the interpreter remains aware of the fact that the actualization he has achieved is a transformation of the historical—a transformation in which the historical distance is constantly kept in view and remains a critical corrective of the understanding of history. And then again it can happen, in accordance with the wellknown principle of the hermeneutic circle, that the understanding which achieves the actualization becomes the key to seeing specific matters of historical fact for the first time in their distinctiveness and peculiarity, and thus also to applying properly the technical methods of historical research. Modern historical science is unquestionably still a long way from being able to take the critical historical method as it here appears in the wide context of the hermeneutic problem and provide in satisfying categories an exposition of it that is theoretically unobjectionable. For that it depends on the co-operation of philosophy, which in its turn can make progress on the problem of hermeneutic methods only in closest touch with historical science. 4. Theology, too, is affected by the existence of all these still unclarified problems in regard to the critical historical method. As historical theology in the nineteenth century it passed through the same successes, difficulties and dangers as secular historical science. It does not find itself the happy possessor of its own, specifically theological method of fulfilling the hermeneutic task. So far as it has to do with the understanding of history, it knows no difference at all in its method from the tasks that are prescribed to so-called secular historical science. It has no expository method

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of its own at its disposal—no “spiritual” method, or whatever it may be called—that differs as a method from the way in which, say, a text of Plato is to be interpreted. In regard to the tasks and problems of the critical historical method theology has therefore in actual fact no option but to take its place along with historical science and philosophy in what is essentially the same struggle to discover the nature and correct employment of the critical historical method. Only in one respect, it is true, is theology in a special case in so far as it is doubly affected by the problems that here arise—first in the general form of how genuine knowledge and understanding of history is possible, but then also on the particular point of what the consequences of the modern attitude to history are for matters so closely related to history and bound up with history as the proclamation and teaching of the church. Is there not a danger that with the emancipation of the critical historical method the very substance of theology, the revelation in history, will come to be destroyed? It would imply failure to grasp the theological situation in which we find ourselves if I were to try in what follows to provide solutions for the whole vast array of problems whose treatment is precisely the onerous task this Journal seeks to serve. I can therefore only try to provide a few pointers to indicate the nature of the problems. (a) I have already pointed out that here Catholicism and Protestantism are radically opposed. One need only observe the way Roman Catholicism has concentrated and consolidated its theological forces since the beginning of the nineteenth century—its uncompromising attitude of opposition to the spirit of the times and its transition from the defensive to the offensive both inwardly and outwardly—in order to find it a sore trial how very different is the picture of church and theology presented by modern Protestantism: countless splits in all directions, progressive dissolution not only of its unity but also of its dogmatic substance, such infection by modern thought as apparently leads to internal sepsis, and where the attempt is made to defend or revitalize the old, the unseasonable, the distinctive and indispensable, there we find a defensive attitude towards the outside opponent that savours of anxiety, grimness or despair, while the courage, indeed the sheer brazen audacity of which modern Protestantism has certainly no lack is devoted to ever new onslaughts of criticism within the camp and is more inexorable than the enemies of Christianity in ruthlessly questioning the foundations of the Protestant Church and of its theology. It is a decision of fundamental importance what attitude we take to this, what judgment we pass on the respective paths of Catholicism and Protestantism today. Are we to look enviously and longingly towards Catholicism and say: there the Christian cause has been championed more purely and decisively, and better maintained? Must we be ashamed of the history of modern Protestantism and confess: here the cause of Christianity has been betrayed, or at the very least men have been carelessly playing with fire? And must the conclusion be: what Protestantism in the nineteenth century failed to do and what, if there is anything at all still to be salvaged, must now be made good as quickly and thoroughly as possible is, mutatis mutandis likewise the preparation of a Syllabus errorum, the establishment of a final, absolute doctrinal authority, of an antimodernist oath and of an ecclesiastically authorized standard Thomist

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theology? Or must we assent to the other possibility—namely, to expose ourselves relentlessly to the vulnerability, the insecurity and the dangers, to refuse to let our ties with the thought of the day be broken, not to wait until criticism comes from an opponent’s side and then be the more inflexible in rejecting all criticism, but to go ahead with the critical examination of our foundations, to let everything burn that will burn and without reservations await what proves itself unburnable, genuine, true—and to adopt this attitude at the risk that much that seemed established may begin to rock, that indeed some things may even be temporarily considered shaky which upon ever new examination then prove to be stable after all, that thus many mistakes and errors are made, much asserted and much taken back again, that our path takes us through serious crises, bitter struggles, bewildering debates and the results are apparently weakness and collapse? And to increase the difficulty of the decision that faces us here: it is not by any means as if Catholicism in all this had become a dead, stagnant pool, whereas Protestantism had provided proof that it alone has power and life and a future. If we sought to judge by outward success, then the history of the modern age has surely rather justified Catholicism. The fact is, that through the developments of modern times the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism has become a degree sharper, that to the old confessional distinctions of the sixteenth century there has been added still another new element of separation, whose basis was of course already given in the Reformation itself—namely, a fundamentally different attitude to the spirit of the modern age. Not as if the position of Protestantism in this respect were a wholly unified one. It is no wonder that the decisive question which has arisen has taken root within Protestantism itself and now the two tendencies struggle together within it: either to take a path that runs at least parallel to that of Catholicism—in other words, the path of restoration, of concentration and of remaining as immune from the modern spirit as possible—or to assent to the path to which Protestantism has been led by an inner necessity, i.e. the path into vulnerability, into the fires of criticism. And it is likewise no wonder that between these two extremes there has arisen an abundance of attempts at mediation. But whatever position we may adopt, the simple fact has emerged that Protestantism of any shade is completely unable to evade the emancipation of historical criticism which distinguishes it from Catholicism, that it cannot take the road via Syllabus errorum, infallible authority on doctrine, anti-modernist oath and standard church theology, and that the only question is how the task of criticism is to be properly carried out and what the result of it proves to be. Without making light of the difficulties that here arise, it must neverless be said that Protestantism has decided in principle for the critical historical method and therewith for the dangerous path just described. Indeed, I venture to assert that the Protestanism of the ninettenth century, by deciding in principle for the critical historical method, maintained and confirmed over against Roman Catholicism in a different situation the decision of the reformers in the sixteenth century. That of course is not to say what wherever in the history of modern Protestantism theology the motto of the critical historical method has been most loudly proclaimed and most readically applied, there men have also really been

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nearest to the Reformation in every respect. But what it certainly does mean is, that wherever they made way for critical historical method and, however grievous their errors, took it seriously as their task, there, certainly often in a very practical way, they were really asserting the fundamental principle the Reformers in the intellectual situation of the modern age. (b) The proof that must be provided for the assertion that assent to the critical historical method has essentially a deep inner connexion with the Reformers’ doctrine of justification leads to far-reaching questions in historical and systematic theology. To expound it fully will still require many detailed examinations of individual aspects of the theology of the Reformation and the history of modern Protestant theology. To that end a resumption and continuation of the work of Dilthey and Troeltsch on the historic relation between the Reformation and the rise of the modern spirit is urgently needed. The historical facts are, as far as the directly demonstrable historical connexions are concerned, manifestly very complicated. If the Reformation is taken as a historic whole, then there will certainly again and again be facts to notice that dialectically balance each other. The Reformation had both an extraordinarily revolutionary effect on the course of thought, and on the other hand was undoubtedly also a strongly retarding factor in the general intellectual transition from the Middle Ages to modern times. Yet not only its positive, but also its critical relations with the humanism which more especially paved the way for the modern age must be taken into account as well in assessing the inner connexions that exist between the Reformation and the rise of modern historical thinking. And it could be asked how far it is not precisely a result of the Reformation heritage when the historical thinking of modern times, after a phase of rather strong dependence on the objectivistic thinking of humanism, goes on to a comprehensive solution of the hermeneutic problem from the standpoint of a critical historical method that is understood far more deeply than in merely technical ways. However, operating with the Reformation as a historical whole will certainly not in itself enable us to solve the problem in question. Only critical reflexion on the decisive basic principle from which the Reformers set out can help us to perceive whether and in what way there exist in the complex dynamic field of the Reformation as a whole definite essential inner connexions with the critical historical method of modern times. That they do exist should already be clear from the above arguments, which have demonstrated all along the line the hermeneutic relevance of the Reformers’ theology as contrasted with the Catholic position. The sola fide of the Reformation doctrine of justification both contains a rejection of any existing ways of ensuring present actualization, whether ontological, sacramental or hierarchical, and also positively includes an understanding of actualization in the sense of genuinely historic, personal encounter. If this encounter with the historic revelation takes place solely in hearing the Word, then the shattering of all historical assurances that supposedly render the decision of faith superfluous is completely in line with the struggle against the saving significance of good works or against understanding the working of the sacrament in the sense of the opus operaturn. The sola fide destroys all secretly docetic views of revelation which evade the historicalness of revelation by making it a history sui

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generis, a sacred area from which the critical historical method must be anxiously debarred. In the Reformers’ view, both revelation and faith are discovered in their genuine historicalness, and that quite definitely means that faith is exposed to all the vulnerability and ambiguity of the historical. Only in that way and only for that reason can genuine encounter with the historic revelation be attained in faith and only in faith. As everywhere in Reformation theology, so also here in regard to the relation to history, the assent to lack of guarantees is merely the reverse side of the certainty of salvation sola fide. And thus we are justified in asking whether a theology which evades the claims of the critical historical method has still any idea at all of the genuine meaning of the Reformers’ doctrine of justification, even when the formulae of the sixteenth century are repeated with the utmost correctness. The objection that of course at the time of the Reformation and in early Protestant Orthodoxy the Reformers’ doctrine of justification was presented and maintained without knowledge of the critical historical method, merely betrays the basic error of a traditionalism that believes itself relieved by the Reformers’ theology from responsible theological labour of its own. On closer inspection, however, it is plain that alongside the fundamental relation between the Reformers’ doctrine of justification and the critical historical method, the theology of the Reformation itself also broached an abundance of problems involving content with which the critical historical method has to do. One need only think of the at least latent criticism to which the Greek categories of thought in early church dogma were subjected, or the quite obvious internal criticism of content applied to the interpretation of the New Testament. The heritage of the Reformation with its obligations would be poorly preserved if the attempt were made to shirk the same problems as soon as they are posed anew admittedly in the sharper form of historical reflexion—by the critical historical method. Precisely for the sake of keeping the heritage of the Reformation intact, we shall have to come to grips with many problems that are already heralded in the Reformers’ theology itself, and to set about them, as befits the changed intellectual situation, by new and different methods from what were used at the Reformation. (c) But now, in spite of the emphasis on the essential inner connexion between the Reformers’ doctrine of justification and the critical historical method, there can of course be no denying the fact that the evolution of modern Protestant theology is full of unsolved difficulties. And these must be borne in mind if the call to adopt the critical historical method is not to be misunderstood as involving uncritical acceptance of all the painful errors manifested by the history of Neo-Protestant theology, but is rather to be understood as a demand for critical discussion of the history of Protestant theology in the sense of duly measuring it against the basic principles of the Reformers. The chief theological difficulty, which every effort must be made to overcome, is the fatal isolation of the historical disciplines from systematic theology and from the life of the church. For the historical disciplines much will here depend on whether work is continued not only on fearless pursuit of individual researches committed solely to the discovery of truth, but also on the hermeneutic problem by which the historical disciplines are drawn into the wider context of theological work as a whole. It is vital

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to clarify the manner in which what was above called genuinely historic, personal encounter with the text takes effect in the realm of theological study of the Old and New Testaments and of Church History and the History of Theology in ways that can be methodically grasped—in other words, to clarify the theological relevance of critical historical work on these texts and events. This is a most vital task, both that we may avoid the caricature of a research that is content with discussing minute matters of detail and also that we may escape the false path of a pseudo-theological exposition that spares itself all the trouble of detailed historical examination and makes the text a springboard for its own thoughts. We shall therefore have to strive to secure recognition of the theological bearing of historical work, not by by-passing critical historical examination nor in disconnected supplementation of it, but through the very act of carrying it out. Whether and how far it is possible to fix general norms for setting limits to the improper employment of the critical historical method in the realm of theology, is a question that assuredly requires very careful consideration. Yet at the same time we must here primarily bear in mind the fact that unceasing critical self-correction belongs to the nature of the critical historical method, so that precisely with questions of historical criticism an over-hasty censorship of doctrine is most readily liable to cause only the greater harm by limiting freedom in matters of teaching and research and thereby cutting off the possibility of genuine critical self-correction. When we survey the course of historical theology in the nineteenth century, then we must realize what a decisive share the critical historical method had not so much in producing as rather in overcoming dogmatic aberrations in the Enlightenment, Idealism, Romanticism and Liberalism. Instead of everything succumbing step by step to dissolution at the hands of the critics, as was feared, the critical historical method actually taught a new regard for facts to which the dominant theology was paying no attention at all. One need only think, say, of the extraordinary theological significance of the eschatological view of the preaching of Jesus, or the stimulus that came from the questions raised by the religious-historical or form-critical methods. The task of even beginning to explore on any wide scale the real theological relevance of the tremendous work of critical historical theology in the nineteenth century is one in which nineteenth-century theology undoubtedly failed and which now, in the general antipathy towards the nineteenth century, threatens to be entirely forgotten. Systematic theology must therefore be required not only to respect the results of critical historical research—even on that point there is still much to be desired—but also to take up fully and completely into its own approach the outlook of the critical historical method. The trouble is—and it is plainly manifest in the history of modern theology—that Protestant dogmatics since the days of the Enlightenment has not succeeded in really squaring up to this task. It is not historical, but systematic theology that makes plain the crisis which has arisen in Protestant theology. To be sure, critical historical theology has also contributed to it in manifold ways. Yet the primary source of the trouble has not at all been it’s coming, as it often enough did and does, to mistaken conclusions in what are really uncritical ways. The trouble has

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been above all that its champions have either supposed that systematic theology could and must be abolished altogether, or else considered themselves in a position to produce a doctrine of the Christian Faith as a direct result of their critical historical labours, whether in the form of reducing everything to the life and teaching of Jesus or of progressively bringing to light the advances that have taken place in the history of church and theology itself. The fact that it is precisely in systematic theology that the problems arise with such sharpness points to a real aporia on the part of Protestantism. It will at all events be unable, if it rightly understands its own nature, to develop a dogmatics that is structurally identical with Catholic dogmatics. Yet what the shape of Protestant dogmatics should be and what method it should go by is still an entirely open question—one which Schleiermacher certainly perceived with a clarity hardly ever to be attained again later, even if he, too, failed to solve it. If systematic theology takes up into its own approach the whole outlook of the critical historical method, then the result will be not only that it will achieve the critical destruction of all supposed assurances, but above all that it will be kept strictly to its proper concern— namely, the historic revelation in Jesus Christ—full awareness of the historicalness of its own systematic theological labours. And finally, the proclamation of the church—and the form of church order is also closely connected with that—must be required to take the work of historical criticism seriously. It is a real question whether the widespread frightful lameness and staleness of the church’s message, her powerlessness to speak to the men of today, and likewise the lack of credibility that attaches to the church as such are not very largely connected with its fear of letting the work of critical historical theology bear fruit in the proper way and its failure to take sufficient account of the nature of the hermeneutic problem, which is acutely concentrated in the act of preaching. For critical historical theology is not identical with liberal theology. It is, however, the indispensable means of reminding the church of the freedom rooted in the iustificatio impii. (d) We turn again in conclusion to the situation of today. The period since the first World War is marked by a movement of concentration in church and theology, introduced by new theological reflexion on the heart of the Christian kerygma and strengthened by the period of testing in the church struggle—a movement of concentration which found confessional expression in the Theological Declaration of Barmen. Something has happened there which no one can go back on and presumably only few wish to go back on either. But precisely when we know ourselves committed to what has happened, the commitment will have to consist in resolutely combatting the partly manifest and partly veiled dangers it immediately brings: we are committed not to a reactionary movement of opposition, but to watchful concern for the purity of the Gospel message. The dangers of a movement of concentration are by its very nature those of one-sidedness, foreshortening and isolation, of striving for security and impregnability, of seeking to avoid conflict and testing. To trace out these dangers concretely in detail would require a carefully differentiated analysis of the theological and ecclesiastical forces involved, extraordinarily different and conflicting

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as they were in spite of their common participation in the movement of concentration. Yet, certain main tendencies stand out in various degrees: a new theological dogmatism and traditionalistic confessionalism, a clericalism and sacramentalism, an over-simplification through insistence on pietistic edification or else through catchword theology, radicalism, confessional rhetoric, etc. The critical historical method is certainly recognized in principle, except by a few outsiders. But in practice it is widely felt in ecclesiastical and theological circles to be really a tedious nuisance. Its results may perhaps be noted, but then they are left aside after all instead of being worked through. And where the critical historical method is seriously applied today, it remains a matter for the individual historical disciplines, and does not have an effect on theology as a whole, still less on the church—or when there is any visible sign of consequences of such a kind, it is pronounced to be rationalism and liberalism, or even rouses the cry of heresy. The path which theology has to tread in this situation for the church’s sake is certainly full of unsolved problems, but there is no doubt as to the direction it must take.

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9 Henri De Lubac History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen. Selections from the Conclusion*

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enri De Lubac (1896–1991) was a French theologian. He wrote on early Christian theology and its use today, the relationship between nature and grace, the doctrine of the church, as well as atheism and other religions. His teachings were suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church for some time; eventually, however, he gained a voice within Catholicism, influencing the formulation of Vatican II and being elevated to the position of cardinal late in his life. This selection is an abridged version of the conclusion to De Lubac’s substantial study of Origen’s exegesis, History and Spirit (published in French in 1950). The main body of the book is a historical exposition of Origen’s view of the task of exegesis; it presents the third century Alexandrian theologian in a sympathetic light and makes a special effort to vindicate him from the charge that he is essentially dualistic and dis­regards history. The concluding chapter takes up the question of what Christian readers of Origen might learn from his example. De Lubac’s overall strategy for retrieving insights from Origen is thoughtful, subtle, and notably non-polemical. He does not want to see what Origen offers dismissed out of hand on the presumption that modern study of the Bible renders all of his insights obsolete. Yet neither does he recommend simply parroting back all of Origen’s teaching, as if his goals in his own time are precisely the ones that modern Christians ought to pursue, and as if modern historical methods have nothing at all to teach us

All original notes have been removed.

*

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that might supersede Origen’s ideas. What is needed, rather, is a balanced approach, one that takes into consideration the full scope of Origen’s framework of thought on exegesis, for isolated parts of his synthesis will make little sense by themselves. The particular focus of De Lubac’s study is the controversial practice of allegory, together with its supporting theological bases. This selection contains some useful reflections on terminological alternatives to the term “allegory,” and the precise meaning of the term is worth pondering, but it can be summarized conveniently as the work of discerning the mystery of Christ and his followers as these realities are prefigured in the Bible. Following his own advice to explore how this interpretive practice interrelates with other aspects of Christian doctrine, De Lubac ties allegorical interpretation to the sanctification of the Christian believer. This does raise the question of whether non-Christians will want to employ allegory as a reading strategy. But if allegorical interpretation presupposes and perfects spiritual practice, as De Lubac claims, that at least explains why allegorical reading finds a place within the Christian tradition. De Lubac offers a fascinating distinction between the “religious sense” of Scripture and its “spiritual sense,” which is highly relevant to this reader’s theme of the relationship between historically and theologically focused readings of the Bible. The difference is, again, a subtle one, for De Lubac says that in practice the two will often overlap. But they do differ in principle, and the author wants to say that these two kinds of reading ultimately need one another. What would a modern allegorical reading of the Bible look like? Is it sustainable now? In this reading, where is De Lubac himself offering his own theological views, and where is he simply summarizing Origen? When De Lubac offers his own judgments, how do his arguments work? Is his program one that is open only to insiders to the Christian, and specifically Roman Catholic, tradition? Or is it genuinely open to outsiders as well?

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What remains of this vast doctrine, which emerges again before our eyes like a dream palace through the mist of the distant past? Depending on our perspective in approaching it, we would respond: Not much, or, on the contrary: Everything essential. The valid part of the heritage is, in fact, well maintained, if we assess it from the precise point of view of biblical science. The details of Origenian exegesis, taken one by one, withdrawn from the living synthesis they illustrate much more than they construct, can often appear to us as so many fantasies, to some degree ingenious or evocative, but without profit for solid knowledge. The processes of which they are the fruit are themselves often full of arbitrariness, and an arbitrariness that we cannot fail to find very foreign. What we will have to gather from it will thus be much less than what is today currently designated by the word exegesis. But perhaps, to look at it from another point of view, it will also be much more. For a thorough understanding of Scripture and of Christianity itself, Origen’s work offers resources that were used by all the centuries that followed, whether they knew it or not, resources they sometimes allowed to lie idle for too long, resources that are far from having been exhausted. Aside from other considerations, the number of centuries that separate us from his work should warn us sufficiently that, in order to conserve or to rediscover the spirit of it, we must consent to drop much of what he says literally, that is, much of all this appearance on the basis of which we are at first tempted to judge it and without which we could most certainly not define it. Moreover, if we wanted to judge it in a completely relevant way, it would be appropriate to distinguish in this work the debt owed to a given time and milieu, the inimitable part of genius finally, the contribution of tradition. We should not forget however that these three shares cannot really be dissociated. As soon as it is concerned with a whole that is all complex, tradition cannot be grasped or maintained in a pure state. Those who transmit it to us with the greatest force and authenticity have no choice but to color and shift its emphasis. They receive it already stamped with the style of their epoch and, in the stamp which they in turn imprint on it, they inevitably mix it with a personal investment that is never without a few errors. But such an analysis would be endless. The preceding chapters have traced a few starting points. We will puopose to the reader, by way of conclusion, some reflections, extending far beyond Origen, concerning the spiritual understanding of Scripture such as appears during the course of history. Our present problems will not be resolved by this. Perhaps they will at least receive some light. *** What, then, remains of Origen in this regard? First of all, unquestionably, the historical witness of a great cultural phenomenon. And that in itself is not fruitless. The archeologist who lovingly seeks to make the Minoan civilization live again in our imaginations or the one who is filled with wonder in recreating the religious life of the cities of upper Asia during the time of the great Buddhist pilgrims, certainly has

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no desire to take us back to the customs of King Minos or to beliefs of the monks of Khotan, they nevertheless have the sense of being moved by something other than futile curiosity. Is not the fruit of these investigations into the human past that of enriching the mind, of giving it a new fertility by making, so to speak, rich, ample humus for it. In proportion as he explores and tastes the varied creations of the genius of his race, man better perceives his own potentialities and each cast of the sounding line into ancient cultures thus makes one more source spring up through which his own culture will be fed. Now, would we want to argue that what is easily admitted when it is a question of distant epochs or exotic societies does not aply as well to the more or less fragile forms that the Christian genius has also worked our? Not everything in them has that permanent value which comes from truth. But this is not to say that even their ephemeral part must be without serious interest for us or, with still greater reason that we might not be wrong to underrate the past greatness of them. Even in those things most mixed with illusion, if we do not wish to be frivolous ourselves, let us be careful to appreciate the human weight. Faced with the exegetical constructions of someone like Origen we could indeed exclaim: This was a great and beautiful dream, but criticism has dispelled it and faith easily passes it by; let the historian allow it a retrospective admiration, today’s Christian has nothing more to do with it. Even if it must be disputed in part, such language is understandable.“ To say that Greek tragedy is a genre that is over and done with is not to undermine its immortal beauty.” But we go on to say: “None of that, in the Christian past, represents anything great, anything new; it was all only an aberration; none of it deserves from the historian a glance of sympathetic curiosity, an effort to rediscover its soul,” then we would be making an erroneous historical judgment, and not without damage to the support and renewal of Christian culture. It would be no less an error—we are pushing things to the extreme here, without any opinion in mind that has actually been maintained to admire these ancient constructions so much that we wished to take up permenant residence in them; to canonize those doctrines to the point of not being able to discern the weak or no longer valid parts of them; to believe we were being faithful to their author by copying him or imitating him literaly. This would be to emigrate from the present without rediscovering a homeland in the past. The “primitives” of today do not give us an accurate idea of what pimitive humanity might have been, full of creative energy, open to unforseeable progress. Nor could any modern “figurist” carry on among us the work of the great founders of spiritual exegesis. And if this desire for serville imitation entails contempt—even if purely practical—with regard to the scientific methods whose patient application has renewed in our age the historical understanding of the Holy Books, the infidelity to the spirit of Origen would be even more obvious. It is useless to wonder what exactly one of the ancients would do if he were suddenly transported amoung us, in totally different conditions, discovering curiosities that his era did not know, enjoying a more advanced state of knowledge, equipped with new instruments for work, enlightened by a secular experience whose orientation he could

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not have foreseen … There is no way to respond to such questions. Nevertheless, the most certain history shows well enough, not only Origen’s esteem for acquired knowledge, but also his ardor in research, his zeal to clear paths for it, so that in this domain it is impossible to support on his authority the least disdain, indeed, the least negligence. But it is true that his Alexandrian Platonism created a dangerous climate. The world of history was no more solidified in it, so to speak, than the world of nature. In consequence, we see the rather rapid passage to the spiritual meaning from the one as from the other, the tendency not to stop at literal exegesis any more than one dwelled on the natural sciences. Thus the historical information often remains brief because it serves as a springboard for thought and does not provide a goal for it. This is observable in Augustinianism as well—which did not prevent Saint Augustine (who was, moreover, much less open than Origen to scientific problems) from having, like Origen, a profoundly historical thought. On the other hand, if we cast an overall look at the history of Christian exegesis in the last few centuries, we observe that what for a long time, even very recently, barred the way to critical work was not—with minimal exceptions—the spiritual interpretation. It was false science; it was bad literalism, “taking everything literally, through wanting to follow the literal sense alone”; it was the mania of concordism; it was false ideas concerning biblical inerrancy or tradition. All things from which a greater familiarity with Origen and his peers is rather suitable for freeing the mind. A more subtle misinterpretation is also possible. It would consist in considering all “allegorism” of the Fathers to be like a game, without, moreover, denying it a debt of admiration. This would be a just assessment for a certain number of later authors. Even for someone like Origen, this view could appear to have some justification. As we have seen, his thought develops with an abundance and wealth of symbols into which an element of gratuitousness enters. He makes use of ancient aestheticism to express Christian salvation history. But these observations, as important as they may be, must not mask the essence. Criticism would be wrong to confine itself to this. Faced with the text for which he wanted to provide commentary, Origen’s attitude was always serious and grave. One can amuse oneself with Sacred Scripture as if it were a toy. One can play with the “spiritual sense“. But another patron must be sought for these amusements. For Origen, Scripture was always, not in general, but hic et nunc, the Word of God. It was in his hands, or rather in the divine hands, the weapon against the adverse powers, the two-edged sword whose sharp point pierces to the division of soul and spirit. And his exegesis also responded to necessities that were those of nascent Christianity. It is difficult for us today to perceive these well. The role of this exegesis escapes us, not because it was without importance, but because it was perfectly filled. We enjoy in peace those of its results that were acquired forever, and we no longer imagine the situation that made it necessary. The mystical interpretation of the Scriptures, wrote Möhler, “constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena of the early Church; it has never been appreciated as much as it deserves or grasped in all its fullness. It would be impossible to calculate completely the good that this method

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did for the propagation of Christianity among the pagans and Jews. It was also, and in accordance with its very essence, related to the birth of a very pure conception of the Christian life.” These remarks of a theologian who in his short career gave many proofs of his perceptiveness in what concerned the spirit of Christianity are accurate and of great importance. We believe them to be, however, still insufficient. The question is not only essential for understanding early Christianity. It teaches, as Möhler himself seems to imply toward the end, moreover, to the permanent foundations of Christian thought. So it is appropriate to be delighted at seeing it reappear in our time in the forefront of our preoccupations with exegesis and theology. This has not been without trial and error, without obscure discussions, indeed, without a few false steps. Who could be surprised at that? Let us, then, in our turn, after having questioned Origen at length and with simplicity, try to see independently of him what is basically at issue here—without intending in any way to assert all the points of view that could successively be adopted in so particularly complex a subject and one that is so particularly difficult to grasp in its center. *** For a long time, in each new generation, we have received from our ancestors in the faith a Christianity that is, objectively, wholly constituted, from the basic expression of its dogma to its most refined spirituality. The work that has earned us this whole universe of perfect expressions has been done, once and for all. All we have to do is to gather the fruit without being preoccupied with the tree. That is the reason why, among other things, we can without great harm, in our exegesis of the Bible, behave like pure literalists. It seems to us quite natural to consider as pure historians—and we have at our disposal for that purpose resources incomparably richer than our fathers did—all that we find deposited in the books of the Old Testament. This is because its figurative substance, so to speak, was extracted for our use a long time ago. But in the very beginning, still for two or three centuries later, Christians could not afford the luxury of such disinterestedness. In the reading of the Holy Books it was, in a direct way, the whole concept of religion, it was the whole idea of the new faith that was involved. Their spiritual interpretation was not at that time in any degree a supererogatory practice. With even greater reason was it nothing like a game! Before seeming to be well-founded, this spititual was itself contributing to the foundation of the faith, or at least to expressing it. It did not provide, if we can put it thus, a surplus amount to the religious capital already possessed; rather, it centered essentially into a constitution of the capital. In other words, it was indispensible for freeing Christianity from its swaddling clothes without cutting it from its roots. For it was necessary to give it a full awareness of itself to assure its independent life, outside of Judaism, while preserving it from crude interpretations with which, on the other side, the pagan spirit was threatening. Even more, in the very first place, it was necessary to forge its objective expression. With Christ, all was given, absolutely everything; but it was necessary to express this event of Christ.

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Let us think about that, in fact. The Christian truth did not enter into empty minds. Nor did reflection upon it start from nothing. What gave it its body and permitted it to be grapsed where above all the biblical realities in the extension of which is was formulated. Rumination on the Old Testament in the light of Christ, thanks to the twofold law of analogy and contrast, made it possible to have a thorough understanding of the New Testament at the same time as it made it easier to see its newness. It was useful for the exposition of the faith, but first of all it was useful for its understanding, for the very perception of its object. Thus the old economy continued its age-old pedagogical role in the midst of the new. Thus it lived on in a mysterious way that constitutes a unique fact in religious history. This is because, according to the great providential economy that comprises them and associates them with each other, the Christian mystery was not delivered to us in a series of timeless definitions, unrelated to any precise historical situation, even if this meant allowing itself to assume whatever biblical images we wished later on, by way of illustration. The links between the two Testaments are close in a different way. Even in the very consciousness of Jesus—if we may cast a human glance even into this sanctuary—the Old Testament was like the matrix of the New or the instrument of its creation. That means more than external preparation. The categories in which Jesus expresses himself about himself are the old biblical categories. He explodes them, or, if you prefer, he sublimates and unifies them, by making them converge on himself. But they are in some way necessary to him, and, on the other hand, in this renewed use, they do not become various abstract categories, nor do they serve as incidental images. They preserve all their value and their flavor as allusions to precise facts, to singular realities. These realities in relation to which Jesus situates himself and which he, by that very fact, transforms are those that fill the history of Israel or that constitute the object of its hope. It is the same with everything, or nearly everything, that his first witnesses teach us about his person and his work. The “biblical images,” with all the concrete facts they cover, thus furnish the material, both historical and noetic, of which the Christian mystery, in its very newness and its very transcendence, is woven. “If there is always a benefit,” it has been written, “in clarifying the New Testament teaching on baptism, for example, through the typology of the Red Sea, the spiritual fruit of these comparisons will fall very far short of that provided by a biblical theology of baptism according to Saint Paul or Saint John taken literally. The culmination of revelation is clearer than its beginnings, and, in truth, the latter are clarified by the former.” These last words are indisputable. They express a truth that is opportune to recall. But the question that arises is precisely that of knowing if the beginnings of revelation are not something of a factor, and perhaps an important factor, even in the expression of its finished form; in other words, that of knowing if the New Testament teaching has not been formulated and has not become intelligible in its very literal sense through the agency of a spiritual meaning conferred, in Christ, on the events of the old Law. For the case offered here as an example, it seems to us clear that” the typology of the Red Sea,” or that of the cloud, is not just any comparison whatever added on to the Pauline theology: it is explicitly a part of it; and undoubtedly the

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Apostle saw in it more than a way of clarifying from outside a baptismal doctrine already wholly constituted for an extrinsic spiritual fruit. It has been said with much greater accuracy: “Our Fathers in the faith heard of the first Adam only in relation to the second, of Melchizedek only in relation to the Eucharist, of the tree of paradise only in relation to baptism, of the psalms of David only in their relation to Christ, of the Temple only in reference to the Church.” But that itself is like the second side of a truth which, in its essential lines, must first be expressed in opposite terms. Baptism, Eucharist, Church, and so forth, were thought out for the first time, at least when it was a question of reflecting on them, only in relation to Melchizedek, to the official Passover, to the passage through the Red Sea, to manna, to the desert assembly, to the Temple of Jerusalem … Covenant, Election, People of God, Word, Messiah, Kingdom, Day of the Lord, and so on, all these basic biblical themes enter into the Christian idea of salvation. The mystery of the redemption, which purifies us and lifts us out of slavery to sin, occupies the center of our faith; now, if it found access to the mind of the early generations of believers, this was thanks to a transposition, prepared by the prophets, of the legal ideas of sacrifice and expiation and of Babylon and the twofold liberation of its people carried out like a ransom by the God of Israel. And did not the whole New Covenant seem to be sealed by the blood of Christ just as the Old had been by the blood of victims? Thus “the rock of Golgotha was understandable to mankind because it had been outlined on the background of ancient Judaism, of its beliefs, its aspirations, its worship.” The Jewish people prefigured the Church by preparing for her; it prepared for her by prefiguring her, and the earthly kingdom that seemed promised to it was the image of the heavenly kingdom that Jesus was to announce. Finally, “the themes that were most strictly new in the gospel: the adoption of the Father, the gift of the spirit, as well as the revelation of the Son, took on their full meaning, had an intelligible meaning at all, only when revealed in the confluence of the great themes of the prophetic Word.” Is it not enough, moreover, to read with a little attentiveness the writings of which our collection of the “New Testament” is composed in order to perceive that they are all presented in large measure, whatever the distinctive genius of each author or the diversity of genres, as a never-ending interpretation of the Scriptures, that is to say, of what has become for us the “Old Testament”? This interpretation is, in most cases, a spiritual transposition; it is worked out, then, by means of symbolism. But, again, in most cases, whether spontaneous or reflective, it is most appropriate to liken this, not to some superadded embellishment, but to the weft of a fabric. Or rather, if Christianity is a body of doctrine, this spiritual interpretation is not a garment thrown over it after the fact: it is part of that body itself, whose unifying soul is the present reality of the Savior. *** The word that was used for the first time by Saint Paul and that then prevailed in the Latin tradition to express this symbolic transposition was allegory. For a long

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time theology understood by that, and often in the broadest sense, the mysteries of Christ and the Church as prefigured in Scripture. The allegorical sense was thus par excellence the dogmatic sense, rooted in history. Far from compromising the historical foundation of faith, it provided all Christian thought with this essentially historical character, so consonant with the Christian faith itself and which has often been so unfortunately blurred since then. Nevertheless, for easily explained reasons, the word lost favor. Its etymyology suggests a sense other than the literal, which is to say, alongside it, without organic relation to it. Its modern usage contrasts it either to organic symbols or to parables, and in either case, this distorts its original meaning: it in fact evokes the idea of an analogy that is artificial and forced in all its details or the use of imagery to emphasize a ready-made idea. Such an evocation responds only too well to what the use of scriptural allegoria had in fact become. It can even suggest fatal negations. Moreover, already with the ancients themselves, the pavilion of Christian allegory covered some strange merchandise: hence the ambivalence and alternating adoption and rejection even in the same author. Consequently other terms have been preferred to it. Some, remarking that for the ancient Fathers “it is within the literal sense that the profound and Christian meaning of the Scriptures must be sought,” propose to keep to this expression “literal sense,” when it is “perceived by faith” according to its full tenor, as sufficient for designating “the only true sense of the Bible.” They thereby obey a praiseworthy concern for unity, while preserving from all confusion with “allegorizing exegesis” in the Greek or Philonian manner the true exegesis of the Fathers, “which consists of bringing out the profound and objective meaning of a text in the light of the entire economy of salvation.” They rightly wish to extricate “the living architecture of the Bible” from the “allegorizing plaster” that covers its over. And everything, is, in fact, in a certain way, contained in the literal meaning, since everything that is not the foundation would be superadded to the text and thus arbitrary.“The spiritual sense is never to be sought behind the literal but always within it, just as the Father is found, not behind the Son, but in him and through him.” It seems to us, nevertheless, that if such terminology has the advantage of simplicity, it is, on the other hand, too contrary to universal usage to be completely acceptable. It also conflicts with the traditional distinction by which inspired Scripture is set apart from all other books by the fact that the things signified by its words have in themselves a significance willed by God, a significance relating to salvation. How would the meaning of the thing be, with nothing more, the meaning of the letter, that is, the meaning of the word, since the literal meaning of the word, thus of the letter, already signifies this thing? The distinction in the unity is well marked (whatever the practice might be) in this formula of Saint Gregory the Great: “Aliquando in historia litteram suscipiunt, aliquando vero per significationem litterae spiritum requirunt” (Sometimes they receive the literal sense in the history, but sometimes they seek the spirit through the signification of the letter). The terminology that we are discussing seems, moreover, a bit inaccurate, because what is within the letter, or under the letter, is not, for all that, literal. Finally, if, on the one hand, it prevents one type of confusion, does it not risk creating another

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by allowing the belief that everything in the meaning of Scripture is reduced to what the sacred writer was able explicitly to perceive in it? Consequently we speak more readily today of typology. That is a neologism, in use for scarcely a century. But finding it was fortuitous. For, ever since Saint Paul, everywhere in traditional exegesis, there have been references to “types,” that is, to figures, and occasionally we encounter “typical sense,” taken as a synonym for mystical or allegorical sense or also, as Pascal said, for figurative sense. It also offers the merit of clearly discarding, at least by intention, all the old chaff from the grain of Christian exegesis, which the word allegory did not by itself do. It has the disadvantage, nevertheless, of bearing reference solely to a result without alluding to the soul, to the inner spirit of the process that carries it out. Its meaning also appears perhaps too limited, for it corresponds strictly only to the first of the three meanings that the classical division enumerates after the literal sense, the sense of “history.” Typology thus gives itself a very narrowly circumscribed subject. In any case, it leaves outside its perspectives explanations that are most properly spiritual. A serious lacuna that there is reason to fear might at times be deliberate. Those who have been the first to emphasize “typology” have made a choice of solid ground, but they have made it too narrow. We should not confine ourselves to it too exclusively if we want to avoid reducing the profound and bold doctrine of a Saint Paul to a game of figures, even if a genuine one. Is it not best, in the final analysis, to come back to the most traditional and most general of all the expressions and—without excluding other words and without prejudice to later clarifications—to speak again quite simply of the “spiritual sense,” of “spiritual understanding”? The word instills fear in some. It can in fact be open to abuse, but the risk of abuse must not make us “extinguish the spirit.” It must not deprive us of one of the essential words of the Christian language, one that Scripture formally authorizes. There is no serious reason to exclude it, and for even an incomplete view of the reality to be described, one really cannot do without it. It expresses with irreplaceable force the characteristic of the whole new Economy. In the latter, the former people of Israel become, in the Church, Israel according to the spirit. The entire Old Law becomes spiritual law. As Saint Augustine teaches, the whole historical as well as prophetic pedagogy at work in the Old Testament has no other end but to lead man to perceive at least the spiritual realities, realities that are no longer either past or future but that remain eternally. And is not the typology of the liturgy in fact always spiritualizing? Now this spiritualization is at the same time an interiorization: when one says spiritual, one also says interior. The New Law is engraved no longer on tablets of stone but in hearts, and the visible relations of Christians among each other in the “Body of Christ” only go to express or serve as bonds of the mythical order. A twofold transposition, a twofold passage (that is not complete in any of us as long as this age has itself not completed its course) from the first Testament to the second. The fruit of the interpretation of Scripture that takes this twofold passage into account is thus well named the “spiritual sense.” This name is also appropriate for other reasons. “Spirit” is naturally allied, in the language of Christian tradition, to “truth,” to the strong and substantial sense that

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this latter word has when it expresses the reality of Christ in contrast to the shadows and figures that preceded him. It also allows us to take advantage, from a different point of view, of the Pauline antithesis between the letter, or the flesh, and the spirit. Of course we must recall here that the letter is not then the equivalent of the literal sense, and the flesh even less so. It is, in a way, a literal sense that is sterilized, deprived of the spiritual potentialities that were deposited in it like seeds; a sense that is materialized, hardened, exclusive, and, consequently, distorted, opposed, henceforth, even though the times have come, to that twofold passage we have just mentioned. As Origen remarked, it is the figure that, refusing to recognise itself as such, refuses to give way to the reality. Such was the temptation of the beneficiaries of the Old Covenant when the Message of Christ rang out. But let us not believe that all analogous peril has disappeared within Christianity. The miracle of the water changed into wine must ever be renewed by the Lord so that we may not fall back into the Jewish interpretations. The latter could be found again even under what seems a wholly Christian “typology.” Thus the vehement admonitions of Saint Paul have not lost, will never lose, their timeliness. To consider but one example—relatively benign and too old to offend anyone—do we think that the Politique tirée [des propres paroles] de l’Écriture sainte (Politics Drawn from the very Words of Sacred Scripture) by the great Bossuet would not have been somewhat different if he had meditated on those words at greater length? And how, moreover, can we not call the “spiritual sense” the sense that comes in a special way from the Holy Spirit? We have seen enough about this in commenting on our author for there to be any need to insist on it at length. Of course the literal sense is also from the Holy Spirit. Any real sense of Scripture is inspired, and the inspiration is unique. Nevertheless, to the degree that we have not penetrated to the most profound level, we have not completely perceived the intention of the Spirit: if we deliberately stop this side of it, we are unfaithful to that intention. It is thus already that the spiritual sense supports a particular relation to the Spirit, a relation in virtue of which it appears once again well named. And then, the meaning of things is not placed in them by the human author of the book; it comes entirely from the Spirit. In it we find the Spiritus sancti sacramenta [mysteries of the holy Spirit]. Through it we enjoy the Spiritus sancti consortium [companionship of the Holy Spirit]. Moreoever—is this not its essential characteristic?—it is the meaning of the New Testament, that is to say, the meaning taught by the Spirit of Truth, which is the Spirit of Christ. For no resource of the human mind, no method, no scientific process will ever be enough to make heard “the music written on the silent pages of the Holy Books.” Finally, more simply still, this meaning is the meaning that relates to Christ, to the Lord: now “the Lord is the Spirit,” which is to say, precisely the Spirit of the Scriptures. Even the very imprecision of the word is, in certain respects, valuable. When it was a question of the word allegory, that type of imprecision could be harmful, and there was some importance in making a clear distinction between the figurative literal senses and the mystical or “typical” senses, which were too often mixed in many of the ancients. On the other hand, there was an obvious advantage in preserving the one

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name of spiritual understanding for the action that leads to both. For, notwithstanding the objective diversity of the cases considered, it is always a question of the same essential movement of the mind, under the influence of the same Spirit, for the same penetration of the spirit of the text, the result of which must be the discovery of some portent of Christ, the abandonment of the carnal sense apparent in some prophecies, the understanding of a parable, or the deep insight into the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount … It is also always a question of obtaining that “scientia spiritualis” (spiritual knowledge) and that “purus sensus” (pure understanding) which Saint Caesarius of Arles tells us is granted to the Church. Finally—and this, too, is an essential point—the spiritual sense, understood as the figurative or mystical sense, is the sense that objectively, ends in the realities of the spiritual life and that at the same time, subjectively, can be given only as the fruit of a spiritual life. That is where it leads: for insofar as we have not gone that far, we have not drawn from Scripture a totally Christian interpretation. The Christian mystery, in fact, is not to be contemplated with curiosity as a pure object of science; rather it must be interiorized and lived. It finds its fullness in coming to completion in souls. “Ad haec etiam omnis Testamenti Veteris historia pertinet, quae carnaliter gesta ita denuntiat, ut in eis spiritualis vitae intelligentiam exquirendam edoceat” (The entire history of the Old Testament extends also to those deeds done in flesh, which it reports in such a way that it may teach us to seek in them for the understanding of the spiritual life). But the converse is no less true: for the spiritual meaning of a mystery is the meaning that one discovers, or rather, into which one enters by living this mystery. Even more fundamentally, the whole process of spiritual understanding is identical, in principle, to the process of conversion. It is its luminous aspect. “Intellectus spiritualis credentem salvum facit” (The spiritual understanding saves the believer). The Word of God, a living and efficacious word, reaches its real fulfilment and its full meaning only by the transformation that it works in the one who receives it. Whence the expression: “to pass on to the spiritual understanding,” the equivalent of “to be converted to Christ”—with a conversion that one can never say is fully achieved. There is thus a reciprocal causality between that conversion to Christ and the understanding of the Scriptures.“Cum autem conversus fuerit ad Dominum, auferetur velamen” (But when he is converted to the Lord, the veil will be taken away). If we wish to understand the source of the problem debated everywhere today about the spiritual understanding, it would be advisable to examine the conversion of the Church to her Lord, considered especially in the person of the early generations of the faithful. Nothing is better suited to make us understand the seriousness of such a problem, that seriousness which is so striking, for example, in someone like Origen and which the exuberance of the foliage or the subtlety of the analyses risks hiding from us. All of Scripture is perceived in a new light by the soul that opens itself to the Gospel and that belongs to Christ. All of Scripture is transfigured by Christ. “Accedite ad cum, et illuminamini” (Draw near to him, and you will be enlightened). What is at issue here, as we have seen, is a unique act and consequently, a comprehensive interpretation that still remains undetermined in many points, just as it can be obscure in

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many individuals (each of us is not the whole Church, and it is only as members of the entire body that we participate in her faith and her understanding as in her hope and glory). It is a unique movement, which, beginning with initial incredulity, is raised by faith to the summits of a spiritual life whose end is not here on earth. Its unfurling is coextensive with the gift of the Spirit, with the progress of charity. The whole Christian experience, with its various phases, is thus contained in it in principle. The newness of the understanding is correlative with the “newness of life.” To pass on to the spiritual understanding is thus to pass on to the “new man,” who never ceases to be renewed de claritate in claritatem (from glory to glory). In other words this understanding cannot end in results that are totally verifiable by any method whatever or capable of being collected into a definitive canon. In other words, it can never be totally objectivized. It always envelops and overflows what it has grasped, just as it feels enveloped and overflowed by what it has still not been able to grasp. “Dicta igitur sacri eloquii, cum legentium spirity excrescunt” (Therefore, the sayings of the sacred speech grow with the spirit of the readers). For, “To enter into the spirit of Scripture means, in the end, to learn to know what is inside God, to appropriate the thoughts of God about the world,” and how it is conceivable that one could ever have learned this? Endless dialects, similar to that of mysticism and mystery. We can really only speak of it in the singular, as of one act. To wish, therefore, to judge it from a purely objective point of view or to reduce it to some scientific discipline is to condemn ourselves to not understanding it. An enterprise in which a certain number of its supporters as well as its adversaries are joined. From the moment it is no longer borne by the movement that gave birth to it, the practice of spiritual understanding soon becomes nothing but an empty fantasy, little respectful of the divine Word—unless in its desire for perfect objectivity it restricts itself to recording a series of symbols, grading their respective value according to the twofold criteria of how strong their resemblance is to the object signified and of how many attestations they have traditionally received. A good lexicon would suffice once and for all. And if such an interest is legitimate, it is also limited. One can observe, moreover, that the two criteria invoked are not of the same order and do not always overlap: some symbolisms, among the best attested in tradition, seem in themselves to be very artificial or very flimsy … The question remains open of knowing if we can today aim at something else, or even if we have the right to do so. But, to restrict ourselves for the moment solely to the historical point of view, if we aspire to find something of what was the spiritual interpretation of Scripture in the early centuries of the Church, it is important to look at things both in greater depth and with greater freedom. Without either a return to archaic forms or servile mimicry, often by totally different methods, it is a spiritual movement that we must reproduce above all. And it is the struggles of Jacob with the angel of God that we must ceaselessly begin again. ***

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But there is also another misunderstanding that needs to be cleared up. There are times when something is asked of the “spiritual sense” that it is incapable of providing or when it is, on the other hand, rejected as of no significance, indeed, as harmful to the true understanding of the Bible because its nature and the area in which it is exercised have been misjudged. A misjudgment encouraged, moreover, by various types of confusion that we find evidenced in the history of exegesis, the most ancient as well as the most recent. We have turned up some of these in Origen’s case. To sum up everything in an antithesis, at the risk, in the beginning, of forcing things a bit, let us say that we must carefully distinguish between the spiritual sense of Scripture, as it has continuously been understood by tradition, and the religious sense of the Bible. In the meanings that we are going to specify, these two senses are not reducible to each other and do not answer the same purposes. We can scarcely compare them except by contrast. The religious sense of the Bible is also a historical sense. We can make the history of religion—including the history of Israel—to be like any other series of facts, and to do this with any seriousness we must bring out, through an effort that goes beyond purely critical erudition, the religious sense of the texts that are its witnesses. In this process, the historian makes himself, in a way, contemporaneous with the facts that he must describe and explain. With the joint concern of not giving too much importance to the texts and not restricting himself to a superficial interpretation, he seeks to reconstruct the religious consciousness of the man from the biblical past, just as he would for any other past. He studies the soul of people like Abraham, Moses and David; that of Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah … He strives to understand the religious institutions of the people of Israel as they were understood by those people, not only in the masses but in the elite of its members. He reconstitutes the framework of its representation of the universe; he makes the impulse of its prayer rise up again from the old documents. Of course, he does not forbid himself the consideration earned by his privilege of being born later and of being able to take in a long series of events with a single glance. While being wary of facile finalistic explanations and of those broad arbitrary views that take cover under the name of “philosophy of history,” he will be able to untangle the play of causalities and influences, to detect what promise was held by some particular institution, inspiration, new attitude, even without his subject’s knowing it. For in the history of the human spirit, whether it is a question of religion or of secular thought, there are certain particular complex, particularly fruitful moments whose true measure can only be taken by considering not only their antecedents, their “sources,” but also and especially the descendants that find in them their origin. Any religions experience that is in the least profound, no matter how crude its first expression, contains spiritual germs that will bear fruit only over the length of the tradition that derives from it. The “inevitable refraction” that time and distance cause then becomes legitimate and illuminating ”elaboration.” The historian, however, will remain ever attentive to the differences of historical situations. He will bring out, for example, the abyss that separates “the religious plane where the Covenant of Yahweh is set in motion with a few bands of pillaging Bedouins who want to insure the conquest of a coveted land and the transcendent plane where the Spirit

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of Jesus consecrates the union of love of the elect with the Father for an eternal life in his Son.” All his care will still go toward reconstituting the past as such. The latter is far from being without interest for the believer, and, as it is a question in this case of a unique history, it will be important that the one who retraces it does so as a believing historian—but this will still be as a historian. The “spiritual sense,” taken in its purest form, such as tradition most often provides it to us, is something quite different. It does not proceed from any retrospective curiosity. If it is still, in its own way, at least in one of its aspects, an interpretation of the Jewish past, it is so uniquely from the point of view of the Christian present. It is the Old Testament understood in the spirit of the New. Far from having to be wary of a finalistic view, it presupposes it: a view fully legitimate here because it is founded on the definitive Event, which in certain regards is already the “end of history.” But this finalistic view is necessarily a view of faith. The meaning that results from it is brought out only in the light of Christ and under the action of his Spirit, within his Church. The one who takes up the history of the religion of Israel in that way gives it the whole of its historical significance because he understands it as the Church’s history of salvation. But he no longer studies this salvation history as a historian, properly speaking, as a spectacle that he would make unroll before him: rather he would think of it as a believer—and not as a Jewish believer but as a Christian believer—in order to live from it. It is his own history; he cannot cut himself off from it. In the strong, precise sense of the word, this history interests him. It is a mystery that is still, identically, his own mystery. Thus he does not examine the Bible as a document or as a series of documents about the past; rather he “searches the Scriptures” in order to discover in them the thought and the intentions of God for him. The psychology of the ancient believers is not what attracts him. He knows very well, moreover, that everything he discovers in their writings could not be, as such, in their consciousness, since it was necessary for the Lion of the tribe of Judah to break open the seals of the Book. Of course the opposition that we are setting up in this way is a formal one. We will even admit it to be somewhat artificial. The exact significance of it will be gauged in what follows. Concretely, the spiritual sense of Scripture and the religious sense of the Bible coincide at many points. Ideally, they extend and interpenetrate each other. In a certain way, they need each other, the first in order not to lack a foundation, the second in order not to remain too narrow. This could be expressed by saying that, before interpreting the Old Testament spiritually by the New, it is indispensible to have understood the New historically by the Old. It is nonetheless of great importance—and that very phrase indicates it—not to confuse the disciplines. Their union is desirable, even necessary, but it is delicate. The spiritual interpretation, although it be an interpretation of history in an eminent sense, must not interfere indiscreetly or prematurely with the historical work. With even greater reason must it not take itself to be history, even religious history, or to substitute itself for history. Left to its own inclinations, it would, rather, be hostile to it. Even taking it as the most authentic tradition shows it to be, its use, while easily complementary to historical criticism, is not always also in agreement with the religious understanding of the ancient texts.

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The more a text is religiously beautiful and strong, the more a certain overly swift and overly narrow way of seeking a “spiritual sense” in it empties it of its strength and its beauty. Here, the critical method and the allegorical method, by combining their twofold exclusivism, would prove to be equally sterilizing. There is cause, then, for reacting against an excessively invasive or immediate practice of spiritual interpretation in the name of the religious value of the Old Testament considered in its literal sense, in its historical situations. This does not mean, moreover, that there is not at the heart of the doctrine of the spiritual sense—not such as we are able to reconstruct it ideally, but such as historically given, such as it emerges from its traditional usage—a certain tendency to depreciate the Jewish Scriptures. it generally points out the modus judaicus intelligendi (Jewish way of understanding) only in order to reject it with disdain. Let us not forget its Pauline origins. Now it results above all, in the Apostle, from a polemical attitude. Paul sets the two Testaments in opposition. He contrasts the letter that kills to the spirit that gives life. He contrasts the empty shadows to the fullness of Christ. He argues against the Jewish law. Thus, in following him, we could fear, not giving too much importance to the historical data by going beyond the literal meaning, but, on the contrary, giving them too little. One remark, however, allows us to avoid the danger. We need not take the Pauline opposition from the sole point of view of history. It was not set up between two ways of assessing the value of the ancient religion of Israel. When he turns towards the past, Paul magnifies the privileges of his race; he exalts the religion of his fathers. His whole polemical point is turned against the “Israel according to the flesh,” such as it claims to continue after having rejected the Messiah, or against the inconsistent Christians who still place their hope in practices that have been repealed. It is not the Old Covenant that is the object of his scorn: it is the covenant that has become old, the aged covenant, the covenant whose historical role is henceforth over. It does not have to do with “Jewish antiquities” but with Jewish obsolescence—which presupposes, as an already present antithesis, the Christian newness. He is aiming at “the letter,” not the literal sense. So, after him, we still see this opposition concentrate entirely on the law of Moses. Saint Augustine, for example, will speak of these judaizers who, “exstinguentes prophetiae spiritum vivum, ad carnalia opera sine vita, hoc est, sine intellectu spirituali remanserant” (extinguishing the living spirit of prophecy, had remained in carnal works without life, that is, without spiritual understanding). From this point of view, the crux of the problem concerns a legislation, a cult, not a history. And in the later tradition, the spiritual interpretation will nearly always in fact find its terrain of choice in the Pentateuch. It is precisely to the most material facts of Mosaism that it will prefer to apply itself. It will in any case always be the search for the meaning of things. It will thus analyze internal facts and objective institutions much more than it will elucidate feelings or thoughts, and it will usually do nothing to fill in the distance between the primary meaning of these institutions or of these facts such as it was understood and lived by the whole of the ancient Jews and the Christian meaning that they receive by way of signs. ***

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Must we be distressed by such forgetfulness, such misunderstandings? Less, perhaps than we might be tempted to be. Spiritual exegesis has long since accomplished an essential part of its task. It has contributed to the expression of the Christian mystery and to the building up of the Church. It could not be reconstructed today in all its fullness. As long as its results are not denied, the damage is not fatal. It would only be important to recall that in the spiritual order, it would be an illusion to believe that anything could ever be acquired absolutely, once and for all. The Church herself is maintained in her faith only by the ever-current and ceaselessly active presence of the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, the genre has been cultivated for so long a time and it has grown so many ramifications that, in the eyes of many, its life force seems exhausted. In any case, there are certainly better things to be done today, as Father Lagrange said, than to “rack one’s brains to find new spiritual meanings” or to “make a card file of the spiritual meanings of the Fathers so as to give to the public a modern historical commentary after the fashion of Cornelius a Lapide.” Nevertheless, this does not mean that patristic exegesis was but a temporary substitute for scientific exegesis, which alone is true and complete. It does not mean that its whole function was to “maintain the Bible in a very pure and lofty sphere of ideas and sentiments while waiting for minds to be completely ripe for the understanding of the past and the direct explanation of the texts.” Despite our admiration for Dom Wilmart, we cannot help finding in such remarks a slight whiff of modern smugness. The believer will always seasrch for more in the Bible than “the understanding of the past.” Neither do we think it expedient to invite Christian exegesis, as others have seemed to do, to “cast aside the language of allegorism” since it might be misunderstood. Similarly, if it is incontestable that the rules of interpretation followed by the Fathers “were very often only temporary means, long since obsolete, that served to preserve the treasure of Scripture” and that “current exegesis is, in certain respects, better equipped“ than theirs, it is also permissable to think that the latter, in return, had a kind of connaturality with Scripture that our faith does not rediscover without difficulty.It is Newman who assures us of this: This age is a practical age; the age of the Fathers was more contemplative; their theology, consequently, had a deeper, more mystical, more subtle character about it, than we with our present habits of thought can readily enter into. We lay greater stress than they on proofs from definitive verses of Scripture, or what are familiarly called texts, and we build up a system upon them, they rather recognised a certain truth lying hid under the tenor of the sacred text as a whole, and showing itself more or less in this verse or that as it might be. We look on the letter of Scripture more as a foundation, they as an organ of the truth. Such a difference is quite allowable, or rather natural or even necessary. The Fathers might have traditionay information of the general drift of the inspired text which we have not. Moderns argue from what alone remains to them; they are able to move more freely. Moreoever, a certain high moral state of mind, which times of persecution alone create, may be necessary for a due exercise of mystical interpretation. To attempt it otherwise than from the heart, would be a profanation; better not attempt it at all.

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For the reasons that Newman says—the last is quite particularly applicable in the case of Origen—and for others that emerge from what we have said above, we will thus avoid, with regard to the ancients, an excessive enthusiasm that would lead us to imitate their methods. Most certainly, we believe that through everything that is, in them, only the fruit of human ingenuity, respectable but contingent tradition, a great idea emerged that deserves to remain; far more, at the heart of their exegesis dwells a sacred element that belongs to the treasure of the faith. In a matter so delicate and so difficult to discern, everyone is free to draw the boundaries between the zones of the ephemeral and the eternal, of the divine or the human. What is certain is that our own exegesis, even when spiritual, could not take on exactly the same forms as theirs. That is as much due to progress achieved as with our own incapacities. The Fathers are the witnesses of a springtime, of an adolescence—and that is a privilege that cannot be taken from them. But we must manage, in return, to reprersent maturity. “The holy Doctors, despite all their commentaries and all that could be added to them, never succeeded in thoroughly explaining the language of the Holy Spirit; what is ordinarily said about it is only the least part of it.” The Word that God addresses to each generation,while always the same, is infinitely fruitful. So it is not possible to describe with precision all the forms in which the Holy Spirit will nourish the Church with it. The Spirit, ever faithful and ever the same, is always unforeseen as well. Several characteristics, however, appear. Of course, our spiritual exegesis, supposing it is revived, will remain christological, purely christological—taking care now as always not to neglect any of the dimensions of Christ. Unlike an unintelligent science whose ravages have often been deplorable, it will strive always to be sensitive to that “marvelous depth” of the divine words which inspired in Saint Augustine a love mixed with dread. But we will pay more strict attention to what that exegesis never seems to learn about the weaknesses of criticism. By that means, without discarding the fundamental principles of the ancients, we will have often gotten away from their practice and from the justifications they imagined for it. We will imitate their usual modesty more than their processes. No less attentive than they themselves were to the Mystery signified in the historicity of the figure or, at least, more aware of the approach that the precise knowledge of that historicity requires. And we will strive to unite our modern “historical sense” to the profound “sense of history” that their spiritual exegesis was able to bring out. Better, too, than they, we will be able to “dispose of the anthropomorphism according to which, in order to arrange some historical events in figures, God would have had to calculate a subtle plan of contingent details”; we will be better able to see that in reality,” by means of the very weft with which he wove it, be made of the Old Testament an image of the New and of both a type of glory.” In other words, a simplified symbolism, generally more sober, could receive new strength through a stronger connection with history. Not that a simple reflection on this providential history must ever replace it; but it will be like the root of that symbolism and willl constitute its underground unity. Perhaps, too, we will see a more attentive glance cast on the eternal significance of the great biblical episodes, always in the light of the Christian mystery, and we will learn, in a way, “to know better the eternal youth

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of the old text.” Then, through a resurgence that is not at all impossible, perhaps the symbolic function of our understanding will be deployed anew and will produce new fruits in the unforeseeable freedom of thr Spirit—the essential and final criterion ever remaining the anaology of faith, which, as we will never forget, is an ecclesial criterion. Any attempt at pure and simple reconstitution would thus seem no more desirable than an overbold anticipation. It would be mere posturing. Nor is is seriously to be feared. To go to the root of the question,it is in a very different direction that the spirit of the age carries us. To say that it repudiates or disintegrates any kind of symbolism is again to stop at appearances. Rather, in a thousand ways, it establishes an antisymbolism. Along this line, instead of seeing angels in the publicans, as Origen did, we would see publicans—or some other wholly human reality—in the angels … Running counter to the Christian ages and the way of the ancient Greeks, who found in the stories of their gods an allegory for the natural forces or faculties of the soul, we are threatened with a totalitarian “earth-boundedness” and humanism. In the diversity of their systems, psychologists, sociologists, and metaphysicians conspire to impose such views on us. In a word, our great temptation is to make God the symbol of man, his image objectified. Through this dreadful inversion, all biblical allegory, along with faith itself, would obviously be taken away with a single stroke. This inverted symbolism is not, moreover, without giving witness itself to that symbolical function inherent in the human mind to which we have just alluded. Such a function may have long been misunderstood by a rationalist, narrow, and superficial doctrine or mentality. In the age of “lights,” only certain kinds of seers, a William Law, a Hamann, indeed a Svedenborg, seemed to support the practice of it. Today, it has been rediscovered everywhere, on all planes of being and thought. To tell the truth, even in the most classical philosophy, it had never been completely stifled. It was at work in the Monadology of Leibniz, in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, in Auguste Comte’s Subjective Synthesis. It played a considerable role in Hegel and his disciples and also in Proudhon. Quite close to our own time, we see it exploited, from many different points of view, by the works of Freud and Jung, of Levy-Bruhl and Ehade, by the analysis of Sartre … And Jean Lacroix recently wrote: “What is most profound in the spiritual history of mankind is the comprehension of the sign, and all great philosophy is a semiology; to discover the cipher of the world and to be able thus to reveal the language of it is the object of man’s fundamental desire. And mysticism is, without doubt, first of all the sense of signs.” These are but examples. There is no question of placing any of these latter names in relation with scriptural symbolism. But they evoke a certain climate of thought that is less unfavorable than previously to its understanding. And as this climate is developing at a time when, on the other hand, the works of biblical criticism and history are rapidly expanding and when the scientific methods in exegesis are enjoying a fully recognized and established freedom in the Church, there is reason to hope for a fortuitous convergence in the near future that will benefit the study and meditation of the Book. We can hope this especially since a very lively taste for the Bible is taking hold of the Christian elite. “The Bible,” wrote Father Louis Bouyer, “is no longer savored or

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understood because spiritual exegesis is misunderstood, and, even more, unknown.” But the time is perhaps near when this diagnosis will be overtaken by a less pessimistic judgment. The Bible will again be savored and understood because on the foundation of demonstrated science, a soundly spiritual exegesis will again be widespread. We must be grateful to those who will have been its heralds: today a Leon Bloy, a Peguy, today especially, a Claudel. We would be wrong to deny their message on the pretext that it is a question of poets, that they are too unaware of simple history, or even that they prove unfair with regard to criticism. They have nonetheless given a salutary impetus. They have helped to renew the most authentic tradition. They could not be expected to speak as specialists of exegesis any more than of theology or spirituallity. But this kind of testimony, whatever might be the weaknesses or excesses of it, reminds the specialists in an opportune way that the Bible will never belong to them as so many other ancient documents do. It also verifies the law according to which some values are discovered or rediscovered in all their force only outside professional circles. Many professionals are clear-sighted enough to recognize it, humble enough not to be shocked by it.

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10 Krister Stendahl Selections from “Biblical Theology, Contemporary”*

K

rister Stendahl (1921–2008) was a Swedish theologian and New Testament scholar. In addition to his scholarly work, he was an important institutional figure at Harvard Divinity School for many years, the bishop of Stockholm, and a major international figure in Christian ecumenism and interfaith relations. It is uncommon for articles in reference works to attain classic status. Usually only books and scholarly essays rise to that level of importance and generate discussion decades after they were published. Yet, due to its thoughtfulness and rhetorical power, Stendahl’s treatment of biblical theology (1962) continues to stimulate thinking even today. The article is built around a key distinction that Stendahl phrases in a simple and memorable way: what a biblical text meant in its original context is not the same thing that it means now. Determining the meaning of a biblical passage is the task of biblical theology, and is an operation that is purely descriptive, not necessarily normative. The biblical theologian explicates the theology of the text, regardless of how it relates to his own views. The subsequent task of reflecting on what the text might mean in the present falls to the systematic theologian and the preacher. Their job is to begin with an accurate rendering of the sense of a biblical passage and then to translate that into a different setting. So the text must undergo a hermeneutical transposition as the focus of consideration shifts from descriptive analysis to normative re-formulation. Stendahl comments briefly but insightfully on some of the materials featured earlier in this reader. He notes that it was the History of Religions School that set the stage for his descriptive-historical mandate for biblical studies (see chapter 4). On the other hand, he discusses both Barth (chapter 5) and Bultmann (chapter 6) as figures lying on the opposite end of the interpretive spectrum, for neither of them, in their handling of Reading consists of A1–3 and B1, 4 only; thus A4–6 and B2–3 have been omitted.

*

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the Bible, strictly observes the firm line of demarcation between past and present. In Stendahl’s judgment, their engagement with the text suffers because they elide this key distinction: elements of the Bible are inevitably left behind, and not presented, when its exposition is taken over by foreign categories of thought. Readers of this piece should ask themselves whether the author is being fair to Barth and Bultmann as well as how they might respond to him. If it is important to hold apart past and present, at least as an initial step in the reading process, what are the advantages and disadvantages of doing so in the way that Stendahl does with his frequently quoted means/meant distinction? What guidelines does Stendahl offer for theologians and preachers in negotiating the transition of the biblical message into the present? What counts as doing that well or poorly?

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A

historical survey of major contributions to the field of biblical theology, such as in Biblical Theology, History of, makes it more than obvious that there is no one definition of this field on which biblical scholars can unanimously agree. It is true that a closer analysis of contemporary contributions to the field may well show that some of the older definitions are obsolete, as well as bring to light certain common tendencies in aim and method; but it will not eliminate the tensions between different conceptions of what a biblical theology is or should be. Such diversity was to be expected, since very different theological and philosophical presuppositions are necessarily involved. And yet, in spite of these differences, recent biblical studies have gravitated with an unprecedented enthusiasm toward topics and problems which undoubtedly fall within the biblical theological field. This seems to be due to the fact that a new stage has been set for biblical theology, as a result of a new emphasis upon its descriptive task. Since consideration of this task has proved far more suggestive and creative than is often recognized, there is good reason to consider the nature of the new descriptive biblical theology and then to move toward its implications for other aspects of theology. This can be done only by way of hermeneutics. Thus we arrive at the following outline: A. The descriptive task 1. A new stage set for biblical theology 2. What it meant and what it means 3. Three approaches to NT theology a. Barth b. Bultmann c. Cullmann d. Conclusions 4. Is a descriptive NT theology possible? 5. The descriptive approach and the OT 6. “Sacred history” and the unity of the Bible B. The hermeneutic question 1. As raised by a descriptive biblical theology 2. Alternative answers to the hermeneutic 3. The significance of “canon” for biblical theology 4. The preacher and biblical theology

1. The descriptive task 1. A new stage set for biblical theology. The alleged biblical basis for what has been called “liberal theology” in its classical form (the use of the term “liberal” in this sense, referring to the dominant theology c. 1900, does not imply that

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many more recent types of theology are not just as “liberal” in their method and presuppositions)—i.e. the view that the OT is a witness to the evolution of a more and more ethical monotheism and that the gospels are biographies of Jesus as the even more refined teacher of the Golden Rule, the fatherhood of God, and the eternal value of the individual—the alleged biblical basis of this view was not shattered by the conservatives, but by the extreme radicals of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule (history-of-religions school). They could show, on the basis of the comparative material, that such a picture of Jesus or of the OT prophets was totally impossible from a historical point of view and that it told more about the ideals of bourgeois Christianity in the late nineteenth century than about the carpenter from Nazareth or the little man from Tekoa. What emerged out of the studies of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule was a new picture of the men, the ideas, and the institutions of biblical history. Those elements and traits, which did strike modern man as crude, primitive, cultic, and even magical, were now given equal and often greater emphasis than those which happened to appeal to enlightened Western taste. The “peril of modernizing Jesus”— to use Henry J. Cadbury’s phrase—was fully recognized. Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer made a forceful plea for a most abstruse and appalling eschatology as the actual setting for Jesus and his followers; H. Gunkel, H. Gressmann, and S. Mowinckel placed the OT back in the matrix of Near Eastern myth and cult. Johannes Pedersen applied V. Groenbech’s studies of human self-understanding in old Nordic religion to an extensive study of OT anthropology, where cherished distinctions between soul and body, magic and religion, cult and ethics, individual and collective, were thoroughly intermingled and lost much of their meaning. It became a scholarly ideal to creep out of one’s Western and twentieth-century skin and identify oneself with the feelings and thought-patterns of the past. The distance between biblical times and modern times was stressed, and the difference between biblical thought and systematic theology became much more than that of diversification over against systematization or of concrete exemplification over against abstract propositions. What emerged was a descriptive study of biblical thought—empathetic in the sense that it was beyond sympathy or antipathy. This was actually a new phenomenon in biblical studies, and yet it came as a mature outgrowth of the historical and critical study of the Scriptures. It differed in three ways from earlier contributions of historical criticism: a)  The strait jacket of doctrinaire evolutionism—in Darwinistic as well as in Hegelian terms—was considerably loosened. While development and stages were recognized and noticed, the later stages were not preconceived as progression (e.g. from priests to prophets) or regression (e.g. from Jesus to Paul). Each period and each ideology was given enough attention to be granted a careful description on its own terms. b) The question of fact—i.e. whether, e.g. the march through the Red Sea or the resurrection of Jesus had actually taken place as described—was not any more the only one which absorbed the historian. Now there was more concern about what the function and the significance of such an item or of such a message as “He is risen” might have been to the writers and readers (or hearers) of the biblical records. Form

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criticism and Sitz im Leben became the catchwords for students of the documents of temple, synagogue, and church. c) The question about relevance for present-day religion and faith was waived, or consciously kept out of sight. This statement will be, perhaps, the strongest reminder of how biblical theology was swallowed up or threatened by a history of biblical thought or a history of biblical religion. This historicism or antiquarianism, with its lack of interest in relevance, has been challenged on many scores by modern writers. And yet it remains a fact that modern biblical theology would be quite inexplicable were it not for the fact that the religionsgeschichtliche Schule had drastically widened the hiatus between our time and that of the Bible, between West and East, between the questions self-evidently raised in modern minds and those presupposed, raised, and answered in the Scriptures. Thereby a radically new stage was set for biblical interpretation. The question of meaning was split up in two tenses: “What did it mean?” and “What does it mean?” These questions were now kept apart long enough for the descriptive task to be considered in its own right. 2. What it meant and what it means. To liberals and conservatives alike, this distinction was not sharply in focus prior to the religionsgeschichtliche Schule. We may be justified in taking Harnack’s What Is Christianity? as the most influential popular summary of liberal interpretation of the NT. It is not accidental that Harnack, as Bultmann points out in his Introduction to a reprint of the work (1950), “failed to realize the importance of the so-called religionsgeschichtliche Schule and never truly became sympathetic with it.” Albert Schweitzer had brought this aspect of Harnack’s interpretation to bear upon the problem now under consideration when he said in The Quest of the Historical Jesus: “Harnack, in his ‘What Is Christianity?’ almost entirely ignores the contemporary limitations of Jesus’ teaching, and starts out with a Gospel which carries him down without difficulty, to the year 1899.” The apologetic intentions of the “liberals” should not be forgotten. In the light of later development, “liberal” came to stand for the “leftists” in the theological assembly. By the turn of the century this was not so. The liberals understood themselves as the mediating party who, often with a deep concern for Christianity and its fature role in our culture and with a genuine piety, refuted the radical assaults of D. F. Strauss and others. But the way in which they carried on their apologetic task made them poor historians of religion. Their methods were basically the same as those used by the conservatives. Both were convinced that the Bible contained revelation which could be grasped in the clean form of eternal truth unconditioned and uncontaminated by historical limitations. The difference was only one of degree. While the orthodox interpreters found this revelation in the whole of scripture and systematized it by harmonization and by interpreting the less easily fitting by those passages which were hand in glove with their own systems, the liberals arrived at the pure revelation by way of more or less drastic reductions. This reductionist approach was often carried out by literary criticism, but once the ipsissima verba (“very words”) of the prophets or of Jesus were established, these words happened to square well with the ideals of the modern age. Thus the tension between the past and the present

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meaning had been overcome before it could create any problems for interpretation. And this happened because the liberals were convinced that the teachings of the Bible were meaningful for modern man—just as the orthodox claimed the same for a vastly more challenging amount of biblical teaching. For the liberals the nucleus of revelation had to be that which could be hailed as relevant and acceptable to modern man. The resistance to the religionsgeschichtliche Schule was openly or unconsciously aimed against its disregard for theological meaning and relevance. By and large, Gunkel’s Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit, Mowinckel’s Psalmenstudien, and Schweitzer’s Quest appeared on the scene with no immediate relation to the ongoing theological discussion. Schweitzer’s work did actually contain an Epilogue in which the author made a cautious attempt to draw out the ramifications of the thoroughgoing eschatology of Jesus for theology as well as for the life of the believer, but the return is rather small. When facing the shocking distance back to the Jesus of the gospels, Schweitzer finally takes refuge in an expectant mysticism where the Christ of faith comes to us as “One unknown,” yet One who in an ineffable mystery lets man experience who He is. In the German edition this final sentence, of the whole volume symbolically ends with ellipsis dots. This ellipsis formed, however, a challenge, the response to which is the vigorous interest in biblical theology starting in the 1920’s and showing no slackening tendencies, toward the end of the 1950’s. Once freed from the anachronistic interpretations of their predecessors, and forced to accept the hiatus between the ideas and ideals in the biblical material, the theologically minded student of the Scriptures slowly found a new and deeper relevance in what the religionsgeschichtliche Schule described for him as the pre-Westernized meaning of sayings and events. In the broader context of cultural climate this tendency had its obvious similarities in the taste for the primitive, with its crude vigor in art, music, and. literature. It was akin to Rudolf Otto’s reevaluation of religious phenomena in his study of holiness. It had striking parallels in the field of historical theology, where, e.g. Luther’s own words and intentions were sharply contrasted with the teaching of seventeenth-century Lutheranism, the sympathies of the scholars always siding with the former. But it was primarily the experience of the distance and the strangeness of biblical thought as a creative asset, rather than as a destructive, and burdensome liability. Without this new and nonmodernizing look at the Bible, Karl Barth’s programmatic commentary on Romans or Rudolf Bultmann’s Theology of the NT—or his book written in 1926 on Jesus—would be inexplicable. O. Cullmann’s Christ and Time, as well as his more recent NT Christology, are the typical examples of a somewhat different result of the same ideal of historical distance. In OT studies, W. F. Albright’s From the Stone Age to Christianity and G. E. Wright’s God Who Acts, as well as W. Eichrodt’s and G. von Rad’s OT theologies, are all inspired by the same tension between the mind of a Semitic past and the thought of modern man. Yet most of these writers launch strong attacks on the “historicism” of the “historian of religion.” By these terms they do, however, usually refer to other elements in the religionsgeschichtliche Schule than

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the one to which attention has been drawn here—viz., the descriptive element, and its awareness of the distinction between what it meant and what it means. 3. Three approaches to NT theology. This distinction between past and present meaning has its specific problems for OT theology, and we may consequently be wise in first trying to clarify the issue in relation to NT theology. We may for this purpose go to three contemporaries who exemplify three different types of NT theology: Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and Oscar Cullmann. They are all aware of what we have called the distance between the centuries. Especially Bultmann’s relation to the radical tradition—over against the liberal—in biblical studies is obvious—e.g. in his references to D. F. Strauss. The question raised by the distance should thus be faced in its most radical form: Do these old documents have any meaning for us—except as sources for our knowledge of a small segment of first-century life and thought, or as means for a nostalgic visit to the first era of Christian history? If they have a meaning in the present tense and sense, on what ground do they have this meaning? a.  Barth. In the Preface to the second edition of his commentary on Romans, Barth argues for the exegesis of Luther and Calvin over against that of men like Jülicher and Lietzmann. The former are the only ones who really have tried to “understand” Paul, since, e.g. Calvin, “having first established what stands in the text, sets himself to rethink the whole material and to wrestle with it, till the walls which separate the sixteenth century from the first become transparent, i.e. till Paul speaks there and the man of the sixteenth century hears here, till the conversation between the document and the reader is totally concentrated on the subject-matter, which cannot be a different one in the first and sixteenth century.” The concentration on the subject matter (God, Jesus, grace, etc.) bridges the gap between the centuries, and it does so since they cannot but be the same. This identity in the subject matter guarantees the meaningfulness of the Pauline writings. They must speak about what Calvin (or the modern interpreter) knows as the subject matter. This is apparently so since God, Christ, and all of revelation stand above history. Thereby the tension between the first century and ours is resolved, or rather transformed, into a theological category of “otherness.” It is also significant to note that Barth speaks as if it were a very simple thing to establish what Paul actually meant in his own terms. To say that the Reformers interpreted Paul by equating the problem of the Judaizers and the Torah in Paul with the problem of work-righteousness in late medieval piety and that this ingenious translation or application of Pauline theology may be 80 per cent correct but left 20 per cent of Paul inexplicable—and consequently distorted in a certain sense the true picture of Pauline thought—to say this is to call attention to a problem which could not be detected, let alone criticized, by Barth or any truly Barthian exegete. Thus biblical theology along this line is admittedly incapable of enough patience and enthusiasm for keeping alive the tension between what the text meant and what it means. There are no criteria by which they can be kept apart; what is intended as a commentary turns out to be a theological tractate, expanding in contemporary terms what Paul should have said about the subject matter as understood by the commentator.

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When the term “biblical theology” is used of works where this method is applied, it does not designate anything basically different from systematic theology, except that its systematic task is so defined as to make the Bible central in its work. Thus it may be convenient for classification within the realm of systematic theology to speak of this theology as “biblical” rather than philosophical. But from the point of view of biblical studies such a theology is not automatically “more biblical” than other types of systematic theology. b.  Bultmann. On the last page of Bultmann’s Theology of the NT we find a statement (in italics below), apparently made in passing, which is worth noting in relation to the question if or why the biblical documents have any meaning for the present. He places the reader before an alternative: “Either the writings of the NT can be interrogated as the ‘sources’ to reconstruct a picture of primitive Christianity as a phenomenon of the historical past, or the reconstruction stands in the service of the interpretation of the NT writings under the presupposition that they have something to say for the present.” Bultmann sides with the second alternative, and in so doing he takes for granted that the NT has such meaning. For Bultmann, as for Barth, the common denominator of meaning is the subject matter; but for Bultmann there is only one subject matter which is valid: the self-understanding as it expresses itself in the NT and as it is experienced through human history until the present time. This gives to his NT theology a strikingly uneven character. In dealing with the message of Jesus, the kerygma of the early church and its development into the second century, his method is by and large descriptive; but in the exposition of Pauline and Johannine material—and this is almost half the whole work—the tone and even the method are different, since these writings lend themselves so much more easily to anthropological interpretation. Yet nobody could blame Bultmann for not having given reasons for what he is doing. Most of his later writings have centered around his plea for demythologizing, and it has become more and more obvious that this to Bultmann also implies a dehistoricizing of the NT. His attack on the historicism of NT interpretation (i.e. the use of the NT as a “source” for our knowledge of a historical past, be it the historical Jesus or the life and teaching of early Christianity) is centered in his emphasis on the NT as a message, a kerygma. The intent of NT theological utterances is not to state a doctrine (as for orthodoxy) and not to give the material for a concept (as treated by the historians). It is to challenge man in his own self-understanding, and consequently “the act of thinking must not be divorced from the act of living.” When the NT kerygma witnesses to historical events (as in 1 Cor. 15.3–8), these “events” are of little significance as events; what counts is to recreate their effect on man’s self-understanding. Thus—in Bultmann’s own view—his NT theology becomes “theology” explicitly only where it clarifies the “believing self-understanding in its reference to the kerygma.” As such—and only as such—has the NT “something to say to the present.” Only on such terms does Bultmann find it possible to do justice to the intent of the NT. c.  Cullmann. In Cullmann, perhaps the most productive contemporary writer in the field of NT theology, we find a very different approach to biblical theology. If history is

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mute to Bultmann for reasons of hermeneutics and philosophy—a view which colors Bultmann’s exegesis to the extent that he interprets NT eschatology as implying the end of history in Christ—Cullmann finds the key to NT theology in its understanding of time. Most discussions of Cullmann’s Christ and Time have centered around a criticism of his distinction of linear time (biblical) versus circular time (Greek) and his idea of Christ as the center of time, but if these interpretations were refuted, the thrust of Cullmann’s argument is still unchallenged when it urges us to recognize how the categories of time and history, rather than essence, nature, and eternal or existential truth, are the ones within which the NT moves (cf. Cullmann’s “Le mythe dans les écrits du NT,” Numen, I (1954), 120–35). Cullmann has thereby recaptured the mood of thought of the NT writers and stays within it long enough to work out its implication for different aspects of NT thought. On the other hand, it is not quite clear how Cullmann understands the relation between such a descriptive biblical theology in its firstand second-century terms and its translation into our present age; his hermeneutic discussions have nothing of the radical penetration of Bultmann’s. His work is basically confined to the descriptive task, and when Bultmann could say about Cullmann—as he does about E. Stauffer’s NT theology—that he “transforms theology into a religious philosophy of history,” Cullmann’s answer would be that NT theology is, whether we like it or not, a religious philosophy of history, and that he finds it difficult to see how this historical dimension can be translated away in any presentation of the gospel to the present age. Such a discussion between Cullmann, Stauffer, and Bultmann would, however, be totally fruitless, for the following reasons: (a) All three take for granted that the NT has “meaning,” but while Bultmann discusses from the vantage point of his own motivation for such a meaning, Cullmann (and Stauffer) have not clarified their answer to why or how they consider the NT as meaningful for the present age. Because of this lack of clarification, their works are read by many—perhaps most—readers as being on the same level of present meaning as Bultmann’s or Barth’s highly “translated” interpretations; and there are indications that they do not mind such a use of their works. A close study of Stauffer’s NT theology makes it quite clear, however, that its method remains strictly descriptive; this is the more obvious in his extensive and impressive use of non-canonical intertestamental material as equally significant to picture the mood of NT thought. Cullmann’s Christology follows suit in this respect, (b) Consequently, Bultmann’s critique of such an approach should be the opposite to what it actually is. He could charge his opponents with not having seen the need for transforming or translating the NT religious philosophy of history into a contemporary theology, a need which he himself has epitomized in his quest for demythologizing. This would force his opponents to clarify why they consider such a dehistoricizing translation unnecessary or arbitrary. (c) Bultmann’s case for the end of history in Christ and Cullmann’s for ongoing history as the essence of NT eschatology have to be tested on the descriptive level. On this level a meaningful discussion can be carried on. If Cullmann seems to be much closer to the truth, Bultmann’s interpretation may remain valid as a demythologized translation. But the “validity” of such an interpretation

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hinges then on the validity of the hermeneutic principles of the interpreter, and is of no direct consequence to the descriptive task of biblical theology. In the present state of biblical studies, Cullmann’s (and Stauffer’s) contribution reminds us of Schweitzer, who felt himself compelled to present as forceful an eschatological picture of Jesus as he found in the sources, in spite of the fact that he did not see too clearly what its theological ramifications might be. This is the same as saying that these works carry the signs of hope which belong to every vigorous contribution to descriptive biblical theology, in spite of its hermeneutic unclarity. The pitfall for both the scholars and the common reader is the ambiguity by which the descriptive method is allowed to transcend its own limitations. (Stauffer later moved on to a quite different methodology, by which he claims to have established a new basis for the “historical Jesus.”) d.  Conclusions. It thus appears that the tension between “what it meant” and “what it means” is of a competitive nature, and that when the biblical theologian becomes primarily concerned with the present meaning, he implicitly (Barth) or explicitly (Bultmann) loses his enthusiasm or his ultimate respect for the descriptive task. And yet the history of the discipline indicates that all types of biblical theology depend on the progress of this descriptive biblical theology, to which the contribution of the theologically irrelevant representatives of the relgionsge-schichtliche Schule is strikingly great. From the very beginning of the use of the term “biblical theology” in the seventeenth century, there has been the tension between the contemporary (be it scholasticism, conservatism, liberalism, or existentialism) and the biblical, but it is in the light of historical criticism that this tension has become clarified as one between two centuries with drastically different modes of thought. Once this difference became great enough to place the Bible further away from us—to the liberal theology the historical Jesus was closer to modern man than was the Christ confessed in the dogma of the church—the need for “translation” became a real one. Bultmann’s plea for demythologizing—regardless of the way in which he carries it out—is certainly here to stay. But this makes it the more imperative to have the “original” spelled out with the highest degree of perception in its own terms. This is the nucleus of all biblical theology, and the way from this descriptive task to an answer about the meaning in the present cannot be given in the same breath on an ad hoc basis. It presupposes an extensive and intensive competence in the field of hermeneutics. With the original in hand, and after due clarification of the hermeneutic principles involved, we may proceed toward tentative answers to the question of the meaning here and now. But where these three stages become intermingled, there is little hope for the Bible to exert the maximum of influence on theology, church life, and culture. How much of the two last stages should belong to the discipline of biblical studies or to what extent they call for teamwork with the disciplines of theology and philosophy is a practical question, a question which in itself indicates the nature of the problem. If the three stages are carelessly intermingled, the theology as well as the preaching in our churches becomes a mixed or even an inarticulate language.

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2. The hermeneutic question 1. As raised by a descriptive biblical theology. A more thorough familiarity with the net result of such a descriptive approach as the one outlined above raises the hermeneutic question in a somewhat new form. No period of Christian theology has been as radically exposed to a consistent attempt to relive the theology of its first adherents. The ideal of an empathetic understanding of the first century without borrowing categories from later times has never been an ideal before, nor have the comparative sources for such an adventure been as close at hand and as well analyzed. There have always been bits and pieces of an appeal to the original meaning over against different later dogmas and practices of the church. The School of Antioch fought the School of Alexandria by such means; the Reformers argued with the papal theologians, and the Anabaptists with the Reformers, on such a basis; the pietists criticized the orthodox scholastics in the same fashion, and the liberal theologians claimed the same type of arguments against the evangelicals, etc. But never before was there a frontal nonpragmatic, nonapologetic attempt to describe OT or NT faith and practice from within its original presuppositions, and with due attention to its own organizing principles, regardless of its possible ramifications for those who live by the Bible as the Word of God. The descriptive approach has led us far beyond a conglomeration of diverse ideas, the development of which we may be able to trace. We are now ushered right into a world of biblical thought which deserves the name “theology” just as much as do the thoughts of Augustine, Thomas, Calvin, and Schleiermacher. The translation of its content cannot any more be made piecemeal. The relation to the historical record is not any more one where systematic theology takes the raw material of nonsystematic data of revelation and gives to it systematic structure and theological stature. The relation is not one between a witness of a theologically innocent faith and a mature and sophisticated systematic theology. It is a relation between two highly developed types of theology. On the one hand, theologies of history, from which all statements about God, Christ, man, righteousness, and salvation derive their meaning and connotations, in terms of their function within the plan and on the plane of history; and on the other hand, theologies of an ontological sort, where Christianity is understood in terms of the nature of God, Christ, man, etc. Within this pattern of nature or essence Christian theology has always tried to do justice to the historical element in the biblical material. But under the pressure of the thought-pattern inherent in the Western theological approach, biblical eschatology— i.e. the matrix of NT thought—was taken care of in a “last chapter” of systematic theology dealing with the “last-things.” Thereby the very structure of biblical thought was transformed and its eschatology inactivated. In more recent Protestant theology there have been serious attempts to do more justice to eschatology as the overarching category of systematic theology and the motif of the “two aeons,” this age and the age to come, has been stressed—e.g. by

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the Lundensian theologians. But once again the outcome is a radical transformation, in that the aeons became internalized as levels of existence and experience in the mind and life of every Christian according to the formula “At the same time justified and sinner.” The life on the border between the two dispensations as Paul knew them is lifted out of its historical context and becomes a timeless description of an inner dialectic of the Christian existence. The focal point for a theological preservation of the historical dimension in the biblical material was found quite naturally in the stern insistence on the Incarnation in Jesus Christ. But in this process the Incarnation was more and more intensively developed in terms of its ramifications for the nature of Jesus Christ, while its original connotations were far more centered in the chronological pattern of the Johannine Prologue: God had now come to men in Jesus Christ to tabernacle among them in a glory which outshone that of Moses and the law. The situation could perhaps be best analyzed in the realm of NT Christology, where significant strands of tradition display what later on came to be branded and banned as adoptionism—i.e. the concept of Jesus, who was made the Christ in his Baptism, or in his Resurrection, or by his Ascension. In the light of later doctrinal development it is easy to see why such a Christology was deemed heretical. But there is no indication that there was any conscious tension or argument, within the NT and in its time, between an adoptionist position and one which spoke of Jesus Christ in terms of pre-existence or virgin birth. This was apparently not a matter of conflict. It became so only when the biblical witness was forced to yield the answer to the question about the nature of Jesus Christ, and when this very question became the shibboleth of true doctrine. As long as the question remains within the theology of history, it does not ask what Jesus Christ is or how human and divine nature go together in him. It centers around the question: Who is he? Is he the Messiah or isn’t he? In such a context an adoptionist answer coincides for all practical purposes with that of the pre-existence type. But once this framework is lost, the answers come miles apart from one another as contradictory, and the kerygmatic statements in Acts 2.32–7 are a sheer liability to the orthodox theologian when they hail Jesus as the one whom God has made both Lord and Christ after his crucifixion, placing him on his right side as the enthroned Messiah in heaven, whence he now could and did pour out the promised Holy Spirit as a sizable down payment of the age to come. It is perhaps even more striking when Acts 3.18–21 urges repentance in order that times of refreshment might come from God and that he might send the aforetime-appointed Messiah, namely Jesus, who is now retained in heaven. Here the Parousia is really not the Second Coming of later theology. There is only one coming of the Messiah, the one at the end of time. We are used to considering the First Coming—i.e. the earthly ministry of Jesus, as a clear, uncomplicated “coming” of the Messiah, but recognize how many complications arose out of the interpretation of the Second Coming. To the theology manifested in Acts 3, the problem seems to have been the opposite one. The Parousia—what we call the Second Coming—was no “problem”; it was part of the Jewish expectations concerning the age to come. The

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problem was rather in the opposite direction: To what extent was the First Coming, the earthly ministry of Jesus, a real coming? How much of an anticipation did it imply, and to what extent did Jesus exercise messianic power within it? Once he was hailed as the Messiah enthroned in heaven, it was clear to the gospel writers that Jesus was the Christ, but there are enough indications left in the Synoptic gospels to show that he was so by inference from what had happened after Calvary, and by references about what he was to become. Thus the pattern of history in this type of NT theology sheds new light on the discussion about the messianic consciousness of Jesus. Those who deny such a consciousness and credit the church with having made Jesus their Messiah overlook the nature of this theology of history, for which there needed to be no distortion of facts in the belief that Jesus was made the Messiah in his ascension and enthronement. Those who claim a straight messianic consciousness in Jesus overlook the evidence that the messiahship in Jesus’ earthly ministry has a strong futuristic note. But from the vantage point of post-Resurrection/Ascension the church confesses: Jesus is the Messiah now, and consequently he was the Messiah then—but he had not really become so by then, nor is he yet the Messiah here on earth as he is to be at the Parousia. Such an attempt to catch the theological meaning as found in Acts 2–3 gives no sense to one who inquires into the nature of Jesus Christ, and it sounds strange to a “yes-or-no” approach to the problem of the messianic consciousness of Jesus. But it was highly significant to those who were eager to understand where they were in the messianic timetable of Jewish and Christian eschatology. He who changes the question can only be misled or confused by using the biblical text as a direct answer to it. Texts and problems have been chosen from some of the highly controversial areas of NT exegesis only as illustrations to clarify the problem before us. The exegesis involved may well require correction or refutation, but the thrust of the descriptive method would always be of the same nature. The hermeneutic problem of biblical theology therefore centers in the clash between two types of theology. Each type includes a wide variety of alternatives. On the biblical side there are the different types of OT theology, some contemporary with one another, some later developments of earlier strata. In the NT it is somewhat easier to discern a Matthean, Markan, Lukan, Johannine, or Pauline theology, etc. But they all live within the presupposition of their respective centuries, and they all answer questions which require a historical consciousness and an awareness of where in God’s history they now stand. On the systematic side there is perhaps an even greater diversity, but in our Western tradition we find the questions asked by the systematic theologian to be by their very nature above history and beyond change. Such a systematic approach has been considerably intensified by biblical criticism, with its conflicting answers to exegetical problems and its radical doubt or mild uncertainty about many events and data on which systematic theology would have to rest its case. Lessing’s statement that eternal truth cannot be derived from historical data became the more pertinent to systematic theology once the biblical basis for orthodox Christianity was summoned

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to constant trial before the courts of historical criticism. But in a certain sense Christian theology had freed itself from its historical matrix already in the time of the apologists of the second century when the case for Christianity was spelled out in the terms of Hellenistic philosophy. It would be unwise to exclude some elements within the OT and the NT from a similar tendency; thus the need for and the possibility of a translation of biblical theology into new categories of thought is taken for granted from the very outset. Orthodoxy never had repristination as its program in the periods of its strength. The possibility of translation was given—as it is for Barth—in the reality of the subject matter, apart from its intellectual manifestation in the thought-patterns of the original documents. God and Christ were not Semites in such a sense that the biblical pattern of thought was identified with revelation itself. Consequently, theology through the centuries acted in great freedom and with good conscience and considerable creativity. The fathers and the Reformers alike had no idea of a biblical theology apart from other theological endeavors. They were convinced that they were biblical theologians in the only sense one could be a theologian; in this respect Barth is certainly right in claiming the authority of Calvin and Luther for his biblical approach. But once the concern for a biblical theology as distinguished from other types of systematic theology has made itself manifest, a new problem arises. By way of a wide variety of hybrids where systematic and biblical categories were hopelessly intermingled, this concern has now brought us to the point where we can make reasonably clear statements about the meanings of the original in its own terms. This is why we have the right to say that the result of descriptive biblical theology has raised the hermeneutic problem in a somewhat new form 4. The preacher and biblical theology. A sharp distinction between what the texts meant in their original setting and what they mean in the present has considerable ramification for the work of the preacher, if he in any sense sees it as his task to communicate the message of the Bible to the congregation whose shepherd he is, and to the world which is his mission field. If we may use once more the analogy of the original and the translation—and this should not be considered more than an approximate analogy—the preacher is called upon to function as the bilingual translator. He should through his training and his ongoing studies attain the marks of a truly bilingual person—i.e. one who is capable of thinking in two languages. (By “languages” are meant, not the Greek and Hebrew of the Bible—although these would become more and more indispensable if the “bilingual” approach were taken seriously—but the modes and patterns of thought in the Bible.) His familiarity with the biblical world and patterns of thought should, through his work in descriptive biblical theology, have reached the point where he is capable of moving around in his Bible with idiomatic ease. His familiarity with the “language” of the contemporary world should reach a similar degree of perception and genuine understanding. Only so could he avoid the rhetorical truisms of much homiletic activity, where the message is expressed in a strange—sometimes even beautiful—mixed tongue, a homiletical Yiddish which cannot be really understood outside the walls of the Christian ghetto. The demand for such a bilingual function of the preaching ministry may seem quite

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exacting, and indeed it is. It is also as it should be that the work of biblical as well as systematic theology finds its functional focus in the pulpit of the church. But it would be unreasonable to demand of the preacher—if now we may press our analogy once more—to become an academic grammarian of these two “languages” or a master of philosophical semantics. His task and his competence would remain by and large on the level of the vernacular, which he should have overheard long enough to be able to use it naturally and easily, as he would also use the Bible. A mere repetition and affirmation of the biblical language, or even a translation which mechanically substitutes contemporary terms—often with a psychological slant—for those of the original, has little chance to communicate the true intention of the biblical text. To use an example from Bultmann’s demand, for demythologizing, the mere statement “Jesus is risen” directs the mind of most listeners toward a unique phenomenon, glorious or impossible as the case may be. On the basis of this phenomenon the believer is invited to base his hope for eternal life. A closer descriptive study of the resurrection passages suggests, however, that to the first listeners to the kerygma the phenomenon of the Resurrection was not surprising in the same sense. All Jews—except the Sadducees—expected the Resurrection as the climax of God’s history; the phenomenon was nothing strange and new to them. The only new thing was that it had happened. The claim of the church that Jesus was risen thus meant to those who accepted it that the general resurrection, to which they looked forward, had started to happen; Paul consequently says that Christ has been raised as the “first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15.20). In the same chapter the argument runs partly in the opposite direction to what we are used to think: “If there is no general resurrection, then Christ has not been raised” (vs. 13; cf. vs. 16). Those who first heard and believed the news about the Resurrection were not absorbed in a consideration of the phenomenon as such, but received it as a message that the new age had started to manifest itself here and now. This certainly affirmed their hopes in sharing in Christ’s resurrection in God’s good time, but the center of the message was that the power of the new age was at work in their own world and their own time. Bultmann suggests that the task of the preacher is to free this message from its biblical nucleus, the proclaimed fact of the Resurrection as a historical event. But even for a preacher, who finds reason to object to such a demythoiogizing or dehistoricizing of the gospel, the problem which Bultmann points up remains a real one. Can the preacher say that he has communicated the message of Easter by stating and by underscoring the physical nature of the phenomenon of the Resurrection as a stumbling block for unbelievers, but a rock of salvation for those who believe? His familiarity with the results of a descriptive biblical theology would urge him to place the emphasis where the texts themselves put it and to meditate, e.g. along the lines of how the power of the new age manifested itself in Jesus Christ, not only as a token of our resurrection, but as the enthronement of Christ and as the possibility for man to live by the powers of the new age here and now. There would be many other lines like this which opened up from the gospel of Easter if the preacher did not become

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paralyzed—in faith or in doubts—by the phenomenon of the Resurrection, deducing from it theological propositions, but let his familiarity with the biblical world guide him through the concrete and diversified way in which the early church recognized and rejoiced in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. His homiletic imagination would become enriched, and the message would have a chance to find its live and relevant translation. If the task of the pulpit is—as suggested here—the true Sitz im Leben, “life situation,” where the meaning of the original meets with the meaning for today, then it is once more clear that we cannot pursue the study of biblical theology adequately if the two tenses are not kept apart. For the descriptive biblical theologian this is a necessity implied in his own discipline; and whether he is a believer or an agnostic, he demands respect for the descriptive task as an enterprise valid in its own right and for its own sake. For the life of the church such a consistent descriptive approach is a great and promising asset which enables the church, its teaching and preaching ministry, to be exposed to the Bible in its original intention and intensity, as an ever new challenge to thought, faith, and response.

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11 Brevard Childs Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Chapter 3, “Canon and Criticism”

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revard Childs (1923–2007) was an American biblical scholar. His main contribution to the field came through his career-long development and defense of “canonical criticism,” though he himself expressed reservations about what this term might suggest, as we will see below. This selection is the third chapter of Child’s Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (1979). Many of the readings in this volume have dealt with how the text of the Bible is to be construed, whether historically or theologically or in a way that combines both of those perspectives. This selection, more forcefully and explicitly than any other piece in this collection, asks which words constitute the biblical text. Or, to phrase the issue differently, which form of the text should readers use? Historical critics have reconstructed various stages of the text’s history, and have tested out conjectures about the oral and written sources that informed the composition of the biblical text. Childs argues that the canonical form, or the final form, of the Bible should receive primary attention. Childs makes his case for the primacy of the canonical form on overtly theological grounds. His most fundamental reason for preferring the canonical text is not that this is the form that became normative for the Christian church, though this is true. His basis is less directly ecclesial than it is to do with theology proper.“The significance of the final form of the biblical text,” he says, “is that it alone bears witness to the full history of revelation.” Though theology, and a certain debt to Karl Barth specifically, helps to set the interpretive agenda, once it has been established that the final form of the text is the one that should be read, Childs asks readers to engage in a description of the text that is historically grounded.

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The canonical approach becomes most sharply defined when Childs sets it in contrast with a number of other approaches, including literary criticism. The canonical approach shares with literary criticism a commitment to study texts in their integrity as complete works. Yet there is no analog within literary criticism to the precise role that the community of faith plays in the milieu of Scripture’s origin. Even more telling is Child’s differentiation of the canonical approach from what he calls the “traditioncritical approach.” Form critics study various stages of the text’s composition and refuse to privilege any one point in its diachronic development. Childs differs from them fundamentally and for theological reasons. Now the reason that Childs does not like the label “canon criticism” becomes intelligible. He worries that calling his approach canon criticism suggests that it is simply another dimension of the overall historical-critical paradigm, like source, form, or redaction criticism. Instead, the canonical approach—Childs prefers the term “approach” to “criticism”—serves as a broad rubric under which to position, and indeed to reconceive, aspects of these other methods. They can be used, but they must be utilized with a view toward understanding the canonical form, not for the sake of inquiring into other matters for their own sake. A question that has dogged the canonical approach is which form of the canon it prefers and why. Different ecclesial bodies operate with different canons. Does Childs provide any hints in this chapter about how he would respond to this question? Childs does not want his use of Christian theological terms within the rationale for his approach to alienate Jews with whom he might study the Hebrew Scriptures. Does he have reason to hope that they would not be put off by his strategy?

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The purpose of this chapter is to describe an approach within the discipline of Old Testament Introduction which will attempt to overcome the methodological impasse of the canon which has been described in the previous chapter. Its goal is to take seriously the significance of the canon as a crucial element in understanding the Hebrew scriptures, and yet to understand the canon in its true historical and theological dimensions. It will seek to relate the canonical form of the Old Testament to the complex history of the literature’s formation, the discovery of which is the hallmark of the modern historical critical study of the Bible. Throughout this Introduction I shall be criticizing the failure of the historical critical method, as usually practised, to deal adequately with the canonical literature of the Old Testament. Nevertheless, it is a basic misunderstanding of the canonical approach to describe it as a non-historical reading of the Bible. Nothing could be further from the truth! Rather, the issue at stake is the nature of the Bible’s historicality and the search for a historical approach which is commensurate with it. The whole point of emphasizing the canon is to stress the historical nature of the biblical witness. There is no “revelation” apart from the experience of historical Israel. However, a general hermeneutic is inadequate to deal with the particular medium through which this experience has been registered. The study of the canonical shape of the literature is an attempt to do justice to the nature of Israel’s unique history. To take the canon seriously is to stress the special quality of the Old Testament’s humanity which is reflected in the form of Israel’s sacred scripture.

1. Exegesis in a canonical context At the outset I should like to set certain parameters to the scope of this study. The larger problems for Christian theology of establishing the relation between the two Testaments, as well as of examining the claims of the apocryphal books on the Christian church, lie beyond the scope of this Introduction to the Hebrew scriptures. In my judgment, these important subjects belong to the fields of biblical theology, New Testament, and early church history. However, I will at least express my own conviction regarding the importance of the study of the Hebrew scriptures for Christian theology. It is insufficient that the Christian church seeks to relate itself in some way with the historical events of the Old Testament. Rather, it is essential for a theological relationship to be maintained between the people of the Old Covenant and of the New. Regardless of whatever other writings or traditions were deemed authoritative by each community within a larger canon—for Jews it is the tradition of the sages, for Christians the gospel of Jesus Christ—the common canon of the Hebrew scriptures provides the fundamental basis for any serious relationship. I am well aware that this is a prescriptive statement, and that only seldom has either of the two communities of faith functioned in a way which reflected the common canon of sacred scripture. To seek to trace the development of the Christian canon within the church and to do justice to both the historical and theological problems involved far

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exceeds the scope of this present enterprise. For this reason the discussion which follows will limit itself, by and large, to the Hebrew scriptures. Only in the final chapter will I return to a reflection on these broader issues of Biblical Theology. The major task of a canonical analysis of the Hebrew Bible is a descriptive one. It seeks to understand the peculiar shape and special function of these texts which comprise the Hebrew canon. Such an analysis does not assume a particular stance or faith commitment on the part of the reader because the subject of the investigation is the literature of Israel’s faith, not that of the reader. However, apart from unintentional bias which is always present to some extent, the religious stance of the modern reader can play a legitimate role after the descriptive task has been accomplished, when the reader chooses whether or not to identify with the perspectives of the canonical texts of Israel which he has studied. Because this literature has had a special history as the religious literature of ancient Israel, its peculiar features must be handled in a way compatible to the material itself. A corpus of religious writings which has been transmitted within a community for over a thousand years cannot properly be compared to inert shreds which have lain in the ground for centuries. This observation is especially in order when one recognizes that Israel’s developing religious understanding—the Bible speaks of God’s encounter with Israel—left its mark on the literature in a continuing process of reshaping and growth. Canonical analysis focuses its attention on the final form of the text itself. It seeks neither to use the text merely as a source for other information obtained by means of an oblique reading, nor to reconstruct a history of religious development.“Rather, it treats the literature in its own integrity. Its concern is not to establish a history of Hebrew literature in general, but to study the features of this peculiar set of religious texts in relation to their usage within the historical community of ancient Israel. To take the canonical shape of these texts seriously is to seek to do justice to a literature which Israel transmitted as a record of God’s revelation to his people along with Israel’s response. The canonical approach to the Hebrew Bible does not make any dogmatic claims for the literature apart from the literature itself, as if these texts contained only timeless truths or communicated in a unique idiom, but rather it studies them as historically and theologically conditioned writings which were accorded a normative function in the life of this community. It also acknowledges that the texts served a religious function in closest relationship to the worship and service of God whom Israel confessed to be the source of the sacred word. The witness of the text cannot be separated from the divine reality which Israel testified to have evoked the response. It is a misunderstanding of the canonical method to characterize it as an attempt to bring extrinsic, dogmatic categories to bear on the biblical text by which to stifle the genuine exegetical endeavour. Rather, the approach seeks to work within that interpretative structure which the biblical text has received from those who formed and used it as sacred scripture. To understand that canonical shape requires the highest degree of exegetical skill in an intensive wrestling with the text. It is to be expected that interpreters will sometimes disagree on the nature of the canonical shaping,

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but the disagreement will enhance the enterprise if the various interpreters share a common understanding of the nature of the exegetical task.

2. The canonical approach contrasted with others Several crucial methodological issues are raised when the canonical approach is described as focusing on the final form of the text. Perhaps these issues can be most sharply profiled by contrasting the approach which I am suggesting with other familiar methods of critical biblical scholarship. The canonical study of the Old Testament shares an interest in common with several of the newer literary critical methods in its concern to do justice to the integrity of the text itself apart from diachronistic reconstruction. One thinks of the so-called “newer criticism” of English studies, of various forms of structural analysis, and of rhetorical criticism. Yet the canonical approach differs from a strictly literary approach by interpreting the biblical text in relation to a community of faith and practice for whom it served a particular theological role as possessing divine authority. For theological reasons the biblical texts were often shaped in such a way that the original poetic forms were lost, or a unified narrative badly shattered. The canonical approach is concerned to understand the nature of the theological shape of the text rather than to recover an original literary or aesthetic unity. Moreover, it does not agree with a form of structuralism which seeks to reach a depth structure of meaning lying below the surface of the canonical text. Then again, the canonical method which is being outlined differs sharply from the so-called “kerygmatic exegesis” which was popularized by von Rad and his students the 50s and 60s. Classic examples of this method can be found in the writings of H. W. Wolff, C. Westermann, W. Brueggemann, among others. For several years beginning in 1966 Interpretation ran a series of articles under the rubric “Kerygma of the Bible.” This method attempted to discover the central intention af a writer, usually by means of formulae or themes, which intention was then linked to a reconstruction of a historical situation which allegedly evoked that given response. Its major concern was to combine historical critical analysis with a type of theological interpretation. A major criticism of the method is the extremely subjective, reductionist method in which the formcritical method has been extended beyond its original function to derive a theological message. Often the assumption that the theological point must be related to an original intention within a reconstructed historical context runs directly in the face of the literature’s explicit statement of its function within the final form of the biblical text. The fragile nature of this kind of exegesis is also illustrated by its heavy dependence upon critical theories which bear less and less weight (von Rad’s Credo, Noth’s amphicytony, etc.). Again, the canonical study of the Old Testament is to be distinguished from the traditio-critical approach in the way in which it evaluates the history of the text’s formation. By assuming the normative status of the final form of the text the canonical

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approach evokes the strongest opposition from the side of traditio-historical criticism for which the heart of the exegetical task is the recovery of the depth dimension. Form critics raise familiar questions: Why should one stage in the process be accorded a special status? Were not the earlier levels of the text once regarded as canonical as well, and why should they not continue to be so regarded within the exegetical enterprise? Is not the history which one recovers in the growth of a text an important index for studying Israel’s development of a self-understanding, and thus the very object of Old Testament theology? Having been trained in the form-critical method, I feel the force of these questions and am aware of the value of the approach. Still I feel strongly that these questions miss the mark and have not fully grasped the methodological issues at stake in the canonical proposal.

3. The final form of the text and its prehistory The reason for insisting on the final form of scripture lies in the peculiar relationship between text and people of God which is constitutive of the canon. The shape of the biblical text reflects a history of encounter between God and Israel. The canon serves to describe this peculiar relationship and to define the scope of this history by establishing a beginning and end to the process. It assigns a special quality to this particular segment of human history which became normative for all successive generations of this community of faith. The significance of the final form of the biblical text is that it alone bears witness to the full history of revelation. Within the Old Testament neither the process of the formation of the literature nor the history of its canonization is assigned an independent integrity. This dimension has often been lost or purposely blurred and is therefore dependent on scholarly reconstruction. The fixing of a canon of scripture implies that the witness to Israel’s experience with God lies not in recovering such historical processes, but is testified to in the effect on the biblical text itself. Scripture bears witness to God’s activity in history on Israel’s behalf, but history per se is not a medium of revelation which is commensurate with a canon. It is only in the final form of the biblical text in which the normative history has reached an end that the full effect of this revelatory history can be perceived. It is certainly true that earlier stages in the development of the biblical literature were often regarded as canonical prior to the establishment of the final form. In fact, the final form frequently consists of simply transmitting an earlier, received form of the tradition often unchanged from its original setting. Yet to take the canon seriously is also to take seriously the critical function which it exercises in respect to the earlier stages of the literature’s formation. A critical judgment is evidenced in the way in which these earlier stages are handled. At times the material is passed on unchanged; at other times tradents select, rearrange, or expand the received tradition. The purpose of insisting on the authority of the final canonical form is to defend its role of providing this critical norm. To work with the final stage of the text is not to lose the historical dimension, but it is rather to make a critical, theological judgment regarding

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the process. The depth dimension aids in understanding the interpreted text, and does not function independently of it. To distinguish the Yahwist source from the Priestly in the Pentateuch often allows the interpreter to hear the combined texts with new precision. But it is the full, combined text which has rendered a judgment on the shape of the tradition and which continues to exercise an authority on the community of faith. Of course, it is legitimate and fully necessary for the historian of the ancient Near East to use his written evidence in a different manner, often reading his texts obliquely, but this enterprise is of a different order from the interpretation of sacred scripture which we are seeking to describe. Then again, the final form of the text performs a crucial hermeneutical function in establishing the peculiar profile of a passage. Its shaping provides an order in highlighting certain elements and subordinating others, in drawing features to the foreground and pushing others into the background. To work from the final form is to resist any method which seeks critically to shift the canonical ordering. Such an exegetical move occurs whenever an overarching category such as Heilsgeschichte subordinates the peculiar canonical profile, or a historical critical reconstruction attempts to refocus the picture according to its own standards of aesthetics or historical accuracy. Although much of my polemical attention up to now has been directed against various forms of historicism which have made the use of the Bible dependent upon a reconstructed form of historical events rather than on the final form of the canonical text, I am also aware that another, very different front has been opened up which is equally incompatible with the canonical approach. In the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and his followers the Bible is seen as a deposit of metaphors which contain inherent powers by which to interpret and order the present world of experience, regardless of the source of the imagery. The concern is to illuminate what lies “ahead” (devant) of the text, not behind. This approach shows little or no interest in the historical development of the biblical text or even in the historical context of the canonical text. The crucial interpretative context in which the metaphors function is provided by the faith community itself (cf. D. Kelsey). Such an approach fails to take seriously the essential function of the canon in grounding the biblical metaphors within the context of historic Israel. By shaping Israel’s traditions into the form of a normative scripture the biblical idiom no longer functions for the community of faith as free-floating metaphor, but as the divine imperative and promise to a historically conditioned people of God whose legacy the Christian church confesses to share.

The canonical process and the shaping of the Scripture The formation of the canon took plce over an extended period of time in close relation to the develoment of the Hebrew Literature. But the canonical process was not

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simply an external validation of successive stages of literary development, but was an integral part of the literary process. Beginning in the pre-exilic period, but increasing in significance in the post-exilic era, a force was unleashed by Israel’s religious use of her traditions which exerted an influence on the shaping of the literature as it was selected, collected and ordered. It is clear from the sketch of the process that particular editors, religious groups, and even political parties were involved. At times one can describe these groups historically or sociologically, such as the reforming Deuteronomic party of Jerusalem, or the editors associated with Hezekiah’s court (Prov. 25.1). But basic to the canonical process is that those responsible for the actual editing of the text did their best to obscure their own identity. Thus the actual process by which the text was reworked lies in almost total obscurity. Its presence is detected by the effect on the text. Moreover, increasingly the original sociological and historical differences within the nation of Israel—Northern and Southern Kingdom, proand anti-monarchial parties, apocalyptic/versus theocratic circles—were lost, and a religious community emerged which found its identity in terms of sacred scripture. Israel defined itself in terms of a book. The canon formed the decisive Sitz im Leben for the Jewish community’s life, thus blurring the sociological evidence most sought after by the modern historian. When critical exegesis is made to rest on the recovery of these very sociological distinctions which have been obscured, it runs directly in the face of the canon’s intention. The motivations behind the canonical process were diverse and seldom discussed in the biblical text itself. However, the one concern which is expressly mentioned is that a tradition from the past be transmitted in such a way that its authoritative claims be laid upon all successive generations of Israel. Such expressions of intent are found in the promulgation of the law (Deut. 31.9ff.), in the fixing of rituals (Exod. 12.14), and in the provisions for transmitting the sacred story (Exod. 12.26ff.). A study of the biblical text reveals that this concern to pass on the authoritative tradition did not consist in merely passively channelling material from one generation to another, but reflects an involvement which actively shaped both the oral and written traditions. A major hermeneutical move was effected in the process of forming an original law, prophetic oracles, or ancient narrative into a collection of scripture through which every subsequent generation was to be addressed. It is not clear to what extent the ordering of the oral and written material into a canonical form always involved an intentional decision. At times there is clear evidence for an intentional blurring of the original historical setting (cf. the discussion of “Second Isaiah”). At other times the canonical shaping depends largely on what appear to be unintentional factors which subsequently were incorporated within a canonical context (e.g. the sequence of the proverbs in Prov. 10ff.). But irrespective of intentionality the effect of the canonical process was to render the tradition accessible to the future generation by means of a “canonical intentionality,” which is coextensive with the meaning of the biblical text. The implication of this understanding of canon is crucial for one’s approach to the problem of the “actualization” of the biblical text. In the recent hermeneutical debate

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the term actualization (Vergegenwärtigung) denoted that process by which an ancient historical text was rendered accessible to a modern religious usage. An axiom of much redactional criticism is that the layering of a biblical text derives chiefly from a need to “update” an original tradition. Although this description occasionally applies (Isa. 16.13f.), the chief point to be made by the canonical approach is that actualization is by no means limited to this one model. Rather, it is constitutive of the canon to seek to transmit the tradition in such a way as to prevent its being moored in the past. Actualization derives from a hermeneutical concern which was present during the different stages of the book’s canonization. It is built into the structure of the text itself, and reveals an enormous richness of theological interpretation by which to render the text religiously accessible. The modern hermeneutical impasse which has found itself unable successfully to bridge the gap between the past and the present, has arisen in large measure from its disregard of the canonical shaping. The usual critical method of biblical exegesis is, first, to seek to restore an original historical setting by stripping away those very elements which constitute the canonical shape. Little wonder that once the biblical text has been securely anchored in the historical past by “decanonizing” it, the interpreter has difficulty applying it to the modern religious context. (I am indebted to Gerald T. Sheppard for this formulation of the issue.)

5. Scripture and tradition One of the most difficult theological problems of the canonical approach to the Old Testament involves understanding the relationship between the divine initiative in creating Israel’s scripture and the human response in receiving and transmitting the authoritative Word. Christian theology has, by and large, continued to describe the Bible in traditional terminology as the “Word of God” which implies divine authorship in some sense. Nevertheless, few theologians in this post-critical era would wish to deny that the active human participation in the hearing, writing, and transmission of the Bible is an absolutely necessary feature for correctly understanding the text. What then is the relationship between these two dimensions of the Bible? It is impossible to discuss the problem without being aware of the long and heated controversy within Christian theology which has strongly affected the history of exegesis, and has usually been treated under the rubric of “Scripture and Tradition.” In the sixteenth century a sharp polarity developed between Protestant insistence on the primacy of the Bible and the Roman Catholic claim of ecclesiastical authority. The Reformers argued that the Bible was authoritative, not because the church made it so, but because of the Word of God which it contained. The Roman Catholic theologians countered that the church had been the human medium through which the Spirit of God had given the scriptures a concrete form and thus tradition could not be set in subordination to Word. This polemical impasse continued to play an important role throughout the seventeenth century and provided the framework in which much of the historical critical

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research first emerged (cf. Simon, Le Clerc, Carpzov, etc.). By the middle of the nineteenth century the widespread recognition of the historical dimension in the formation of the Bible had badly damaged the traditional dogmatic positions of both Protestants and Catholics. The older theological issue was lost in the new historical and literary concerns to understand the growth of the literature. Within the dominant critical circles of Liberal Protestantism the role of God in the Bible’s formation was relegated to a loosely defined divine purpose lying somewhere behind the evolution of Israel’s religion. The rebirth of confessional theology within Protestantism following World War I brought a renewed emphasis on the primacy of the Word of God, roughly analogous to the position of the sixteenth-century Reformers. However, there was a major difference in the attempt to accommodate orthodox Christian theology to the nineteenth-century historical critical study of the Bible. Several different models were suggested which sought to maintain the full divine initiative, but also to accord theological integrity to the historical process in the formation of the scriptures. Within Roman Catholic theology several imporant theological developments also occurred in this same period, reflected in the papal encyclical of 1943, Divino afflante spiritu, and culminating in the theological formulations of Vatican II. First, there was an attempt to offer a more positive view of the results of the historical critical method, which up to that time had been largely negative as a reaction to the earlier Modernist threat. Secondly, in terms of the scripture and tradition problem the new Catholic formulation re-emphasized the active role of the church in the Bible’s formation but in a way which did not jeopardize the primacy of the divine Word. Only occasionally was the older Roman position defended. In sum, there has been a remarkable theological rapprochement between Protestants and Catholics regarding the traditional controversy over scripture and tradition. Both camps have returned to a position more akin to that of the early church in which the two elements were closely related, but not fused, in a rule of faith. It is also significant to observe that both the threat and promise arising from the challenge of the historical critical method exerted an important factor in this theological reconciliation. The major purpose of this brief historical review is to suggest that the canonical method is not tied to one narrowly conceived dogmatic stance respecting the problem of scripture and tradition. The approach seeks to work descriptively within a broad theological framework and is open to a variety of different theological formulations which remains the responsibility of the systematic theologian to develop. I would admit, however, that the canonical method which is here described does run counter to two extreme theological positions. It is incompatible with a position on the far right which would stress the divine initiative in such a way as to rule out any theological significance to the response to the divine Word by the people of God. It is equally incompatible with a position on the far theological left, which would understand the formation of the Bible in purely humanistic terms, such as Israel’s search for selfidentity, or a process within nature under which God is subsumed. It is also my sincere hope that Jewish scholars will not feel excluded from the

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theological enterprise associated with the canon. Even though the language used in the debate tends to stem from Christian circles, the theological issue of Israel’s role in the canonical process lies at the heart of Jewish tradition. In my judgment, much of the failure of the usual Jewish-Christian dialogue to achieve a serious theological dimension arises from the loss of a sense of a common Bible which is precisely the issue addressed by the canon. At the conclusion of each chapter of the descriptive analysis of the Old Testament books, I have added a brief bibliography of the history of exegesis including both Jewish and Christian contributions. Attention to the subsequent history of interpretation of the Bible is absolutely essential for its understanding, but the topic is so immense as to exceed the boundaries suitable for an Introduction. Obviously the purpose of pursuing this history is not to suggest that biblical scholarship needs only to return to the past, but that the future task is sorely impoverished if the great insights of our predecessors are overlooked. Particularly in the search for the canonical shape of a biblical book, pre-critical interpreters often saw dimensions of the text more clearly than those whose perspective was brought into focus by purely historical questions. Conversely, the history of exegesis illustrates some perennial, even ontological, errors in mishearing the text which continue to find new support.

6. Canon and interpretation A final word is in order regarding the effect of the canon on the larger exegetical enterprise of interpreting the Old Testament. The approach which I am undertaking has been described by others as “canonical criticism.” I am unhappy with this term because it implies that the canonical approach is considered another historical critical technique which can take its place alongside of source criticism, form criticism, rhetorical criticism, and similar methods. I do not envision the approach to canon in this light. Rather, the issue at stake in relation to the canon turns on establishing a stance from which the Bible can be read as sacred scripture. The concern with canon plays both a negative and a positive role in delineating the scope of exegesis. On the one hand, its negative role consists in relativizing the claims to priority of the historical critical method. It strongly resists the assumption that every biblical text has first to be filtered through a set historical critical mesh before one can even start the task of interpretation. On the other hand, its positive role seeks to challenge the interpreter to look closely at the biblical text in its received form and then critically to discern its function for a community of faith. Attention to the canon establishes certain parameters within which the tradition was placed. The canonical shaping serves not so much to establish a given meaning to a particular passage as to chart the boundaries within which the exegetical task is to be carried out. Attention to these canonical guidelines within this Introduction may seem overly formalistic and too frequently concerned with determining a book’s structure or

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interpretative patterns. However, one should not confuse this one aspect of the canonical approach with the full range of responsibilities comprising the exegetical task. A canonical Introduction is not the end, but only the beginning of exegesis. It prepares the stage for the real performance by clearing away unnecessary distractions and directing one’s attention to the main activity which is about to be initiated. In one sense the canonical method sets limits on the exegetical task by taking seriously the traditional parameters. In another sense the method liberates from the stifling effect of academic scholasticism. By insisting on viewing the exegetical task as constructive as well as descriptive, the interpreter is forced to confront the authoritative text of scripture in a continuing theological reflection. By placing the canonical text within the context of the community of faith and practice a variety of different exegetical models are freed to engage the text, such as the liturgical or the dramatic. In sum, the canon establishes a platform from which exegesis is launched rather than a barrier by which creative activity is restrained.

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12 David Steinmetz “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis”*

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avid Steinmetz (b. 1936) is an American intellectual historian of the Reformation. He has written landmark studies of Martin Luther and John Calvin, and has done a great deal to bring the attention of other historians to the importance of biblical exegesis within Reformation theology. This essay, which originated as a lecture, was first published in 1980. The title of the piece, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis” will strike as ironic anyone who holds the common view that the transition from a pre-modern to a modern culture was characterized by remarkable advances in knowledge, not least in the effort to understand the Bible. It is indeed a major part of Steinmetz’s purpose to challenge this commonplace. He does not want, however, to claim that pre-critical exegesis is superior in all respects, but mainly in one significant way, that is, that it allows the text to speak to its present day readers. The text’s point of departure is a critical consideration of the hermeneutical position of nineteenth-century Oxford scholar Benjamin Jowett, according to whom the text of the Bible means precisely and only what its author meant in his original ancient context. Steinmetz takes Jowett to be in agreement here with later historical-critical interpreters of the Bible, who certainly are more sophisticated in many other respects. For Jowett and those who follow in this line, the history of the interpretation of the Bible before the rise of historical-critical study is generally seen as an obstacle to ascertaining the text’s single genuine meaning. Thus it ought to be put to one side, for it is little more than the history of prejudice. Contrary to this position, Steinmetz argues that Origen, Augustine, and the medievals are right to claim that the Bible has multiple (though not infinite) meanings. Much of the essay is a brief but lucid survey of the development of and rationale for All original notes have been removed.

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this view. A few readings of Matthew 20’s parable of the workers in the vineyard serve as concrete examples of how this style of reading works in practice. This essay has stimulated historical work on the inner rationale of pre-critical exegesis, from the birth of Christianity up to the Reformation, and it has spurred hermeneutical reflection on the legitimacy of continuing these sorts of interpretive practices in the present day. Some questions worth considering in connection with this essay include the following. The author claims that the historical-critical approach has indeed made some advances beyond the pre-critical interpretive tradition. Is he clear on what these advances are? In his appropriation of Thomas Aquinas, does he lean as heavily on the divine author as Thomas himself does in explaining how the Bible is to be read? Steinmetz clarifies his own views and defends himself against some of his critics in a new piece composed about 30 years after the original: “Appendix: Footnotes to an Old Complaint,” in Taking the Long View: Christian Theology in Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 161–7.

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In 1859 Benjamin Jowett, then Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, published a justly famous essay on the interpretation of scripture. Jowett argued that “Scripture has one meaning—the meaning which it had in the mind of the Prophet or Evangelist who first uttered or wrote, to the hearers or readers who first received it.“ Scripture should be interpreted like any other book, and the later accretions and venerated traditions surrounding its interpretation should, for the most part, either be brushed aside or severely discounted.“The true use of interpretation is to get rid of interpretation, and leave us alone in company with the author.“ Jowett did not foresee great difficulties in the way of the recovery of the original meaning of the text. Proper interpretation requires imagination, the ability to put oneself into an alien cultural situation, and knowledge of the language and history of the ancient people whose literature one sets out to interpret. In the case of the Bible, one has also to bear in mind the progressive nature of revelation and the superiority of certain later religious insights to certain earlier ones. But the interpreter, armed with the proper linguistic tools, will find that “universal truth easily breaks through the accidents of time and place“ and that such truth still speaks to the condition of the unchanging human heart. Of course, critical biblical studies have made enormous strides since Jowetts time. No reputable biblical scholar would agree today with Jowetts reconstruction of the Gospels in which Jesus appears as a “teacher … speaking to a group of serious, but not highly educated, working men, attempting to inculcate in them a loftier and sweeter morality.” Still, the quarrel between modern biblical scholarship and Benjamin Jowett is less a quarrel over hermeneutical theory than a disagreement with him over the application of the theory in his exegetical practice. Biblical scholarship still hopes to recover the original intention of the author of a biblical text and still regards the pre-critical exegetical tradition as an obstacle to the proper understanding of the true meaning of that text. The most primitive meaning of the text is its only valid meaning, and the historical-critical method is the only key that can unlock it. But is that theory true? I think it is demonstrably false. In what follows I want to examine the pre-critical exegetical tradition at exactly the point at which Jowett regarded it to be most vulnerable, namely, in its refusal to bind the meaning of any pericope to the intention, whether explicit or merely half-formed, of its human author. Medieval theologians defended the proposition, so alien to modern biblical studies, that the meaning of scripture in the mind of the prophet who first uttered it is only one of its possible meanings and may not, in certain circumstances, even be its primary or most important meaning. I want to show that this theory (in at least that respect) was superior to the theories that replaced it. When biblical scholarship shifted from the hermeneutical position of Origen to the hermeneutical position of Jowett, it gained something important and valuable. But it lost something as well, and it is the painful duty of critical scholarship to assess its losses as well as its gains.

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1 Medieval hermeneutical theory took as its point of departure the words of Paul: “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3.6, NIV). Augustine suggested that this text could be understood in either one of two ways. On the one hand, the distinction between letter and spirit could be a distinction between law and Gospel, between demand and grace. The letter kills because it demands an obedience of the sinner that the sinner is powerless to render. The Spirit makes alive because it infuses the forgiven sinner with the new power to meet the rigorous requirements of the law. But Paul could also have had in mind a distinction between what William Tyndale later called the “storybook” or narrative level of the Bible and the deeper theological meaning or spiritual significance implicit within it. This distinction was important for at least three reasons. Origen stated the first reason with unforgettable clarity: Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and moon and stars? And that the first day, if we may so call it, was even without a heaven? And who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, “planted a paradise eastward in Eden,“ and set in it a visible and palpable “tree of life,” of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life; and again that one could partake of “good and evil” by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And when God is said to “walk in the paradise in the cool of the day” and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events. Simply because a story purports to be a straightforward historical narrative does not mean that it is in fact what it claims to be. What appears to be history may be metaphor or figure instead, and the interpreter who confuses metaphor with literal fact is an interpreter who is simply incompetent. Every biblical story means something, even if the narrative taken at face value contains absurdities or contradictions. The interpreter must demythologize the text in order to grasp the sacred mystery cloaked in the language of actual events. The second reason for distinguishing between letter and spirit was the thorny question of the relationship between Israel and the church, between the Greek Testament and the Hebrew Bible. The church regarded itself as both continuous and discontinuous with ancient Israel. Because it claimed to be continuous, it felt an unavoidable obligation to interpret the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. But it was precisely this claim of continuity, absolutely essential to Christian identity, that created fresh hermeneutical problems for the church. How was a French parish priest in 1150 to understand Psalm 137, which bemoans captivity in Babylon, makes rude remarks about Edomites, expresses an ineradicable

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longing for a glimpse of Jerusalem, and pronounces a blessing on anyone who avenges the destruction of the temple by dashing Babylonian children against a rock? The priest lives in Concale, not Babylon; has no personal quarrel with Edomites; cherishes no ambitions to visit Jerusalem (though he might fancy a holiday in Paris); and is expressly forbidden by Jesus to avenge himself on his enemies. Unless Psalm 137 has more than one possible meaning, it cannot be used as a prayer by the church and must be rejected as a lament belonging exclusively to the piety of ancient Israel. A third reason for distinguishing letter from spirit was the conviction, expressed by Augustine, that while all scripture was given for the edification of the church and the nurture of the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, not all stories in the Bible are edifying as they stand. What is the spiritual point of the story of the drunkenness of Noah, the murder of Sisera, or the oxgoad of Shamgar, son of Anath? If it cannot be found on the level of narrative, then it must be found on the level of allegory, metaphor, and type. That is not to say that patristic and medieval interpreters approved of arbitrary and undisciplined exegesis, which gave free rein to the imagination of the exegete. Augustine argued, for example, that the more obscure parts of scripture should be interpreted in the light of its less difficult sections and that no allegorical interpretation could be accepted that was not approved by the “manifest testimonies” of other less ambiguous portions of the Bible. The literal sense of Scripture is basic to the spiritual and limits the range of possible allegorical meanings in those instances in which the literal meaning of a particular passage is absurd, undercuts the living relationship of the church to the Old Testament, or is spiritually barren. From the time of John Cassian, the church subscribed to a theory of the fourfold sense of scripture. The literal sense of scripture could and usually did nourish the three theological virtues, but when it did not, the exegete could appeal to three additional senses, each sense corresponding to one of the virtues. The allegorical sense taught about the church and what it should believe, and so corresponded to the virtue of faith. The tropological sense taught about individuals and what they should do, so corresponded to the virtue of love. The analogical sense pointed to the future and awakened expectation, and so corresponded to the virtue of hope. In the fourteenth century Nicholas of Lyra summarized this hermeneutical theory in a much quoted little rhyme: Littera gesta docet, Quid credas allegoria, Moralis quid agas, Quo tendas anagogia. [The letter teaches stories, Allegory teaches what to believe, The moral sense what to do, Anagogy where to aim for.]

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This hermeneutical device made it possible for the church to pray directly and without qualification even a troubling psalm like 137. After all, Jerusalem was not merely a city in the Middle East; it was, according to the allegorical sense, the church; according to the tropological sense, the faithful soul; and according to the anagogical sense, the center of God’s new creation. The psalm became a lament of those who long for the establishment of God’s future kingdom and who are trapped in this disordered and troubled world, which with all its delights is still not their home. They seek an abiding city elsewhere. The imprecations against the Edomites and the Babylonians are transmuted into condemnations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. If you grant the fourfold sense of scripture, David sings like a Christian. Thomas Aquinas wanted to ground the spiritual sense of scripture even more securely in the literal sense than it had been grounded in patristic thought. Returning to the distinction between “things” and “signs” made by Augustine in De doctrina Christiana (though Thomas preferred to use the Aristotelian terminology of “things” and “words”), Thomas argued that, while words are the signs of things, things designated by words can themselves be signs of still other things. In all merely human sciences, words alone have a sign-character. But in Holy Scripture, the things designated by words can themselves have the character of a sign. The literal sense of scripture has to do with the sign-character of words; the spiritual sense of scripture has to do with the sign-character of things. By arguing this way, Thomas was able to show that the spiritual sense of scripture is always based on the literal sense and derived from it. Thomas also redefined the literal sense of scripture as “the meaning of the text which the author intends.” Lest Thomas be confused with Jowett, I should hasten to point out that for Thomas the author was God, not a human prophet or apostle. In the fourteenth century, Nicholas of Lyra, a Franciscan exegete and one of the most impressive biblical scholars produced by the Christian church, built a new hermeneutical theory on the aphorism of Thomas. If the literal sense of scripture is the meaning that the author intended (presupposing that the author whose intention finally matters is God), then is it possible to argue that scripture contains a double literal sense? Is there a literal-historical sense (the original meaning of the words as spoken in their first historical setting) that includes and implies a literal-prophetic sense (the larger meaning of the words as perceived in later and changed circumstances)? Nicholas not only embraced a theory of the double literal sense of scripture, but was even willing to argue that in certain contexts the literal-prophetic sense takes precedence over the literal-historical. Commenting on Psalm 117, Lyra wrote: “The literal sense in the Psalm concerns Christ; for the literal sense is the sense primarily intended by the author.” Of the promise to Solomon in 1 Chronicles 17.13, Lyra observed: “The aforementioned authority was literally fulfilled in Solomon; however, it was fulfilled less perfectly, because Solomon was a son of God only by grace; but it was fulfilled more perfectly in Christ, who is the Son of God by nature.” For most exegetes, the theory of Nicholas of Lyra bound the interpreter to the dual task of explaining the historical meaning of a text while elucidating its larger and later

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spiritual significance. The great French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, however, pushed the theory to absurd limits. He argued that the only possible meaning of a text was its literal-prophetic sense and that the literal-historical sense was a product of human fancy and idle imagination. The literal-historical sense is the “letter that kills.” It is advocated as the true meaning of scripture only by carnal persons who have not been regenerated by the life-giving Spirit of God. The problem of the proper exegesis of scripture is, when all is said and done, the problem of the regeneration of its interpreters. In this brief survey of medieval hermeneutical theory, there are certain dominant themes that recur with dogged persistence. Medieval exegetes admit that the words of scripture had a meaning in the historical situation in which they were first uttered or written, but they deny that the meaning of the words is restricted to what the human author thought he said or what his first audience thought they heard. The stories and sayings of scripture bear an implicit meaning understood only by a later audience. In some cases that implicit meaning is far more important than the restricted meaning intended by the author in his particular cultural setting. Yet the text cannot mean anything a later audience wants it to mean. The language of the Bible opens up a field of possible meanings. Any interpretation that falls within that field is valid exegesis of the text, even though that interpretation was not intended by the author. Any interpretation that falls outside the limits of that field of possible meanings is probably eisegesis and should be rejected as unacceptable. Only by confessing the multiple sense of scripture is it possible for the church to make use of the Hebrew Bible at all or to recapture the various levels of significance in the unfolding story of creation and redemption. The notion that scripture has only one meaning is a fantastic idea and is certainly not advocated by the biblical writers themselves.

2 Having elucidated medieval hermeneutical theory, I should like to take some time to look at medieval exegetical practice. One could get the impression from Jowett that because medieval exegetes rejected the theory of the single meaning of scripture so dear to Jowett’s heart, they let their exegetical imaginations run amok and exercised no discipline at all in clarifying the field of possible meanings opened by the biblical text. In fact, medieval interpreters, once you grant the presuppositions on which they operate, are as conservative and restrained in their approach to the Bible as any comparable group of modern scholars. In order to test medieval exegetical practice I have chosen a terribly difficult passage from the Gospel of Matthew, the parable of the good employer or, as it is more frequently known, the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Mt. 20.1–16). The story is a familiar one. An employer hired day laborers to work in his vineyard at dawn and promised them the standard wage of a denarius. Because he needed more

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workers, he returned to the marketplace at nine, noon, three, and five o’clock and hired any laborers he could find. He promised to pay the workers hired at nine, noon, and three what was fair. But the workers hired at the eleventh hour, or five o’clock, were sent into the vineyard without any particular promise concerning remuneration. The employer instructed his foreman to pay off the workers beginning with the laborers hired at five o’clock. These workers expected only one-twelfth of a denarius, but were given the full day’s wage instead. Indeed, all the workers who had worked part of the day were given one denarius. The workers who had been in the vineyard since dawn accordingly expected a bonus beyond the denarius, but they were disappointed to receive the same wage that had been given to the other, less deserving workers. When they grumbled, they were told by the employer that they had not been defrauded but had been paid according to an agreed contract. If the employer chose to be generous to the workers who had only worked part of the day, that was, in effect, none of their business. They should collect the denarius that was due them and go home like good fellows. Jesus said the Kingdom of God was like this story. What on earth could he have meant? The church has puzzled over this parable ever since it was included in Matthew’s Gospel. Thomas Aquinas in his Lectura super evangelium Sancti Matthaei offered two interpretations of the parable, one going back in its lineage to Irenaeus and the other to Origen. The “day” mentioned in the parable can refer to the life span of an individual (the tradition of Origen), in which case the parable is a comment on the various ages at which one may be converted to Christ, or it can refer to the history of salvation (the tradition of Irenaeus), in which case it is a comment on the relationship of Jew and Gentile. If the story refers to the life span of a man or woman, then it is intended as an encouragement to people who are converted to Christ late in life. The workers in the story who begin at dawn are people who have served Christ and have devoted themselves to the love of God and neighbor since childhood. The other hours mentioned by Jesus refer to the various stages of human development from youth to old age. Whether one has served Christ for a long time or for a brief moment, one will still receive the gift of eternal life. Thomas qualifies this somewhat in order to allow for proportional rewards and a hierarchy in heaven. But he does not surrender the main point: eternal life is given to late converts with the same generosity it is given to early converts. On the other hand, the story may refer to the history of salvation. Quite frankly, this is the interpretation that interests Thomas most. The hours mentioned in the parable are not stages in individual human development but epochs in the history of the world, from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to David, and David to Christ. The owner of the vineyard is the whole Trinity, the foreman is Christ, and the moment of reckoning is the resurrection from the dead. The workers who are hired at the eleventh hour are the Gentiles, whose complaint that no one has offered them work can be interpreted to mean that they had no prophets as the Jews had.

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The workers who have borne the heat of the day are the Jews, who grumble about the favoritism shown to latecomers but who are still given the denarius of eternal life. As a comment on the history of salvation, the parable means that the generosity of God undercuts any advantage that the Jews might have had with respect to participation in the gifts and graces of God. Not everyone read the text as a gloss on Jewish-Christian relations or as a discussion of late conversion. In the fourteenth century, the anonymous author of The Pearl, an elegy on the death of a young girl, applied the parable to infancy rather than to old age. What is important about the parable is not the chronological age at which one enters the vineyard, but the fact that some workers are only in the vineyard for the briefest possible moment. A child who dies at the age of two years is, in a sense, a worker who arrives at the eleventh hour. The parable is intended as a consolation for bereaved parents. A parent who has lost a small child can be comforted by the knowledge that God, who does not despise the service of persons converted in extreme old age, does not withhold his mercy from boys and girls whose eleventh hour comes at dawn. Probably most original interpretation of the parable was offered by John Pupper of Goch, a Flemish theologian of the fifteenth century, who used the parable to attack the doctrine of proportionality, particularly as that doctrine had been stated and defended by Thomas Aquinas. No one had ever argued that God gives rewards that match in exact quantity the weight of the good works done by a Ghristian. That is arithmetic equality and is simply not applicable to a relationship in which people perform temporal acts and receive eternal rewards. But most theologians did hold to a doctrine of proportionality; while there is a disproportion between the good works Christians do and the rewards they receive, there is a proportion as well. The reward is always much larger than the work that is rewarded, but the greater the work, the greater the reward. As far as Goch is concerned, that doctrine is sheer nonsense. No one can take the message of the parable of the vineyard seriously and still hold to the doctrine of proportionality. Indeed, the only people in the vineyard who hold to the doctrine of proportionality are the first workers in the vineyard. They argue that twelve times the work should receive twelve times the payment. All they receive for their argument is a rebuke and a curt dismissal. Martin Luther, in an early sermon preached in 1517 before the Reformation, agreed with Goch that God gives equal reward for great and small works. It is not by the Herculean size of their exertions but by the goodness of God that believers receive any reward at all. Unfortunately, Luther spoiled this point by elaborating a thoroughly unconvincing argument in which he tried to show that the last workers in the vineyard were humbler than the first and therefore one hour of their service was worth twelve hours of the mercenary service of the grumblers. The parable, however, seems to make exactly the opposite point. The workers who began early were not more slothful or more selfish than the workers who began later in the day. Indeed, they were fairly representative of the land of worker to be

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found hanging around the marketplace at any hour. They were angry not because they had shirked their responsibilities, but because they had discharged them conscientiously. In 1525 Luther offered a fresh interpretation of the parable, attacking it from a slightly different angle. The parable has essentially one point: to celebrate the goodness of God, which makes nonsense of a religion based on law-keeping and good works. God pays no attention to the proportionately greater efforts of the first workers in the vineyard; rather, to their consternation, God puts them on exactly the same level as the last and least productive workers. The parable shows that everyone in the vineyard is unworthy, though not always for the same reason. The workers who arrive after nine o’clock are unworthy because they are paid a salary incommensurate with their achievement in picking grapes. The workers who spent the entire day in the vineyard are unworthy because they are dissatisfied with what God has promised, think that their efforts deserve special consideration, and are jealous of their employer’s goodness to workers who accomplish less than they did. The parable teaches that salvation is not grounded in human merit and that there is no system of bookkeeping that can keep track of the relationship between God and human beings. Salvation depends utterly and absolutely on the goodness of God. The four medieval theologians I have mentioned—Thomas Aquinas, the author of The Pearl, the Flemish chaplain Goch, and the young Martin Luther—did not exhaust in their writings all the possible interpretations of the parable of the workers in the vineyard. But they did see with considerable clarity that the parable is an assertion of God’s generosity and mercy to people who do not deserve it. It is only against the background of the generosity of God that one can understand the relationship of Jew and Gentile, the problem of late conversion, the meaning of the death of a young child, the question of proportional rewards, even the definition of grace itself. Every question is qualified the severe mercy of God, by the strange generosity of the vineyard owner who pays the nonproductive latecomer the same wage as his oldest and most productive employees. If you were to ask me which of these interpretations is valid, I should have to respond that they all are. They all fall within the field of possible meanings created by the story itself. How many of those meanings were in the conscious intention of Jesus or of the author of the Gospel of Matthew, I do not profess to know. I am inclined to agree with C. S. Lewis, who commented on his own book Till We Have Faces: “An author doesn’t necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else.” The act of creation confers no special privileges on authors when it comes to the distinctly different, lesser, task of interpretation. William Wordsworth the critic is not in the same league with Wordsworth the poet, while Samuel Johnson the critic towers over Johnson the creative artist. Authors obviously have something in mind when they write, but a work of historical or theological or aesthetic imagination has a life of its own!

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3 Which brings us back to Benjamin Jowett. Jowett rejected medieval exegesis and insisted that the Bible should be read like any other book. I agree with Jowett that the Bible should be read like any other book. The question is, how does one read other books? Take, for example, my own field of Reformation studies. Almost no historian I know would answer the question of the meaning of the writings of Martin Luther by focusing solely on Luther’s explicit and conscious intention. Marxist interpreters of Luther from Friedrich Engels to Max Steinmetz have been interested in Luther’s writings as an expression of class interests, while psychological interpreters from Hartmann Grisar to Erik Erikson have focused on the theological writings as clues to the inner psychic tensions in Luther’s personality. Even historians who reject Marxist and psychological interpretations of Luther find themselves asking how Luther was understood in the free imperial cities, by the German knights, by the landed aristocracy, by the various sub groups of German peasants, by the Catholic hierarchy, by lawyers, by university faculties—to name only a few of the more obvious groups who responded to Luther and left a written record of their response. Meaning involves a listener as I well as a speaker, and when one asks the question of the relationship of Luther to his various audiences in early modern Europe, it becomes clear that there was not one Luther in the sixteenth century, but a battalion of Luthers. Nor can the question of the meaning of Luther’s writings be answered by focusing solely on Luther’s contemporaries. Luther’s works were read and pondered in a variety of historical and cultural settings from his death in 1546 to the present. Those readings of Luther have had measurable historical effects on succeeding generations, whose particular situation in time and space could scarcely have been anticipated by Luther. Yet the social, political, economic, cultural, and religious history of those people belongs intrinsically and inseparably to the question of the meaning of the theology of Martin Luther. The meaning of historical texts cannot be separated from the complex problem of their reception, and the notion that a text means only what its author intends it to mean is historically naive. Even to talk of the original setting in which words were spoken and heard is to talk of meanings rather than meaning. To attempt to understand those original meanings is the first step in the exegetical process, not the last and final step. Modern literary criticism has challenged the notion that a text means only what its author intends it to mean far more radically than medieval exegetes ever dreamed of doing. Indeed, contemporary debunking of the author and the author’s explicit intentions has proceeded at such a pace that it seems at times as if literary criticism has become a jolly game of ripping out an author’s shirt-tail and setting fire to it. The reader and the literary work to the exclusion of the author have become the central literary preoccupation of the literary critic. Literary relativists of a fairly moderate sort insist that every generation has its own Shakespeare and Milton, and extreme relativists

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loudly proclaim that no reader reads the same work twice. Every change in the reader, however slight, is a change in the meaning of a text. Imagine what Thomas Aquinas or Nicholas of Lyra would have made of the famous statement by Northrop Frye: It has been said of Boehme that his books are like a picnic to which the author brings the words and the reader the meaning. The remark may have been intended as a sneer at Boehme, but it is an exact description of all works of literary art without exception. Medieval exegetes held to the sober middle way, the position that the text (any literary text, but especially the Bible) contains both letter and spirit. The text is not all letter, as Jowett and others maintained, or all spirit, as the rather more enthusiastic literary critics in our own time are apt to argue. The original text as spoken and heard limits a field of possible meanings. Those possible meanings are not dragged by the hair, willy-nilly, into the text, but belong to the life of the Bible, in the encounter between author and reader as they belong to the life of any act of the human imagination. Such a hermeneutical theory is capable of sober and disciplined application and avoids the Scylla of extreme subjectivism, on the one hand, and the Charybdis of historical positivism, on the other. To be sure, medieval exegetes made bad mistakes in the application of their theory, but they also scored notable and brilliant triumphs. Even at their worst they recognized that the intention of the author is only one element—and not always the most important element at that—in the complex phenomenon of the meaning of a text. The defenders of the single-meaning theory usually concede that the medieval approach to the Bible met the religious needs of the Christian community, but that it did so at the unacceptable price of doing violence to the biblical text. The fact that the historical-critical method after two hundred years is still struggling for more than a precarious foothold in that same religious community is generally blamed on the ignorance and conservatism of the Christian laity and the sloth or moral cowardice of its pastors. I should like to suggest an alternative hypothesis. The medieval theory of levels of meaning in the biblical text, with all its undoubted defects, flourished because it is true, while the modern theory of a single meaning, with all its demonstrable virtues, struggles because it is false. Until the historical-critical method becomes critical of its own theoretical foundations and develops a hermeneutical theory adequate to the nature of the text that it is interpreting, it will remain restricted, as it deserves to be, to the guild and the academy, where the question of truth can endlessly be deferred.

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13 Ulrich Luz “Reflections on the Appropriate Interpretation of New Testament Texts”

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lrich Luz (b. 1938) is a Swiss New Testament scholar who is best known for his scholarship on the Gospel of Matthew. Much of his work centers on the history of reception of this biblical text. As is evident from Luz’s footnotes, his approach to appropriating New Testament texts leans heavily on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of Wirkungsgeschichte (German for “history of effects”). Gadamer’s Truth and Method is a sophisticated, philosophically informed articulation of his interpretive theory. To summarize it very briefly, the core idea is that while classical texts, such as the New Testament, originate in the past, they have a history of influence that reaches into the present and affects readers even before they directly encounter the text itself. The presuppositions they bring to reading are, in some measure, affected by the classics they are reading and bridge the gap between past and present. Understanding a text is an encounter with its subject-matter, and occurs as the reader and text enter into a dialogue regarding the work’s substantive claims, a reciprocal process of question and answer. The German original of this essay appeared in 1982. Luz brings Gadamer’s general theory to bear on problems around the interpretation of Christian Scripture. In this orderly and erudite essay, Luz asks how one might respond to the tension that exists between historical-critical exegesis of biblical texts and their use by interpreters in the present. Because classical historical criticism produces readings of the text as a past act of communication, and intentionally casts aside the text’s relevance to the present, religious communities often feel that they have no use for this mode of interpretation. As Luz says, “Historical-critical exegesis of a biblical text appears to silence it for the present time.” Unlike some of the earlier authors whose works are anthologized in this

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reader, Luz is not dismissive toward readings of the text for the sake of present. He does not write these interpretations off as nonsense, bias, or power plays. The reason for this derives from Luz’s distinctive view of what textual understanding means in the first place. He certainly does not want to expunge historical engagement with a text from the total process of understanding it. What he does want to do is to say that understanding is holistic. That is, a historical exegesis of a text, grasping the content of the text with reference to the framework of one’s own thinking, and the realization of the text’s message in a new setting are all elements of what it means to understand. The biblical texts themselves call for this sort of understanding. At least for texts like Matthew, there simply is no original sense cut off from its later history of appropriation, whether that use takes the form of acceptance or critique. The text exists in a continual process of taking on new life in different settings. Because of the freedom that this view grants to interpretation, Luz has to give some account of what a true reading is. He uses theological criteria, not exactly a method and certainly not an algorithm, to evaluate different ways of making the text present. Luz’s program values both the text’s past and present contexts. Does he relate the two successfully? Are the historical and theological criteria he uses to regulate interpretation too thin and indeterminate genuinely to function as norms? How should his use of Augustine’s love criteria be evaluated?

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Today we look back on a time when the necessity of exegesis has repeatedly been called into question. Some students have gone so far as to boycott exegesis, deeming it unimportant for the practice of ministry. It has also been questioned on a theoretical level. I have in front of me, for instance, a recent essay in which exegesis as an “informative discipline” is considered just good enough to assist in “dismantling authoritative Christian norms derived from biblical traditions and considered unquestionable.”1 On the other hand, the last few years have witnessed a revival of exegesis. This is not without its problems, especially since it is church leaders who tend to call up and advocate the revival. Exegesis shares its ups and downs with history as a discipline. After 1968, German education departments were seriously considering the removal of “history” from the secondary school curriculum. This had its impact. But in 1977 Hermann Lübbe declared the results of the discussions to be “a rehabilitation of scientific historicism.”2 Is the recent revival of historicism however only compensatory, running parallel to the rises and falls in the market for antiques, or does it represent real progress? All of this is reason enough for an exegete to reflect on the tasks of his discipline and the solutions he can offer.

1. The problem The basic problem seems to me to lie in the experience of many theologians that their intense preoccupation with the original sense of a text, deriving from historicalcritical interpretation, actually makes it difficult or even impossible to answer the question of its present-day meaning. On the one hand, the historical-critical method, understood as an open scientific tool, has proved and established itself in scholarship. This is exemplified in the visible and widespread absorption and integration of a fundamentally ahistorical “structural exegesis” in the historical approach to the understanding and interpretation of texts.3 On the other hand many people, including our students and a large number of clergy, find that historical-critical interpretation leaves them stranded in the past, with no methodological path into the present. Hence the widespread feeling (which in my opinion should be taken very seriously) that historicalcritical exegesis has nothing to offer to church practice, ministry, or society.4 The question of the truth of a text for the present and the question of the original sense of the text in the past appear to be completely distinct. 1.1 The basic problem is visible at various points. One example is the striking contrast today between scholarly exegesis with its high degree of specialization (already too demanding for many students of theology) and “lay exegesis” which is completely untouched by scholarship and for this very reason deeply fascinating to students of theology. This is illustrated by the impact of Ernesto Cardenal’s Gospel of Solentiname among European students of theology.5 This simple Bible study, almost untouched by scholarly exegesis,6 holds an incredible fascination for many of our students, who in the face of today’s advanced exegetical specialization are no longer able to develop genuine exegetical competence and who at the same time

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are stranded in historical criticism. The most striking element of such lay exegesis is its freedom toward the biblical text, allowing for direct confrontation between one’s own experience and the text and for interpretation of the text symbolically in the light of one’s experience.7 I am not thinking here primarily of fundamentalist lay exegesis, which is not so much lay exegesis as a theological assault on lay exegesis. What I find fascinating and exciting about lay exegesis is its freedom from the meticulous adherence to the original sense of the text that characterizes scholarly exegesis. 1.2 Another point at which the basic problem becomes visible is the current contrast between exegetical and homiletic interpretation of the Bible.8 Today’s situation is apparent if we compare exegesis and sermon in the early church and up to the time of Reformation and Protestant orthodoxy. Before the Enlightenment, exegetical and homiletic interpretation were closely related. This is exemplified by the influence of John Chrysostom’s homilies on the scholarly Bible commentaries of the Middle Ages, or the relation between Luther’s lectures and sermons. Since the Enlightenment, however, scholarly and homiletic interpretations have gone separate ways, to the point that reference to the text is largely abandoned in preaching, both in homiletic theory9 (at times) and in the practice of preaching (very frequently). Scholarly exegesis is concerned with the question of what people, whether authors or communities, considered true and life-determining at the time when the New Testament was emerging. Historical-critical exegesis is not competent to say whether this truth of a past age can claim to be truth today. 1.3  A further symptom of the great distance between the question of the past and the question of truth is, as I see it, the disparity between historical research, including historical-critical exegesis, and the philosophical concept of history and hermeneutical theory.10 Today’s hermeneutical theories, as exemplified by Gadamer, tend increasingly toward a holistic understanding of the past which takes in ones own present and one’s own horizon. By contrast, historical-critical exegesis is becoming ever more obsessed with detail and, in our discipline particularly, takes such exaggerated interest in the original sense of letters and strokes of the text that there is little room for any unified understanding of the whole. Historical-critical research is largely uninfluenced by hermeneutical theory, and hermeneutics in turn no longer issues in a methodology for historical-critical work.11 The contrast between modern and classical hermeneutics—such as that of Matthias Flaccius Illyricus or Schleiermacher—is apparent. The tension between the concept of history which underlies our historical work and the much more thoughtout concept in today’s philosophical debate is similarly evident. Hans Weder has rightly pointed out that the “historicist” concept of history, although no longer fully subscribed to by the majority of historians or exegetes, continues de facto to inform historical-critical research.12 This can be seen above all in the tendency of historical study to objectify facts in the past. The historical-critical understanding of a text isolates its original sense from the present-day exegete as well as from all exegetes of the past by attempting as far as possible to exclude from the process of interpretation the present situation of the exegete and all that has since occurred in history.13

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For this reason the historical-critical reconstruction of the text cannot speak to the present, since today’s reader cannot by definition be its addressee. As Gadamer rightly observes: “The text that is understood historically is forced to abandon its claim to be saying something true. We think we understand when we see the past from a historical standpoint—i.e. transpose ourselves into the historical situation and try to reconstruct the historical horizon. In fact, however, we have given up the claim to find in the past any truth that is valid and intelligible for ourselves.”14 For historical-critical exegesis of New Testament texts, for example, the fundamental question of the unity of New Testament testimony is strictly speaking unanswerable, since the canon is a later development than the individual texts and must therefore be excluded from the exegetical process. 1.4 It appears to me that the separation in modern thought between truth and history is one of the most far-reaching intellectual developments, a development whose roots are to be found in the emancipation of reason from history since the Enlightenment. Reason breaks through the shell of history and reaches towards eternal truth. Here I can only call to mind a few examples, starting with Rationalism. According to Spinoza, the divine law results from the observation of human nature by the human being itself; it consists in the idea of God as the supreme Good. Faith in history of whatever kind does not belong to the divine law, but rather has simply the pedagogical value of undergirding the teaching contained in the divine law.15 As I see it, Lessing’s thesis that contingent truths of history can never be proof of necessary truths of reason remains an unsolved problem in exegesis: “If no historical truth can be demonstrated, it follows that nothing can be demonstrated by means of historical truth.”16 Kant, for his part, makes the Bible, and with it exegesis, a crucial pillar in the structure of church dogma. He considers sacred writings to be works of authority for the spiritually immature and sees it as especially fortunate when the book of a religion holds “the purest moral doctrine of religion in its completeness.”17 The rationalistic devaluation of history, however, continues to be influential beyond the Age of Reason. I draw attention to Schleiermacher’s words: “The true historical sense rises beyond history. All phenomena exist just as the sacred miracles for the purpose of directing our attention to the Spirit which brought them forth with ease”18 Finally, we hear the voice of the existential philosopher Karl Jaspers, who seeks to “arrive at a point before and above all history, a ground of being in the light of which the whole of history is phenomenon.” He seeks the path toward this point in, inter alia, transcendence of the historicity of existence.19 The same basic problem applies to an existential philosophy which understands existence in history ontologically as “the ‘recurrence’ of the possible” and in this way not only allows for possibilities within historical existence but also excludes impossibilities.20

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2. Hermeneutical goals In this section I consider the basic elements necessary for understanding the “matter”21 of biblical texts. To this end, I inquire of the biblical texts themselves what their understanding of understanding is and what kind of understanding their message requires. My basic presupposition is that a theological contribution to hermeneutical debate must begin with the basic biblical texts of theology and bring them into the debate. My approach, however, does not contain the hidden agenda of a special “sacred hermeneutic.” Rather, I wish to draw, first, on the linguistic insight that different text types, that is, genres, communicate with the recipients in very different ways and need to be understood in different ways. The conditions for understanding vary greatly with the different literary documents, and are different again for nonliterary material. Second, we have frequently found in the history of modern exegesis that no concept of a general hermeneutic applied to the biblical texts from outside can ever fully do justice to them. This is exemplified by the criticism of Bultmann’s “anthropocentric” existential interpretation. The theological restions asked of Bultmann’s concept in countless variations all center on whether he succeeds in actually declaring the transcendental nature of his subject, namely God’s action in history transcending the human being. A further example of the limitations of applying general hermeneutical concepts to biblical texts is the debate on the scope of structural approaches to the New Testament texts. It is increasingly doubted whether structural analysis, which treats the text as a semantic structure and examines the differentiations within this structure, can take seriously the reference beyond the text. The reference in biblical texts is primary: they signify something or someone; they proclaim something; they are not autonomous entities, but point to a history which lies beyond them and in which God acts.22 Biblical texts speak of something very special, indeed unique. They speak of how God acts in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, and this makes them special texts in form and structure, calling for a particular and appropriate understanding. Third, it must be kept in mind that no hermeneutical concept is completely neutral and not indebted to specific historical experience. We theologians do well to remember this, since we continue to appeal programmatically to our tradition. When considering the process of understanding, we shall need to take seriously and listen to our own specific form of tradition, i.e. the biblical texts.23 Beginning the question of how to understand biblical texts by turning to the texts themselves is, then, not simply the product of current intellectual unease. Here I deliberately leave open the question of how far our reflections might be generalized beyond the understanding of biblical texts. 2.1 The first element which I consider basic to an understanding of biblical texts which speak of God is the holistic nature of the process of understanding. Biblical texts are “as it were, crystallized spiritual life” (and not only spiritual!).24 Their message

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aims at an understanding which takes hold of the whole person and finds direct expression in that person’s life.25 Understanding is an event which involves the whole person.26 This is why Jesus’ parables, for instance, are not understood when only their teaching is understood. This may be sufficient for rabbinic parables, but not for the parables of Jesus. They are stories which seek to take hold of the listener’s life and transform it. I have not understood the story of the laborers in the vineyard (Mt. 20.1–16) if I only know that God does not reward according to what is earned. Only when I am glad about that have I understood. Luke’s composition of the parable of the great dinner makes abundantly clear that I have not understood if I can only formulate the point of the story correctly. Only when I put the story into practice in my own life have I understood it, for example when I am invited as a guest and have the choice between different places at the table (Lk. 14.7–14). An especially emphatic example of what is meant by understanding in the New Testament can be found in the Gospel of Mark. Peter, who rebukes Jesus (Mk 8.32), knows perfectly well what Jesus means when he speaks of the Son of Man who must undergo great suffering, be rejected by the Jewish leaders and be killed. Nevertheless, he protests; and directly following this scene Mark condenses his theologoumenon of the disciples’ lack of understanding very precisely. He makes it clear that one can “understand” Jesus only if one is ready to follow him on his road to the cross. One cannot understand Jesus in the way Peter did, but only in the way Simon of Cyrene did.27 To give a further example: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12.1–2). The interrelation between knowledge and life could not be expressed more succinctly. Understanding the matter of the New Testament is thus tied in with life itself, and the understanding intended by the New Testament texts is ultimately inseparable from faith. This means that there is no such thing as a “sense” of the biblical texts in and of itself, separable from life.28 This is in accordance with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s recognition of application as “an integral element of all understanding” and not merely as an appendage to understanding. Gadamer draws consciously on the theological hermeneutics of the pietist Johann Jakob Rambach.29 The various levels of textual interpretation can thus be terminologically distinguished as follows: (1) historical-critical exegesis of the original sense of the text; (2) interpretation of the matter of the text with reference to the present-day context of my thinking, my language and my situation; (3) realization of the matter of the text through suffering or through action. These levels of interpretation belong together, but it is clear that the understanding of biblical texts comes to completion and reaches its objective only on the third level.30 If historical-critical exegesis is to contribute to understanding the matter of biblical texts, it is necessarily dependent on the other levels of interpretation and remains embedded as one element of the wider hermeneutical horizon. 2.1.1 This has consequences in the historical-critical quest for the original sense of the texts. As I see it, historical-critical interpretation of biblical texts must not remain

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on the textual level when enquiring into their sense. Rather, it must probe behind the texts to enquire into the history and life that is crystallized in them. Historicalcritical exegesis must penetrate the structure of the texts to reach their historical life. Only then is it moving towards the matter of the texts. Historical-critical exegesis of a biblical text, then, means enquiry into the experiences which underlie the text. It means explaining how the text came about, what it intended and what it gave rise to.31 Here I can refer to a well-worded formulation of Hans Weder, who sees narrative as the appropriate form of exegesis for most biblical texts: “The task of exegesis is to explain in narrative form the coming into being of a text” (and in my opinion its effects also), “taking account of its reference.” Weder continues: “One could perhaps say that the truth of the text comes to light in such an explanation.”32 2.2. The second basic element for the understanding of biblical texts is closely connected with the first. It is the direct and necessary reference of the texts to the history to which they bear witness and in which they originate. In the words of Christian Link: “Biblical texts are not such that they require an ‘explanation.’ In order to understand them, one has to enter their world, so to speak, and study the ‘treatment’ of the reality that has given rise to their statements.”33 It is events and experiences which have compelled the biblical authors to speak and write, and concerning these events and experiences the texts need to be interrogated and listened to. Attempting a more precise definition of the experiences, we can say that the New Testament deals with human experience with the history of Jesus Christ, a history which is not dead but living and active in experiences. In the New Testament texts, then, we encounter “history” in two ways. There is on the one hand the basic history of Jesus Christ, a unique event in the past. Because this history continues to “be effective” and attract people afresh, there are on the other hand the effects of Jesus Christ’s history, which is history in its own right, for example Jesus’ effect in the experience, thinking and mission of Paul. Thus the New Testament texts represent segments of the early “effective history” of Jesus. Understanding the texts means taking note of the experiences they originate in, comprehending the reality they reflect, and listening to the fundamental history to which they refer. One way or the other, understanding biblical texts means dealing with history. In contrast to the widespread current idea that the historical is, in the end, relative and therefore secondary, we must say that for biblical texts the history to which they refer and which they reflect is primary.34 2.2.1. This has a further consequence for historical-critical exegesis which I shall treat only briefly here. The now almost undisputed thesis that in exegesis synchronic analysis of the text must take precedence over diachronic analysis should, in my opinion, be critically reexamined. To the extent that we are dealing with texts which transmit history, this postulate is as correct as it is banal. The texts are to be analyzed, primarily, as they now stand. However, they result from a historical reality and seek to influence history. With this in mind one must say that synchronic analysis itself points to the diachronic dimension. Only then can one take seriously the fact that the texts see themselves as testimonies that owe their existence to an event and seek to

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recreate this event. With reference to the biblical texts we must, in my opinion, speak of the precedence of synchronic analysis in regard to method, and the precedence of diachronic analysis in regard to their matter. 2.3. The third basic element for the understanding of biblical texts is freedom to change and renew. Here too I can point to the Bible itself. Both Old and New Testament texts are intended to open up new meaning for new people in new situations. The interpretation of past history does not mean simply the exposition of the old stories, but retelling them in an entirely new way. The constant retelling of Israel’s foundational story in different versions in the Old Testament and the retelling of Jesus’ story in the different Gospels bear witness to this. In the Old and New Testaments, then, it is primarily the narrated history which is interpreted and not (or not yet!) the texts which narrate that history. A similar thing holds true, mutatis mutandis, for non-narrative texts. Jewish tradition up to the time of Jubilees and the Temple Scroll is less an exegesis of the Torah than a reformulation of it. Jesus’ use of the Old Testament tradition and the early Christians’ use of the ethical sayings of Jesus reflect a similar, indeed even greater freedom. Only later did it come about, both in Judaism and in early Christianity, that the interpretation of the text replaced the actualization of the history and the reformulation of the Law. This happened around the same time for both groups and marked a decisive shift.35 This freedom in interpretation has to do above all with the fact that the purpose of the biblical message is to speak, time and again, to new people in new situations and to be interpreted in new ways in their lives. The proclamation and activity of Jesus establish the freedom which we see at work in the later actualizations.36 This means that biblical texts are similar to many other texts in that they do not have a fixed, definable sense which can be established once and for all. Their meaning is not simply identical with their original sense.37 Rather, they can be said to have a firm basis38 and a directionality39 which continually open up new meanings. Thus biblical texts do not have a fixed sense which lies somewhere behind the text, not even on the level of ideas, which could then become sayable in exegesis.40 Rather, the biblical texts open up new meanings through encounter. This brings them close to poetic texts, which Emil Staiger says are, “like every genuine, living work of art, infinite within their finite boundaries.”41 They are texts whose understanding is, according to Gadamer, “historical,” so that a text “is understood only if it is understood in a different way as the occasion requires.”42 As I see it, however, the understanding of biblical texts comes into this category not only because they are historical foundational texts of a specific type. In addition, this kind of understanding actually corresponds to the claim of the texts themselves to urge new attitudes in life and a new way of living, and to give the freedom to achieve this. 2.3.1.  This conclusion gives rise to a further consequence for the historical-critical exegesis of New Testament texts. If the sense of a text is realized in a new way in each new historical situation by new listeners or readers, the text’s recipients must, wherever possible, be accorded equal significance to the author.43 This applies primarily to the original recipients, but also to later recipients of the text in the history

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of its reception, its actualization and its interpretation. As Schindler rightly says, “The polyphonic echo of the centuries belongs to the Bible as an element of itself.”44 The exegete must endeavor, in my opinion, to examine New Testament texts not only from the perspective of textual analysis but also—and more importantly—from the perspective of communication theory. The Word which has taken on written form in the New Testament texts is an event intended to be effective, or as Paul puts it, have a δύναμις (energy, force; cf. Rom. 1.16–17; 1 Cor. 1.18). In the New Testament texts, it is not only true that what is said or written contains what is meant. It is also true that through what is written, and even more through what is said, that which is meant comes into being.45 If New Testament research takes seriously the fact that in general its texts do not provide information (or do so only superficially) on particular matters but witness to and transport events arising from the story of Jesus and seeking realization in history, then New Testament exegesis will have to take account of reception theory and reception history. By reception theory I mean the question of the intended effect of a text, and by reception history I mean the question of the actual effect of a text.46.The interpretation of a text takes place largely in this area of conflict between the intended and actual effects of the text.47 This provides, in my opinion, a starting point in exegesis for formulating questions on reception history.

3. The question of truth in the interpretation of New Testament texts If the meaning of a New Testament text is more than the original sense of the text, and if understanding a text involves it changing in new situations, we are faced with a fundamental problem. What now constitutes the truth of an interpretation? If the “exposition” of Scripture also takes place in the life of the church and of Christians, “in doing and suffering, … in ritual and prayer, in theological work and in personal decisions, in church organization and ecclesiastical politics, … in wars of religion, and in works of compassionate love,”48 the question concerning truth in the exposition of Scripture becomes even more pressing, since the truth of exposition coincides with the truth of faith and of life. But if the sense of the text is not fixed and “the truth of the text … is its history,” as the literary theorist Hannelore Link puts it, following Gadamer,49 then there appears to be no answer to the question of truth. When the truth of biblical texts is indeed not a matter of certain predicates but a question of adequate treatment of the text in the context of life, the truth question becomes even more urgent. This is especially true for a church accustomed to saying “sola scriptura” and now being made aware, by means of hermeneutical reflections on Scripture, of the open market of possibilities. The fundamental question is: Are there criteria for distinguishing between true and false interpretations? A hermeneutic of biblical texts which draws on Gadamer and

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affirms his opening of existential interpretation to the dimension of history is faced with the same question I would ask of Gadamer himself: How can one enter the open field of tradition history and at the same time retain one’s critical faculties in the face of the superior force of history? How can one reject the claims of tradition when necessary?50 Jürgen Habermas criticized Gadamer’s hermeneutical approach:“The right of reflection requires the self-limitation of the hermeneutical approach.“The right of refection requires the self-limitation of the hermeneutical approach. It demands a system of reference that exceeds the context of tradition as such. Only then can tradition be criticized.” At the same time, Habermas recognizes the danger that, with the help of such a system of reference, the human being might destroy the openness of history and the subject might once again over-power history. Hence he restricts his own postulate as follows: “But how shall such a system of reference be legitimized, if not by the appropriation of tradition?”51 The relationship of the subject to tradition thus constitutes a circle whose parts are reciprocally determined. The person judges the tradition by means of evaluation and reflection, and the tradition in turn calls into question the person who judges. Habermas has described this circle as the interlocking of knowledge and interest.52 Human judgment of traditions is necessary, since it is only on the basis of such judgment that the human being reaches the point of action. At the same time, human ability to judge can be developed only in dialogue with the tradition. In this analysis Habermas has, as I see it, brilliantly described the formal structure of the problem of truth and tradition. The question is, however, how we arrive at a system of reference which exceeds the realm of tradition. In contrast to Gadamer, Habermas postulates the “transition from the transcendental conditions of historicity to universal history” which constitutes the human person as a being of understanding.53 Anticipating a philosophy of history is necessary, according to Habermas, for the extrapolation of a normative system of reference with regard to action. Unlike Hegel and his followers, Habermas is well aware of the danger of absolutizing the subject.54 Hence his anticipation is “hypothetical”55 and is only a postulate of the practical reason which necessitates it. Only in this way, concepts such as freedom and emancipation are to be understood as guidelines to action. Theology cannot, in my opinion, follow Habermas in his attempt to arrive at criteria for truth by anticipating a universal historical system. Theology’s search for truth criteria cannot hypothetically transcend history but must lead into it. The path theology must take involves asking its own special tradition, that is, the biblical texts, what criteria they offer for a critical evaluation of their tradition and of interpretations of that tradition. In this way the circle to which Habermas refers is present in a very specific manner. The tradition, which is to be critically interpreted, itself provides the criteria for that critique. In theology, the criticism of biblical tradition owes its own critical ability to that very tradition.56 This circle in theology has a particular presupposition, namely that the theologian, appealing to a special tradition, must in a fundamental sense already be in agreement with the tradition that is critically evaluated.57

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Interpretations of New Testament texts are reactualizations of the past history of Jesus Christ. Accordingly, the criteria for appropriate interpretations can be sought on two temporal levels, that of the past history of Jesus Christ and that of the later or present-day reactualization of that history. 3.1 If we look for criteria in the past history of Jesus Christ, theology has the following formulations to offer: The history of Jesus Christ is the truth criterion for the interpretation of biblical texts. Or: The critical focus of exegesis can be none other than “the point of reference of the language of faith,” namely the one who was crucified and raised from the dead.58 Already in the New Testament this was formulated even more trenchantly by John: “I am the way, the truth and the life” (14:6). Such expressions are, as it were, historical variants on what Protestant theology has attempted to formulate as canon within the canon. Conceptual rather than historical formulations of this canon were for example “what promotes Christ,” “justification by faith alone,” “the kingdom of God,” “the love of God.” The problems arising from such endeavors are the following: 3.1.1 These conceptual formulations have the advantage of determining, to a degree, the content of what took place in the history of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, they can give rise to misunderstandings in that they cause interpretations of New Testament texts to be judged primarily or exclusively on their doctrinal substance, e.g. questioning whether a particular interpretation of an individual text is in accordance with the basic doctrine of justification by faith. It is however extremely difficult on the basis of the New Testament itself to find an unambiguous and generally accepted conceptual expression for the “canon within the canon.” For example, it is noteworthy that Paul formulates the principle of faith in a new way, namely as justification by faith alone, even though he certainly knew Jesus’ principle of the coming kingdom of God. Overstating the argument, one could say that in the New Testament the history of Jesus is the constant basis, while its theological and conceptual explication is variable. This means searching for a criterion in the first-mentioned “historical” direction. But here the difficulties loom even larger. What do we mean by saying that the history of Jesus Christ is the truth criterion for the interpretation of New Testament texts? 3.1.1.1  This cannot be taken exclusively to refer directly to the factuality of individual episodes or accounts. If that were the case, we would be obliged to remove from the New Testament canon faith legends that probably have no basis in the earthly life of Jesus, such as his walking on the water. Or, conversely, we would have to postulate the historicity of such legends for dogmatic reasons. It must be possible for a text to correspond in a “symbolic” sense to the history of Jesus in that it expresses appropriately what took place with Jesus for humankind and for the world. And there must be limits to a merely external application of this criterion. Those who adhere literally to genuine words or stories of Jesus do not necessarily correspond to his history. It is possible for a literal and correct interpretation of one of Jesus’ commands, such as the prohibition of divorce, to run completely counter to what Jesus intended, i.e. to Jesus’ history, in a different situation.

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3.1.1.2 The story of Jesus itself requires interpretation, and it is we who have to interpret it. Yet when we consider how little consensus there is regarding the reconstruction of the real story of Jesus and his “genuine” proclamation, we may easily be discouraged. Moreover, we must always look to the center, that is, the main matter of the story of Jesus. Thus the criterion depends on our interpretation. 3.1.1.3 Furthermore, if we do not simply hold to the historically reconstructed account of the earthly Jesus but add to it the interpretations of post-Easter faith, the “truth criterion” slips completely from our grasp. If it is only the interpreted history of Jesus Christ (as interpreted by post-Easter faith) which is his true history—as in the New Testament—then the truth criterion is completely unusable. Whose interpretation is then the normative one? And how can I prevent or indeed deny my interpretation of the history of Jesus Christ becoming a criterion? If this is so, it is highly questionable what this criterion can in fact distinguish. 3.1.2. Nevertheless, the criterion does not seem to me to be simply an empty formula. It can be misunderstood if it is treated merely as the measure of a “correct” interpretation. Rather, as I see it the actual sense of pointing to the story of Jesus Christ as the truth criterion lies in the fact that it initiates a movement. The story of Jesus Christ, to which every interpretation has reference, is a truth criterion in a more fundamental sense than that it delimits and defines truth and distinguishes it from untruth. It is a truth criterion in the sense that it brings truth itself into being. Thus John interprets the truth that is Jesus by use of the words “way” and “life.” Only to a small degree is Jesus truth in the sense of limitation and confinement. Primarily, he is truth in the sense of a way which he opens up and which we walk. If we understand truth not as a usable criterion but as a way we are to walk, then Jesus gives us direction and leads us into ever new environments. Jesus does not therefore make possible a conclusive definition of truth. Rather, his history is the constant point of reference to which the search for truth must time and again return.59 3.1.3 It is from this point that the fundamental significance of historical-critical exegesis for the Christian faith becomes apparent. Historical-critical exegesis asks after the original sense of texts, and the early history of faith is not “interpretation” in the holistic sense demanded by the texts. Historical-critical exegesis of a text cannot regulate in a direct and immediate sense the interpretation of that text in the present. Nonetheless, its significance for faith is lasting and fundamental in that it reminds us that faith derives irreversibly from a specific history. In its striving for the most objective reconstruction possible, historical-critical exegesis reminds us that this history is the given element of faith and thus cannot be arbitrarily changed or newly created.60 By confronting us with biblical texts, biblical witnesses and biblical history in all their antiquity, it enables us to realize that the Christian faith owes its existence not to itself but to something alien which it has perhaps not yet understood.61 By asking in a particular way after the early history of the faith and its early witnesses, historical-critical exegesis sets out the basic direction of the Christian way, with the history of Jesus as its point of departure. For these reasons, I do not believe that the historical-critical method can be replaced by “alternative” methods such as structural

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analysis or psychoanalytical interpretation. These can only supplement and develop it further in the direction of holistic understanding. 3.2 We can, however, also look for a truth criterion in the concrete realization of the story of Jesus in the present. My thesis is as follows: the texts of the New Testament are intended to instruct us in the love of God given to us in Jesus Christ.62 This means that New Testament texts and interpretations of them are true so long as they bring about love. This formulation takes seriously the fact that understanding New Testament texts involves the whole person and that verbal interpretations of the texts cannot be detached from the situation in which they arose. All interpretations must be questioned as to whether the consequences they have correspond to the texts themselves. Here I draw attention to Matthew, who is the most consistent in the New Testament in using love as the criterion of truth and untruth in faith. At the end of his Sermon on the Mount, for example, he sets out how at the time of judgment Christ will say to many who knew him, prophesied in his name, did deeds of power in his name and even rightly confessed him to be the Lord, “I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers” (Mt. 7.21–3). Here we find a distinctive feature of the whole New Testament. It is evident too in John 15.7ff., where abiding in Christ, abiding in his love, his words abiding in us and the keeping of his commandments are all closely linked. 1 Corinthians 13 is another profound text of similar import. Here love is contrasted with knowledge, and the chapter ends with the words, “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13.13). Love is not a criterion which anticipates an eschatological totality of meaning in history. Given the spiritual phenomena in the Corinthian church, the statement that, in the eschaton, love remains, is a paradoxical one. It corresponds to the statement that the cross is the present-day form of eternal life. It may be said of knowledge, including the knowledge gained from interpretation of biblical texts, that—as in 1 Corinthians 13—it “abides” so long as love is in it. The question of the truth of an interpretation of a biblical text or of a later interpretation of a biblical text is the question whether love comes about in it. This makes concrete the question of whether an interpretation “promotes Christ.” It contains both an element of freedom and of commitment to tradition. The key word “love” takes up the direction of Jesus’ history, and at the same time there is an element of freedom in that love cannot be defined in advance or in general.63 3.2.1 Love as a criterion of truth is not a theoretical or abstract criterion but historical and practical. Since love is not merely an idea, the question of love cannot be asked only in terms of reception theory. We cannot simply ask: Did or does this interpretation intend to bring about love? We must also ask, in terms of history of reception, whether the interpretation actually did bring love about, since it is characteristic of love to consider its own consequences. Love as a criterion takes seriously that the understanding of New Testament texts is a holistic understanding, of which application is an integral part. 3.2.2  Love as a criterion of truth has its limitations. As I see it, there are two in particular. Firstly, it is often difficult to establish definitively what love is or was, in

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relation both to the past and the present. Here theology needs a high degree of social studies reflection. 3.2.3  My second point is theologically even more important. The bringing about of love by human beings cannot be an exhaustive truth criterion for New Testament texts because human love is not the primary concern of the texts. They are concerned with the divine gift of love which brought about human activity. The lack of human love with which we are all too often confronted does not disprove the God who according to the texts is the originator of all love. This is why “love” cannot be an exhaustive criterion of truth. At this point the question of the significance of the Holy Spirit for the interpretation of Scripture should be taken seriously. Beside and above human theological truth criteria there is the power of the Spirit which makes up for the powerlessness of the human form of the Word of God. 3.2.4  In spite of the limitations of love as a truth criterion for interpretation of the gospel, the scope of this criterion is considerable. It can call into question attempts at “correct” interpretations of biblical sayings undertaken without reference to the concrete historical situation. It can call into question the separation of academic historical or dogmatic interpretation from practical living. The criterion of love is crucial in a situation where churches tend to locate the heart of the gospel outside the realm of their own behavior, for example when attempts are made to achieve agreement about the gospel without reference to politics, or when church budgets are hardly seen as a matter of the truth of the church’s proclamation. 3.3 The first of these two truth criteria, that is, orientation to the history of Jesus Christ, has certain affinity with philosophical attempts to understand truth as the correspondence between a statement and its object. The second criterion, love, which looks for truth in the interpretation itself, i.e. in the signifier and not in its reference, has a certain affinity with pragmatically oriented philosophical systems. The two criteria are valid only in conjunction with each other and even then they are neither exhaustive nor easily manageable. For this very reason it is essential that Christians should strive for this truth in dialogue with each other. The way of truth of faith is in principle open-ended and can never be defined in a final sense by human beings. Nonetheless, every understanding aims at universal agreement for the sake of agreement concerning action.64 Striving for consensus is part of the task of interpretation of biblical texts, for a twofold reason in particular. First, the one history of Jesus Christ sets the task of finding in the various interpretations the truth that all have in common. Second, since “the truth of faith is a way … of love,” this truth offers “the possibility of a common path.”65 This is why the way of truth involves striving for agreement and consensus. Thus exegesis and interpretation of biblical texts for the present by means of teaching and everyday living are not the task of individuals but of the whole church. It need not be emphasized among Protestants that the criterion of consensus cannot be a final, absolute, and conclusive one. But it is a reminder to us Protestants which is perhaps not entirely superfluous. For the sake of its matter and of the truth of its claim, the interpretation of the New Testament is the task of the church and not only of individuals.

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3.4 Theses 3.4.1  The Problem Historical-critical preoccupation with the original sense of a biblical text appears today to complicate rather than facilitate the answer to the question of its meaning and truth in the present. Historical-critical exegesis of a biblical text appears to silence it for the present time. 3.4.1.1 Symptoms: Today’s academic exegesis, increasingly specialized and too demanding even for many students of theology, is far removed from lay exegesis with its great freedom towards the texts. 3.4.1.2  Symptoms: Exegetical interpretation of the Bible and homiletic actualization of a text, which exegesis should in fact serve, are now hardly in touch with each other. 3.4.1.3  Symptoms: Many hermeneutical systems of today, aiming at holistic understanding, stand “beside” and are scarcely connected with the historical method which reconstructs and isolates events as past “facts” and texts in their “objective” original sense. 3.4.1.4 The background of the problem: Modern thought has been determined since the age of Enlightenment by the rationalist approach which sees in history only imperfect realizations of eternal truths of reason. Thus there is a qualitative leap between the question of the past and the question of truth. 3.4.2  Hermeneutical Goals In establishing a right understanding which corresponds to the biblical texts, theology can only listen to the texts themselves and should not rely on a general philosophical system of understanding. The reasons for this can be found in: MM

linguistics: different models of understanding correspond to different text types;

MM

history of exegesis: the adoption of general, non-theological models of understanding has frequently resulted in the neglect of important concerns of biblical texts;

MM

hermeneutics: no concept of understanding is ahistorical and without a debt to particular traditions. This is especially important for theology, which owes itself in its very origins to a particular history.

3.4.2.1  Holism is the basic principle of an understanding of biblical texts. Biblical texts speak of God and aim at an understanding which is holistic and embraces the whole person. An understanding of biblical texts concerning God is bound up with faith, obedience, prayer and action. 3.4.2.1.1 Consequence for the historical-critical question of the original sense: Historical critical interpretation of biblical texts must not only enquire into the sense of a text on the textual level but reach back beyond the texts into the historical life which gave rise to them.

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3.4.2.2 Historical reference is essential to the understanding of biblical texts. Gaining an understanding of biblical texts means becoming aware both of the history of Jesus Christ to which they point, and of the effects of that history to which they bear witness. Understanding biblical texts means becoming involved in a history. 3.4.2.2.1  Consequence for the historical-critical question of the original sense. In the exegesis of most biblical texts, the synchronic perspective takes precedence only methodologically, and intrinsic structural analyses have only propaedeutic significance. For the referential aspect of the texts, the history to which they refer and which they reflect, i.e. the diachronic dimension, is decisive. 3.4.2.3 Productivity and freedom are essential to the understanding of biblical texts. Biblical texts do not have a fixed, definable meaning which can be finally described. Rather, they have a firm core and a directionality which is realized in new interpretations in each new situation. 3.4.2.3.1  Consequence for the historical-critical question of the original sense: If the meaning of biblical texts is constantly realized afresh in the course of history, the question of the original sense of a text must be not only text—but also communication-oriented. It must enquire not only into the author but also into the recipients of the text. 3.4.3  Truth of Interpretation The criteria which help to distinguish between truth and untruth in the interpretation of biblical texts come from the biblical tradition itself. Theological criticism of biblical tradition owes its own critical faculty to the biblical tradition. 3.4.3.1 A truth criterion relating to the past history of Jesus Christ (“correspondence criterion”). As New Testament texts and their interpretations are testimony to historical effects of the history of Jesus Christ, their truth lies in the fact that they correspond to that past history. 3.4.3.1.1 Limitations of this criterion: the history of Jesus Christ is itself historically conditioned and in need of interpretation. This makes it only partially usable as a criterion. 3.4.3.1.2 The non-defining character of this criterion: the history of Jesus Christ is not a truth criterion in the sense that it defines and restricts the truth of its interpretations, but in the sense of a way that gives the direction in new contexts. 3.4.3.1.3  Historical-critical exegesis has lasting significance for the interpretation of biblical texts in that it reminds faith of its origins, which cannot be arbitrarily altered. 3.4.3.2  A truth criterion relating to the present-day actualizations of the history of Jesus Christ (“pragmatic” criterion). New Testament texts and their interpretations are true insofar as they bring about love. 3.4.3.2.1 As love does not operate only on the level of ideas, it is not sufficient to ask whether a text intended to bring about love, but also whether a text did bring about love. 3.4.3.2.2. Limitations of this criterion: It is often difficult to determine clearly what love is or was.

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3.4.3.2.3 Limitations of this criterion: The lack of human love does not disprove God, with whom according to the texts all love originates. 3.4.3.2.4 The scope of the criterion: If love is the truth criterion for the interpretation of biblical texts, all reduction of the holistic nature of understanding to mere words, mere theology, mere dogmatics or mere exegesis is contrary to the gospel. 3.4.3.3 (“Consensus criterion”) The reference of interpretations of the gospel to the one history of Jesus Christ (3.4.3.1) and the fact that the way of truth is a way of love and thus a way in common (3.4.3.2) enable us to recognize communication, dialogue and the search for consensus as essential elements in the interpretation of biblical texts. Interpretation is not a private task but a task for the church.

Notes 1

Gerd Petzke, Exegese und Praxis, ThPr 10 (1975), pp. 2–19, here: p. 19.

2

Hermann Lubbe, Geschichtsbegriff und Geschichtsinteresse (Basel: Schwabe, 1977), p. 9.

3

The problem of the relation between essentially ahistorical structuralism and the biblical texts which speak of a unique history was clearly recognized by Paul Ricoeur; cf., e.g. “Structure and Hermeneutics,” in: Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1974), pp. 27–61, partie, pp. 44–54.

4

Jürgen Moltmann formulates succinctly the correspondence of the process of “objectification” of the historical “facts” and their evaluation, which is increasingly at the discretion of the subject.“To the extent to which it (that is, historical consciousness) establishes that Paul was a child of his time addressing his contemporaries, the present becomes free of what he has to say” (“Verkündigung als Problem der Exegese,” in Perspektiven der Theologie [Munich: Kaiser, 1968], pp. 113–27, here: p. 115).

5

Ernesto Cardenal, El evangelio en Solentiname (Salamanca: Sigueme, 1976–8).

6

Typically, the theologian Cardenal does not attempt in the Solentiname Bible studies to bring the original sense of the texts critically into play with the “symbolic” interpretations of the peasants which relate the texts to their own life and situation.

7

Non-fundamentalist lay exegesis of this kind is well described by Carlos Mesters, “‘Listening to What the Spirit Is Saying to the Churches.’ Popular Interpretation of the Bible in Brazil,” Concilium 1980:1, pp. 100–11.

8

Moltmann (see note 4), p. 113, speaks of “diametrically opposed tendencies.”

9

An example can be found in considerations by Gert Otto which are neither naive nor unreflected (Thesen zur Problematik der Predigt in der Gegenwart [Hamburg: Furche, 1970], pp. 39f.): “The rule that a sermon is an address directly derived from the exegesis of a biblical passage must be recognized as being conditioned by the history of theology. It can no longer be dedared original in an unreflected manner. Accountability of the sermon to the biblical text narrows the horizon.”

10 History as an academic discipline is confronted with similar problems. Alfred Heuss, Verlust der Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1959), distinguishes

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between “history as reminiscence” and “history as science,” the latter constantly destroying the former. 11 There are exceptions e.g. in the work of Frederik Torm, Hermeneutik des Neuen Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1930), and in Paul Ricoeur whose work consistently endeavors to bring together the question of truth and the question of method. A further exception is Peter Stuhlmacher’s attempt (Vom Verstehen des Neuen Testaments, NTD Erg. 6 [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1979], p. 220) to concretize his hermeneutics of “assent” (Einverständnis) in the historical-critical field as a methodological “principle of apprehending” (Prinzip des Vernehmens). 12 Hans Weder, “Zum Problem einer christlichen Exegese,” NTS 27 (1980), pp. 64–82, here: pp. 66f. 13 At this point the insights offered by Arthur Danto’s analytical philosophy of history are helpful, stating that only the future of past events enables them to be historically evaluated. One should also keep in mind however Rudolf Bultmann’s recognition that historicism misunderstands present and past because it sees their relationship deterministically as a purely causal one. Rather, what the past is is decided in the present when we deal with the past. “Our past has by no means one meaning only. … Historicism also misunderstands the future as determined by the past through causality. … Historicism … overlooks the dangerous character of the present, its character of risk” (History and Eschatology. The Gifford Lectures [Edinburgh: University Press, 1957], p. 141). The crucial point as I see it is that the person considering the past “per se” and “objectively” has extracted him- or herself from the context of the influence of the past and dialogue with the past. The apparent objectivity of the past corresponds to apparent human autonomy towards it. 14 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (2nd rev. edn, New York: Crossroad, 1989), p. 303· 15 Baruch Spinoza, “Theologico-Political Treatise,” in: The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, Vol. I (trans. R. H. M. Elwes; New York: Dover, 1951), Chs 4 and 5. 16 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft. An den Herrn Director Schumann zu Hannover,” in: Werke, Vol. 8 (Munich: Hanser, 1979), pp. 11f. 17 Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (trans. Theodore M. Greene/Hoyt H. Hudson, New York/London: Harper and Row, 1960), p. 98. 18 Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Leben Schleiermachers (Berlin: Reimer, 1870), Anhang, p. 117. 19 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (trans. Michael Bullock; London: Routledge, 1953), Ch. III/5. 20 As I see it, Heidegger before the “shift” can be interpreted in this way, if he is not understood from the beginning in the light of his later philosophy. It is especially Bultmann’s reception of Heidegger which seems to me to point in this direction. The citation is from Being and Time (trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963. 21 Basic to what I have to say here is Karl Barth’s distinction between “document” and “matter” in the preface to his The Epistle to the Roamans (Oxford: Oxford University, 1993), p. 8: “Intelligent comment means that I am driven on till I stand with nothing before me but the enigma of the matter; till the document seems hardly to exist as a document; till I have almost forgotten that I am not its author; till

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THEOLOGY, HISTORY, AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION I know the author so well that I llow him to speak in my name and am even able to speak in his name myself.”

22 Ricoeur (see note 3), pp. 45–7. 23 My approach is related in its intention to Ernst Fuchs, who introduces into Bultmann’s general concept of existential interpretation the idea of Jesus as “our help” in understanding the text.“If everything is not to go round in circles, the texts themselves will have to tell us who can help us” (“Was ist existentiale Interpretation B?” in Fuchs, Zum hermeneutischen Problem in der Theologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1959), pp. 91–106, here: p. 97. I am also obliged to Peter Stuhlmacher, whose hermeneutics of assent seeks to take “the Bible as the book of education and the book of life for the Church” (see note 11, p. 206) seriously. I do believe however that it is not only the interpretation of individual texts but the overall horizon of understanding which must assent to the biblical texts. That is what I am endeavoring here. 24 Alfred Schindler, “Vorund Nachteil der Kirchengeschichte für das Verständnis der Bibel heute,” Reformatio 30 (1981), pp. 261–77, here p. 264. 25 It is thus correct, though too restrictive, to say of the hermeneutics of biblical texts: “In the field of theology, hermeneutics is the theological function which makes the texts … sermons” (Eberhard Jüngel, “Was hat der Text mit der Predigt zu tun?” in: Predigten [Munich: Kaiser, 1968], pp. 126–43, here p. 140). This statement is too restrictive because in my opinion one could also say, instead of “sermon,” “prayer” or “way of life” or “thanks,” etc. 26 One can hardly emphasize enough the interpretation of understanding as “event,” elaborated particularly by Ernst Fuchs, e.g. in the following succinct words: “Text and come together in understanding in such a way that the understanding itself becomes and participates in a history of which both text and reader are part” (see note 23, p. 93). 27 The associations between Mark 15.21 and Mark 8.34 were undoubtedly intended by the Evangelist, particularly as the sons of Simon will probably have been known to the Markan community as Christians. Cf. Joachim Gnilka, Das Evangelium nach Markus II, EKK II.2 (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1979), p. 315. 28 Here the term “sense” is used for the textual level of a text and the term “meaning” for the “matter” expressed in the text. 29 Gadamer (see note 14), p. 308. José Míquez-Bonino, Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), p. 88, analyzes the prevalence of an abstract and supra-historical “truth” over against its secondary “application” in history in Western theology and exegesis as follows: “Truth is therefore pre-existent to and independent of its historical effectiveness. Its legitimacy has to be tested in relation to this abstract heaven of truth.’ …” 30 The classical distinction by Wilhelm Dilthey between explaining and understanding remains noteworthy in my opinion. Ernst Fuchs’ significant rendering of it is as follows: “Explaining is … different from understanding, although the two cannot easily be distinguished. Explaining chooses the object or the process that is to be explained… . Understanding on the other hand lives with the things themselves … . Explaining isolates, analyses and objectifies. This can have fatal consequences for the living object. Understanding relates from the outset to the situation in which something appears as it does.” Thus understanding, unlike explaining, is based on the given relationship between the matter of the text and the listener. Fuchs terms

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this relationship “pre-understanding” (which is more than mere possibly erroneous or half-baked “foreknowledge” of something) and says: “Full understanding draws on and refines pre-understanding, thus making us move and perhaps even bringing us to rest.” Explaining and understanding are however closely related, and the one does not exclude the other: “An explanation seeks to awaken appreciation and therefore presupposes possible understanding.” Understanding can “more easily explain” things because it is affected by them. Not only what is explicable can be understood. Rather, “all that is explicable (is) in the realm of understanding” (citations from Marburger Hermeneutik [Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1968], pp. 18f.). 31 In this connection I find Wilhelm Dilthey’s idea of understanding as “re-shaping, re-experiencing” (Gesammelte Schriften VII [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1958], pp. 213ff.) productive, although it must not be restricted to re-experiencing the genesis of the work in the author. 32 Hans Weder, Das Kreuz Jesu bei Paulus, FRLANT 125 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1981), p. 250. 33 Christian Link, “In welchem Sinn sind theologische Aussagen wahr?” EvTh 42 (1982), pp. 518–40, here p. 526. 34 Biblical texts are referential in that “historical grouping always takes precedence over intellectual and theological grouping” (Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, I [London: SCM, 1975], p. 116). For this reason, a theology of the Old or New Testament must have the character of a narrative and should not be structured according to systematic points of view which are external to the texts. Paul Ricoeur speaks with regard to history of “a surplus of what is signified, which opens towards new interpretations.” He does not have in mind a text’s hidden totality of meaning in history which the exegete may be able to ascertain. What he means is that the narrated history of biblical texts constantly produces new history and thus new texts. What the exegete does is “the repetition of the Entfaltung which presided over the elaboration of the traditions of the biblical base” (Ricoeur [see note 3], pp. 47f.). 35 This shift is not fully identical with the canonization process of Old and New Testament. Josephus and Pseudo-Philo wrote their “new” original history of Israel, and the authors of the Temple Scroll and the Book of Jubilees wrote their “new law” at a time when the corresponding parts of the Old Testament had already taken on quasi-canonical status. 36 Weder, Kreuz Jesu (see note 32), pp. 56f., pp. 59f.; Zum Problem (see note 12), pp. 75f., draws a parallel between Arthur Danto’s concept of history (the historian can speak properly of past events only when he incorporates their future: Analytical Philosophy of History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968], pp. 143–81) and the Gospels, which can speak appropriately of Jesus only in the light of his future, i.e. of the cross and resurrection. Although the comparison is useful, we should bear in mind the differences between the historian in Danto’s sense and the Evangelists. The Evangelists do not simply harness the future for an understanding of Jesus, but one very specific and remarkable future (the resurrection of the one who was crucified). They make use of the freedom which Jesus himself gave. Quite deliberately, they want to claim (that is, proclaim!) Jesus in what they say, whereas Danto is concerned with the genuine “objectivity” of the historian. These are different emphases but are not in fact contradictory. 37 Gadamer’s theses are decisive here: Understanding is “not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well.” Understanding does not mean

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THEOLOGY, HISTORY, AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION understanding a text better than its author did, but in order to understand at all “we understand in a different way.” Truth and Method (see note 14), pp. 296–7. Hans Robert Jauss speaks of the “sense potential” of a work of literature. This seems a helpful expression to me, provided there is no suggestion that a work has a potential totality of sense but rather that it is the potentiality of the work itself which initiates actualizations in the course of its post-history. In: Literaturgeschichte als Provokatiton (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 186.

38 Cf. Ricoeur (see note 34). 39 In using the idea of “direction” I am taking up what Paul Hoffmann/Volker Eid, Jesus von Nazareth und eine christliche Moral, QD 66 (Freiburg: Herder, 2, 1975), pp. 109ff. passim, have fortuitously termed “perspective.” Miguez-Bonino (see note 29), p. 103, speaks of the “direction of the biblical texts.” 40 Klaus Berger, Exegese des Neuen Testaments (Heidelberg: Quelle uns Meyer, 1977), whose approach is similar in many respects to what I present here, is concerned (p. 253) that Ricoeur’s concept of “surplus of meaning” contains an unnecessary “metaphysical existence” of a sense lying behind the various historical receptions of a text. This is probably not what Ricoeur means (see note 34). 41 Emil Staiger, Die Kunst der Interpretation (Munich: dtv, 1971), p. 28. 42 Gadamer (see note 14), p. 309. 43 In exegesis it is Klaus Berger who has pointed most emphatically to the importance of reception theory questions (see note 40, pp. 92ff.). In literary history the following are important: Hannelore Link, Rezeptionsforschung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1976); Harald Weinrich, “Fur eine Literaturgeschichte des Lesers,” Merkur 21, 1967, pp. 1027ff.; Gunter Grimm, “Einfiihrung in die Rezeptionsforschung,” in: Grimm (ed.), Literatur und Leser (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975), pp. 11–84; Hans Robert Jauss (see note 37); Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge, 1978). 44 Schindler (see note 24), p. 265. 45 Iser (see note 43), p. 94 46 On the terminology cf. H. Link (see note 43), pp. 43ff. 47 This does not provide us with criteria for assessing the claim of a text, but only touches on a very complex issue which is enlarged on further in the next section. On the one hand, we should be concerned if texts in their reception history continually give rise to effects that were not intended, or if their successful reception is based on elements that are in fact alien to them. On the other hand, it is self-evident that the successful reception of a text cannot be the basis for an assessment of its quality or its truth (as evidenced in literary history by trivial literature). The question of criteria for judging the effect of biblical texts is a theological question which has to be negotiated in dialogue with the texts themselves. 48 Gerhard Ebeling, “Church History Is the History of the Exposition of Scripture,” in Isbling, The Word of God and Tradition (tr. by Samuel Henry Hooke; London: Collins, 1968). 49 H. Link (see note 43), p. 125. 50 Jauss (see note 37), p. 188, asks the same question: If understanding is nothing but entering into tradition, the “productive element in understanding” as described by Gadamer (Truth and Method [see note 14], p. 296) is in danger of being neglected. Jürgen Habermas, “Zu Gadamers ‘Wahrheit und Methode’” in Habermas (ed.),

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Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), pp. 45–56, here pp. 48f., suspects a “rehabilitation of prejudice” in Gadamer and points to the frequently disturbed communication processes in social reality which harden into the historical experience that “authority and knowledge (do not) converge” (p. 50). Habermas “denies”—and I can only emphasize this—Gadamer’s concept “the power of reflection which … proves itself in being able to reject the claims of tradition” (p. 49). I also have the impression that Gadamer is in close proximity with questionable aspects of historicism. This problem was recognized by Bultmann and expressed concisely in his discussion of historicism: “Our past has by no means one meaning only” (see note 13, p. 141). 51 Habermas (see note 50), p. 50. 52 Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1971). 53 Habermas (see note 50), p. 55. 54 In his reply in Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (see note 50), p. 307, Gadamer speaks of the danger of being in sole possession of the right conviction. This applies to orthodox Marxism but hardly to Habermas. Conversely, the same reply shows that one should exercise extreme caution in reproaching Gadamer with a critical deficit. In his struggle against a “depth hermeneutics” claiming to know better than tradition, he is concerned with the critical ability of the subject, not so much towards the tradition as towards the self. 55 Habermas (see note 50), p. 55, speaks about a “hypothetical anticipation of a philosophy of history in practical perspective.” On the dominance of practice in Habermas—one of the main differences vis-à-vis Gadamer—see the differentiated considerations of Wolfhart Pannenberg, Wissenschaftstheorie und Theologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 199ff. 56 Berger (see note 40), p. 255, expresses it admirably: “The norms (sc. of action, and thus also of the truth of biblical texts) are … not above history as such, since redemption itself was historical and can be historically experienced in history only through narrating and remembering.” 57 I am here in agreement with Peter Stuhlmacher. Recognizing that understanding itself and the question of the truth of an interpretation must be determined by the texts themselves, he ends his book Vöm Verstehen des Neuen Testaments (Understanding the New Testament) with a chapter that appears at first glance to be an appendix. It is entitled “Entwurf biblischer Versöhnungstheologie” (Outline of Biblical Theology of Reconciliation). In view of this, I consider it a weakness that he develops his (somewhat formal, in my opinion) hermeneutics of assent in the previous chapter quite independently of the final chapter. 58 Weder (see note 32), p. 248. 59 Fuchs (see note 30), p. 38: “We ask after truth by asking where truth is apparent. We do not allow ourselves to be logically trapped in advance, but ask about the situation of truth. That is the special aspect of ‘new’ hermeneutics.” 60 In this context the endeavor to achieve relative objectivity is an indispensable element of all academic history. For this reason historical-critical text exegesis will take the text first as a statement and not as a communication with us. 61 Gadamer too, in Truth and Method (see note 14), p. 306, speaks emphatically of projecting “a historical horizon that is different from the horizon of the present.” This

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62 The keyword “love” by which I attempt to “verify” truth here is inspired mainly by Augustine, De doctrina Christiana (trans. R. P H. Green; Oxford: Oxford University, 1995). 36 (86), 40 (95). It is not contrary to the keyword “freedom” chosen by Ch. Link (see note 33), pp. 539f. I find it helpful because on the level of human action in Jesus or Paul it is love which determines the potentialities of freedom and thus makes it true freedom. 63 With this criterion too the concept of “direction,” given by love and including commitment and freedom in new interpretations, is useful. Berger (see note 40) speaks in well-chosen words of a “tendency in action” which marks the “influence of the event of redemption.” 64 Both Jürgen Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), p. 158, and Karl Otto Apel, “Szientismus oder transzendentale Hermeneutik?” in Rüdiger: Bubner et al. (eds.), Hermeneutik und Dialektik, I (FS Hans-Georg Gadamer; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1970), pp. 105–44, here p. 105, strongly emphasize the significance of consensus as the precondition for action that is part of understanding. 65 Paul Ricoeur, “Skizze einer abschliessenden Zusammenfassung,” in: Xavier Léon Dufour (ed.), Exegese im Methodenkonflikt (Munich: Kösel, 1973), pp. 188–99, here p. 198.

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14 Jean-Luc Marion God without Being: Hors-Texte. Chapter 5, “Of the Eucharistic Site of Theology”

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ean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) is a French philosopher and theologian with a wide range of interests. He has worked on early Christian theology, early modern philosophy, twentieth-century phenomenology, postmodernism, and contemporary religious questions. This selection is Chapter 5 of his book God without Being, which was originally published in French in 1982. The volume’s title is striking, but it is not intended to imply that God does not exist. Instead of being a case for atheism, the central concern of the book is to liberate contemporary thinking about God from the specter of “metaphysics.” This term refers to large-scale conceptual frameworks, especially theories of being that define what it means to exist, which are human inventions and, as such, cannot actually accommodate God. When applied to “God,” they misrepresent him, and present what is really only an idol, a human creation that is easily confused with God. In the text, Marion crosses out the letter “o” in God to indicate divinity without invoking a metaphysical framework. Much of the book is given over to purging contemporary thought of this problematic pattern, which Marion sees as pervasive in the history of Western intellectual life, but the present selection is an effort at reconstruction. It begins from the only valid possible starting point, the Word. Only God can speak of God, and this God is the Word. The significance of the incarnation of Jesus Christ is that, as the Word becomes flesh, he abolishes the gap between the sign and its referent. In saying this, Marion offers a sophisticated exegetical reflection on the prologue to John’s Gospel. Readers will have to labor through Marion’s seemingly deliberately obscure language (“for nothing else remains to be said outside of this saying of the said, saying of the said said par excellence, since it is proffered by the said-saying”), but they will do well to

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remember that, at root, this is a fairly traditional doctrine of the incarnation, albeit one that is keen to guard itself, at every point, against the lurking danger of metaphysics. The Bible itself is not the focus of discussion for the entire chapter. But this text implicitly, yet powerfully, makes the point that how the Bible is understood is a function of where it is positioned in a wider field. In this case, the view of the biblical text that Marion favors depends on other theological commitments, his view of the incarnation first among them. If God reveals himself in the person of Jesus Christ, and the Bible is a sign pointing to this event, then the text should be read for what it might tell readers about this event. A “scientific” reading, in which the text is seen as a past act of communication, may not, in and of itself, point today’s readers to the Word. Neither may a “literary” reading, one that does not distinguish between the text as sign and the Word as referent. How does a reader interpret the text with reference to the Word? For Marion, the answer is that only readers who have themselves encountered the Word in the Eucharist can understand the text in light of that transformative experience. Marion’s Roman Catholic ecclesiology shines through in this reading, and his view of theological interpretation of Scripture will probably be fully persuasive only to those who share that commitment. It is, nevertheless, worth exploring analogies that hold between Marion’s own tradition and other denominations. Scholarly discussion of the book has inquired into the extent to which the issue of metaphysics, over which Marion is greatly exercised, is really the sort of problem within the Christian tradition that he takes it to be. Marion’s text contains some exegesis, especially of Luke 24. Those interested in seeing a longer sample of this sort of reading should consult Marion’s essay, “They Recognized Him; and He Became Invisible to Them” in Modern Theology 18 (2002): 145–52.

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Theology can reach its authentically theological status only if it does not cease to break with all theology. Or yet, if it claims to speak of God, or rather of that Go xd who strikes out and crosses out every divine idol, sensible or conceptual, if therefore it claims to speak of Go xd, in such a way that this of is understood as much as the origin of the discourse as its objective (I do not say object, since Go xd can never serve as an object, especially not for theology, except in distinguished blasphemy), following the axiom that only “God can well speak of God”;1 and if finally this strictly inconceivable Go xd, simultaneously speaking and spoken, gives himself as the Word, as the Word given even in the silent immediacy of abandoned flesh—then there is nothing more suitable than that this theology should expose its logic to the repercussions, within it, of the theos.

1. Let it be said … What, in fact, does theology—Christian theology—say? For in the end, what distinguishes Christian theology from every other does not stem from a singularity of meaning (as decisive as one would like) but from what, precisely, authorizes this eminent singularity, namely, the very position given to meaning, to its statement, and to its referent. Christian theology speaks of Christ. But Christ calls himself the Word, He does not speak words inspired by Go xd concerning Go xd, but he abolishes in himself the gap between the speaker who states (prophet or scribe) and the sign (speech or text); he abolishes this first gap only in abolishing a second, more fundamental gap, in us, men: the gap between the sign and the referent. In short, Christ does not say the word, he says himself the Word. He says himself—the Word! Word, because he is said and proffered through and through. As in him coincide—or rather commune—the sign, the locutor, and the referent that elsewhere the human experience of language irremediably dissociates, he merits, contrary to our shattered, inspiring or devalued words, to be said, with a capital, the Word. To say that he says himself the Word already betrays that we stutter: for this “he says himself” already means to say—the Word. He says himself, and nothing else, for nothing else remains to be said outside of this saying of the said, saying of the said said par excellence, since it is proffered by the said-saying. In short the dict of the Said. He is said and all is said: all is accomplished in this word that performs, in speaking, the statement that “the Word pitched its tent among us” (John 1.14), because he has nothing to do, here, other than to say [himself]. That he simply should say [himself], and all is accomplished. That he should say [himself], and all is said. He only has to say [himself] in order to do. Better, he does not even have anything to say in order to say everything, since he incarnates the dict in saying it: no sooner said than done. And hence the Word, the Said, finally says nothing; he lets people speak, he lets people talk, “Jesus gave him no answer” (John 19.19 = Luke 23.9)· And so he does by letting be said, and so he says by letting be done. So be it: “He says: all is finished” (John 19.30). The Word does not say [itself] as Word, or better: says [itself]—Word!—only by letting be said: which one can understand in a

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double sense. The Word, as Said of God, no man can hear or understand adequately, so that the more men hear him speak their own words, the less their understanding grasps what the said words nevertheless say as clear as day. In return, men cannot render to the Word the homage of an adequate denomination; if they can—by exceptional grace—sometimes confess him as “Son of God,” they do not manage (nor ever will manage) to say him as he says himself. The Word is not said in any tongue, since he transgresses language itself, seeing that, Word in flesh and bone, he is given as indissolubly speaker, sign, and referent. The referent, which here becomes locutor, even if he speaks our words, is not said in them according to our manner of speaking. He proffers himself in them, but not because he says them; he proffers himself in them because he exposes himself in them; and exposes himself less as one exposes an opinion than as one exposes oneself to a danger: he exposes himself by incarnating himself. Thus speaking our words, the Word redoubles his incarnation, or rather accomplishes it absolutely, since language constitutes us more carnally than our flesh. Such an incarnation in our words can be undertaken only by the Word, who comes to us before our words. We, who on the contrary occur only in the words, we cannot freely carry out this incarnation. Incarnate in our words, the Word acquires in them a new unspeakableness, since he can be spoken in them only by the movement of incarnation that is, so to speak, anterior to the words, which he speaks and which he lets speak him. Any speech that speaks only from this side of language hence cannot reach the referent, which, alone and in lordly manner, comes nevertheless, in language, to meet us. Before our words, the Word lets people talk, thus manifesting that he cannot be spoken in them, but that, by the lordly freedom of this redoubled incarnation, he gives himself in them to be spoken. What is unheard of in the Word stems from the fact that he only says [himself] unspeakably (gap Word/words), but that in this very unspeakableness he is said nevertheless perfectly (the gap traversed by redoubled incarnation). The Word says [himself] absolutely though unspeakably, unless he is only absolved from unspeakableness in traversing it by a perfect incarnation. He is unspeakable, not simply like an overly high note that no throat can sing, by default of speech: it is not only a question of speech, but especially of the sign and meaning. He is unspeakable also, but not only, like the untenable thought of the abyss, where Zarathustra founders, because it opens to the terror of an unfurling of divinity; for it is not a question here first of a thought, but of a referent, in flesh and bone, of the Word whose incarnation occupies and transgresses at once the order of speech and meaning. No human tongue can say the Said of, Go xd. For to say it, one must speak as He alone speaks, with exousia (Mk 1.22, etc.), with that sovereign freedom, whose (super-)natural ascendancy impresses all as an omnipotence so great that it only has to speak in order to be admitted. The Word says itself, it therefore becomes unspeakable to us; labile inhabitant of our babble, it inhabits our babble nevertheless as referent. The Word, as Son, receives from the Father the mandate and the injunction (entolé) to say; but, when he becomes the locutor, this message already coincides otherwise (or precisely: not otherwise) with that message which the paternal illocution eternally realizes in him as Word; such that he can legitimately transfer, in the very act of his

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statement—the incarnation—not only the message spoken by him, but the speaker who, with and before him, speaks it, him, the unspeakable Said, as such—verbym Dei. When he speaks the words of the Father he lets himself be spoken by the Father as his Word. Thus the Word is said as it is given: starting from the Father and in return to the Father. This very transference designates the Spirit. Or rather the Spirit takes the turn to speak in order to designate this transference of the speaker (Jesus) in the sign (the text of the divine will) as that of which the Spirit trinitarily offers the referent—“A voice came from heaven; I glorified you and I will glorify you” (Jn 12.28), the voice where Spirit speaks (at the baptism; Mt. 3.16), in the name of the Father (transfiguration, Mk 9.7) who speaks the Son as such. In other words: I hold this one as my preferred son in whom I proffer myself, the proffered that, of all the proffered, I prefer because he prefers to proffer me, rather than himself. Preferred, proffered: the Word, beloved Son. The Word lets himself be said by the Father—in the Spirit that consists, in a sense, only in this—exactly as he lets his will do the will of the Father. Thus appears the Said of the Father: the Word seems to be the Said, when he appears as the Son of the Father. Said of the Father: the Word proffered by the breath of the paternal voice, breath, Spirit. Upon the Cross, the Father expires as much as the Word—since they expire the same Spirit. The Trinity respires from being able to breath among us. Of such a Word, of such a logos, a discourse becomes legitimate, hence possible, only if it receives and maintains the repercussion of that which it claims to reach. To justify its Christianity, a theology must be conceived as a logos of the Logos, a word of the Word, a said of the Said—where, to be sure, every doctrine of language, every theory of discourse, every scientific epistemology, must let itself be regulated by the event of its redoubling in a capital, intimate, and anterior instance. It is not simply a question of making a concession, for example, of admitting that, given the event of Christ, certain conditions of linguistics, of hermeneutics, and of the methods of human sciences have to undergo a few modifications, even exceptions. For here, the Word arises short of the field of possible objects for given methods: one can well attempt (in fact though, one cannot) to do “theologies” of labor, of nonviolence, of progress, of the middle class, of the young, and so on, where only the complement of the noun changes; but one could not do a “theology of the Word,” because if a logos pretends to precede the Logos, this logos blasphemes the Word (of) Go xd. Only the Said that lets itself be said by the Father can assure the pertinence of our logos concerning him, in teaching it also to let itself be said—said by the Word made flesh, unspeakable and silent. Theology: most certainly a human logos where man does not master language but must let himself be governed by it (Heidegger); but above all, the only logos of men that lets itself be said—remaining human logos more than ever—by the Logos. To do theology is not to speak the language of gods or of “God,” but to let the Word speak us (or make us speak) in the way that it speaks of and to Go xd: “Receive the spirit of filiation, in which we cry, ‘Abba, Father’” (Rom. 8.15), “You then, pray thus: Our Father who art in heaven …” (Mt. 6.9).2 Theology: a logos that assures its pertinence concerning Go xd to the strict degree that it lets the Logos be said in itself, logos itself understood (strictly: heard) as he who alone, can let himself be said perfectly

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by the Father: for in order to say Go xd one first must let oneself be said by him to the point that, by this docile abandon, Go xd speaks in our speech, just as in the words of the Word sounded the unspeakable Word of his Father. It is not a question, for the “theologian,” of reaching that which his discourse speaks (well or poorly—what does it finally matter, for what norm in this world would decide?) of Go xd, but of abandoning his discourse and every linguistic initiative to the Word, in order to let himself be said by the Word, as the Word lets himself be said by the Father—him, and in him, us also. In short, our language will be able to speak of Go xd only to the degree that Go xd, in his Word, will speak our language and teach us in the end to speak it as he speaks it—divinely, which means to say in all abandon. In short, it is a question of learning to speak our language with the accents—with the accent of the Word speaking it. For the Word, by speaking our words, which he says word-for-word, without changing anything of them (not an iōta Mt. 5.18), takes us at our word, literally: since he speaks what we speak, but with an entirely different accent, he promises us the challenge, and gives us the means to take it up—to speak our word-for-word with his accent, the accent of a God. The theologian lets himself say (or be said by) the Word, or rather lets the Word let him speak human language in the way that Go xd speaks it in his Word.

2. The foreclosed event This position secured, it becomes possible to intervene in the debate that defines, if not theology, at least the function of the theologian. On what does Christian theology bear? On the event of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ. How does this event, separated from us by the course of time and documentary distance, occur to us? It occurs to us through a word spoken by a man, fides ex auditu.3 What does this word say? Inevitably, it transmits a text: that of the originary kerygma, in stating it or by allusion, or else by deploying its dimensions following the complete New Testament. In any case, the announcement makes use of a text in order to tell an event. The word dogs not transmit the text, but rather, through the text, the event. The text does not at all coincide with the event; at best, it consigns the traces of it, as the veil of Veronica retains the features of Christ: by rapid imposition of the event that transpires. The evangelical texts fix literarily the effects of meaning and of memory on the witnesses of an unimaginable, unheard of, unforeseeable, and in a sense invisible irruption. The Christic event left its traces on some texts, as a nuclear explosion leaves burns and shadows on the walls: an unbearable radiation.4 Hence the text does not coincide with the event or permit going back to it, since it results from it. The shadow fixed by the flash of lightning does not reproduce the lightning, unless negatively. The text assures us a negative of the event that alone constitutes the original. One also can understand this gap as from the sign to the referent. This gap finds confirmation a contrario in two contradictory impasses of hermeneutics. Either, in “scientific” exegesis, one attempts to read the text on the basis of itself, as if it meant nothing more than what it obviously says (historical meaning); the

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frequent triviality of the result ensues from the breakdown of every event other than the text, which, bearing only on itself, must support itself. In this case, the only event still possible will consist in the simple encounter of the text by its reader. Hence the temptation to master the text scientifically, to prohibit in it all utterance of the event, of the Said. Or else again, as the text remains so radically nonfactual that no salvation can occur in it, one will be tempted to assign it another event, no longer anterior to the text, as beyond, hence inaccessible, but subsequent, as short of it, still to come in the future of the reader himself. The sign does not at all forget its referent, it waits for it, tends toward it, announces it. This “prophetic” (in the common sense) treatment of the text would not undertake its hermeneutic by the utopia of an event to come (“liberation,” “hope,” “kingdom of the Spirit,” etc.) if it were not first conscious that the text does not make an event. The false event testifies at least to the absence of the authentic, hence of its function. Consequently, by thus hollowing out the gap between the text and the event, the sign and the referent, does one not destroy the possibility in general of all authentically theological discourse? Literature, as regards the referent, either dispenses with it (Emma Bovary, Werther, Swann “do not exist”) or rediscovers it in each of its readers (Emma Bovary “is me,” Werther “is not me,” etc.), which amounts to the same thing. In any case, literature dispenses with having recourse to an event in order to find its referent in that event. History, as regards the referent, publishes an abolished text, or rather publishes the text of an abolished referent at which one aims to the very extent that it remains forever abolished, undone. As to poetry, it alone provokes, if not produces, its referent by a pure and simple text: the very emotion that the letter causes in us; immanent, this referent, in a sense, does not constitute one.5 Theology alone remains; it claims to tell the only living one; it therefore must open up access to the referent; but this referent consists in the past death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ; the Easter that was—it is said—actual as an event of history, by the very fact of this undone fact, is accomplished, hidden away, and foreclosed in it; the text carries the trace of a foreclosed event but no longer opens any access to it. The confinement of its text protects this finite event, inaccessible referent. Would we be deprived of the event by the very sign that refers to it? Would the theological discourse culminate in the repetition of the irrefutable? Let us not dissolve too easily, by whatever clever move, this closure which closes theological discourse, but also meaning upon itself. For whereas, no doubt, every other discourse can adapt to the closure of meaning whence the referent is exiled, the theological discourse, which proceeds from an event and only announces the indefinite repetition of it, alone cannot do so.6 But, such access to the finished event, such aim and vision of the referent—how are we to recognize in them more than pious wishes? But a wish that remains “pious” rightly has nothing pious about it—only that which would accomplish its duty with respect to the divine would become pious—it founders in sterility, at the level of blasphemy.

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But this impasse, in which the supposedly theological discourse is implicated, results from what that discourse wants to reproduce, concerning the Logos come into our words—a linguistic device that the Logos overturns to the benefit of another device, this time theological, one that is in effect explicitly in the episode told about the disciples at Emmaus (Lk. 24.13–49). The Paschal event is accomplished, the Paschal accomplishment has occurred (Lk. 24.18, ta genomena = Jn 19.28, hoti eˉdeˉ panta tetelestai). For the disciples, as for us, it no longer belongs to the present. Once things have happened, there remain only words: for us, there remains the text of the New Testament, just as for the disciples there remained only the rumor, or already the chronicle, of the putting to death (Lk. 24.17, hoi logoi hais antiballete pros alleˉlous). In both cases, the event referred to is lacking. We cannot lead the biblical text back as far as that at which it nevertheless aims, precisely because no hermeneutic could ever bring to light anything other than a meaning, whereas we desire the referent in its very advent. When the disciples interpret what is said of the event, their correct interpretation can reach only one meaning—the meaning of an elapsed event, whose visible contemporaneousness does not even become envisageable to them: “their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (Lk. 24.16). It happens—a new event, which coins the Paschal event—that the referent in person redoubles, completes, and disqualifies the hermeneutic that we can carry out from this side of the text, through another hermeneutic that, so to speak, bypasses its text from beyond and passes on this side. The referent itself is interpreted in it as referring only to itself: “and Jesus himself (autos) approached and went with them … and he himself (autos) said to them: O unintelligent men and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets said! Did not the Christ have to suffer all these things to enter into his glory? And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he carried out the hermeneutic at length, in all the Scriptures, of what concerned him (diermeˉneusen … ta peri heautou)” (Lk. 24.15, 25–7). It is a decisive moment: the Paschal event can be read in a text (Old Testament, first Chronicles of the apostles) only if the text itself receives an adequate interpretation. But what human thought will be able adequately to refer a (human) text to an unthinkable event? Who thereby would not become “unintelligent”? “Only” (Lk. 24.18) he who “does not know” what all know—and, in fact, he does not know what the spectators know, nor as they know; this “he learned from what he suffered” (Heb. 5.7); he knows it in fact and in body, not by sight and hearsay. He can aim at the referent since he assures it; he whom no text can speak, because he remains outside the text, the referent (unspeakable Word), transgresses the text to interpret it to us, as an interpreter authorized by his full authority (exousia): less explaining the text than explaining himself with it, explaining himself through it, he goes right through it, sometimes locutor, sometimes referent, saying and said; in short, strictly, he is told in it. Hence a first principle for the theologian: to be sure, he proceeds to a hermeneutic of the biblical text that does not aim at the text but, through the text, at the event, the referent. The text does not offer the original of faith, because it does not constitute its origin. Only the Word can give an authorized interpretatlon of he words written or

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spoken) “concerning him.” Hence the human theologian begins to merit his name only if he imitates “the theologian superior to him, our Savior”7 in transgressing the text by the text, as far as to the Word. Otherwise, the text becomes an obstacle to the comprehension of the Word just as the Old Testament for the disciples, so, for us, the New. In developing a letter indefinitely commented on by itself, the text silences the Word—kills it. It is the masters ès-verba, the scribes of the self-sufficient text, who condemn the Word—for all time.“ Some cause trouble as if we were introducing a foreign God added by a fraud of writing (pareggrapton) and battle excessively over the letter; may they know, may they ‘fear there where there is no place to fear’ (Psalms 14:5), because their love of the letter is but the mask of their impiety.”8 They refuse the divinity of the Spirit, which, proclaiming alone the divinity of the Word, assures the transgression of the text. Such transgression, which the Verb carries out in person at Emmaus, offers nevertheless the unique possibility not of a spiritual reading but of any reading of the Scriptures whatsoever, indeed of the sole access to an originary word: “The veil is lifted [namely from the prophecies], as soon as you move forward to the Lord; thus is nonwisdom (insapientia) lifted, when you move forward to the Lord, and what was water becomes wine. Do you read the books of the prophets without hearing Christ? What could be more insipid, more extravagant? But if you hear Christ in them, not only do you savor what you read, but you are elated by it, lifting your spirit out of your body, ‘forgetting what is behind you, no longer to strain but toward what is before’ (Phil. 3.13).”9 Even and especially in the hermeneutic of the biblical text, one must rely “less on the literality of the letter, than on the powers of the Lord and his justice alone.”10 We should be understood: it is precisely not a matter here of any praise of fundamentalism (which sticks to the letter) or of a falsely “spiritual” fantasy, but of this principle: the text results, in our words that consign it, from the primordial event of the Word among us; the simple comprehension of the text-—the function of the theologian—requires infinitely more than its reading, as informed as one would like; it requires access to the Word through the text. To read the text from the point of view of its writing: from the point of view of the Word. This requirement, as untenable as it may appear (and remains), cannot be avoided. The proof is that as long as the Word does not come in person to interpret to the disciples the texts of the prophets and even the chronicle of the things seen (logoi, Lk. 24.17) at Jerusalem, this double text remains unintelligible—strictly, they comprehend nothing of it (anoetoi, Luke 24.25), they do not see what is evident (Lk. 24.17). The theologian must go beyond the text to the Word, interpreting it from the point of view of the Word.

3. The Eucharistic hermenutic But, one will object, does this principle not lead at all to a delirious presumption, strictly to a delirium of interpretation, which asks a man to take the place and position of the Word himself? Do we not even open the field to all the rationalist interpretations of Scripture, made in the name of the Word himself reduced to our rationality? There

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is more: in supposing that the Word in person should carry out for us hic et nunc the hermeneutic of the words, we behave exactly as the disciples from Emmaus. Even after the self-referential hermeneutic of the texts by the Word, we remain equally blind, unintelligent. That this absolute hermeneutic should be realized or not, that we should be on the path toward Emmaus or on the way to the end of the second millennium, this finally matters little: no hermeneutic could open our eyes to see the exegete of the Father (Jn 1.18). This objection leads to a remark: curiously, the account of Luke 24, which expressly informs that Christ “carried out the hermeneutic” of the text, does not recount the argument to us, or a fortiori the developments of that argument. Oversight? This hypothesis, passably common, does not hold, since the whole account aims at a hermeneutic that may render the Word visible in the biblical text. How is this to be understood? An absolute hermeneutic is announced, and not only does it reveal nothing, but it shines by its absence; barely named, it disappears to the benefit of the eucharistie moment (Lk. 24.28–33). Does not such an abrupt transition from the hermeneutic to the Eucharist admit the impossibility of the former? No doubt, but only if, following a serious prejudice of reading, one distinguishes here, as between two acts of Christ, between the hermeneutic and the Eucharist. Otherwise, another hypothesis would present itself: the hermeneutic lesson appears truncated, even absent, only if one takes it to be different from the Eucharistic celebration where recognition takes place; for immediately after the breaking of the bread, not only did the disciples “recognize him” and at last “their eyes were opened” (Lk. 24.31), but above all the hermeneutic went through the text as far as the referent: “and they said to one another, ‘did not our hearts burn within us, when he was speaking along the way, when he opened to us [allowed us to communicate with the text of the Scriptures?’” (Lk. 24.32). The Eucharist accomplishes, as its central moment, the hermeneutic (it occurs at 24.30, halfway between the two mentions of the Scriptures, 24.27 and 24.32). It alone allows the text to pass to its referent, recognized as the nontextual Word of the words. Why? We know why: because the Word interprets in person. Yes, but where? Not first at the point where the Word speaks of the Scriptures, about the text (24.27–8), but at the point where he proffers the unspeakable speech, absolutely filial to the Father—“taking bread, he gave thanks …” (24.30). The Word intervenes in person in the Eucharist (in person, because only then does he manifest and perform his filiation) to accomplish in this way the hermeneutic. The Eucharist alone completes the hermeneutic; the hermeneutic culminates in the Eucharist; the one assures the other its condition of possibility: the intervention in person of the referent of the text as center of its meaning, of the Word, outside of the words, to reappropriate them to himself as “what concerns him, ta peri heautou” (24.27). If the Word intervenes in person only at the eucharistic moment, the hermeneutic science fundamental theology will take place, will have its place, only in the Eucharist. The first principle (the theologian must pass through the text as far as the Word, by interpreting it from the point of view of the Word) here finds its support and the norm that spares it delirium: the theologian secures the place of his hermeneutic—the one that passes through the text toward the Word-referent on the basis of the Word-interpreter—only

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in the Eucharist, where the Word in person, silently, speaks and blesses, speaks to the extent that he blesses. One even must specify: the theologian finds his place in the Eucharist because the Eucharist itself offers itself as the place for a hermeneutic. Offers itself as place: at the very moment of his recognition by the disciples, the Word in flesh disappears: “for it is to your advantage that I go away” (Jn 16.7). For what? So that the Word recognized in spirit, recognized by and according to the Spirit, should become the site where those might dwell who live according to this Spirit, his own received from the Father. In fact, the Word, at the eucharistic moment, does not disappear so much as the disciples, who eating his body and drinking his blood, discover themselves assimilated to the one whom they assimilate and recognize inwardly; the Word does not disappear to their sight so much as they themselves disappear as blinded individuals, literally stray on paths that lead nowhere.11 They enter into the place of the Word, and now, like him, they go up to Jerusalem (Lk. 24.33 = Mt. 16.4). This place—in Christ in the Word—is opened for an absolute hermeneutic, a theology. For the two disciples go back up to Jerusalem only to say the eucharistic hermeneutic that they have just experienced, and to sanction it: “they themselves recounted [did the exegesis, exegounto] the things that happened on the way and how he was recognized by them in the breaking of the bread” (Lk. 24.34). To say the eucharistic hermeneutic, to repeat it for the first time, as one tries a new art, a new thought, a new mode of the real, hence to perform it, this draws, so to speak, an immediate (and in a sense supererogatory) confirmation: “While they said these things, he himself stood among them” (Lk. 24.37) to give the Spirit, and to be repeated as absolute Word: “It is me,” but also “I am me, ego eimi autos” (Lk. 24.38–9)· The circle is closed: the hermeneutic presupposes that the disciples occupy the eucharistic site of the Word, but their hermeneutic, in return, passes through every text and all speech, toward, again, the absolute referent (“I am,” Lk. 24.39 = Jn 8.24 and 58 = Exod. 3.14). The Christian assembly that celebrates the Eucharist unceasingly reproduces this hermeneutic site of theology. First the text: the prophets, the law, the writings, all of the Old Testament (as in Lk. 24.27), then the logia of the Christ (as in Lk. 24.17: logoi displayed in 24.18–24, through a sort of hypothetical kerygma, hypothecated by death). It is read before the assembly that, theological in negative, asks that a hermeneutic allow it to comprehend not words, but the Word. Then the hermeneutic: the priest who presides over the Eucharist begins by “carrying out the hermeneutic” (as in Lk. 24.27) of the texts, without the community yet distinguishing in him the Word in person (like the disciples); the hermeneutic that the homily verbally executes—henceforth the literary mode par excellence of the theological discourse—must be accomplished in the eucharistic rite where the Word, visibly absent, makes himself recognized in the breaking of the bread, characterizes the priest as his person, and assimilates to himself those who assimilate him. Finally the community: it hears the text, verbally passes through it in the direction of the referent Word, because the carnal Word comes to the community, and the community into him. The community therefore interprets the text in view of its referent only to the strict degree that it lets itself be called together and assimilated, hence converted and

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interpreted by the Word, sacramentally and therefore actually acting in the community. Hermeneutic of the text by the community, to be sure, thanks to the service of the theologian, but on condition that the community itself be interpreted by the Word and assimilated to the place where theological interpretation can be exercised, thanks to the liturgical service of the theologian par excellence, the bishop.

4. Whereof we speak This compound device, which we could develop and confirm in a number of results, directly has at least four consequences. Two concern the theologian, two others theology. If, first, theology as ideology attempts the hermeneutic of the words in view, hence also, from the point of view of the Word, if the Eucharist offers the only correct hermeneutic site where the Word can be said in person in the blessing, if finally only the celebrant receives authority to go beyond the words as far as the Word, because he alone finds himself invested by the persona Christi, then one must conclude that only the bishop merits, in the full sense, the title of theologian. This proposition may appear paradoxical, but at the risk of simplifying, we must insist on it: the teaching of the Word characterizes the apostles (hence also those who follow in their place) as does the presiding of the Eucharist; the close tie between the two functions clearly marks that it is in fact a question of the same. Without the presiding of the Eucharist, the hermeneutic does not attain the theological site the Word in person. No doubt the function of the theological hermeneutic can be delegated, but in the same way that the bishop delegates to the simple priest the function of presiding over the Eucharist. And just as a priest who breaks his communion with the bishop can no longer enter into ecclesiatical communion, so a teacher who speaks without, even against, the Symbol of the apostles, without, even against, his bishop, absolutely can no longer carry on his discourse in an authentically theological site. From this perspective, one cannot avoid considering every attempt to constitute theology as a science to be at least very problematic; beyond the fact that the status of science makes of theology a theology, beyond the fact that demonstrative rigor doubtless has hardly more pertinence here than in philosophy, this epistemological mutation prompts, or requires, the loosening of the tie of delegation between the bishop, theologian par excellence, and his teaching adjunct, who, always and naturally brought to postulate his independence, henceforth finds a possible justification for this illusion: for to detach oneself from the bishop does not offer to “theological science” an “object” that is finally neutral, but does away with the eucharistie site of the hermeneutic; henceforth, instead of interpreting the text in view and from the point of view of the Word, hence in service of the community, the theologian will have only one alternative: either to renounce aiming at the referent (positivistic “scientific” exegesis) without admitting any spiritual meaning, and the text has no referent—it says nothing—or else to produce by himself, hence ideologically, a new site of interpretation, in view of a new referent. In one case, breaking with the bishop,

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the theologian no longer serves the community in any way, and he abandons it to the hunger dodging of the “pastoral”: in the other, manipulating the bishop as he does the community, the theologian turns them away, from the eucharistie site.12 For a few years we have seen these two attitudes and experienced their common impasse. The rectification of theological discourse can only result from a restoration of the tie of delegation from the bishop to the teacher, who—learned person and hermeneut— constitutes only one particular case of charismas which are worth nothing unless related to charity and the edification of community (1 Cor. 14, passim). The theological teacher is not justified unless he serves charity otherwise, he brings death. But, the more the teacher inscribes himself in the eucharistic rite opened by the bishop, the more he can become a theologian. Hence, second, an inverse requirement: if the theologian cannot or must not want to reach a “scientific” status, he can only become holy himself. Holiness existentially redoubles the institutional requirement of a tie to the bishop: it is a question, in both cases, of the same access to the eucharistic site of the theological hermeneutic. Let us not fool ourselves here: the requirement of holiness is not the concern of pious edification any more than the requirement of an episcopal delegation imposes a limit on the freedom to think. Something entirely different is at stake: to satisfy the conditions of possibility of a theological discourse, namely, of a discourse that does not contradict, in its formal definition, that which it claims to reach. As the teacher becomes a theological by aiming in the text at the referent, he must have an anticipated understanding of the referent, for lack of which he will not be able to spot its effects of meaning in the text. There are many exegetes or theologians who commit massive misinterpretations of texts (biblical or patristic), not for want of knowledge, but out of ignorance of what is in question, of the thing itself. He who never knew passion can with precision analyze a scene from Racine or Stendhal; he cannot understand it from the point of view of its author—a fortiori the Song of Songs or even Hosea (of which many commentators seem to lack even an historical sense). He who never heard an orchestra sound can indeed decipher a musical score, he cannot hear or understand it as the musician composed it, in listening to it silently—a fortiori the Psalms or the Gospels (concerning which many commentators sometimes seem to omit that they were always destined for prayer). He who claims to go beyond the text as far as the Word must therefore know whereof he speaks: to know, by experience, charity, in short, “to have learned from what he suffered” (Heb. 5.8) like Christ; thus, according to Denys the Mystic, the divine Hierotheus: “either he received them from the holy theologians, or he considered them at the end of a scientific investigation of the logia [texts of Scripture] at the price of long training and exercise, or finally he had been initiated into them by a more divine inspiration—he did not learn things of God other than through what he suffered, and by this mystical compassion toward them, he was led to the perfection of mystical union and faith, which, if one might say, are not taught.”13 To go through the text of the logia in order, through passion, to receive the lesson of charity (in the sense that to receive a good lesson indicates that one suffered a good thrashing), here is the qualification, extrascientific but essential, that

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makes the theologian: the referent is not taught, since it is encountered by mystical union. And yet, one must speak of him. With this mystical experience, the morality or private virtues of the theologian are not first at stake, but above all his competence acquired in the matter of charity, in short of knowing the Word nonverbally, in flesh and Eucharist. Only the saintly person knows whereof he speaks in theology, only he that a bishop delegates knows wherefrom he speaks.14 As for the rest, it is but a question of vision, of intelligence, of labor, and of talent—as elsewhere, quite simply.

5. The delay to interpretation For theology also, two consequences become unavoidable. The first: theology, eucharistic or impossible, is practiced by traversing the gap from the text (signs) to the referent, from the words to the Word. In this gap, the unspeakable Word saturates each of the signs of its text with the absolute: the absolute of the referent reflects, so to speak, on the most trivial of signs—each of which takes on a spiritual meaning. The text, where the Word’s effect of meaning is fixed in verbal signs, consigns the incommensurability of the Word: the Scriptures thus exceed the limits of the world (Jn 19.30, 21.35). The text escapes the ownership of its literary producers in order to be inspired, so to speak, by the Word: or rather, it assumes the “objective” imprint of it in the same way that the disciples receive, from the Word, an “objective” figure: apostleship. For the text also becomes apostolic—sent by another than itself to go where it did not want to go. Hence a sort of infinite text is composed (the closure of the sacred canon indicating precisely the infinite surplus of meaning). It offers, potentially, an infinite reserve of meaning (as one speaks of “the reserved Eucharist”), hence demands an infinity of interpretations, which, each one, leads a fragment of the text back to the Word, in taking the point of view of the Word; hence it implies an infinity of eucharistie hermeneutics. Theology can progress in this way to infinity, on the condition that the Word and its text appear as given once and for all: the historically indefinite unfolding of eucharistic hermeneutics implies, impassable and unique, the transtextual revelation of the Word. Indeed, in what does the production of a new theology consist? In a new way of leading certain words from the Scriptures back to the Word, an interpretation rendered possible, more even than by the talent of a mind, by the labor of the Spirit that arranges a eucharistic community in such a way that it reproduces a given disposition of the Word-referent, and is identified with the Word, interpreted according to this relation. Coinciding with this new persona, the community (hence also the theologian who doubles in it for the bishop) realizes a new dimension of the original event, thus accomplishing a new hermeneutic of some words, signaling a “new” theology. This endless fecundity depends on the power of the Spirit that gives rise to the eucharistic attitudes (therefore, there can be no “progress” of theology without a deepening of the eucharistic gesture, which is confirmed by the facts). A theology is celebrated before it is written—because “before all things, and particularly before theology, one must begin by prayer.”15 In order to give

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an (infinite) hermeneutic of the (finite) text in view of the (infinite) Word, an infinity of situations are mobilized from the point of view of the Word, hence an infinity of Eucharists celebrated by an infinity of different communities, each of which leads a fragment of the words back to the Word, to the exact degree that each one repeats and welcomes eucharistically the Word in person. The multiplicity of theologies—if these indeed eucharistically merit theological status—ensues as necessarily from the unspeakable infinity of the Word as does the infinity of Eucharists. And the theologies contradict one another as little as do the Eucharists—and all as much, if both lose their site. In short, the “progress” of theology works only to overcome the irreducible delay of the eucharistic interpretation of the text in relation to the manifestation of the Word. And despite all our “realizations,” no theology will ever be able to attain the first Parousia by an adequate extension of the text to the referent; for that, nothing less than a second Parousia of the Word would be necessary. In this way the indefiniteness of our new interpretations (theologies) also (and especially?) indicates our impotence to enter into an authentically eucharistic—eschatalogical—site. Theological chatter, like liturgical bricolage, often testifies less to creativity than to impotence in performing the original repetition—that is, the reintegration in the center, the “recapitulation in the unique master, the Christ” (Eph. 1.10). Nevertheless, time dispenses with patience, so that our Eucharist may interpret without interruption or delay the words in view and on the basis of the Word—until he returns. Hence an ultimate consequence. The theological function does not constitute, in the Church, an exception to the initial deal of its foundation: “There has been given to me all exousia in heaven and on earth. Go teaching all the nations …, teach them to keep all that I have commanded you; and here it is that I, I am with you all the days until the end of time” (Mt. 28.18–20). All is given to the Church (space: the nations; time: the days) so that the Church may return it (keep the commandments) to the Word, because he already received all (exousia) from the Father; in theology it is not a question, any more than elsewhere, of working to a completion yet to come: completion, for the Church, is accomplished definitively at Easter, hence at the origin (tetelestai, Jn 19.28 = 13.1)· Accomplishment occurs at the origin and moreover alone renders it possible, fertile, pregnant with a future. To speak of progress, of research, of discovery in theology, either means nothing precise or betrays a radical ignorance of the eucharistic status of theology, or else finally must be understood in a roundabout way: not that theology progresses in producing a new text, like every other discourse, but in the sense that theology progresses eucharistically in a community, which accomplishes its own extension, through the text, to the Word. In short, theology cannot aim at any other progress than its own conversion to the Word, the theologian again becoming bishop or else one of the poor believers, in the common Eucharist. Once all is given, it remains to say it, in the expectation that the Said itself should come again to say it. Thus understood theological progress would indicate less an undetermined, ambiguous, and sterile groping, than the absolutely infinite unfolding of possibilities already realized in the Word and not yet in us and our words; in short, the infinite freedom of the Word in or words, and reciprocally. We are infinitely free in

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theology: we find all already given, gained, available. It only remains to understand, to say, and to celebrate. So much freedom frightens us, deservedly.

Hors-Texte 1 Pascal, Pensées, Br. sec. 799, L. Sec. 303 [trans. Krailsheimer, p. 123]. With Athenagoras of Athens as counterproof: “each one thinking himself fit to know what concerns God not from God himself (ou para theou peri theou), but from himself alone,” A Plea Regarding Christians, VII, P.G. 6,904b. 2

Father constitutes the first word that we say to Go xd in the very sense that Go xd says it (to Go xd, as Son to Father, precisely): “But, one day, somewhere, he was praying. When he had finished, one of his disciples asked him: ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught it to his disciples.’ He said to them: ‘When you pray, say: Father’ …” (Lk. 11.1–2). Father, we cry (Rom. 8.15; Gal. 4.16), only because first Christ says it himself (Mk 14.36; Mt. 11.25; 26.39; Lk. 23.34, 46; Jn 11.41; 12.27, 28; 17.1, 5,11, 21, 24, 25; etc.).

3

(Rom. 10.14.) One should listen here to R. Bultmann: “[Revelation is not illumination or the communication of knowledge, but rather an occurrence … Thus revelation must be an occurrence that directly concerns us, that takes place in us ourselves; and the word, the fact of its being proclaimed must itself belong to the occurrence. The preaching is itself revelation”; “Der Begriff der Offenbarung im Neuen Testament,” Glauben und Verstehen, 3 (Tübingen, 1960), p. 21 [trans. Ogden, p. 78]. As to the limits of this position, they are well known (see, among others, our outline, “Remarques sur le concept de révélation chez R. Bultmann,” Résurrection, 27, [Paris, 1968]).

4

One thus would have to speak of a sort of textual Sindon or, in another sense, of a literary veil of Veronica: the impression made by the paradoxically visible glory of Go xd upon a shroud of inert words, of dead letters.

5

It is therefore a question, for once in a strict sense, of a literary event: an event produces effects, leaves traces, imposes monuments under the figure of texts. Not that the texts themselves make the event (in the sense of the usual “literary event of the season”), but, inversely, in the sense that, precisely, they do not make the event, since the event alone makes them. Proof being that taken in themselves, they cannot lead back to the event, nor reconstitute it. This very gap between texts and event, far from removing us forever from the Paschal event (Bultmann, and others), indicates to us on the contrary (a) that with Easter it indeed is a question of an event and not of the effect of meaning or of a play of interpretation, and (b) that the full repetition of this event by an other/the same opens the texts to us—right to the Eucharist.

6

On the different acceptations of the closure of meaning and their theological implications, we refer to the whole of the published works of M. Constantini, and primarily to “Celui que nous nommons le Verbe,” Résurrection, 36 (Paris, 1971); “Du modèle linguistique au modèle chrétien du langage,” Résurrection, 46 (Paris, 1975); “La Bible n’est pas un texte,” Revue Catholique internationale Communio, 1/7 (Paris, 1976); “Linguistique et modèle chrétien de la parole,” in Confession de la foi (series edited by C. Bruaire) (Paris, 1977).

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7

Gregory of Nazianzus, Orationes, XXXI, 8, P.G. 36,14lb. In other words, and on a whole other register: “Now, we are going to speak a bit, no longer of God, but of theology. / What a fall!” (M. Bellet, Théologie Express [Paris, 1980], p. 77). Despite its title, more trivial than intriguing, if only because of its insolent and mystical tone, this essay, which is right on target, should receive a meditative welcome.

8

Gregory of Nazianzus, Orationes, XXXI, 3, P.G. 36,136a.

9 Augustine, In Johannis Evangelium, IX, 3, CCSL, vol. 36 (Turnhout, 1954), p. 92. No doubt one mustn’t attribute to chance that this text is invoked by Hamann, to center his Aestheticain Nuce (Fr. trans. J.-F. Courtine, in Poétique, 13 [Paris, 1980], p. 41). 10 Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Super Cantica Canticorum, n.21, ed. J.-M. Déchanet, “Sources Chrétiennes” (Paris, 1962), p.96 [trans. (here modified) Mother Columba Hart, p. 16]. 11 “[S]ur des chemins qui ne mènent nulle part,” an allusion to the French translation of Heidegger’s Holzwege.—Trans. 12 See “De l’éminente dignité des pauvres baptisés,” Revue catholique internationale Communia, IV/2 (Paris, 1979). 13 Denys, Divine Names, II, 9, P.G. 3,648b, and the authorized commentaries of Maximus Confessor (or John of Scythopolis) Scholia in lib. De Divinus Nominibus P.G. 4, 228b, and from Thomas Aquinas: “non solum discens, sed et patiens divina, id est non solum divinorum scietiam in intellectu accipiens, sed etiam diligendo, eis unitus per affectum” (Expositio super Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus II, 4, ad fin.). We could not put it better than to say that the love of Love constitutes an epistemological condition of theology as rheology. 14 Doubtless it would be useful here to take up again certain passages from Heidegger, Phänomenologie und Theologie, Wegmarken, G. A, 9, pp. 54 and 56 [trans. Han and Maraldo, pp. 10–11, 12–13]. 15 Denys Divine Names, III, 1, P.G. 3,680d.

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15 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza “The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship”

E

lisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (b. 1938) was born and educated in Europe and is a feminist and New Testament scholar. She has made contributions to the more abstract side of biblical studies, with her works on interpretation theory, as well as to the relatively concrete side, in her efforts to read specific biblical texts and to reconstruct segments of the history of the early Christian church. In all of this, she has championed the cause of women, attempting to bring their histories and perspectives from the margins and into the mainstream of academic discussion. This text, originally published in 1988, served as Schüssler Fiorenza’s Society of Biblical Literature presidential address. The Society of Biblical Literature is the primary academic and professional organization for biblical scholars in the English-speaking world. Schüssler Fiorenza was the first woman in the organization’s history to preside over it. Given the sort of case that Schüssler Fiorenza makes in this lucid and direct essay, it is worth noting her background; it is not simply a bit of peripheral trivia that she offers a female perspective, or that her discipline is one in which women had played only a minor role. Her sub-title is “decentering biblical studies,” and Schüssler Fiorenza wants to unsettle a certain approach to the Bible, not precisely masculine perspectives on the text, but a stance toward study of the Bible that gives a very low profile to factors such as gender (or race and class) that shape the reader’s identity. Studying the Bible according to a “scientistic ethos” means that whatever role these contingent elements of readers’ identities might play in how they live their lives, as interpreters of the text, they need to detach themselves from their backgrounds and engage the text in a dispassionate mode of inquiry. Stepping out of one’s own perspective gives a reader the best chance of being able to enter into the alien point of view

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that the biblical text manifests. Schüssler Fiorenza portrays the scientistic approach as both naïve, because all readings just do proceed from a certain point of view, and also oppressive, because claiming that perspective should not come into play easily morphs into marginalizing (female) perspectives that are foreign to the predominantly male establishment. Her address, then, is a work of ideology critique. The author does not intend to replace the standard interpretive practices of the biblical studies guild, but she does call for them to be recontextualized within a rhetorical framework, one that foregrounds the question of who creates “biblical” worlds of meaning and whose purposes are served by this process. This rhetorical vantage point is alert to the role that experience plays in the practice of reading, it welcomes a plurality of perspectives, especially those of women, and it is alive to the ways in which discourse on the Bible can serve to improve the lives of people and the plight of the world in which they live. How would a theological reading of the Bible be different if it were shaped by female points of view? Is Schüssler Fiorenza assuming that there is such a thing as a woman’s point of view? In other words, is a version of gender essentialism built into her position? Her portrayal of the goal of historical research is nuanced. She does not think that such research should proceed on the basis of a correspondence view of truth (i.e. that one’s view of the past could match up to reality in a straightforward manner), and she is clear that the historian’s reading is an assertion of power. What does she think that historians of the early church should actually be doing? What does she mean by an “ethics of historical reading,” and why does she value historical study? In what sense might an interpretation be true on her view?

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It is commonplace that presidential addresses have primarily rhetorical functions. They are a ceremonial form of speech that does not invite responsive questions nor questioning responses. Such presidential rhetoric is generally of two sorts: either it addresses a particular exegetical, archaeological, or historical problem, or it seeks to reflect on the status of the field by raising organizational, hermeneutical, or methodological questions. The latter type sometimes attempts to chart the paradigm shifts or decentering processes in biblical scholarship which displace the dominant ethos of research but do not completely replace it or make it obsolete. Almost eighty years ago, in his presidential address entitled “The Bearing of Historical Studies on the Religious Use of the Bible,” Frank Porter of Yale University charted three such shifts: (1) The first stage, out of which biblical scholarship had just emerged, was the stage in which the book’s records are imposed upon the present as an external authority. (2) The second stage, through which biblical scholarship was passing in 1908, was that of historical science, which brings deliverance from dogmatic bondage and teaches us to view the past as past, biblical history like other histories, and the Bible like other books. (3) Porter envisioned a third stage “at which, while the rights and achievements of historical criticism are freely accepted, the power that lives in the book is once more felt.”1 He likens this third stage to the reading of great books, whose greatness does not consist in their accuracy as records of facts, but depends chiefly on their symbolic power to transfigure the facts of human experience and reality. In the past fifteen years or so, biblical studies has followed Parker’s lead and adopted insights and methods derived from literary studies2 and philosophical hermeneutics; but it has, to a great extent, refused to relinquish its rhetorical stance of value-free objectivism and scientific methodism. This third literary-hermeneutical paradigm seems presently in the process of decentering intp a fourth paradigm that inaugurates a rhetorical-ethical turn. This fourth paradigm relies on the analytical and practical tradition of rhetoric in order to insist on the public-political responsibility of biblical scholarship. It seeks to utilize both theories of rhetoric and the rhetoric of theories in order to display how biblical texts and their contemporary interpretations involve authorial aims and strategies, as well as audience perceptions and constructions, as political and religious discursive practices. This fourth paradigm seeks to engender a self-understanding of biblical scholarship as communicative praxis. It rejects the misunderstanding of rhetoric as stylistic ornament, technical skills or linguistic manipulation, and maintains not only “that rhetoric is epistemic but also that epistemology and ontology are themselves rhetorical.”3 Biblical interpretations, like all scholarly inquiry, is a communicative practice that involves interests, values, and visions. Since the sociohistorical location of rhetoric is the public of the polis, the rhetorical paradigm shift situates biblical scholarship in such a way that its public character and political responsibility become an integral part of our literary readings and historical reconstructions of the biblical world.“The turn to rhetoric” that has engendered critical theory in literary, historical, political and social studies fashions a theoretical context for such a paradigm shift in biblical studies.4 Critical theory, reader response criticism,

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and poststructuralist analysis,5 as well as the insight into the rhetorical character and linguist­icality of all historiography, represent the contemporary revival of ancient rhetoric. The ethics of reading which respects the rights of the text and assumes that the text being interpreted “may say something different from what one wants or expects it to say”6 is highly developed in biblical studies. Therefore, I will focus here on the ethics of biblical scholarship as an institutionalized academic practice. I will approach the topic by marking my present rhetorical situation as a “connected critic”7 who speaks from a marginal location and that of an engaged position. Then I will explore the rhetoric of location and that of an engaged position. Then I will explore the rhetoric of SBL presidential addresses with respect to the shift from a scientific antiquarian to a critical-political ethos of biblical scholarship. Finally, I will indicate what kind of communicative practice such a shift implies.

Social location and biblical criticism In distinction to formalist literary criticism, a critical theory of rhetoric insists that context is as important as text. What we see depends on where we stand. One’s social location or rhetorical context is decisive of how one sees the world, constructs reality, or interprets biblical texts. My own rhetorical situation is marked by what Virginia Woolf, in her book Three Guineas, has characterized as the “outsider’s view”: It is a solemn sight always—a procession like a caravanserai crossing a desert. Great-grandfather, grandfathers, fathers, uncles—they all went that way wearing their gowns, wearing their wigs, some with ribbons across their breasts, others without. One was a bishop. Another a judge. One was an admiral. Another a general. One was a professor. Another a doctor … But now for the past twenty years or so, it is no longer a sight merely, a photograph … at which we can look with merely an esthetic appreciation. For there, traipsing along at the tail end of the procession, we go ourselves. And that makes the difference.8 Almost from its beginning women scholars have joined the procession of American biblical scholars.9 In 1889, not quite one hundred years ago, Anna Rhoads Ladd became the first female member of this Society. Ten years later in 1899, Mary Emma Woolley, since 1895 chair of the Department of Biblical History, Literature and Exegesis at Wellesley College, and from 1900 to 1937 President of Mount Holyoke College, is listed in attendance at the annual meeting. In 1913 Professor Louise Pettibone Smith, who also served later in 1950–1 as secretary of the Society, was the first woman to publish an article in the Journal of Biblical Literature. Mary J. Hussy of Mount Holyoke College had held the post of treasurer already in 1924–6. At the crest of the first wave of American feminism, women’s membership in 1920 was around 10 percent. Afterwards it steadily declined until it achieved a low of 3.5 percent in 1970.

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Presently the Society does not have a data base sufficient to compute the percentage of its white women and minority members. The second wave of the women’s movement made itself felt at the annual meeting of 1971, when the Women’s Caucus in Religious Studies was organized, whose first co-chairs were Professor Carol Christ of AAR and myself of SBL. A year later, at the International Congress of Learned Societies in Los Angeles, the Caucus called for representation of women on the various boards and committees of the Society, the anonymous submission and evaluation of manuscripts for JBL, and the establishment of a job registry through CSR. At the business meeting two women were elected to the council and one to the executive board. Fifteen years later I am privileged to inaugurate what will, it is hoped, be a long line of women presidents, consisting not only of white women but also women of color,10 who are woefully underrepresented in the discipline. The historic character of this moment is cast into relief when one considers that in Germany not a single woman has achieved the rank of ordinary professor in one of the established Roman Catholic theological faculties. However, the mere admission of women into the ranks of scholarship and the various endeavors of the Society does not necessarily assure that biblical scholarship is done in the interest and from the perspective of women or others marginal to the academic enterprise. Historian Dorothy Bass, to whom we owe most of our information about women’s historical participation in the SBL, has pointed to a critical difference between the women of the last century who, as scholars, joined the Society and those women who sought for a scientific investigation of the Bible in the interest of women.11 Feminist biblical scholarship has its roots not in the academy but in the social movements for the emancipation of slaves and of freeborn women. Against the assertion that God has sanctioned the system of slavery and intended the subordination of women,12 the Grimké sisters, Sojourner Truth, Jarena Lee, and others distinguished between the oppressive anti-Christian traditions of men and the life-giving intentions of God. Many reformers of the nineteenth-century shared the conviction that women must learn the original languages of Greek and Hebrew in order to produce unbiased translations and interpretations faithful to the original divine intentions of the Bible. Nineteenth-century feminists were well aware that higher biblical criticism provided a scholarly grounding of their arguments. Women’s rights leaders such as Frances Willard and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were the most explicit in calling on women to learn the methods of higher biblical criticism in order to critique patriarchal religion. Although Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the editorial committee of the Woman’s Bible sought to utilize the insights and methods of “higher criticism” for interpreting the biblical texts on women, no alliance between feminist biblical interpretation and historical-critical scholarship was forged in the nineteenth century. Cady Stanton had invited distinguished women scholars “versed in biblical criticism” to contribute to the Woman’s Bible project. But her invitation was declined because—as she states—”they were afraid that their reputation and scholarly attainments might be compromised.”13 This situation continued well into the first half of the century. In the

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1920s Rev. Lee Anna Starr and Dr. Katherine Bushnell, both outside the profession, used their knowledge of biblical languages and higher criticism to analyze the status of women in the Bible and the theological bases for women’s role in scripture.14 The androcentric character of biblical texts and interpretaions was not addressed by a woman scholar until 1964 when Margaret Brackenbury Crook, a longstanding member of the SBL and professor of Biblical Literature at Smith College, published Women and Religion.15 Although Brackenbury Crook repeatedly claimed that she did not advocate feminism or animosity toward men but that as a scholar she was simply stating the facts on the basis of evidence, she did so in order to insist that the masculine monopoly in biblical religions must be broken and that women must participate in shaping religious thought, symbols, and traditions. In the context of the women’s movements in the seventies and eighties, women scholars have not only joined the procession of educated men but have also sought to do so in the interest of women. We no longer deny our feminist engagement for the sake of scholarly acceptance. Rather we celebrate tonight the numerous feminist publications, papers, and monographs of SBL members that have not only enhanced our knowledge about women in the biblical worlds but have also sought to change our methods of reading and reconstruction, as well as our hermeneutical perspectives and scholarly assumptions. The Women in the Biblical World Section has since 1981 consistently raised issues of method and hermeneutics that are of utmost importance for the wider Society. And yet, whether and how much our work has made serious inroads in biblical scholarship remain to be seen. The following anecdote can highlight what I mean. I am told that after I had been elected president of the Society a journalist asked one of the leading officers of the organization whether I had been nominmated because the Society wanted to acknowledge not only my active participation in its ongoing work but also my theoretical contributions both to the reconstruction of Christian origins and to the exploration of a critical biblical hermeneutic and rhetoric.16 He reacted with surprise at such a suggestion and assured her that I was elected because my work on the book of Revelation proved me to be a solid and serious scholar. Interpretive communities such as SBL are not just scholarly investigative communities, but also authoritative communities. They possess the power to ostracize or to embrace, to foster or to restrict membership, to recognize and to define what “true scholarship” entails. The question today is no longer whether women should join the procession of educated men, but under what conditions we can do so. What kind of ethos, ethics, and politics of the community of biblical scholars would allow us to move our work done in “the interest of women” from the margins to the center of biblical studies? I hasten to say that I do not want to be misunderstood as advocating a return to a precritical reading and facile application of biblical texts on and about Woman. Rather I am interested in decentering it in a critical interpretive praxis for liberation. Ethos is the shared intellectual space of freely accepted obligations and traditions as well as the praxial space of discourse and action.17 Since ethos shapes our scholarly behavior

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and attitudes, it needs to be explored more explicitly in terms of its practitioners. The rhetoric of previous addresses of SBL presidents can serve as a text for engaging us in a critical reflection on the ethos as well as the rhetorical aims of biblical studies.

The rhetoric of biblical scholarship Only a few presidential addresses have reflected on their own political contexts and rhetorical strategies. If my research assistant is correct,18 in the past forty years, no president of SBL has used the opportunity of the presidential address for asking the membership to consider the political context of their scholarship and to reflect on its public accountability. Since 1947 no presidential address has explicitly reflected on world politics, global crises, human sufferings, or movements for change. Neither the civil rights movement nor the various liberation struggles of the so-called Third World, neither the assassination of Martin Luther King nor the Holocaust has become the rhetorical context for biblical studies. Biblical studies appears to have progressed in a political vacuum, and scholars seem to have understood themselves as accountable solely—as Robert Funk puts it—to the vested interests of the “fraternity of scientifically trained scholars with the soul of a church.”19 This ethos of American biblical scholarship after 1947 is anticipated in the following letter of R. Bultmann written in 1926: Of course the impact of the war has led many people to revise their concepts of human existence; but I must confess that that has not been so in my case.… So l do not believe that the war has influenced my theology. My view is that if anyone is looking for the genesis of our theology he [sic] will find, that internal discussion with the theology of our teachers plays an incomparably greater role than the impact of the war or reading Dostoievsky [sic].20 My point here is not an indictment of Bultmann, who more than many others was aware that presuppositionless exegesis is not possible nor desirable. Rather, it allows me to raise the question: Does the immanent discourse between teachers and students, between academic fathers and sons—or daughters, for that matter— between different schools of interpretation jeopardize the intellectual rigor of the discipline? Do we ask and teach our students to ask in a disciplined way how our scholarship is conditioned by its social location and how it serves political functions? In his 1945 address, President Enslin of Crozer Theological Seminary ironizes the British snobbishness of Sir Oliver Lodge, who thought that the only American worth speaking to was Henry Cabot Lodge.21 He nevertheless unwittingly supports such a scholarly in-house discourse by advocating an immersion in the works of the great scholars of the past while at the same time excoriating the “demand for the practical in biblical research.” He rejects the requirement that biblical research “strengthen faith and provide blueprints for modern conduct” as one and the same virus which has

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poisoned German scholarship and made it liable to Nazi ideology. He therefore argues that biblical critics must be emotionally detached, intellectually dispassionate, and rationally value-neutral. Critical detachment is an achievement that turns the critic into a lonely hero who has to pay a price in comfort and solidarity. However, Enslin does not consider that this scholarly ethos of dispassionate industry, eternal questioning, utter loneliness, detached inquiry, patient toil without practical results, and the unhampered pursuit of truth “under the direction of men [sic] whom students can trust and revere” could be the more dangerous part of the same political forgetfulness that in his view has poisoned German biblical scholarship. This scientist ethos of value-free detached inquiry insists that the biblical critic needs to stand outside the common circumstances of collective life and stresses the alien character of biblical materials. What makes biblical interpretations possible is radical detachment, emotional, intellectual, and political distanciation. Disinterested and dispassionate scholarship enables biblical critics to enter the minds and world of historical people, to step out of their own time and to study history on its own terms, unencumbered by contemporary questions, values, and interests. Apolitical detachment, objective literalism, and scientific value-neutrality are the rhetorical postures that seem to be dominant in the positivistic paradigm of biblical scholarship. The decentering of this rhetoric of disinterestedness and presupposition-free exegesis seeks to recover the political context of biblical scholarship and its public responsibility. The “scientist” ethos of biblical studies was shaped by the struggle of biblical scholarship to free itself from dogmatic and ecclesiastical controls. It corresponded to the professionalization of academic life and the rise of the university. Just as history as an academic discipline sought in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to prove itself as an objective science in analogy to the natural sciences, so also did biblical studies. Scientific history sought to establish facts objectively free from philosophical considerations. It was determined to hold strictly to facts and evidence, not to sermonize or moralize but to tell the simple historic truth—in short, to narrate things as they actually happened.22 Historical science was a technique that applied critical methods to the evaluation of sources, which in turn are understood as data and evidence. The mandate to avoid theoretical considerations and normative concepts in the immediate encounter with the text is to assure that the resulting historical accounts would be free of ideology. In this country, Ranke was identified as the father of “the true historical method,” which eschewed all theoretical reflection. Ranke became for many American scholars the prototype of the nontheoretical and the politically neutral historian, although Ranke himself sought to combine theoretically his historical method with his conservative political views.23 This positivist nineteenth-century understanding of historiography as a science was the theoretical context for the development of biblical scholarship in the academy. Since the ethos of objective scientism and theoretical value-neutrality was articulated in the political context of several heresy trials at the turn of the twentieth century, its rhetoric continues to reject all overt theological and religious institutional engagement as unscientific, while at the same time claiming

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a name and space marked by the traditional biblical canon. Such a scientist posture of historical research is, however, not displaced when it is decentered by an objectivist stance that arrogates the methodological formalism of literary or sociological science. The pretension of biblical studies to “scientific” modes of inquiry that deny their hermeneutical and theoretical character and mask their historical-social location prohibits a critical reflection on their rhetorical theological practices in their sociopolitical contexts. Although the dominant ethos of biblical studies in this century seems to have been that which is paradigmatically expressed in Bultmann’s letter and Enslin’s address, there have nevertheless also been presidential voices that have challenged this self-understanding of biblical scholarship. Already in 1919, James Montgomery of the University of Pennsylvania had launched a scathing attack on the professed detachment of biblical scholars when addressing the Society: We academies flatter ourselves on what we call our pure science and think we are the heirs of an eternal possession abstracted from the vicissitudes of time. We recall Archimedes working out his mathematical problems under the dagger of the assassin, or Goethe studying Chinese during the battle of Jena. But we dare not in this day take comfort in those academic anecdotes nor desire to liken ourselves to the monastic scholars who pursued their studies and meditations in their cells undisturbed by the wars raging without….24 Almost twenty years later, at the eve of World War II, Henry Cadbury of Harvard University discussed in his presidential address the motives for the changes in biblical scholarship. He observed that most members of the Society are horrified by the perversions of learning and prostitutions of scholarship to partisan propagandistic ends in Nazi Germany. He noted, however, that at the same time most members are not equally aware of the public responsibility of their own scholarship and of the social consequences of their research. He therefore challenged the membership to become aware of the moral and spiritual needs in contemporary life and to take responsibility for the social and spiritual functions of biblical scholarship.25 At the end of World War II, Leroy Waterman of the University of Michigan also called in his address for the sociopublic responsibility of scholarship. Biblical scholarship must be understood as situated in a morally unstable world tottering on the brink of atomic annihilation. Students of the Bible should therefore take note of the deep moral confusion in their world situation and at the same time make available “any pertinent resources within their own keeping.” While biblical scholars cannot forsake their research in “order to peddle their wares,” they also cannot remain in the ivory tower “of privileged aloofness.” Waterman argued that biblical studies and natural science have in common the “claim to seek truth in complete objectivity without regard to consequences.”26 But biblical scholarship and natural science sharply diverge with respect to their public influence. Whereas science has cultivated a public that is aware of the improvements

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science can effect for the increase of human welfare or its destruction, biblical scholarship has taken for granted the public influence of the Bible in Western culture. Therefore, it has cultivated as its public not a society as a whole but organized religion, “whose dominant leadership has been more concerned with the defense of the status quo than with any human betterment accruing from new religious insights.”27 The task of biblical studies in this situation is therefore to make available to humanity on the brink of atomic annihilation the moral resources and ethical directives of biblical religions. At the eve of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit on nuclear arms reduction, Waterman’s summons of the Society to public responsibility is still timely.

The ethos of biblical scholarship: Critical rhetoric and ethics Although I agree with his summons to public responsibility, I do not share his optimistic view of positive science. The reluctance of the discipline to reflect on its sociopolitical location cannot simply be attributed, as Waterman does, to the repression of biblical scholarship by organized religion. It is as much due to its ethos of scientist positivism and professed value-neutrality. Scientist epistemologies covertly advocate an apolitical reality without assuming responsibility for their political assumptions and interests.“Scientism has pretensions to a mode of inquiry that tries to deny its own hermeneutic character and mask its own historicity so that it might claim a historical certainty.”28 Critical theory of rhetoric or discursive practices, as developed in literary, political, and historical studies, seeks to decenter the objectivist and depoliticized ethos of biblical studies with an ethos of rhetorical inquiry that could engage in the formation of a critical historical and religious consciousness. The reconceptualization of biblical studies in rhetorical rather than scientist terms would provide a research framework not only for integrating historical, archaeological, sociological, literary, and theological approaches as perspectival readings of texts but also for raising ethical-political and religious-theological questions as constitutive of the interpretive process. A rhetorical hermeneutic does not assume that the text is a window to historical reality, nor does it operate with a correspondence theory of truth. It does not understand historical sources as data and evidence but sees them as perspectival discourse constructing their worlds and symbolic universes.29 Since alternative symbolic universes engender competing definitions of the world, they cannot be reduced to one meaning. Therefore, competing interpretations of texts are not simply either right or wrong,30 but they constitute different ways of reading and constructing historical meaning. Not detached value-neutrality but an explicit articulation of one’s rhetorical strategies, interested perspectives, ethical criteria, theoretical frameworks, religious presuppositions, and sociopolitical locations for critical public discussion are appropriate in such a rhetorical paradigm of biblical scholarship. The rhetorical understanding of discourse as creating a world of pluriform meanings and a pluralism of symbolic universes, raises the question of power. How is meaning

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constructed? Whose interests are served? What kind of worlds are envisioned? What roles, duties, and values are advocated? Which social-political practices are legitimated? Or which communities of discourse sign responsible? Such and similar questions become central to the interpretive task. Once biblical scholarship begins to talk explicitly of social interests, whether of race, gender, culture, or class, and once it begins to recognize the need for a sophisticated and pluralistic reading of texts that questions the fixity of meaning, then a double ethics is called for. An ethics of historical reading changes the task of interpretation from finding out “what the text meant” to the question of what kind of readings can do justice to the text in its historical contexts. Although such an ethics is aware of the pluralism of historicaland literary-critical methods as well as the pluralism of interpretations appropriate to the text, it nevertheless insists that the number of interpretations that can legitimately be given to a text are limited. Such a historical reading seeks to give the text its due by asserting its original meanings over and against later dogmatic usurpations. It makes the assimilation of the text to our own experience and interests more difficult and thereby keeps alive the “irritation” of the original texts and their historical symbolic worlds that they relativize not only them but also us. By illuminating the ethical-political dimensions of the biblical text in its historical contexts, such an ethics of historical reading allows us not only to relativize through contextualization the values and authority claims of the biblical text but also to assess and critically evaluate them. The rhetorical character of biblical interpretations and historical reconstructions, moreover, requires an ethics of accountability that stands responsible not only for the choice of theoretical interpretive models but also for the ethical consequences of the biblical text and its meanings. If scriptural texts have served not only noble causes but also to legitimate war, to nurture anti-Judaism and misogynism, to justify the exploitation of slavery, and to promote colonial dehumanization, then biblical scholar­ship must take the responsibility not only to interpret biblical texts in their historical contexts but also to evaluate the construction of their historical worlds and symbolic universes in terms of a religious scale of values. If the Bible has become a classic of Western culture because of its normativity, then the responsibility of the biblical scholar cannot be restricted to giving “the readers of our time clear access to the original intentions” of the biblical writers.31 It must also include the elucidation of the ethical consequences and political functions of biblical texts in their historical as well as in their contemporary sociopolitical contexts. Just as literary critics have called for an interpretive evaluation of classic works of art in terms of justice, so students of the Bible must learn how to examine both the rhetorical aims of biblical texts and the rhetorical interests emerging in the history of interpretation or in contemporary scholarship. This requires that we revive a responsible ethical and political criticism which recognizes the ideological distortions of great works of religion. Such discourse does not just evaluate the ideas or propositions of a work but also seeks to determine whether its very language and composition promote stereotypical images and linguistic violence. What does the language of a biblical text “do” to a reader who submits to its world of vision?32

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In order to answer this question, the careful reading of biblical texts and the appropriate reconstruction of their historical, worlds and of their symbolic universes need to be complemented by a theological discussion of the contemporary religious functions of biblical texts which claim scriptural authority today in biblical communities of faith. To open up biblical texts and the historical reconstructions of their worlds for public discussion requires that students learn to traverse not only the boundaries of theological disciplines but also those of other intellectual disciplines.33 To enable students to do so, biblical studies will have to overcome the institutionalized dichotomy between graduate training in the university and ministerial education in schools of theology. M.A. and Ph.D. students interested in teaching in seminaries and church-related schools are to become skilled in critical-theological reflection just as M.Div. and D.Min. students should be versed in the analysis of religion and culture. Moreover, in view of the insistence that all professions and research institutions should become conscious of the values they embody and the interests they serve, students in religious studies as well as in theology must learn to engage in a disciplined reflection on the societal and public values34 promoted by their intellectual disciplines. Finally, the growth of right-wing political fundamentalism and of biblicist literalism in society, religious institutions, and the broader culture feeds antidemocratic authoritarianism and fosters personal prejudice. In the light of this political situation, biblical scholarship has the responsibility to make its research available to a wider public. Since literalist biblical fundamentalism asserts the public claims and values of biblical texts, biblical scholarship can no longer restrict its public to institutionalized religions and to the in-house discourse of the academy. Rather, biblical scholarship must acknowledge the continuing political influence of the Bible in Western culture and society. If biblical studies continues to limit its educational communicative practices to students preparing for the professional pastoral ministry and for academic posts in theological schools, it forgoes the opportunity to foster a critical biblical culture and a pluralistic historical consciousness. Therefore, the Society should provide leadership as to how to make our research available to all those who are engaged in the communication of biblical knowledge, who have to confront biblical fundamentalism in their professions, and especially to those who have internalized their oppression through a literalist reading of the Bible. Such a different public location of biblical discourse requires that the Society actively scrutinize its communicative practices and initiate research programs and discussion forums that could address issues of biblical education and communication. In conclusion: I have argued for a paradigm shift in the ethos and rhetorical practices of biblical scholarship. If religious studies becomes public deliberative discourse and rhetorical construction oriented toward the present and the future, then biblical studies becomes a critical reflection on the rhetorical practices encoded in the literatures of the biblical world and their social or ecclesial functions today. Such a critical-rhetorical paradigm requires that biblical studies continue its descriptive-analytic work utilizing all the critical methods available for illuminating

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our understanding of ancient texts and their historical location. At the same time, it engages biblical scholarship in a hermeneutic-evaluative discursive practice exploring the power/knowledge relations inscribed in contemporary biblical discourse and in the biblical texts themselves. Such an approach opens up the rhetorical practices of biblical scholarship to the critical inquiry of all the disciplines of religious studies and theology. Questions raised by feminist scholars in religion, liberation theologians, theologians of the so-called Third World, and by others traditionally absent from the exegetical enterprise would not remain peripheral or nonexistent for biblical scholarship. Rather, their insights and challenges could become central to the scholarly discourse of the discipline. In short, if the Society were to engage in a disciplined reflection on the public dimensions and ethical implications of our scholarly work, it would constitute a responsible scholarly citizenship that could be a significant participant in the global discourse seeking justice and well-being for all. The implications of such a repositioning of the task and aim of biblical scholarship would be far-reaching and invigorating.

Notes 1

Frank C. Porter, “The Bearing of Historical Studies on the Religious Use of the Bible,” HTR 2 (1909): 276.

2

Amos N. Wilder articulated this literary-aesthetic paradigm as rhetorical. See his SBL presidential address, “Scholars, Theologians, and Ancient Rhetoric,” JBL 75 (1956): 1–11 and his book Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971)

3

Richard Harvey Brown, Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 85. See also, e.g. J. Nelson, A. Megills, and D. McCloskey, eds. The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Ricca Edmondsen, Rhetoric in Sociology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); John S. Nelson, “Political Theory as Political Rhetoric,” in What Should Political Theory Be Now? (ed. J. S. Nelson; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 169–240.

4

See my article “Rhetorical Situation and Historical Reconstruction in I Corinthians,” NTS 33 (1987): 386–403, and Wilhelm Wuellner, “Where is Rhetorical Criticism Taking Us?” CBQ 49 (1987): 448–63 for further literature.

5

For bringing together the insights of this paper I have found especially helpful the works of feminist literary and cultural criticism. See, e.g. S. Benhabib and D. Cornwell, eds., Feminism as Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987); Theresa de Laurentis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986); E. A. Flynn and P. P. Schweickart, eds., Gender and Reading: Essays on Reader, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); G. Greene and C. Kaplan, eds., Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (New York: Methuen, 1983); Elizabeth A.

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THEOLOGY, HISTORY, AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION Meese, Crossing the Double Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); J. Newton and D. Rosenfelt, eds., Feminist Criticism and Social Change (New York: Methuen, 1985); M. Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, eds., Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and Literary Tradition (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1985); Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (London: Blackwell, 1987).

6

J. Hillis Miller, “Presidential Address 1986. The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base,” PMLA 102 (1987): 284.

7

Michael Walzer characterizes the “connected critic” as follows: “Amos prophecy is social criticism because it challenges the leaders, the conventions, the ritual practices of a particular society and because it does so in the name of values shared and recognized in that same society” (Interpretation and Social Criticism [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987], 89)

8

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966), 61.

9

For the following information, see Dorothy C. Bass, “Women’s Studies and Biblical Studies: An Historical Perspective,” JSOT 22 (1982): 6–12; Ernest W. Saunders, Searching the Scriptures: A History of the Society of Biblical Literature, 1880–1980 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982), 70, 83f.; and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, “American Women and the Bible: The Nature of Women as A Hermeneutical Issue,” in Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship (ed. A. Yarbro Collins; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 11–33.

10 To my knowledge only one Afro-American and one Asian-American woman have yet received a doctorate in biblical studies. 11 Bass, “Women’s Studies,” 10–11. 12 Barbara Brown Zikmund, “Biblical Arguments and Women’s Place in the Church,” in The Bible And Social Reform (ed. E. R. Sandeen; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 85–104; For Jarena Lee, see William L. Andrews, ed., Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 13 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, ed., The Original Feminist Attack on the Bible: The Woman’s Bible (1895, 1898; facsimile ed. New York: Arno, 1974), 1.9; see also Elaine C. Huber, “They Weren’t Prepared to Hear: A Closer Look at the Woman’s Bible,” ANQ 16 (1976): 271–76, and Anne McGrew Bennett et al., “The Woman’s Bible: Review and Perspectives,” in Women and Religion: 1973 Proceedings (Tallahassee: AAR, 1973), 39–78. 14 Lee Anna Starr, The Bible Status of Women (New York: Fleming Revell, 1926); Katherine C. Bushnell, God’s Word to Women: One Hundred Bible Studies on Woman’s Place in the Divine Economy (1923; reissued by Ray Munson, North Collins, NY). 15 Margaret Brackenbury Crook, Women and Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); see also Elsie Thomas Culver, Women in the World of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967). 16 Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983); Schüssler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985). 17 See Calvin O. Schräg, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 179–214.

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18 I want to thank Ann Millin, Episcopal Divinity School, for checking SBL presidential addresses for references to and reflections of their political contexts as well as Margaret Hutaff, Harvard Divinity School, for proofreading the manuscript. I am also indebted to Francis Schüssler Fiorenza for his critical reading of several drafts of this essay. 19 Robert W. Funk, “The Watershed of The American Biblical Tradition: The Chicago School, First Phase, 1892–1920,” JBL 95 (1976): 7. 20 Letter to Erich Förster, pastor and professor in Frankfurt, as quoted by Walter Schmithals, An Introduction to the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1968), 9–10; See also Dorothe Soelle, “Rudolf Bultmann und die Politische Theologie,“ in Rudolf Bultmann: 100 Jahre (ed. H. Thy en; Oldenburger Vorträge; Oldenburg: H. Holzberg, 1985), 69ff.; and Dieter Georgi, “Rudolf Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament Revisited,“ in Bultmann Retrospect and Prospect: The Centenary Symposium at Wellesley (ed. E. C. Hobbs; HTS 35; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 82ff. 21 Morton S. Enslin, “The Future of Biblical Studies,” JBL 65 (1946): 1–12; Already Julian Morgenstern had argued “that in Germany biblical science is doomed.” Since in Europe Biblical Studies are in decline. North America, i.e. the U.S. and Canada “must become the major center of biblical research” (“The Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis,” JBL 61 [1942]: 4–5). 22 George G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (rev. edn, Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1983) 64. 23 Robert A. Oden, Jr., “Hermeneutics and Historiography: Germany and America,” in SBL 1980 Seminar Papers (ed. P J, Achtemeier; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1980), 135–57. 24 James A. Montgomery, “Present Tasks of American Biblical Scholarship,” JBL 38 (1919): 2. 25 Henry J. Cadbury, “Motives of Biblical Scholarship,” JBL 56 (1937): 1–16. 26 Leroy Waterman, “Biblical Studies in a New Setting,” JBL 66 (1946): 5. 27 Ibid. 28 David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, and Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 31. 29 See the discussion of scientific theory choice by Linda Alcoff, “Justifying Feminist Social Science,” Hypatia 2 (1987): 107–27. 30 Maurice Mandelbaum, The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 150. 31 Krister Stendahl, “The Bible as a Classic and the Bible as Holy Scripture,” JBL 103 (1984): 10. 32 See Wayne C. Booth, “Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism,” in The Politics oflnterpretation (ed. J. T. Mitchell; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 51–82. 33 See Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Theory and Practice: Theological Education as a Reconstructive, Hermeneutical and Practical Task,” Theological Education 23 (1987): 113–41 34 See also Ronald F. Thiemann, “Toward an American Public Theology: Religion in a Pluralistic Theology,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 18/1 (1987): 3–6,10.

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16 Jon Levenson “The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism”*

J

on Levenson (b. 1949) is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish tradition. In addition, he has a long-standing interest in the relationship between Jews and Christians and has played a significant role in inter-religious dialogue between the two religious communities. The present form of this essay went into print in 1993. The work explores the tension created by attempts to read texts from the Hebrew Bible in two different contexts: the historical contexts from which they emerge, and the larger literary context that is created when the text becomes part of a canon of Scripture, whether in a Jewish or Christian form. Practicing Jews interpret passages of their Scripture in relation to other biblical passages and in relation to later texts from the Jewish tradition, such as rabbinic teaching. For Christians, such passages become part of the Old Testament, which, together with the New Testament, serves as a witness to Jesus Christ. These are both fundamentally different operations than reading a passage against its historical context, for in the latter case it is illegitimate to read a passage in connection with any literature or religious figure that did not exist at the time. Levenson’s primary claim is, thus, that the practice of historical criticism and the reading habits of any text-based religion do not sit easily with one another. He is, however, at his most acute when he highlights how articles of Christian faith serve as guiding principles for scholars attempting to synthesize texts from the Hebrew Bible into a unified whole. Levenson surveys five historically prominent scholars of the Hebrew Bible and descries in each one how their own inherited faith covertly

All original notes have been removed.

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functions as a principle of coherence. They are not open about how their theological allegiance influences their readings, and want their work to be seen as historically responsible. Perhaps Levenson is especially alert to the presence of Christian faith presuppositions because he himself, as a practicing Jew, does not share them. He also deals with the implicit and sometimes explicit anti-Jewish polemic that accompanies such scholarship. Levenson is both articulate and thoughtful in considering the challenge that historical criticism creates for text-based religious communities. (He gives a modest amount of space in this essay to analyzing the reverse challenge, which emerges from religious communities and is directed to the practice of historical criticism, though there is more of that in the rest of the book from which this essay is drawn.) What Levenson nowhere does, though, is to resolve the tension he reflects upon in such an illuminating way. He refuses to cut this Gordian knot. Is this satisfactory? What alternatives present themselves to people who are members of religious communities but who are also inclined to read their Scripture in a historical-critical manner?

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What could be more glorious than to brace one’s self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really Old South Wales. G. K. CHESTERTON, ORTHODOXY

1 If there has ever been a book that has thriven in a plurality of contexts, it is surely the Hebrew Bible. In the Jewish tradition this book, known as the Tanakh or the Miqra is properly placed alongside the Talmud, Midrash, and medieval rabbinic commentaries. These books, highly diverse and delightfully argumentative, establish a pluriform yet bounded context of interpretation for the Tanakh. In the church, the Hebrew Bible, known as the “Old Testament,” appears as the first of the two volumes of sacred scripture, the “Bible,” and interpretation is not complete until volume 1 is related to volume 2, the Old Testament to the New, so as to proclaim together Jesus Christ. In both the Jewish and the Christian traditions even as they were constituted before the Enlightenment, there is substantial precedent for searching out the meaning of a passage in the Hebrew Bible apart from the meanings directly suggested for it by the books that mark out its traditional contexts of interpretation. At least from the eleventh century c.e., the “plainsense” (Hebrew, peshat) was much prized. It is important to remember that this “plain sense” was itself culturally conditioned and a matter of communal consensus and that among rabbinic Jews and Christians, it was not pursued with the intention of undermining the normativity of the larger context. A plain-sense exegete (pashtan) like Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (“Rashbam,” Northern France, twelfth century) could be uncompromising both in his pursuit of the plain sense and in his allegiance to halakhah (rabbinic law), which often bases itself on the biblical text in a way that contradicts the peshat. He is paralleled by those Christian exegetes who recognized a “historical sense” to the Old Testament without relinquishing a Christocentric interpretation of it. In both the Jewish and the Christian cases, the unity of the overall religion was maintained, even though it was not seen as operative in all forms of exegesis. There could be concentric circles of context, but the smallest circle, the plain sense, finally yielded to the largest one, the whole tradition, however constituted. In the last three centuries, there has arisen another context of interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, the historical context: no part of the book is to be read against literature, either internal or external, that cannot be reasonably presumed to have existed at the time. To be sure, historical criticism has affinities with the pursuit of the plain sense and builds upon the half millennium of pashtanut that preceded its emergence. They differ, however, in that historical critics place all the emphasis on development and historical change and fearlessly challenge both the historicity of the foundational events (e.g. Sinaitic revelation, the resurrection of Jesus) and traditional ideas of

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authorship, for example, that Moses wrote the Pentateuch or that the Gospels were written by the evangelists to whom they are ascribed. Historical critics take the text apart more ruthlessly than traditional pashtanim, and, qua historical critics, they lack a method of putting it back together again. They reconstruct history by concentrating on contradictions, which they then allow to stand. The traditions, of course, often recognized the same contradictions. The difference is that traditionalists had a method that could harmonize the contradictions and, in the process, preserve the unity of the text and its religious utility. Consider, for example, the contradiction between Exodus 12.15, which mandates the eating of unleavened bread during Passover for a full seven days, and Deuteronomy 16.8, which specifies six days of observance for the same commandment. Below, we see one way that the rabbis of the talmudic period handled the contradiction: How can both these passages be maintained? The seventh day had been included in the more inclusive statement and then was taken out of it. Now, that which is singled out from a more inclusive statement means to teach us something about the whole statement. Hence, just as on the seventh day it is optional, so on all the other days it is optional. May it not be that just as on the seventh day it is optional, so on all the rest, including the first night, it is optional? The scriptural passage: “In the first month, at evening ye shall eat unleavened bread” [Exod. 12.18] fixes it as an obligation to eat unleavened bread on the first night. (Mek., Pischa’ 8) The assumption of the rabbis here is that the Deuteronomic law is not independent of that given in Exodus. On the contrary, the operative law is to be discovered by taking both passages into account. The unity of the Mosaic Torah requires that all its data be considered. The two laws do not compete; together, they enable the ingenious exegete to discover the truth. The law that emerges, and is halakhah to this day, reflects neither the seven days of Exodus 12.15 nor the six of Deuteronomy 16.8, but only one day. In short, rabbinic exegesis of the Torah here yields a norm for which, prima facie, the Torah provides no evidence at all. If this seems absurd, consider that the alternative is simply to choose arbitrarily and subjectively one Torah verse over the other, as if they were not of equal sanctity If one assumes, with the rabbis, that they are of equal sanctity and that they exist in the same mind (the mind of God) at the same moment (eternally), then one is required to undertake just the sort of exegetical operation in which the rabbis are here engaged, an operation that is, in fact, in continuity with the redactional process that helped produce the Hebrew Bible itself. In the minds of historical critics, this operation is a historically indefensible homogenization of the past. By harmonizing inconcinnities, the tradition presents itself with a timeless document, one that appears to speak to the present only because the historical setting of the speaking voice or the writing hand has been suppressed, and all voices and all hands are absorbed into an eternal simultaneity The historical critics have a different way of handling the contradiction between

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Exodus 12.15 and Deuteronomy 16.8. They feel no compulsion to see the two verses as derived from one synchronic reality, but readily consign them to different historical periods or to different locales or to different social sectors. Whereas the traditionalist begins with the assumption that the tradition (and certainly its most sacred texts) has a stable core and that there is a unified, if variegated, religion that can be derived from it—“Judaism” or “Christianity”—the historical critic begins with no such assumption of stability and continuity, but with a commitment to restore the texts to their historical contexts. Passages are to be read against their age, not against the book into which they eventually came (not, that is, unless it is the period in which the finished book was produced that we are seeking to interpret). Knowledge of that age is to be gained by excavating within the text, but also by means of archaeology and the extra biblical texts and forgotten biblical manuscripts it unearths, without the traditionalist’s concern that the resultant picture will depend upon an illicit mixture of sacred and profane sources. In an important sense, historical criticism of the Bible thus resembes psycho­ analysis. It brings to light what has been repressed and even forgotten, the childhood, as it were, of the tradition. But if Wordsworth was right that “the Child is the Father of the Man,” it is wrong to think that the man will be happy to meet the child within him whom he thinks he has outgrown. Like psychoanalysis, historical criticism uncovers old conflicts and dissolves the impression that they have been resolved rather than repressed. It is only reasonable to expect both to encounter “resistance” in those to whom they are applied. Although most historical critics of the Bible consider themselves still somehow adherents of the Jewish or the Christian traditions, it must be conceded that the position of the majority of traditionalists who fear historical criticism and doubt its appropriateness is not groundless. Later, we shall examine ways in which some eminent Christian critics have dealt with the dissonance between two contexts, that of the Hebrew Bible of historical criticism and that of the Old Testament of Christian faith. I have argued that the price of recovering the historical context of sacred books has been the erosion of the largest literary contexts that undergird the traditions that claim to be based upon them. In modern times, the multicontextuality of the Hebrew Bible has been the source of acute dissension. Much of the polemics between religious traditionalists and historians over the past three centuries can be reduced to the issue of which context shall be normative. When historical critics assert, as they are wont to do, that the Hebrew Bible must not be taken “out of context,” what they really mean is that the only context worthy of respect is the ancient Near Eastern world as it was at the time of composition of whatever text is under discussion. Religious traditionalists, however, are committed to another set of contexts, minimally the rest of scripture, however delimited, and maximally, the entire tradition, including their own religious experience. Their goal is not to push the Book back into a vanished past, but to insure its vitality in the present and the future: “The word of our God endures forever” (Isa. 40.8). Their interest in the past is usually confined to an optimistic examination of how the vitality of yesteryear can energize

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the present. The discontinuities with which historical critics are preoccupied are of little or no use to traditionalists. In recent years, increasing numbers of scholars have been asserting the validity of both the historical and the literary (or canonical) contexts. Some have sought to develop a hermeneutic that respects the integrity of the received text for purposes of literary analysis or theological affirmation, without in the process slipping into a fundamentalistic denial of historical change. In this, the “second naïveté” of those touched by historical criticism is to be distinguished from the innocence of the orthodox believer who has never become aware of the historical context and who does not feel the claim of historical investigation. In truth, the literary interests of these scholars of the “second naïveté” have little in common with the search for proof texts so important to the growth of both Judaism and Christianity and to the establishment of their normative statements. Underlying the literary context affirmed by religious traditionalists is the conviction that the text is somehow the expression of a reliable God. Harmonization is the exegetical counterpart to belief in the coherence of the divine will. The uniformity of scripture reflects the uniformity of truth. The alternative to this traditional religious position has never been stated more boldly than it was by a great pioneer of the historical criticism of the Christian Bible, Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza (1632–77), when he wrote that “great caution is necessary not to confuse the mind of a prophet or historian with the mind of the Holy Spirit and the truth of the matter.” For Spinoza, the excommunicated Jew who never became a Christian, the idea of inspiration was simply another shackle constricting the exegete. No longer need exegesis take place within the believing community. Scripture must be followed wherever it leads, come what may. The author of a biblical text will be the person who wrote it; its meaning will be what that person meant, not what God means, and no intellectually responsible exposition of it can take place without locating the text unshakably within the historical circumstances of its composition. Jews and Christians can participate equally in the Spinozan agenda only because its naturalistic presuppositions negate the theological foundations of both Judaism and Christianity. Ever since Spinoza, those Jews and Christians who wish both to retain historical consciousness and to make a contemporary use of scripture have been, at least intellectually, on the defensive.

2 The concept that the Bible has many authors rather than one Author has been as brutal to the New Testament as it has been to the Hebrew Bible. It was not long before scholars noticed that the four canonical Gospels contradict each other not only in details (e.g. Did Jesus say “Blessed are the poor” or “Blessed are the poor in spirit”?), but even in theology. In fact, the New Testament, too, soon ceased to be a single book in the minds of critical scholars. For example, they noted that for Paul, Christ is “the end of the law” (Rom. 10.4), whereas the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew denounces

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those who set aside “even the least of the law’s commandments,” for “not a jot or a tittle will disappear from the law until all has been fulfilled” (Mt. 5:17–20). No wonder Matthew’s Jesus commends obedience to the Pharisees, who “sit in the chair of Moses” (Mt. 23.2–3). Now, if “the law” in the Sermon on the Mount means the Mosaic Torah, then St. Matthew’s Gospel, or at least this document in it, is guilty of the heresy of “Judaizing,” for the Pauline position that redemption in Christ means exemption from the Torah (see Galatians) became normative. And so the possibility emerges that the church has canonized a heretic—and his Gospel! If, on the other hand, the position of Matthew 5.17–20 is valid, then what is to be said to all those Gentiles who believe, with Paul, that Christ allows them to come into the very bosom of Abraham while bypassing the Mosaic Torah? And even if Matthew 5.17–20 refers not to the Mosaic Torah but to Jesus’ own Torah or to his particular exposition of Moses,’ then the Pauline doctrine of justification through faith by grace alone, so central to Protestantism, still stands indicted sola scriptura, “through scripture alone.” In short, the reason these various theological positions, including the heresy of “Judaizing,” have kept turning up throughout the history of the church is that they can all make a plausible claim to be biblical. Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms could still express a commitment to “scripture and plain reason” rather than “the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other.” Historical criticism has now abundantly shown that scripture, too, is contradictory, a potpourri drawn from what are, in fact, different religions. In the process, historical criticism of the Christian Bible has shattered the Protestant dream of an orthodox church founded on biblical authority alone. The relationship between theological heterodoxy and the critical study of history is thus reciprocal. The historian soon discovers that orthodoxy hangs from a thread that is very thin, if it exists at all. Some of the traditionalists’ heroes were heterodox; alive today, they might be accused of heresy. On the other hand, persons of heterodox leanings are driven to the study of history, in part because they can use history and historical documents, even the Bible, in support of their “heresy.” The suppressed or forgotten past provides precedents helpful in dissolving the current consensus: historical criticism is invaluable to the venerable liberal (and, in my view, illogical) argument that the inevitability of unwilled change legitimates willed change, that the historical reality that the tradition was, de facto, always changing validates, de jure, contemporary efforts to alter it. In this way, just as fundamentalists suspect, historical criticism of the Bible aids in the rehabilitation of heresies, for the dismantling of the (orthodox) canon (a sine qua non of historical biblical criticism) and the normalization of heterodoxy imply each other. The frankest admission of this of which I know is the last paragraph of James M. Robinson’s presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature in 1981: For Jesus to rise in disembodied radiance, for the initiate to re-enact this kind of resurrection in ecstasy, and for this religiosity to mystify the sayings of Jesus by means of hermeneutically loaded dialogues of the resurrected Christ with his gnostic disciples is as consistent a position as is the orthodox insistence upon the

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physical bodiliness of the resurrected Christ, the futurity of the believer’s resurrection back into the same physical body, and the incarnation of Jesus’ sayings within the pre-Easter biography of Jesus in the canonical Gospels. Neither is the original Christian position; both are serious efforts to interpret it. Neither can be literally espoused by serious critical thinkers of today; both should be hearkened to as worthy segments of the heritage of transmission and interpretation through which Jesus is mediated to the world today. In reconstructing these various Christologies, Robinson uses not only the canonical literature, but also documents such as the Gospel of Thomas and Q. The last-named source is especially germane to a discussion of his method. Q (for German Quelle, “source”) is the material that is common to Matthew and Luke but not to Mark. The theory of most critical scholars is that Mark and Q served as two sources for Matthew and Luke. Of course, Q, a collection of Jesus’ sayings (or sayings attributed to him) without narrative, is hypothetical. It is found only in Matthew and Luke. But the probability that it existed independently has increased in light of the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, which is a very similar collection. Robinson does not ignore the fact that the surviving tradition does not recognize Thomas and subordinates Q to a different genre. On the contrary, these moves he views as simply stations on the way to orthodoxy. His claim, however, is that historical excavation of a literary kind (to recover Q) and of an archaeological kind (to recover Thomas, which was found in a jar in the ground in Egypt) enables us to recover the alternative as it stood before it was branded with the stigma of heterodoxy. Historical study cuts the Gordian knot that holds together the canon and even individual books within it. As a result, the long-suppressed and forgotten Gnostic position becomes a “worthy segment of the heritage of transmission”! The assumption is that one of the traditional obstacles that Christians must overcome in their effort to hear the gospel is the protorthodoxy of the Gospel redactors themselves. If the redactors are orthodox, Jesus is a heretic. One of the Gordian knots that some Gnostics tried to untie was the one that binds the Hebrew Bible and the Christian documents together as one (Christian) Bible. The idea that the two are linked is, of course, internal to the books that came to be called the “New Testament.” Chief among the devices that connect the two is the idea that what the Hebrew Bible, soon to become only an “Old Testament,” predicts is fulfilled in the putative events reported in the New Testament. Thus, for example, Matthew interprets the “voice crying in the wilderness” of Isaiah 40.3 as John the Baptist (Mt. 3.1–3), and taking the poetry of Zechariah 9.9 (“humble and mounted on an ass / on a foal, the young of a she-ass”) literally, he has Jesus ride into Jerusalem on two animals (Mt. 21.1–7) A related technique can be found in Galations 4.21–7, in which Paul understands Ishmael, the son of the slave girl Hagar, to be Israel according to the flesh, that is, the Jews, and Sarah’s son Isaac, who is born of the promise (Gen. 21.1–8), as the church. Here, Hagar stands for Mount Sinai and the slavery that Paul thought to be its legacy. Sarah suggests the heavenly Jerusalem and the freedom from the Torah that Paul considered characteristic of it. One son, the Jews, is a slave;

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the other, the church, is free. Hence, a Christian who observes toraitic law trades freedom for slavery. Although Paul’s technique is based not on the idea of prediction, but on allegory; he, like Matthew (and the apocalyptic Jewish sects of the time), sees the real meaning of scripture as something in his own time. In and of itself, the Hebrew Bible is incomplete. As the Pauline theology of the Law became increasingly normative in the postcanonical era, such allegorical or typological interpretation of the Old Testament became all the more necessary. The church father Origen (d. 254 c.e.) put it nicely: on a plain-sense reading, without allegory, the Old Testament commands the sacrifice of calves and lambs! Christian exegesis requires that the Hebrew Bible be read ultimately in a literary context that includes the New Testament. To read it only on its own would be like reading the first three acts of Hamlet as if the last two had never been written. Christian theology cannot tolerate exegesis that leaves the two Testaments independent of each other, lest either the Marcionite Gnostics or the Jews win the ancient debate. But the two anthologies cannot be collapsed into one, either, lest the newness of the New Testament be lost. For the New Testament is not simply the continuation of the Old, but its fulfillment, not simply another volume in the same series, but the climax and consummation of all the preceding volumes, the one that tells what the others mean. For by the time the books of the New Testament were being composed, almost all the books of the Hebrew Bible were already considered authoritative. The thrust of Christian exegesis, thus, is to present the “Old Testament” as somehow anticipating the New, but only anticipating it. The “Old Testament” must be made to appear essential but inadequate. In modern times, the question of how to bring about such a treatment, how to relate the Old and the New, has once again become a crisis, for the old techniques seem discredited. Critical scholars rule out clairvoyance as an explanation axiomatically. Instead of holding that the Old Testament predicts events in the life of Jesus, critical scholars of the New Testament say that each Gospel writer sought to exploit Old Testament passages in order to bolster his case for the messianic and dominical claims of Jesus or of the church on his behalf. Today, only fundamentalists interpret Old Testament passages as historical predictions of New Testament narratives. Allegory has fared no better. To most biblicists, it seems woefully arbitrary. It is difficult to imagine Paul’s interpretation of Genesis 21 persuading anyone who needed persuading. Although most Christians continue to accept the theology of Galations 4.21–7, its exegetical basis in the Torah has lost all credibility among historical critics. The question arises whether a practitioner of historical criticism can speak of an “Old Testament” at all, whether the concept, like the term (the issue is not merely taxonomic), is not anachronistic. Whereas in the Middle Ages Homer and Virgil were regularly given an interpretatio Christiana, today the Hebrew Bible is the only non-Christian book still commonly given a Christian reading. What is at stake is the very existence of the Christian Bible in nonfundamentalistic minds. The challenge to historical critics of the Old Testament who wish to be Christian and their work

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to be Christian has been to find a way to read the Old Testament that is historically sound but also lends credibility to its literary context, its juxtaposition to the New Testament to form a coherent book. The following pages are devoted to an examination and critique of the ways some influential Christian critics have sought to meet the challenge.

3 Perhaps the most important synthesis of the experience of ancient Israel is that devised by Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918). The son of a German Lutheran pastor, Wellhausen became the great pioneer of the historical-critical study of both Testaments of his Bible. In his classic work, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (1878), Wellhausen divided the history of Israel’s religion into three stages, each marked by a document or set of documents, which, woven together, eventually came to constitute the Pentateuch now in our hands. In the first stage, to be inferred from the Yahwistic history (J) and the closely related Elohistic source (E), religion is natural, free from law and the compulsiveness that Wellhausen associated with it. The sacred feasts are natural in character, tied unobtrusively to the cycle of the agricultural year, without any precise mathematical dates. The priesthood is universal, and one may sacrifice anywhere. In the next phase, known from the Deuteronomic strand (D), the festivals have begun to be detached from nature. Mathematical calculations begin to determine the dates of their celebration (e.g. Deut. 16.9; cf. Exod. 23.16). The priesthood becomes exclusively Levitical (Deuteronomy 18), and tithing begins (Deut. 14.23). Most importantly, whereas in the earlier centuries any place could serve as the locus of a legitimate sanctuary (Exod. 20.24), now only one shrine is permitted (Deut. 12.1–7); the connection with the soil and the rhythm of natural life has been dealt a severe blow. In the third and final stage of the religion of Israel, represented in the Pentateuch by the Priestly source (P), the festivals are fixed on precise days of a calendar (Leviticus 23), and a new festival, unattested in the earlier calendars of JE (Exod. 23.14–17 and 34.18, 22–4) and D (Deut. 16), the Day of Atonement, intrudes (Leviticus 16 and 23.26–32).“Just as the special purposes and occasions of sacrifice fall out of sight,” Wellhausen wrote, “there comes into increasing prominence the one uniform and universal occasion—that of sin; and one uniform and universal purpose—that of propitiation.” The priesthood becomes limited to the clan of Aaron, all non-Aaronite priests having been demoted to the status of minor clergy (Ezek. 44.9–16), and tithing becomes a matter of great concern (Num. 18). Finally, in Wellhausen’s view, in the fiction of the Tabernacle (‘oˉhel moˆ’eˉd ) of Moses’ age, the cultic centralization and unity for which D had fought are simply assumed. With the triumph of P, Wellhausen insisted, the last trace of connection to the soil, the last trace of naturalness, has disappeared. The period of the wilderness becomes normative, as one should expect for a people uprooted in the exile of the sixth century b.c.e. “With the Babylonian

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captivity, the Jews lost their fixed seats, and so became a trading people.” The term “trading people,” of some utility for aspects of medieval and modern Jewish history but of none for the biblical and the rabbinic periods, shows Wellhausen’s estimation of the outcome of this long process of development.“ Judaism” is Israelite religion after it has died: “When it is recognized that the canon is what distinguishes Judaism from ancient Israel, it is recognized at the same time that what distinguishes Judaism from ancient Israel is the written Torah. The water which in old times rose from a spring, the Epigoni stored up in cisterns.” In short, the Torah defines Judaism, and Judaism is the ghost of ancient Israel. “Yet it is a thing which is likely to occur, that a body of traditional practice should only be written down when it is threatening to die out,” wrote Wellhausen in one of his most striking observations, “and that a book should be, as it were, the ghost of a life which is closed.” The ultimate apparition of this ghost, according to Wellhausen, was the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, who were “nothing more than the Jews in the superlative”—narrow, legalistic, exclusivistic, obsessive, compulsive, and hypocritical. It has often been suggested that the major influence upon Wellhausen’s three-stage evolutionary reconstruction was G. W F. Hegel, who is thought to have interpreted world history in terms of a dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. To be sure, there is an analogy to be drawn between the two. It was, after all, Hegel who wrote of Jesus’ reception by the Jews that “[h]is effort to give them the consciousness of something divine was bound to founder on the Jewish masses. For faith in something divine, in something great, cannot make its home in excrement. The lion has no room in a nest; the infinite spirit, none in the prison of a Jewish soul; the whole of life, none in a withering leaf.” Wellhausen simply sought to document the stages of the historical process by which so spiritual a thing as the religion of Israel came to be the ghost he called “Judaism.” On the other hand, there are remarkable differences between Hegel and Wellhausen. The latter’s evolutionary model, for example, was degenerative, whereas the former’s was one of increasing manifestation of the Spirit. Thus, Wellhausen’s P (Judaism, Pharisaism) is in no sense a Hegelian synthesis of JE and D. Furthermore, the state plays no great role in Wellhausen’s schema, whereas it is the manifestation of the Absolute for Hegel. But most significantly of all, Wellhausen, in point of fact, reconstructed more than the three stages that dominate the Prolegomena. In his Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte, Wellhausen treats a fourth stage, the gospel. His conclusion is, “[The gospel] preaches the most noble individualism, the freedom of the children of God.” For Wellhausen, of course, that freedom was the Pauline freedom from the Law, every jot and tittle of it. No wonder he described Paul as “the great pathologist of Judaism” and made Romans 2.14 (“Not having the Law, they do the works of the Law by nature”) the motto of part 1 to his Prolegomena, and Romans 5.20 (“The Law came in between”) the motto of part 3, “Israel and Judaism.” The personal motivation for Wellhausen’s reconstruction of Israelite history can be discerned in an uncharacteristically revealing passage in the introduction to his Prolegomena:

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In my student days I was attracted by the stories of Saul and David, Ahab and Elijah; the discourse of Amos and Isaiah laid strong hold on me, and I read myself well into the prophetic and historical books of the Old Testament. Thanks to such aids as were accessible to me, I even considered that I understood them tolerably, but at the same time was troubled by a bad conscience, as if I were beginning with the roof instead of the foundation; for I had no thorough acquaintance with the Law, of which I was accustomed to be told that it was the basis and postulate of the whole literature. At last I took courage and made my way through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers … But it was in vain that I looked for the light which was to be shed from this source on the historical and prophetic books. On the contrary, my enjoyment of the latter was marred by the Law; it did not bring them any nearer to me, but intruded itself uneasily, like a ghost that makes a noise indeed, but is not visible and really effects nothing … At last, in the course of a casual visit in Göttingen in the summer of 1867, I learned through Ritschl that Karl Heinrich Graf placed the Law later than the Prophets, and almost without knowing his reasons for the hypothesis, I was prepared to accept it; I readily acknowledged to myself the possibility of understanding Hebrew antiquity without the book of the Torah. In essence, Wellhausen tells us, the Law provoked a bad conscience in him, which ever-more attentive involvement in the Law could not assuage. The Law “makes a noise” but “effects nothing.” Only the possibility that the Law is later than the rest of the Old Testament saved the book for him. Discovery of this point of chronology thus proved to be the great liberating experience of Wellhausen’s intellectual life. It is fair to say that all his conceptual works on Israelite religion and Judaism are merely a footnote to that experience in the summer of 1867. To any student of the Christian Bible, Wellhausen’s autobiographical story has a familiar ring: What follows? Is the Law identical with sin? Of course not. But except through the Law I should never have become acquainted with sin. For example, I should never have known what it was to covet, if the Law had not said, “Thou shall not covet.” Through that commandment sin found its opportunity, and produced in me all kinds of wrong desires. In the absence of the Law, sin is a dead thing. There was a time, when in the absence of the Law, I was fully alive; but when the commandments came, sin sprang to life and I died. The commandment which should have led to life proved in my experience to lead to death, because sin found its opportunity in the commandment, seduced me, and through the commandment killed me. (Rom. 7.7–11) In this text Paul, Wellhausen’s great “pathologist of Judaism,” offered a pathologist’s analysis of himself as a Jew, or at least as Paul the Christian would like to reconstruct Paul the Jew, his dead self. It is not that the Torah is bad; on the contrary, Paul asserted that it is “holy” (Rom. 7.12). The injunctive elements of the Torah, the

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commandments, however, lead only to death. They define its negative side. If the holiness and value of the Torah are to be associated with life, then means must be found to suspend the obligations that its commandments announce. In many places, Paul developed an exegesis of the Torah that he hoped would persuade his correspondents that its commandments have become dispensable. One such passage, the allegory of Galations 4.21–7, we have already examined. In Romans 4, Paul gave a kind of chronology of Torah “history” in support of the same point: since Abraham could be reckoned righteous through faith without the Mosaic Torah (Gen. 15.6), which had not yet been given, then the possibility exists for others likewise to be so reckoned without the Sinaitic commandments. Paul saw the Christ event as the mechanism by which this theoretical possibility becomes real. There are, then, essentially three stages to the sacred history of Pauline Christianity: righteousness without the Torah (Abraham), sin and death through the Torah (Moses, Sinai), and the restoration of righteousness without the Torah (participation in Christ). These correspond to the three stages of Julius Wellhausen’s personal experience of the Old Testament: enjoyment of the nonlegal sections, the intrusion of the Torah or at least its most legal books (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers), and enjoyment of the Old Testament again, with a clean conscience now that the Torah has been shown to be later in origin. In his intellectual life, Wellhausen reenacted Paul’s experience, which Lutheran tradition had long taken to be autobiographical and normative. Göttingen was his Damascus. For all his problems with the church over his use of the historical-critical method, Wellhausen’s deepest instincts remained profoundly Lutheran. In light of the influence of this Pauline archetype on him, Wellhausen’s reconstruction of Israelite and Jewish religion becomes more readily understandable. JE was his Abraham, righteous and secure without the Torah. P was his era of the Mosaic Torah, dead and death-dealing, “Pharisaical” (D is only intermediate between JE and P). Finally, the gospel was for him, as for Paul, that which liberates from toraitic tyranny, restoring the innocence of the distant past, Adam (before the Fall) or Abraham for Paul, and JE for Wellhausen. But note what Wellhausen did: he historicized Paul’s exegesis. Instead of individuals within one book of unitary authorship, Wellhausen wrote of historical periods. JE and P both write on Abraham. It is not Abraham who was the ideal for Wellhausen, but the historical period of JE. Not being a fundamentalist, Wellhausen did not accept the Pauline exegesis as it stood. Instead, he converted it into historical categories, producing critical history that witnesses to the truth of salvation-history. The Torah in its entirety is no longer the norm; it has been replaced by the historical process that produced it. Scrutiny of that historical process discloses what is essential to the Torah and what is dispensable. What is dispensable is law, “Judaism.” In short, Wellhausen decomposed the Torah into its constituent documents, reconstructed history from those components, and then endowed history with the normativity and canonicity that more traditional Protestants reserve for scripture. Biblical history replaces the Bible, but biblical history still demonstrates the validity of the biblical (i.e. Pauline) economy of salvation and thus serves to preserve

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the literary context of the Hebrew Bible. Its conjunction to the New Testament as volume 1 of the Christian Bible is logical after all. The historical context replaces the literary context, but without casting into doubt the anti-Judaic and antitoraitic thrust of Pauline-Lutheran theology. The Hebrew Bible remains only an “Old Testament.”

4 Wellhausen’s Prolegomena appeared at the last moment at which its method and its conclusions could have seemed sound. To be sure, the Documentary Hypothesis, upon which so much of it is based, retains the support of the overwhelming majority of critical scholars, whatever the religious communities from which they hail. And many of the details of his reconstruction, such as those involving the centralization of the cult and the evolution of the calendar, remain, for the most part, a matter of consensus. But already in the decades following the publication of the Prolegomena in 1878, archaeological excavations produced an exponential growth in our knowledge of the biblical world, much of it as lethal to Wellhausen’s reconstructed evolution as it is to the traditionalist’s cherished belief in the uniqueness of Israel. In our century, any critical scholar who wishes to address the religion of biblical Israel must treat the cultures of its neighbors as well. There are now far more materials available for a description of the ancient Near Eastern world than was the case when the Prolegomena appeared in 1878. For Wellhausen, no choice between historical description and normative theology was necessary, since he thought history showed a development toward the theological affirmation that claimed his allegiance, the anomian individualism that he considered to be the essence of Christianity. In this century, however, the relationship between historical description (“was”) and normative theology (“ought to be”) has become a pressing problem. Among students of the Bible, only fundamentalists, who do not think historically, and those critical scholars who lack religious commitment will fail to feel its claim. In 1933, Walther Eichrodt, Professor of Old Testament and History of Religion at the University of Basel, Switzerland, published his Theologie des Alten Testaments with the announced determination to break “the tyranny of historicism in OT studies.” Eichrodt wrote that there was only one way to “succeed in winning back for OT studies in general and for OT theology in particular that place in Christian theology which at present has been surrendered to the comparative study of religions.” This could be accomplished “by examining on the one hand [the OT’s] religious environment and on the other its essential coherence with the NT…. The only way to do this is to have the historical principle operating side by side with the systematic in a complementary role.” Herein lay an admirable intention to navigate between the Scylla of fundamentalism and the Charybdis of positivism, in the hope of producing a religious affirmation that is historically accurate and intellectually honest. Eichrodt’s goal was to combine the historical context of the Hebrew Bible (“its religious environment”) and its literary context in Christianity (“its essential coherence with the NT”).

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The unmistakable implication of Eichrodt’s methodological program is that the historical and the systematic principles only work in tandem and never at cross purposes. A historical inquiry into the “religious environment” of the Old Testament that casts doubt upon “its essential coherence” with the New must be disallowed. The consequence of this for Judaism is no less clear: the postbiblical Jewish tradition is a denial of the religious message of the Hebrew Bible not only according to the claims of Christian faith, as one would expect, but even according to the results of historical investigation. If, in fact, the Hebrew Bible speaks univocally in favor of its Christian recontextualization, it is a great historical conundrum why the Jewish tradition endured at all. How could a people have so thoroughly missed the point of its own scriptures? Conversely, if the Hebrew Bible points univocally to rabbinic Judaism, it is puzzling that there ever should have been—and still remain—nonrabbinic traditions (including Christianity) that, in various ways and degrees, also lay claim to the Hebrew Bible. In sum, the historical evidence suggests that the Hebrew Bible speaks less univocally than Eichrodt thinks: it is to some degree coherent and to some degree incoherent with all its recontextualizations—Jewish, Christian, and other. The privileging of one of these over the others depends on something very different from dispassionate historical inquiry. It depends upon something more akin to an act of faith. This is not to impugn the act of faith, but only to say that it is highly problematic when it becomes regulative for historical study. The lack of univocality in the Hebrew Bible is nicely illustrated by an analysis of the familiar words of John 3.16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only son so that everyone who has faith in him may not die, but have eternal life.” This passage and others like it in the New Testament build rather obviously on texts in the Hebrew Bible, the only Bible the authors of what became the New Testament knew and recognized. The idea that God has a son can be found, for example, in Psalm 2.7, in which YHWH tells his viceroy enthroned on Zion that “[y]ou are my son; this day I have begotten you.” The idea that a father must give over his firstborn son appears in Exodus 22.28, and the verse that follows is powerful evidence that the “giving” in question refers to sacrifice (v. 29). That the father should give his son over for sacrifice out of motives of love is familiar from the story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22.1–19, in which Abraham is commended and the promise to him renewed precisely because of his exemplary willingness to sacrifice Isaac, his beloved son (vv. 2, 15–18). This brief analysis of the ancient Israelite background of John 3.16 supports Eichrodt’s conviction that the Hebrew Bible stands in “essential coherence” with the New Testament. That with which Eichrodt’s claim does not reckon is the element of incompatibility between the messages of the two books. Texts that imply the sonship, biological or adoptive, of the human king are exceedingly rare in the Hebrew Bible and in tension with a thoroughly nonmythological, instrumental concept of monarchy, evident, for example, in Deuteronomic tradition (e.g. Deut. 17.14–20; 28.36; 1 Sam. 8.10–22). The concept is also in tension with the pointed assertion of the fundamental difference between human beings and God that one finds in several passages (e.g.

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1 Sam. 15.29; Hos. 11.9). Indeed, the concept of a human being who stands in descent from a god is conspicuous for its absence in the Hebrew Bible. It is, in fact, an idea that seems to have had a much clearer way among Canaanites and Egyptians, for example, than among Israelites. It is striking that in the Hebrew Bible, YHWH has no children at all (except metaphorically, as in Deut. 14.1), no parents, and no wife (except, again, metaphorically, as in Hos. 1–3). The assumption that giving him a divine son would in no way compromise the essential message of the Hebrew Bible is very much open to doubt. The doubt grows exponentially when, as in orthodox Christianity, the divinity of the son is so emphatically affirmed that prayer can be addressed to and through him. The idea that God would sacrifice his son, even out of love for the world, is equally problematic. Despite the few texts in the Hebrew Bible that speak positively of childsacrifice, biblical law explicitly prohibits the practice in its various forms (e.g. Exod. 13.13; 34.20; Lev. 20.2–5), and prophets vehemently condemn it as incompatible with the worship of YHWH and emblematic of idolatry (e.g. Jer. 7.31; Ezek. 16.20–1). In this, biblical law and prophecy stand in marked contradiction to the cult of the Canaanite god El, in which the sacrifice of children seems to have had an important place. Indeed, a Phoenician source tells us of El’s own sacrifice of two of his sons, Yadid and Mot, and in Ugaritic myth, the divine father El hands over the younger god Baal for bondage but also, in another text, rejoices when Baal is raised from the dead. All this demonstrates that the Christian affirmation in John 3.16 not only stands in continuity with the Hebrew Bible, as Eichrodt’s method presumes and requires; it also stands in discontinuity with the same book and with the ongoing Jewish tradition that also regards that book as sacred scripture. The greatest of Eichrodt’s failures is not that he cannot do justice to Judaism, but that he cannot do justice to the theological diversity of that most unsystematic book, the Hebrew Bible. By treating that volume as an “Old Testament,” Eichrodt’s method forces him to focus only on its continuities with Christianity and prevents him from fulfilling the historian’s task of listening to the multiple voices of the text itself. The thematic continuity that Eichrodt developed was based on the notion of “covenant.” Whatever other weaknesses this idea has, it again raises the possibility that the Jews are at least as much the heirs of the Old Testament as the church and perhaps even more so. For whereas Christian theology has generally held that the stipulations of covenant were, to one degree or another, made void through Christ, Judaism retains those stipulations (mitsvot ) and rests more structural weight upon covenant than does Christianity. Or, to put it differently, to the extent that “covenant” survives as a meaningful term in Christianity, it does so without the specificity and concreteness of mitsvot, upon whose observance almost every book of the Hebrew Bible insists. To avoid conceding defeat by the Jews, Christian covenant theologians must do one of three things: (1) they must reassert the classic New Testament claim that covenant does not require observance (i.e. that, in good Pauline fashion, the Mosaic/Sinaitic dimension is actually dispensable); (2) they must show that the Jews have perverted the covenant faith of their ancestors, so that Judaism is more

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discontinuous with the religion of Israel than Christianity (another New Testament theme, found especially in Hebrews); or (3) they must develop a dual covenant theology, that is, a position that somehow upholds the covenantal status of the people, Israel and of the church equally. This last option, though approximated by a few of Eichrodt’s contemporaries, is of the three the least consonant with traditional Christian theology. It is thus hardly surprising that Eichrodt chose only the first two possibilities. His effort to substantiate the second of our three theoretical options is particularly problematic but also particularly revealing of his method. Judaism, he said, has only “a torso-like appearance … in separation from Christianity.” “It was not,” he wrote, “until in later Judaism a religion of harsh observances had replaced the religion of the Old Testament that the Sabbath changed from a blessing to a burdensome duty.” It is in the Mishnah (promulgated c. 200 c.e.) that “real worship of God [was] stifled under the heaping up of detailed commands from which the spirit has fled.” In Judaism, he informed his readers, “the living fellowship between God and man … shrivelled up into a mere correct observance of the legal regulations.” In short, in Judaism “the affirmation of the law as the revelation of God’s personal will was lost.” In making these statements, Eichrodt capitulated in toto to the pole of his method defined by the New Testament; critical historiography did not inform him here at all. He accepted New Testament caricatures, stereotypes, and outright perversions of Judaism in the same manner as would the most unlettered fundamentalist. For example, what literary source in “later Judaism” (by which he means early Judaism) ever saw the Sabbath as “a burdensome duty” rather than a blessing? Volumes are spoken by Eichrodt’s silence about the numerous passages in the Talmud and Midrash that describe the Sabbath as a pearl, as Israel’s bride, or the like (e.g. Ber Rab. 11:8; Shocher Tov 92:1). The likelihood is that he did not know they existed and had no interest in learning what spiritual treasure, what wealth of love, joy, camaraderie, and spiritual reflection, the observant Jew found (and finds) in the Sabbath. Christian anti-Jewish polemics were so much more readily at hand and, especially in the Germanophone world of 1933, so much more readily accepted. Eichrodt’s idea that the personal will of a gracious God fell out beneath rabbinic legalism fares no better. It cannot survive a confrontation with the numerous rabbinic sayings that present observance of mitsvot as a response to God’s grace (e.g. Mek. Bacbodesh 5). In one instance, however, Eichrodt did cite a rabbinic text in support of his antirabbinic theology: This means that for the heathen, being sinners without the Law, the only real possibility is God’s punitive righteousness; and this state of affairs is not altered by Aqiba’s fine saying: “The world is judged by the measure of God’s mercy.” Eichrodt’s footnote to this quotation from the Mishnah reads: Pirqe Aboth 3.16. The continuation, “and everything is done according to the

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multitude of works” proves conclusively that here, as in Wisdom 12.15, the only idea is one of resignation in the face of resistless and overwhelming Omnipotence. An examination of the complete tannaitic dictum shows that Eichrodt simply did not understand Rabbi Aqiba’s point: All is foreseen, but freedom of choice is given. In goodness the world is judged, but all is according to the amount of work. So far as I can determine, the Jewish tradition has always understood the last word of Rabbi Aqiba’s dictum as a reference to human efforts, not God’s action. In other words, Rabbi Aqiba (d. 135 c.e.) here states two paradoxes—the coexistence of divine providence and human free will, and the importance of both divine grace and human effort in God’s judgment of the world. Works are neither sufficient nor dispensable; they are essential but ultimately inadequate. The point is one that a Calvinist theologian should be expected to understand immediately. But for Eichrodt to have understood it and to have rendered it accurately would have been to forfeit his argument that the Jews lost sight of the nature of the divine-human relationship, substituting a legalistic works-righteousness for the more paradoxical and nuanced biblical stance. And to forfeit that argument would have been to forfeit the claim that historical-critical scholarship is compatible with the Christian tenet that the Hebrew Bible is best approached when it is within the same covers as the New Testament, that the Hebrew Bible, examined historically, speaks univocally in favor of its Christian recontextualization. Our examination of the theology of Walther Eichrodt shows that his anti-Judaic remarks were not incidental to his theological method. They were owing not simply to social prejudice, but to his intention to show that the covenantal religion of ancient Israel is of a piece with Christianity. His willingness to accept traditional Christian slurs at face value both contributed to and was influenced by his apparent inability to read the rabbinic sources. In this, he resembled Wellhausen, who confessed his lack of knowledge of Jewish literature, especially the Talmud, and his consequent dependence on Greek sources, but did not allow this handicap to prevent him from presenting a very negative picture of Judaism throughout his career. The disastrous effects on both Wellhausen and Eichrodt of ignorance of literature in postbiblical Hebrew underscore a truism that much of the scholarly world still evades: one cannot be a competent scholar of the Christian Bible without a solid command of rabbinic literature and rabbinic Hebrew (and Aramaic). Hebrew did not die on the cross.

5 If Eichrodt’s assertion that the same theme dominates each half of the Christian Bible is unlikely, even the lesser claim of thematic unity throughout the Old Testament has proven problematic. This search for the unity (or the center) of biblical theology

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is, in a sense, reactionary: it aims to diminish the impression historical criticism leaves that, at least with respect to the Bible, Heraclitus’s dictum is correct— “everything flows.” For, approached historical-critically, biblical theology seems to be like Heraclitus’s river: one cannot step into the same one twice. A less reactionary response is to be found in the work of Gerhard von Rad, especially in his Theologie des Alten Testaments, first published in 1957. Making a virtue of necessity, von Rad saw the reappropriation and reinterpretation of the legacy of tradition as a precious theological asset. Behind that reinterpretation lay a continuing history of salvation (Heilsgeschichte), at the onset of which was a promise for which “there was, oddly enough, never any satisfactory historical fulfillment and consummation.” Therefore, “the Old Testament can only be read as a book of ever increasing anticipation.” The fluctuation of tradition is to be seen theologically as Israel’s effort to keep that promise and the hope for its fulfillment alive. For example, the Yahwist (J) has reinterpreted the promise of land to the Patriarchs as a reference to the conquest under Joshua generations later (Gen. 15.13–15). And the great anonymous prophet of the exile, writing when the promise of grace to the House of David seemed to have been voided, reinterpreted “the sure grace to David” as applying to the entire people Israel (Isa. 55.1–7). Thus could the Davidic covenant be saved at a time when the messiah was seen not in a scion of David, but in the Iranian liberator, Cyrus (Isa. 44.24–45.3). If Old Testament theology recognized this process of recontextualization and reinterpretation of the promise (which, despite the changes, remains valid), then in von Rad’s words, “[T]he material itself would bear it from one actualization to another, and in the end would pose the question of the final fulfillment.” For him, of course, this final fulfillment was Jesus as the Christ. The difference, for example, between Israelite messianism and New Testament Christology therefore need not be denied or minimized. The New Testament simply continues the traditionary process of the Old, which was itself always in flux. Thus could von Rad, on grounds very different from Eichrodt’s, oppose, like him, those who take “the Old Testament in abstraction as an object which can be adequately interpreted without reference to the New Testament.” Von Rad’s method allowed the texts of the Hebrew Bible to speak more in their own voices than did the historicism of Wellhausen or the dogmatism of Eichrodt. His ear was more finely attuned to the plurality of notes sounded in the Hebrew Bible, and his mind was, relative to theirs, less inclined to force external schemes onto the texts themselves. The fact remains, however, that von Rad’s effort to preserve the bifurcated Bible of Christianity without deviation from historical criticism was deeply flawed. Brevard Childs is surely right that a major problem with von Rad’s Old Testament Theology is that he has failed to deal with the canonical forces at work in the formation of the traditions into a collection of Scripture during the post-exilic period, but rather set up the New Testament’s relation to the Old in an analogy to his description of the pre-exilic growth of Hebrew tradition.

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In other words, already by the time of the New Testament documents, Israelite tradition had developed a strong notion of sacred scripture. The claim of the primitive church was not that its gospel was yet another link in an ongoing chain of tradition, but that it was the fulfillment of canonical writ. Von Rad thus preserved the bifurcated Bible by destroying the bifurcation. The New Testament is only the continuation of the Old. But if tradition in the sense of recontextualization is what legitimates the more recent past and binds it to distant antiquity, then von Rad’s exclusive focus on the Christian continuations is unwarranted. Why did he not consider rabbinic tradition, which, especially in the form of midrash, also recontextualized the Hebrew Bible, often strikingly? Why, in short, is the Israelite past to be seen only in light of the early church, the Hebrew Bible only as an “Old Testament”? At times von Rad seemed to answer this in the same way Wellhausen and Eichrodt did, through the disparagement of Judaism, as when he wrote that: The end was reached at the point where the law became an absolute quantity, that is, when it ceased to be understood as the saving ordinance of a special racial group (the cultic community of Israel) linked to it by the facts of history, and when it stepped out of this function of service and became a dictate which imperiously called into being its own community. But, in general, he seems to have been oblivious to the question, perhaps because as a Christian theologian in the judenrein Germany of the post-Holocaust era, he had no one to raise it with him. Like Hegel, Wellhausen, and Eichrodt, he simply assumed the spiritual necrosis of Judaism after Jesus. After “the end was reached,” why consider the Jews? The finality that von Rad attributed to the New Testament is in contradiction to his resolute emphasis on the ongoing nature of tradition. Apparently, he expected us to respect the continuousness of history up to and perhaps including the experience of the apostolic church, but then to make a leap of faith that would deny the continuousness and ongoing nature of all subsequent history. All fulfillments before Jesus are to be seen as provisional. Jesus is to be seen as final and unsurpassable. But must not historical criticism point out that history also passed up Jesus, if, that is, we are to believe he really said what the New Testament evangelists attribute to him? His prediction that the kingdom would come within the generation (Mk 9.1), for example, proved false, forcing his later followers to devise extenuations and explanations, which are themselves recontextualizations. In fact, the entire history of Christian theology can be seen as testimony to the provisional character of the New Testament and its putative “fulfillments.” History continues, and for Christians who read their tradition in light of Nicea, Aquinas, Luther, Trent, or Vatican I and II, the New Testament has itself long been an “Old Testament,” in need of reinterpretation and supplementation. No statement is final because, whatever apocalypticists may say, history continues. Indeed, if we are to assume the validity of recontextualization, why stop with Judaism and Christianity? Islam, after all, claims to have superseded the church in a way not

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altogether different from the way the church claims to have superseded the Jews: Jesus becomes a link in the chain of prophets that culminated in Muhammad (the supersessionists superseded!). Von Rad would probably claim, in rebuttal, that the ultimate fulfillment in Christ is known only through faith; the critical historian can never see it. But in that case, he would have conceded that a historical-critical examination of the religion of the Hebrew Bible does not point to Jesus Christ and that the unity of the Christian Bible cannot be demonstrated by tradition-history after all. Von Rad, in sum, seems to have wanted to move from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament by means of certain methods that, whether accurately applied or not, are fully in accord with historical criticism. Having done so, he then wishes to suspend those methods and to introduce an act of faith in the consummative finality of Jesus. It is this anticritical act of faith that distinguishes the “biblical theologian,” in von Rad’s terminology, from the “historian of the religion of Israel.” When the radical implications of historical criticism got close to home and began threatening the unity and sufficiency of the Christian Bible, von Rad reverted to a position formally indistinct from fundamentalism. He expected faith to stop Heraclitus’s river. At first glance, von Rad’s emphasis upon tradition at the expense of canonical scripture seems strange in a Lutheran theologian. Was it not the Protestant Reformers who asserted that all church tradition must be scrutinized according to the norm sola scriptura, “by scripture alone”? At the point when scripture is shown to be the product of tradition, it surely becomes more difficult to assert the sovereignty of the scripture over the tradition, as the Reformation generally sought to do. On the other hand, von Rad’s assumption that traditions, as recovered by form criticism, are the fundamental units to be interpreted does serve one traditional Lutheran goal, the polarization of grace and law. In an early programmatic essay, von Rad argued that beneath the earliest documents of the Hexateuch (Genesis to Joshua) lay two sets of traditions. One, connected with the Festival of Booths, centered on the experience at Sinai and the proclamation of cultic law. The other, connected with Pentecost, was the tradition of the settlement in the land, a tradition in which the exodus was of prime import. Thus, originally, one could narrate the story of descent into Egypt, enslavement, liberation, and the assumption of the land without any mention of the revelation at Sinai. Von Rad thought that texts such as Deuteronomy 26.5b–9, Joshua 24.2–13, and 1 Samuel 12.8, which omit all reference to the Sinaitic experience, bore out his claim. Of course, many texts witness to the merger of the two sets of traditions (e.g. Nehemiah 9 and Psalm 106). In von Rad’s mind, that merger, that “incorporation of the Sinai tradition into the Settlement tradition should be attributed to the Yahwist” (J).“The blending of the two traditions,” he concluded, “gives definition of the two fundamental propositions of the whole message of the Bible: Law and Gospel.” Thus, through a very different method from Wellhausen’s, von Rad, like him, was able to reverse the canonical merger of “Law and Gospel” (assuming he was right that they were once separate) and thus to cast doubt upon the theology of those traditions in which they were not dichotomized or even differentiated. On the basis of this, von Rad could then replicate the classic Pauline subordination of norm to soterioiogy.

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Once again, a historical method—this time, form criticism—has been employed to decompose the received text and to reorder it according to the needs of Christian theology. This use of historical criticism has proven to be the most important in Old Testament theology, for it enables the theologian to find meanings in the book that the textus receptus does not suggest. The retrieved past (the Hebrew Bible) can thus be rapidly assimilated to the familiar present (the Old Testament). The man can repress the child within and go about his business as if nothing has changed. The same Tendenz can be seen in von Rad’s teacher, Albrecht Alt, a form critic for whom the problematics of contemporary theological affirmation were not a central concern. This makes it all the more revealing that Alt’s historical reconstructions move in the direction of the same Christian theology that we have detected in the works of Wellhausen, Eichrodt, and von Rad. Alt found that biblical law separates into two broad categories, “casuistic” and “apodeictic.” Casuistic law is case-law, characteristically phrased in the form: “if a man … then … ”; it specifies crimes and punishments. Apodeictic law tends to be phrased in the imperative; it takes the form of a personal command and omits any mention of sanctions. Alt’s discovery was that the distinction is not simply formal, but substantive as well. Casuistic law tends to be secular, whereas apodeictic law (e.g. the Decalogue) is sacral. Casuistic law is general in the ancient Near East (Alt thought it a borrowing from the Canaanites), whereas apodeictic law is native to Israel and reflects the unique character of YHWH. Ultimately, according to Alt, the apodeictic law expanded at the expense of the casuistic. It “pursues the Israelite out of the sanctuary of [YHWH] into his daily life, and inevitably clashed with the carefully itemized instances and exceptions of the casuistic law.” Essentially the same dichotomy appeared in America in the work of George E. Mendenhall, only under the rubrics of “law” and “covenant.” Two decades ago, Mendenhall published an essay in which he argued that these two stand in a contrastive relationship. Law, for example, “presupposes a social order,“ whereas covenant is based on “gratitude.” Law is “binding upon each individual by virtue of his status … usually by birth,” but covenant comes “by voluntary act in which each individual willingly accepts the obligations presented,” and so on. A full critique of these theories of von Rad, Alt, and Mendenhall lies outside the purview of our discussion. Each has been challenged or severely qualified. What is of interest here is that each comes to a position that is in profound harmony with a crucial point in the Pauline-Lutheran understanding of the Torah: one can inherit the promise to Abraham and the status of his lineage without “the Law.” Von Rad is the most explicit and probably the most self-conscious: he openly uses the terms “Law and Gospel” and defines them as “the two most fundamental propositions of the whole … Bible.” Obviously, the last word refers to the twofold Bible of Christianity. What von Rad attempted to show was that this Christian dichotomy, ostensibly so alien to the thought-world of the Hebrew Bible, is, in point of fact, basic to the evolution of that set of documents. Alt, despite his less explicit involvement in theological tradition, makes essentially the same point. Is it coincidence that Jesus (so far as we know) spoke only apodeicticly and bequeathed no case-law? To one who stands in the Christian tradition,

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it is surely of use to argue that case-law was always foreign and secular—that is, religiously inessential: what Paul abolished was always dispensable, so much cultural baggage from the environment (actually, a point that Paul himself would not have accepted). Mendenhall’s dichotomy of law and covenant makes the same point.“Law” here sounds very much like the same term in Paul, for whom it is an agent of death, now happily superseded. Law, unlike covenant, for example, is usually a matter of birth for Mendenhall (cf. Rom. 9.6–8). Christians, however, sought to retain the term “covenant,” applying to themselves the prophecy of a “new covenant” (Jer. 31.31), which they interpreted as anomian, a covenant without law (Heb. 8.6–13). Thus, it is no surprise to find most Old Testament theologians as much in favor of covenant as they are against Torah or “law.” This is credible only when law and covenant can be made into contrasts. The claim that there was a time, before the composition of the canonical Pentateuch (or Hexateuch), when Israel could tell its story without the intrusion of law is simply a form-critical analogue to Paul’s argument in Galatians 3 that Abraham was justified through faith without the Law, which came fully 430 years later, in the generation of Moses (v. 17). Aspects of the theory are older than Paul. Martin Hengel points out the Hellenistic writer Posidonius (c. 135–50 b.c.e.) claimed “that the good and simple legislation of Moses had been falsified at a later period by superstitious and forceful priests who by separatist regulations had changed the simple and truthful worship of God intended by the founder into something quite different.” It has been suggested that this theory influenced the Jewish Hellenizers of Seleucid times and even that Paul may have been their heir. If so, then this Hellenizing trend, with its eagerness to suspend the mitsvot, has been preserved for two millennia through the triumph of Pauline Christianity, and the process of its intellectual self-justification continues in the stepchild of the church, biblical criticism. The great vulnerability, however, of those who wish to pursue this line of self-justification through the study of the Hebrew Bible is that the hypothetical two themes—law and gospel, casuistic and apodeictic law, law and covenant—have been woven together so thoroughly that their separation can be effected only through the wholesale dismantling of the canonical literature. For nothing is more characteristic of the biblical law codes than the meshing of casuistic and apodeictic law. In fact, the Pentateuch endows all its laws with the status of personal commandments from God by reading them into the revelation through Moses on Mount Sinai: law and covenant are one. It is here that the techniques of von Rad, Alt, and Mendenhall become useful for Christian apologetics, for these techniques allow the scholar to penetrate back to a putative era that supports the Christian dichotomy, whereas the canonical shape of the literature only casts doubt upon it. Like Wellhausen, those scholars are really engaging in reconstructive surgery, whose purpose is to produce an “Old Testament” in place of the Hebrew Bible, to use historical-critical methods to validate the literary context that is the Christian Bible. Such surgery becomes all the more essential to the Christian historical critics when they discover that this characteristic interlacing of norm and narrative continues in the Talmud and Midrash, where halakhah and aggadah alternate

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uneventfully, a fact that raises the alarming possibility that the Jews are indeed rightful heirs to the Hebrew Bible and that the Christian tradition of supersessionism, as old as the New Testament itself, is inconsonant with the Hebrew Bible. It is no coincidence that the dispossession of the Jews has been an important motive force behind much of the study of “biblical theology.”

6 I have argued that the essential challenge of historical criticism to book religions lies in its development of a context of interpretation, the historical context, which is different from the literary (or canonical) contexts that underlie Judaism and Christianity, in their different ways. In one fashion or another, these religions presuppose the coherence and self-referentiality of their foundational book. These things are what make it possible to derive a coherent religion, one religion (one’s own), from the Book. Historical critics who are uncompromisingly honest, by contrast, exploit the incon­ cinnities and the discontinuities as part of their effort to decompose the Book into its multiple strata in order to reconstruct the history that redaction has repressed. It is not surprising, to resume our psychoanalytic metaphor, that the recovery of repressed material should meet with “resistance,” in this case, the angry salvos of fundamentalists. What is surprising, however, is that so many religious traditionalists who plight their troth to historical criticism insist that their work only enriches and never undermines their religious identity, as if the fundamentalists (who are, incidentally, far more numerous) are simply silly. What makes this optimism possible is the use of historical-critical methods in defense of only the traditional canon and its underlying theology. In the case of the five scholars discussed—Wellhausen, Eichrodt, von Rad, Alt, and Mendenhall—the Hebrew Bible is analyzed in ways that reinforce its status as the “Old Testament” (itself an ahistorical or anachronistic term) and that defuse the threat that historical criticism poses to Christian supersessionism. If this is the case, then these historical studies play for their Christian authors much the same role that midrash played for the classical rabbis: like the midrashim that we examined in section 1, this kind of historical inquiry serves to harmonize discordant texts. This time the texts are not, as there, the differing Passover laws of Exodus 12 and Deuteronomy 16, but Leviticus and Galatians, for example, or Deuteronomy and Romans. For Christian Old Testament scholars who wish their work to be Christian and not simply historically accurate, the urge to harmonize arises, as it did for the rabbis, from the conviction that the sacred text is ultimately a unity, that all those seemingly diverse passages belong in the same book after all. The differences must be shown to be complementary or in dialectical tension; no outright contradictions may be allowed to stand. For if they do stand, then it will be apparent that Christianity attempts to keep the scriptures of at least two different religions in its bifurcated Bible, and the Christian Bible will cease to give a univocal endorsement to Christianity. The endurance and vigor of Judaism should always have cast doubt upon the claim of univocality, but, as

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we have seen, the dominant Christian theological tradition, practiced by ostensible historical critics no less than by fundamentalists, has, in the past, blindfolded itself to that vigor and clung religiously to the old defamations. The aspersions so often cast upon Judaism in the “Old Testament theologies” and related works are thus not incidental. They are indispensable to the larger hermeneutical purpose of neutralizing historical criticism from within. Most Christians involved in the historical criticism of the Hebrew Bible today, however, seem to have ceased to want their work to be considered distinctively Christian. They do the essential philological, historical, and archaeological work without concern for the larger constructive issues or for the theological implications of their labors. They are Christians everywhere except in the classroom and at the writing table, where they are simply honest historians striving for an unbiased view of the past. Even in the world of Old Testament theology, however, there has grown over the last twenty years or so considerable awareness that the historical-critical enterprise is in tension with the demands of Christian proclamation. One thinks of Friedrich Baumgärtel’s argument that “we cannot eliminate the fact, derived from the history of religion, that the Old Testament is a witness out of a non-Christian religion.” A. H. J. Gunneweg has drawn the hermeneutical implication: “But it is impossible to give a Christian interpretation of something that is not Christian; Christian interpretation of something that is not Christian is pseudo-interpretation.” With these two sentences, Gunneweg has pronounced judgment on two millennia of biblical studies in a distinctively Christian mode. He has fired a torpedo into the prediction-fulfillment schema of the Gospels; into Paul’s allegories and all their patristic, medieval, and Reformation kin; into Wellhausen’s historicism, Eichrodt’s and Mendenhall’s anomian covenantalism, and von Rad’s salvation history; and into much else. For all these efforts to make a Christian use of the Hebrew Bible commit the greatest sin known to the historical-critical method, the sin of anachronism. If they are to survive, they must find a defensible mode of reasoning other than historical-critical analysis. The Jew who may be inclined to enjoy the thought that historical criticism may at long last be about to liberate the Hebrew Bible from the New Testament had best observe the admonition of Proverbs 24.17–18. Indeed, the wrath of historical criticism has already fallen upon Judaism and not only upon the church. No critical scholar of the Hebrew Bible believes in its historical unity or in the historical unity even of the Pentateuch. If Leviticus and Galatians cannot be accommodated in one religion, then neither, perhaps, can Exodus and Deuteronomy, and certainly Isaiah and Qohelet cannot. Jews need their harmonistic midrash no less than Christians need theirs, for it is midrash that knits the tangled skein of passages into a religiously usable “text” (from Latin, texo, “to weave”) and continues the redactional process beyond the point of the finalization of the text. The pulverizing effects of the historical-critical method do not respect the boundaries of religions: the method dismembers all midrashic systems, reversing tradition. Rigorous historical critics are no more likely to accept a rabbinic interpretation of literature that is not rabbinic or a Deuteronomic interpretation of literature that is not Deuteronomic than they are to accept a Christian interpretation

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of literature that is not Christian. All religious use of past literature is, to some extent, at cross-purposes with historical criticism, if only because the world of the contemporary religious person is not the world of the author. It is a world into which the author’s work arrives only after it has been recontextualized through redaction, canonization, and other forms of tradition. Without these recontextualizations it is unavailable. The matrix in which the ancient text speaks to the contemporary community is this larger, anachronizing context. To be sure, historical-critical and traditional religious study are not always mutually exclusive. They may, in fact, cross-fertilize or check each other. But it is naive to expect the historical-critical study of the Book only to serve and never to undermine traditional religious purposes, whether the Jewish mitsvah of talmûd tôrâ (the central obligation of Torah study) or Christian kerygmatic proclamation. Both sacred and profane modes of study have value and meaning, but they must not be collapsed one into the other. Two factors account for the remarkable endurance of the tendency to collapse or muddle contexts of interpretation. First, the motivation of most historical critics of the Hebrew Bible continues to be religious in character. It is a rare scholar in the field whose past does not include an intense Christian or Jewish commitment. That commitment brings scholars to the subject, but the character of the method with which they pursue it has less in common with the religious traditions than with the Enlightenment critique of them. The incongruity of the motivation and the methods is seldom acknowledged. It is more convenient to maintain an expectation that somehow the historical-critical method will, in the last analysis, only vindicate, purify, and enrich the original religious motivation. The second factor is simply the institutional correlative of the first. It is that most of the critical scholarship in Hebrew Bible is still placed in Christian theological schools. Indeed, were it not for the religious connection, the field would be no more prominent in Christendom than are most other studies of ancient Western Asiatic cultures. But the religiousness of this location sets up a continuing expectation that, in principle, this nontraditional, nontheistic method will serve traditional theistic goals, such as Christian ministry. The dissonance caused by the placement of Hebrew Bible in Christian contexts is a profound inducement for the creation of a mediating myth that will mask the contradiction. Each of the five scholars whose work we have examined aided profoundly in this myth-making enterprise. Indeed, as I shall argue in chapter 2, the field known as “Old Testament theology,” in which Eichrodt’s and von Rad’s works are classic, is marked by a profound ambivalence as to whether the endeavor is a branch of Christian theology or not. The nearly universal tendency is to have it both ways: Old Testament theology is to be both historical and Christian. Acknowledgment of the survival and vibrancy of Judaism would be difficult to harmonize with this belief in a historically responsible Christian exegesis of a non-Christian set of books, for, if nothing else, the Jewish presence would serve to relativize the Christian reading and to suggest that it is particularistic and confessional and not simply some self-evident “plain sense” that accords with the ancient Israelite author’s intentions. The anxiety that this possibility produces accounts, in part, for the traditional eagerness of Old

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Testament theologians to negate postbiblical Judaism: out of sight, out of mind. The relativistic implications of the multicontextuality of its sacred book are difficult, and perhaps impossible, for any religion to accept. In the case of Christianity, however, a long-standing tendency to conceive of itself as universal and of Judaism as particularistic makes the evidence for its own particularism more painful to embrace. The path of least resistance has been to suppose that the Christian context subsumes all others. The emergence and increasing prominence in recent years of scholars and academic departments that are not committed to any religious perspective have inflicted grave damage upon the status of Christian theology as the ruling paradigm in biblical studies. The explosion in knowledge of the ancient Near East has shifted the focus of many advanced programs in Hebrew Bible from theology to philology and archaeology. As we saw in our discussion of Eichrodt, the hope that the new focus would only complement the old one bore little or no good fruit. In North America, the emergence of religion departments and Jewish studies programs and departments has further contributed to the dethronement of Christian theology, indeed any theology, as the organizing paradigm for the study of the Hebrew Bible. As a consequence, in the elite academic world, those for whom the term “Old Testament” is more than vestigial have been put into the unenviable position of an ex-emperor who now must learn how to be a good neighbor. As of yet, no new emperor has assumed the throne. Given the social mix and the I methodological diversity that are both increasingly characteristic of the field, the throne is likely to be vacant for a long time. Whether the result will be liberty or anarchy remains to be seen.

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17 Alvin Plantinga “Two (or More) Kinds of Scripture Scholarship”

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lvin Plantinga (b. 1932) is an American analytic philosopher. He has contributed to philosophical discussions of logic, the nature of knowledge, metaphysics, and especially religion. His work often makes connections between religion and the other themes. In this essay, originally published in 1998, he analyzes two different modes of reading the Bible: Traditional Biblical Commentary (TBC) and Historical Biblical Criticism (HBC). HBC comes in a number of different varieties, two of which receive their inspiration from authors whose work is featured earlier in this reader: Spinoza and Troeltsch. Though the details of HBC can be unpacked in various ways, the basic contrast between TBC and HBC lies in the role that each allows theology to play in shaping an approach to the Bible. Simply put, TBC is a mode of reading the aim of which is to ascertain what God is saying in a given passage of the Bible. As such, it depends on theological presuppositions, for instance, that the principle author of the Bible is God himself, though in this view biblical texts also have human authors through whom God speaks. HBC, on the other hand, does not rest on any theological background assumptions; instead, it restricts itself to what can be determined about the biblical text on the basis of reason alone. HBC is driven by the same sources that are at work in ordinary history: perception, testimony, the reader’s ability to discern the thoughts and feelings of the (human) authors of biblical texts, and so on. Having set out this distinction, Plantinga inquires whether HBC, which he sees as enjoying substantial academic prestige, genuinely serves to refute cardinal Christian doctrines, as is often assumed. He concludes that it does not, because rather than arguing against major Christian teachings, HBC is defined by putting them to the side from the outset. Thus, while Christians may accept some of the conclusions of HBC, they are right not to feel threatened by the skepticism toward traditional Christian doctrines that is presented as the result of this type of study.

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Plantinga’s robust confidence in the intellectual integrity of traditional Christian doctrines, which he himself spells out along Reformed Protestant lines, has inspired a generation of Christian philosophers of religion, and some theologians also draw on his work. Plantinga does not believe that it is incumbent upon Christians to persuade others to accept their views on the basis of “neutral” premises, ones that any rational human being would be bound to affirm. His essay certainly does not make that sort of case for TBC. The primary challenge it presents to practitioners of HBC is not to switch camps for reasons that make sense within their own framework, but rather to discontinue couching their main conclusions as if they are refutations of Christianity. Readers of this essay will no doubt want to ask themselves how Plantinga is utilizing key sources, especially Spinoza and Troeltsch, and whether this use seems legitimate. They may also want to ask themselves whether Plantinga’s concluding suggestion, that HBC may one day produce findings that challenge Christian beliefs, but that it has not done so already, does justice to the career of historical-critical work to this point.

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The serious and scholarly study of the Bible is of first importance for the Christian community. The roll call of those who have pursued this project is maximally impressive: Chrysostom, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards and Karl Barth, just for starters. These people and their successors begin from the idea that Scripture is indeed divinely inspired (however exactly they understand this claim); they then try to ascertain the Lords teaching in the whole of Scripture or (more likely) a given bit. Since the Enlightenment, however, another kind of Scripture scholarship has also come into view. Variously called “higher criticism,” “historical criticism,” “biblical criticism,” or “historical critical scholarship,” this variety of Scripture scholarship brackets or prescinds from what is known by faith and aims to proceed “scientifically,” strictly on the basis of reason. I shall call it “Historical Biblical Criticism”—HBC for short. Scripture scholarship of this sort also brackets the belief that the Bible is a special word from the Lord, as well as any other belief accepted on the basis of faith rather than reason. Now it often happens that the declarations of those who pursue this latter kind are in apparent conflict with the main lines of Christian thought; one who pursues this sort of scholarship is quite unlikely to conclude, for example, that Jesus was really the pre-existent second person of the divine trinity who was crucified, died, and then literally rose from the dead the third day. As Van Harvey says, “So far as the biblical historian is concerned, … there is scarcely a popularly held traditional belief about Jesus that is not regarded with considerable skepticism.”1 I shall try to describe both of these kinds of Scripture scholarship. Then I shall ask the following question: how should a traditional Christian, one who accepts “the great things of the gospel,” respond to the deflationary aspects of HBC? How should she think about its apparently corrosive results with respect to traditional Christian belief? I shall argue that she need not be disturbed by the conflict between alleged results of HBC and traditional Christian belief.2 Indeed, that conflict should not defeat her acceptance of the great things of the gospel—nor, to the degree that those alleged results rest upon epistemological assumptions she does not share, of anything else she accepts on the basis of Biblical teaching.

1. Scripture divinely inspired At millions of worship services every week Christians all over the world hear passages of Scripture and respond by saying, “This is the Word of the Lord.” Suppose we begin, therefore, by inquiring into the epistemology of the belief that the Bible is divinely inspired in a special way, and in such a way as to constitute divine discourse. How does a Christian come to believe that the gospel of Mark, or the book of Acts, or the entire New Testament is authoritative, because divinely inspired? What (if anything) is the source of its warrant?3 There are several possibilities. For many, it will be by way of ordinary teaching and testimony. Perhaps I am brought up to believe the Bible is indeed the Word of God (just as I am brought up thinking that thousands perished in

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the American Civil War), and I have never encountered any reason to doubt this. But an important feature of warrant is that if I accept a belief B just on testimony, then B has warrant for me only if it had warrant for the testifier as well: the warrant a belief has for the testifiee is derivative from the warrant it has for the testifier.4 Our question, therefore, becomes this: what is the epistemological status of this belief for those members of the community who do not accept it on the testimony of other members? What is the source of the warrant (if any) this belief has for the Christian community? Well, perhaps a Christian might come to think something like the following: Suppose the apostles were commissioned by God through Jesus Christ to be witnesses and representatives (deputies) of Jesus. Suppose that what emerged from their carrying out this commission was a body of apostolic teaching which incorporated what Jesus taught them and what they remembered of the goings-on surrounding Jesus, shaped under the guidance of the Spirit. And suppose that the New Testament books are all either apostolic writings, or formulations of apostolic teaching composed by close associates of one or another apostle. Then it would be correct to construe each book as a medium of divine discourse. And an eminently plausible construal of the process whereby these books found their way into a single canonical text, would be that by way of that process of canonization, God was authorizing these books as together constituting a single volume of divine discourse.5 So a Christian might come to think something like the above: she believes (1)  that the apostles were commissioned by God through Jesus Christ to be witnesses and deputies, (2) that they produced a body of apostolic teaching which incorporates what Jesus taught, and (3) that the New Testament books are all either apostolic writings or formulations of apostolic teaching composed by close associates of one or another apostle. She also believes (4) that the process whereby these books found their way into a single canon is a matter of God’s authorizing these books as constituting a single volume of divine discourse. She therefore concludes that indeed (5) the New Testament is a single volume of divine discourse.

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But of course our question then would be: how does she know, why does she believe each of (1)–(4)? What is the source of these beliefs? Could it be, perhaps, by way of ordinary historical investigation? I doubt it. The problem is the Principle of Dwindling Probabilities. Suppose a Christian proposes to give a historical argument for the divine inspiration and consequent authority of the New Testament; and suppose we think of her as already knowing or believing the central truths of Christianity. She already knows that there is such a person as God, that the man Jesus is also the divine Son of God, that through his ministry, passion, death and resurrection we sinners can have life. These constitute part of her background information, and can be employed in the historical argument in question. Her body of background information B with respect to which she estimates the probability of (1)–(4), includes the main lines of Christian teaching. And of course she knows that the books of the New Testament—some of them, anyway—apparently teach or presuppose these things. With respect to B, therefore, perhaps each of (1)–(4) could be considered at least quite plausible and perhaps even likely to be true. Still, each is only probable. Perhaps, indeed, each is very likely and has a probability as high as .9 with respect to that body of belief B.6 Even so, we can conclude only that the probability of their conjunction, on B, is somewhat more than .5. In that case, belief that the New Testament is the Word of God would not be appropriate; what would be appropriate is the belief that it is fairly likely that the New Testament is the Word of God. (The probability that the next throw of this die will not come up either 1 or 2 is greater than .5; that is nowhere nearly sufficient for my believing that it will not come up 1 or 2.) Of course, we could quibble about these probabilities—no doubt they could sensibly be thought to be greater than I suggested. No doubt; but they could also sensibly be thought to be less than I suggested. The historical argument for (1) to (4) will at best yield probabilities, and at best only a fairly insubstantial probability of (5) itself. The estimates of the probabilities involved, furthermore, will be vague, variable and not really well founded. If the belief in question is to have warrant for Christians, its epistemic status for them must be something different from that of a conclusion of ordinary historical investigation. Now, of course, most Christian communities have taught that the warrant enjoyed by this belief is not conferred on it just by way of ordinary historical investigation. The Belgic Confession, one of the most important confessions of the Reformed churches, gives a list (the Protestant list) of the canonical books of the Bible (Article 5); it then goes on: And we believe without a doubt all things contained in them—not so much because the church receives them and approves them as such, but above all because the Holy Spirit testifies in our hearts that they are from God, and also because they prove themselves to be from God. There is a possible ambiguity here; “we believe all things contained in them not so much because the church receives them, but …”—but to what does this last “them”

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refer? The teachings contained in the books, or the books themselves? If the former, then what we have here is the claim that the Holy Spirit is leading us to see, not that, a given book is from God, but that some teaching—e.g. that God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself—is indeed true. If the latter, however, what we would be led to believe is such propositions as The gospel of John is from God. I think it is at least fairly clear that the latter is what the Confession intends. According to the Confession, then, there are two sources for the belief that (e.g.) the gospel of John is from God. The first is that the Holy Spirit testifies in our hearts that this book is indeed from God; the Holy Spirit does not merely impel us to believe, with respect to a given teaching of the gospel of John, that it is from God, but also impels us to believe that the gospel of John itself is from God. The second is that the book “proves itself” to be from God. Perhaps here the idea is that the believer first comes to think, with respect to many of the specific teachings of that book, that they are indeed from God; that is, the Holy Spirit causes her to believe this with respect to many of the teachings of the book. She then infers (with the help of other premises) that the whole book has that same status.7 This is only one way in which this belief could have warrant; there are other possibilities. Perhaps the believer knows by way of the internal invitation of the Holy Spirit that the Holy Spirit has guided and preserved the Christian church, making sure that its teachings on important matters are in fact true; then the believer would be warranted in believing, at any rate of those books of the Bible endorsed by all or nearly all traditional Christian communities, that they are from God. Or perhaps, guided by the Holy Spirit, she recapitulates the process whereby the canon was originally formed, paying attention to the original criteria of apostolic authorship, consistency with apostolic teaching, and the like, and relying on testimony for the propositions such and such books were indeed composed by apostles. There are also combinations of these ways. However precisely this belief receives its warrant, then, traditional Christians have accepted the belief that the Bible is indeed the Word of God and that in it the Lord intends to teach us truths.8

2. Traditional Christian biblical commentary Of course, it is not always easy to tell what the Lord is teaching us in a given passage: what he teaches is indeed true, but sometimes it is not clear just what his teaching is. Part of the problem is the fact that the Bible contains material of so many different sorts; it is not in this respect like a contemporary book on theology or philosophy. It is not a book full of declarative sentences, with proper analysis and logical development and all the accoutrements academics have come to know and love and demand. The Bible does indeed contain sober assertion; but there is also exhortation, expression of praise, poetry, the telling of stories and parables, songs, devotional material, history, genealogies, lamentations, confession, prophecy, apocalyptic material, and much else besides. Some of these (apocalyptic, for example) present real problems

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of interpretation (for us, at present): what exactly is the Lord teaching in Daniel, or Revelation? That is not easy to say. And even if we stick to straightforward assertion, there are a thousand questions of interpretation. Here are just a couple of examples. In Matthew 5.17–20, Jesus declares that not a jot or a tittle of the Law shall pass away and that “… unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven,” but in Galatians Paul seems to say that observance of the Law does not count for much; how can we put these together? How do we understand Colossians 1.24: “Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christs afflictions, for the sake of his body which is the church”? Is Paul suggesting that Christs sacrifice is incomplete, insufficient, that it requires additional suffering on the part of Paul and/or the rest of us? That seems unlikely. Is it that our suffering can be a type of Christ’s, thus standing to the latter in the relation in which a type stands to the reality it typifies? Or shall we understand it like this: we must distinguish between two kinds of Christ’s suffering, the redemptive suffering, the expiatory and vicarious atonement to which nothing can be added or taken away, on the one hand, and another kind, also “for the sake of his body” in which we human beings can genuinely participate? Perhaps it is suffering which can build up, edify the body of Christ, even as our response to Christ can be deepened by our meditating on Christ’s sacrifice for us and the amazing selfless love displayed in it? Or what? Do Paul and James contradict each other on the relation between faith and works? Or rather, since God is the author of Scripture, is he proposing an inconsistent or self-contradictory teaching for our belief? Well no, surely not, but then how shall we understand the two in relation to each other? More generally, given that God is the principal author of Scripture, how shall we think about the apparent tensions the latter displays? Scripture, therefore, is indeed inspired: what it teaches is indeed true; but it is not always trivial to tell what it does teach. Indeed, many of the sermons and homilies preached in a million churches every Sunday morning are devoted in part to bringing out what might otherwise be obscure in Scriptural teaching. Given that the Bible is a communication from God to humankind, a divine revelation, there is much about it that requires deep and perceptive reflection, much that taxes our best scholarly and spiritual resources. Of course, this fact was not lost on, for example, Chrysostom, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and the others I mentioned earlier on; between them they wrote an impressive number of volumes devoted to powerful reflection on the meaning and teachings of Scripture. (Calvin’s commentaries alone run to some twenty-two volumes.) Their aim was to try to determine as accurately as possible just what the Lord proposes to teach us in the Bible. Call this enterprise “traditional biblical commentary,” and note that it displays at least the following three features. First, Scripture itself is taken to be a wholly authoritative and trustworthy guide to faith and morals; it is authoritative and trustworthy, because it is a revelation from God, a matter of Gods speaking to us. Once it is clear, therefore, what the teaching of a given bit of Scripture is, the question of the truth and acceptability of that teaching is

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settled. In a commentary on Plato, we might decide that what Plato really meant to say was XYZ; we might then go on to consider and evaluate XYZ in various ways, asking whether it is true, or close to the truth, or true in principle, or superseded by things we have learned since Plato wrote, and the like; we might also ask whether Plato’s grounds or arguments for XYZ are slight, or acceptable, or substantial, or compelling. These questions are out of place in the kind of Scripture scholarship under consideration. Once convinced that God is proposing XYZ for our belief, we do not go on to ask whether it is true, or whether God has made a good case for it. God is not required to make a case. Secondly, an assumption of the enterprise is that the principal author of the Bible—the entire Bible—is God himself. Of course, each of the books of the Bible has a human author or authors as well; but the principal author is God. This impels us to treat the whole more like a unified communication than a miscellany of ancient books. Scripture is not so much a library of independent books as itself a book with many subdivisions but a central theme: the message of the gospel. By virtue of this unity, furthermore (by virtue of the fact that there is just one principal author), it is possible to “interpret Scripture with Scripture.” If a given passage from one of Paul’s epistles is puzzling, it is perfectly proper to try to come to clarity as to what God’s teaching in this passage is by appealing, not only to what Paul himself says elsewhere in other epistles (his own or others), but also to what is taught elsewhere in Scripture (for example, the gospel of John9). Passages in Psalms or Isaiah can be interpreted in terms of the fuller, more explicit disclosure in the New Testament; the serpent elevated on a pole to save the Israelites from disaster can be seen as a type of Christ (and thus as getting some of its significance by way of an implicit reference to Christ, whose being raised on the cross averted a greater disaster for the whole human race). A further consequence: we can quite properly accept propositions that are inferred from premises coming from different parts of the Bible: once we see what God intends to teach in a given passage A and what he intends to teach in a given passage B, we can put the two together, and treat a consequence of these propositions as itself divine teaching.10 Thirdly (and connected with the second point), the fact that the principal author of the Bible is God himself means that one cannot always determine the meaning of a given passage by discovering what the human author had in mind. Of course, various post-modern hermeneuticists aim to amuse by telling us that in this case, as in all others, the authors intentions have nothing whatever to do with the meaning of a passage, that the reader herself confers upon it whatever meaning the passage has, or perhaps that even entertaining the idea of a text having meaning is to fall into “hermeneutical innocence”—innocence, oddly enough, which (as they insist) is ineradicably sullied by its inevitable association with oppressive, racist, sexist, homophobic and other offensive modes of thought. This is indeed amusing. Returning to serious business, however, it is obvious (given that the principal author of the Bible is God) that the meaning of a biblical passage will be given by what it is that the Lord intends to teach in that passage, and it is precisely this that biblical commentary tries to discern. Therefore, what the Lord intends to teach us is not identical with what the human author had in mind;11 the latter may not so much as have thought of what is in fact the

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teaching of the passage in question. Thus, for example, Christians take the suffering servant passages in Isaiah to be references to Jesus; Jesus himself says (Lk. 4.18–21) that the prophecy in Isaiah 61.1–2 is fulfilled in him; John (19.36) takes passages from Exodus, Numbers, Psalms and Zechariah to be references to Jesus and the events of his life and death; Matthew and John take it that Zechariah 9.9 is a reference to Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Mt. 21.5 and Jn 12.15); Hebrews 10 takes passages from Psalms, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk to be references to Christ and events in his career, as does Paul for passages from Psalms and Isaiah in his speech in Acts 13. Indeed, Paul refers to the Old Testament on nearly every page of Romans and both Corinthian epistles, and frequently in other epistles. There is no reason to suppose the human authors of Exodus, Numbers, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Habakkuk had in mind Jesus’ triumphal entry, or his incarnation, or other events of Jesus’ life and death, or indeed anything else explicitly about Jesus. But the fact that it is God who is the principal author here makes it quite possible that what we are to learn from the text in question is something rather different from what the human author proposed to teach.

3. Historical biblical criticism For at least the last couple of hundred years there has also been a quite different kind of Scripture scholarship variously called “higher criticism,” “historical criticism,” “biblical criticism,” or “historical critical scholarship”; I will call it “historical biblical criticism” (HBC). Clearly, we are indebted to HBC; it has enabled us to learn a great deal about the Bible we otherwise might not have known. Furthermore, some of the methods it has developed can be and have been employed to excellent effect in various studies of interest and importance, including traditional Biblical commentary. It differs importantly from the latter, however. HBC is fundamentally an enlightenment project; it is an effort to try to determine from the standpoint of reason alone what the Scriptural teachings are and whether they are true. Thus HBC eschews the authority and guidance of tradition, magisterium, creed, or any kind of ecclesial or “external” epistemic authority. The idea is to see what can be established (or at least made plausible) using only the light of what we could call “natural, empirical reason.” (So, of course, not everyone who uses the methods of textual criticism commonly employed in HBC is involved in the project of HBC as I am thinking of it; to take part in that project one must aim to discover the truth about Scripture and its teachings from the standpoint of reason alone.) The faculties or sources of belief invoked, therefore, would be those that are employed in ordinary history: perception, testimony, reason taken in the sense of a priori intuition together with deductive and probabilistic reasoning, Reid’s sympathy, by which we discern the thoughts and feelings of another, and so on—but bracketing any proposition one knows by faith or by way of the authority of the church. Spinoza (1632–77) already lays down the charter for this enterprise: “The rule for [Biblical] interpretation should be nothing but the natural light of reason which is common to all—not any supernatural light nor any external authority.”12

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This project or enterprise is often thought of as part and parcel of the development of modern empirical science, and indeed practitioners of HBC often drape about their shoulders the mantle of modern science. The attraction is not just that HBC can perhaps share in the prestige of modern science, but also that it can share in the obvious epistemic power and excellence of the latter.13 It is common to think of science itself as our best shot at getting to know what the world is really like; HBC is, among other things, an attempt to apply these widely approved methods to the study of Scripture and the origins of Christianity. Thus Raymond Brown, a Scripture scholar than whom none is more highly respected, believes that HBC is “scientific biblical criticism”;14 it yields “factual results” (p. 9); he intends his own contributions to be “scientifically respectable” (p. 11): and practitioners of HBC investigate the Scriptures with “scientific exactitude” (pp. 18–19).15 But what is it, exactly, to study the Bible scientifically? As we will see below there is more than one answer to this question. One theme that seems to command nearly universal assent, however, is that in working at this scientific project (however exactly it is to be understood) you do not invoke or employ any theological assumptions or presuppositions. You do not assume, for example, that the Bible is inspired by God in any special way, or contains anything like specifically divine discourse. You do not assume that Jesus is the divine Son of God, or that he arose from the dead, or that his suffering and death is in some way a propitiatory atonement for human sin, making it possible for us to get once more in the right relationship to God. You do not assume any of these things because in pursuing science, one does not assume or employ any proposition which one knows by faith.16 (As a consequence, the meaning of a text will be what the human author intended to assert (if it is an assertive kind of text); divine intentions and teaching do not enter into the meaning.17) Thus the idea, says E. P. Sanders, is to rely only on “evidence on which everyone can agree.”18 According to Jon Levenson, Historical critics thus rightly insist that the tribunal before which interpretations are argued cannot be confessional or “dogmatic”; the arguments offered must be historically valid, able, that is, to compel the assent of historians whatever their religion or lack thereof, whatever their backgrounds, spiritual experiences, or personal beliefs, and without privileging any claim of revelation.19 Barnabas Lindars explains that There are in fact two reasons why many scholars are very cautious about miracle stories … The second reason is historical. The religious literature of the ancient world is full of miracle stories, and we cannot believe them all. It is not open to a scholar to decide that, just because he is a believing Christian, he will accept all the Gospel miracles at their face value, but at the same time he will repudiate miracles attributed to Isis. All such accounts have to be scrutinized with equal detachment.20

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And even Luke Timothy Johnson, who is in general astutely critical of HBC: It is obviously important to study Christian origins historically. And in such historical inquiry, faith commitments should play no role. Christianity is no more privileged for the historian than any other human phenomenon.21 In practice, this emphasis means that HBC tends to deal especially with questions of composition and authorship, these being the questions most easily addressed by the methods employed. When was the document in question composed—or more exactly, since we cannot assume that we are dealing with a single unified document here, when were its various parts composed? How was the gospel of Luke, for example, composed? Was it written by one person, relying on his memory of Jesus and his words and deeds, or was it assembled from various reports, alleged quotations, songs, poems and the like in the oral tradition? Was it dependent on one or more earlier written or oral sources? Why did the editor or redactor put the book together in just the way he did—was it to make a theological point in a current controversy? Where traditional Biblical commentary assumes that the entire Bible is really one book with a single principal author, HBC tends to give us a collection of books by many authors. And even within the confines of a single book, it may give us a collection of discontinuous sayings and episodes (pericopes), these having been stitched together by one or more redactors. How much of what is reported as the sayings and discourse of Jesus really was said by Jesus? Can we discern various strata in the book—perhaps a bottom stratum, including the actual sayings of Jesus himself, and then successive overlaying strata? As Robert Alter says, scholarship of this kind tends to be “excavative”; the idea is to dig behind the document as we actually have it to see what can be determined of its history.22 Of course, the idea is also to see, as far as this is possible, whether the events reported—in the gospels, for example—really happened, and whether the picture they give of Jesus is in fact historically accurate. Did he say the things they say he said, and do the things they say he did? Here the assumption is that we cannot simply take at face value the gospels as we now have them. There may have been all sorts of additions and subtractions and alterations made in the interest of advancing theological points. Further, the New Testament books are written from the standpoint of faith—faith that Jesus really was the Christ, did indeed suffer and die and rise from the dead, and did accomplish our salvation. From the standpoint of reason alone, however, this faith must be bracketed; hence (from that standpoint) the hermeneutics of suspicion is appropriate here. (This suspicion is sometimes carried so far that it reminds one of the way in which the CIA’s denial that Mr X is a spy is taken as powerful evidence that Mr X is indeed a spy.)

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Varieties of HBC Those who practice HBC, therefore, propose to proceed without employing theological assumptions or anything one knows by faith (if indeed there is anything one knows by faith); these things are to be bracketed. Instead, one proceeds scientifically, on the basis of reason alone. Beyond this, however, there is vastly less concord. What is to count as reason? Precisely what premises can be employed in an argument from reason alone? What exactly does it mean to proceed scientifically?

1. Troeltschian HBC Here many contemporary biblical critics will appeal to the thought and teaching of Ernst Troeltsch.23 Thus John Collins: Among theologians these principles received their classic formulation from Ernst Troeltsch in 1898. Troeltsch sets out three principles …: (1) The principle of criticism or methodological doubt: since any conclusion is subject to revision, historical inquiry can never attain absolute certainty but only relative degrees of probability. (2) The principle of analogy: historical knowledge is possible because all events are similar in principle. We must assume that the laws of nature in biblical times were the same as now. Troeltsch referred to this as ‘the almighty power of analogy.’ (3) The principle of correlation: the phenomena of history are inter-related and inter-dependent and no event can be isolated from the sequence of historical cause and effect.24 Collins adds a fourth principle, this one taken from Van Harvey s The Historian and the Believer,25 a more recent locus classicus for the proper method of historical criticism: To these should be added the principle of autonomy, which is indispensable for any critical study. Neither church nor state can prescribe for the scholar which conclusions should be reached.26 Now the first thing to note is that each of these principles is multiply ambiguous. In particular, each (except perhaps for the second) has a non-controversial, indeed, platitudinous interpretation. The first principle seems to be a comment on historical inquiry rather than a principle for its practice: historical inquiry can never attain absolutely certain results. (Perhaps the implied methodological principle is that in doing historical criticism, you should avoid claiming absolute certainty for your results.) Fair enough, I suppose nearly everyone would agree that few historical results of any significance are as certain as, say, that 2 + 1 = 3, but if so, they do not achieve absolute certainty. (The only reasonably plausible candidates for historical events that are absolutely certain, I suppose, would be such “historical” claims as that either Caesar crossed the Rubicon or else he did not.)

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The third also has a platitudinous interpretation. What Troeltsch says is, “The sole task of history in its specifically theoretical aspect is to explain every movement, process, state and nexus of things by reference to the web of its causal relations.”27 This too can be seen as toothless if not platitudinous. Every event is to be explained by reference to the web of its causal relations—which of course would also include the intentions and actions of persons. Well then, consider even such an event as the resurrection of Jesus from the dead: according to the principle at hand, this event too would have to be explained by reference to the web of its causal relations. No problem; on the traditional view, this event was caused by God himself, who caused it in order to achieve certain of his aims and ends, in particular making it possible for human beings to be reconciled with God. So taken, this principle would exclude very little. I say the second principle is perhaps the exception to the claim that each has a banal, uncontroversial interpretation: that is because on any plausible interpretation the second principle seems to entail the existence of natural laws. That there are such things as natural laws was a staple of seventeenth and eighteenth century science and philosophy of science;28 what science discovers (so they thought) is just these laws of nature.29 Empiricists have always been dubious about natural laws, however, and at present the claim that there are any such things is at best extremely controversial.30 So all but one of Troeltsch’s principles have platitudinous interpretations; but these are not in fact the interpretations given to them in the community of HBC. Within that community those principles are understood in such a way as to preclude direct divine action in the world. Not that all in this community accept Troeltsch’s principles in their nonplatitudinous interpretation; rather, those who think of themselves as accepting (or rejecting) those principles think of themselves as accepting or rejecting their nonplatitudinous versions. (Presumably everyone accepts them taken platitudinously.) So taken, these principles imply that God has not in fact specially inspired any human authors in such a way that what they write is really divine speech addressed to us; nor has he raised Jesus from the dead, or turned water into wine, or performed miracles of any other sorts. Thus Rudolf Bultmann: The historical method includes the presupposition that history is a unity in the sense of a closed continuum of effects in which individual events are connected by the succession of cause and effect. This continuum, furthermore, cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural, transcendent powers.31 Many other theologians, oddly enough, chime in with agreement: God cannot or at any rate would not and will not act directly in the world. Thus John Macquarrie: The way of understanding miracles that appeals to breaks in the natural order and to

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supernatural intervention belongs to the mythological outlook and cannot commend itself in a post-mythological climate of thought … The traditional conception of miracle is irreconcilable with our modern understanding of both science and history. Science proceeds on the assumption that whatever events occur in the world can be accounted for in terms of other events that also belong within the world; and if on some occasions we are unable to give a complete account of some happening … the scientific conviction is that further research will bring to light further factors in the situation, but factors that will turn out to be just as immanent and this-worldly as those already known.32 And Langdon Gilkey: … contemporary theology does not expect, nor does it speak of, wondrous divine events on the surface of natural and historical life. The causal nexus in space and time which the Enlightenment science and philosophy introduced into the Western mind … is also assumed by modern theologians and scholars; since they participate in the modern world of science both intellectually and existentially, they can scarcely do anything else. Now this assumption of a causal order among phenomenal events, and therefore of the authority of the scientific interpretation of observable events, makes a great difference to the validity one assigns to biblical narratives and so to the way one understands their meaning. Suddenly a vast panoply of divine deeds and events recorded in scripture are no longer regarded as having actually happened. Whatever the Hebrews believed, we believe that the biblical people lived in the same causal continuum of space and time in which we live, and so one in which no divine wonders transpired and no divine voices were heard.33 Gilkey says no divine wonders have transpired and no divine voices have been heard; Macquarrie adds that in this post-mythological age, we cannot brook the idea of “breaks in the natural order and supernatural intervention.” Each, therefore, is ruling out the possibility of miracle, including the possibility of special divine action in inspiring human authors in such a way that what they write constitutes an authoritative communication from God. Now, of course, it is far from easy to say just what a miracle is; this topic is connected with deep and thorny questions about occasionalism, natural law, natural potentialities, and so on. We need not get into all that, however. The Troeltschian idea is that there is a certain way in which things ordinarily go; there are certain regularities, whether or not due to natural law, and God can be counted on to act in such a way as never to abrogate those regularities. Of course, God could if he chose abrogate those regularities (after all, even those natural laws, if there are any, are his creatures); but we can be sure, somehow, that God will not abrogate those regularities. Troeltschian Scripture scholarship, therefore, will proceed on the basis of the assumption that God never does anything specially; in particular, he neither raised Jesus from the dead nor specially inspired the Biblical authors.

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2. Duhemian HBC Not all who accept and practice HBC accept Troeltsch’s principles, and we can see another variety of HBC by thinking about an important suggestion made by Pierre Duhem. Duhem was both a serious Catholic and a serious scientist; he was accused (as he thought) by Abel Rey34 of allowing his religious and metaphysical views as a Christian to enter his physics in an improper way. Duhem repudiated this suggestion, claiming that his Christianity did not enter his physics in any way at all and a fortiori did not enter it in an improper way.35 Furthermore, the correct or proper way to pursue physical theory, he said, was the way in which he had in fact done it; physical theory should be completely independent of religious or metaphysical views or commitments. Why did he think so? What did he have against metaphysics? Here he strikes a characteristic Enlightenment note: if you think of metaphysics as ingressing into physics, he says, then your estimate of the worth of a physical theory will depend upon the metaphysics you adopt. Physical theory will be dependent upon metaphysics in such a way that someone who does not accept the metaphysics involved in a given physical theory cannot accept the physical theory either. And the problem with that is that the disagreements that run riot in metaphysics will ingress into physics, so that the latter cannot be an activity we can all work at together, regardless of our metaphysical views: Now to make physical theories depend on metaphysics is surely not the way to let them enjoy the privilege of universal consent … If theoretical physics is subordinated to metaphysics, the divisions separating the diverse metaphysical systems will extend into the domain of physics. A physical theory reputed to be satisfactory by the sectarians of one metaphysical school will be rejected by the partisans of another school.36 Duhem’s main point, I think, is that if a physical theorist employs metaphysical assumptions or other notions that are not accepted by other workers in the field, and employs them in such a way that those who do not accept them cannot accept his physical theory, then to that extent his work cannot be accepted by those others; to that extent, furthermore, the cooperation important to science will be compromised. He therefore proposes a conception of science (or physics in particular) according to which the latter is independent of metaphysics: … I have denied metaphysical doctrines the right to testify for or against any physical theory … Whatever I have said of the method by which physics proceeds, or the nature and scope that we must attribute to the theories it constructs, does not in any way prejudice either the metaphysical doctrines or religious beliefs of anyone who accepts my words. The believer and the nonbeliever may both work

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in common accord for the progress of physical science such as I have tried to define it.37 Duhem’s proposal, reduced to essentials, is that physicists should not make essential use of religious or metaphysical assumptions in doing their physics: in that way lies chaos and cacophony, as each of the warring sects does things its own way. If we want to have the sort of commonality and genuine dialogue that promotes progress in physics, we should avoid assumptions—metaphysical, religious or otherwise—that are not accepted by all parties to the discussion.38 Duhem’s suggestion is interesting and important, and (although Duhem himself did not do so) can obviously be applied far beyond the confines of physical theory: for example, to Scripture scholarship. Suppose we say that Duhemian Scripture scholarship is Scripture scholarship that does not involve any theological, religious or metaphysical assumptions that are not accepted by everyone in the relevant community.39 Thus the Duhemian Scripture scholar would not take for granted either that God is the principal author of the Bible or that the main lines of the Christian story are in fact true; these are not accepted by all who are party to the discussion. She would not take for granted that Jesus rose from the dead, or that any other miracle has occurred; she could not so much as take it for granted that miracles are possible, since these claims are rejected by many who are party to the discussion. On the other hand, of course, Duhemian Scripture scholarship cannot take it for granted that Christ did not rise from the dead or that no miracles have occurred, or that miracles are impossible. Nor, of course, could it employ Troeltsch’s principles (taken non-platitudinously); not everyone accepts them. Duhemian Scripture scholarship fits well with Sanders’ suggestion that what is needed is more secure evidence, evidence on which everyone can “agree.” It also fits well with John Meier’s fantasy of “an unpapal conclave” of Jewish, Catholic, Protestant and agnostic scholars, locked in the basement of the Harvard Divinity School library until they come to consensus on what historical methods can show about the life and mission of Jesus.40 Among the proposed benefits of Duhemian HBC, obviously, are just the benefits Duhem cites: people of very different religious and theological beliefs can cooperate in this enterprise. Furthermore, although in principle the traditional Biblical commentator and the Troeltschian Biblical scholar could discover whatever is unearthed by Duhemian means, it is in fact likely that much will be learned in this cooperative enterprise that would not be learned by either group working alone.

3. Spinozistic HBC Troeltschian and Duhemian HBC do not exhaust HBC; one can be a practitioner of HBC and accept neither. You might propose to follow reason alone in Scripture scholarship, but think that the Troeltschian principles, taken in the strong version in which they imply that God never acts specially in the world, are not in fact deliverances of

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reason. Reason alone, you say, certainly cannot demonstrate that God never acts specially in the world, or that no miracles have ever occurred. If so, you would not be a Troeltschian. On the other hand, you might also reject Duhemianism as well: for you might think that, as a matter of fact, there are deliverances of reason not accepted by everyone party to the project of Scripture scholarship. (The deliverances of reason are indeed open to all, but impeding factors of one kind or another can sometimes prevent someone from seeing the truth of one or another of them.) But then you might yourself employ those deliverances of reason in pursuing Scripture scholarship, thereby employing assumptions not accepted by everyone involved in the project, and thereby rejecting Duhemianism. You might therefore propose to follow reason alone, but be neither a Troeltschian nor a Duhemian. Suppose we use the term “Spinozistic HBC”41 to denote this variety of HBC. The Spinozist concurs with the Troeltschian and Duhemian that no theological assumptions or beliefs are to be employed in HBC. She differs from the Troeltschian in paying the same compliment to Troeltsch’s principles: they too are not deliverances of reason and hence are not to be employed in HBC. And she differs from the Duhemian in holding that there are some deliverances of reason not accepted by all who are party to the project of Scripture scholarship; hence, she proposes to employ some propositions or beliefs rejected by the Duhemian. A final point: It is not of course accurate to suppose that all who practice HBC fall neatly into one or another of these categories. There are all sorts of half-way houses, lots of haltings between two opinions, many who fall partly into one and partly into another, and many who have never clearly seen that there are these categories. A real live Scripture scholar may be unlikely to have spent a great deal of thought on the epistemological foundations of his or her discipline and is likely to straddle one or more of the categories I mention.

Tensions with Traditional Christianity There has been a history of substantial tension between HBC and traditional Christians. Thus David Friedrich Strauss42 in 1835: “Nay, if we would be candid with ourselves, that which was once sacred history for the Christian believer is, for the enlightened portion of our contemporaries, only fable.” Of course, the unenlightened faithful were not so unenlightened that they failed to notice this feature of Biblical criticism. Writing ten years after the publication of Strauss’s book, William Pringle complains that, “In Germany, Biblical criticism is almost a national pursuit … Unhappily, [the critics] were but too frequently employed in maintaining the most dangerous errors, in opposing every inspired statement which the mind of man is unable fully to comprehend, in divesting religion of its spiritual and heavenly character, and in undermining the whole fabric of revealed truth.”43 Perhaps among Pringle’s complaints were the following. First, practitioners of HBC tend to treat the Bible as a set of separate books rather than a unified communication from God. Thus, they tend to reject the idea that Old Testament passages

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can be properly understood as making reference to Jesus Christ, or to events in his life: “Critical scholars rule out clairvoyance as an explanation axiomatically. Instead of holding that the Old Testament predicts events in the life of Jesus, critical scholars of the New Testament say that each Gospel writer sought to exploit Old Testament passages in order to bolster his case for the messianic and dominical claims of Jesus or of the church on his behalf.”44 More generally, Brevard Childs: “For many decades the usual way of initiating entering students in the Bible was slowly to dismantle the church’s traditional teachings regarding scripture by applying the acids of criticism.”45 Second, following Ernst Troeltsch HBC tends to discount miracle stories, taking it as axiomatic that miracles do not and did not really happen, or at any rate claiming that the proper method for HBC cannot admit miracles either as evidence or conclusions. Perhaps Jesus effected cures of some psychosomatic disorders, but nothing that modern medical science cannot explain. Many employing this method propose that Jesus never thought of himself as divine, or as the Messiah, or as capable of forgiving sin46—let alone as having died and then risen from the dead. “The Historical Jesus researchers,” says Luke Timothy Johnson, “insist that the ‘real Jesus’ must be found in the facts of his life before his death. The resurrection is, when considered at all, seen in terms of visionary experience, or as a continuation of an ‘empowerment’ that began before Jesus’ death. Whether made explicit or not, the operative premise is that there is no ‘real Jesus’ after his death” (Johnson, p. 144). Those who follow these methods sometimes produce quite remarkable accounts— and accounts remarkably different from traditional Christian understanding. According to Barbara Thiering’s Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls,47 for example, Jesus was buried in a cave; he did not actually die and was revived by the magician Simon Magus, whereupon he married Mary Magdalene, settled down, fathered three children, was divorced and finally died in Rome. According to Morton Smith, Jesus was a practicing homosexual and conjurer.48 According to German Scripture scholar Gerd Ludemann: the Resurrection is “an empty formula that must be rejected by anyone holding a scientific world view.”49 G. A. Wells goes so far as to claim that our name “Jesus,” as it turns up in the Bible, is empty: like “Santa Claus,” it does not trace back to or denote anyone at all.50 John Allegro apparently thinks there was no such person as Jesus of Nazareth; Christianity began as a hoax designed to fool the Romans, and preserve the cult of a certain hallucinogenic mushroom (Amanita muscaria). Still, the name “Christ” is not empty: it is really a name of that mushroom.51 As engaging a claim as any is that Jesus, while neither merely legendary, nor actually a mushroom, was in fact an atheist, the first Christian atheist.52 And even if we set aside the lunatic fringe, Van Harvey is correct: “So far as the biblical historian is concerned, … there is scarcely a popularly held traditional belief about Jesus that is not regarded with considerable skepticism” (NTS, p. 193).

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4. Why are not most Christians more concerned? So HBC has not in general been sympathetic to traditional Christian belief; it has hardly been an encouragement to the faithful. But the faithful seem relatively unconcerned; of course, they find traditional biblical commentary of great interest and importance, but the beliefs and attitudes of HBC have not seemed to filter down to them, despite its dominance in mainline seminaries. According to Van Harvey, “Despite decades of research, the average person tends to think of the life of Jesus in much the same terms as Christians did three centuries ago …” Harvey finds this puzzling: “Why is it that, in a culture so dominated by experts in every field, the opinion of New Testament historians has had so little influence on the public?”53 Are traditional Christians just ignoring inconvenient evidence? In what follows I will try to answer these questions. Obviously, HBC has contributed greatly to our knowledge of the Bible, in particular the circumstances and conditions of its composition; it has given us new alternatives as to how to understand the human authors, and this has also given us new ideas as to how to understand the divine Author. Nevertheless, there are in fact excellent reasons for tending to ignore that “considerable skepticism,” of which Harvey speaks. I do not mean to claim that the ordinary person in the pew ignores it because she has these reasons clearly in mind; no doubt she does not. I say only that these reasons are good reasons for a traditional Christian to ignore the deflationary results of HBC. What might these reasons be? Well of course one thing is that skeptical Scripture scholars display vast disagreement among themselves.54 There is also the fact that quite a number of the arguments they propose seem at best wholly inconclusive. Perhaps the endemic vice or at any rate the perennial temptation of HBC is what we might call the Fallacy of Creeping Certitude. To practice this fallacy, you note that some proposition A is probable (to .9, say) with respect to your background knowledge k (what you know to be true); you therefore annex it to k. Then you note that a proposition B is probable with respect to k&A; you therefore annex it too to k. Then you note that C is probable to .9 with respect to A&B&k, and also annex it to k; similarly for (say) D, E, F and G. You then pronounce A&B&C&D&E&F&G highly probable with respect to k, our evidence. But the fact is (as we learn from the probability calculus) that these probabilities must be multiplied—so that in fact the probability of A&B&C&D&E&F&G is .9 to the 7th power, i.e. less than .5! But suppose we look into reasons or arguments for preferring the results of HBC to those of traditional commentary. Why should we suppose that the former take us closer to the truth than the latter? Troeltsch’s principles are particularly important here. As understood in the interpretative community of HBC, they preclude special divine action including special divine inspiration of Scripture and the occurrence of miracles. As Gilkey says, “Suddenly a vast panoply of divine deeds and events recorded in scripture are no longer regarded as having actually happened.” Many academic theologians and Scripture scholars appear to believe that Troeltschian HBC is de rigueur, it is often regarded as the only intellectually respectable variety of Scripture scholarship, or the

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only variety that has any claim to the mantle of science. (And many who arrive at relatively traditional conclusions in Scripture scholarship nevertheless pay at least lip service to the Troeltschian ideal, somehow feeling in a semi-confused way that this is the epistemically respectable or privileged way of proceeding.) But why think Scripture scholarship should proceed in this specific way—as opposed both to traditional biblical commentary and varieties of HBC that do not accept Troeltschs principles? Are there any reasons or arguments for those principles?

Force majeure If so, they are extraordinarily well hidden. One common suggestion, however, seems to be a sort of appeal to force majeure: we simply cannot help it. Given our historical position, there is nothing else we can do; we are all in the grip of historical forces beyond our control (this thing is bigger than either one of us). This reaction is typified by those, who like Harvey, Macquarrie, Gilkey, and others claim that nowadays, given our cultural situation, we just do not have any options. There are potent historical forces that impose these ways of thinking upon us; like it or not, we are blown about by these powerful winds of doctrine. “The causal nexus in space and time which the Enlightenment science and philosophy introduced into the Western mind … is also assumed by modern theologians and scholars; since they participate in the modern world of science both intellectually and existentially, they can scarcely do anything else,” says Gilkey; another example is Bultmann’s famous remark to the effect that “it is impossible to use electrical light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.”55 But is not this view—that we are all compelled by contemporary historical forces to hold the sort of view in question—historically naive? First, why think we proceed together in lockstep through history, all at any given time perforce holding the same views and making the same assumptions? Clearly we do not do any such thing. The contemporary intellectual world is much more like a horse race (or perhaps a demolition derby) than a triumphal procession, more like a battleground than a Democratic Party fund-raiser, where everyone can be counted on to support the same slate. At present, for example, there are many like Macquarrie, Harvey and Gilkey who accept the semi-deistic view that God (if there is any such person) could not or would not act miraculously in history. But this is not, of course, the view of nearly everyone at present; hundreds of millions would reject it. The fact is that far more people reject this view than accept it. (So even if Gilkey, et al., were, right about the inevitable dance of history, they would be wrong in their elitist notion to the effect that what they do is the current step.) The utter obviousness of this fact suggests a second interpretation of this particular justification of Troeltschian HBC. Perhaps what the apologists really mean is not that everyone nowadays accepts this semi-deism (that is trivially false), but that everyone

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in the know does. Everyone who is properly educated and has read his Kant and Hume (and Troeltsch) and reflected on the meaning of the wireless and electric light knows these things; as for the rest of humanity (including, I suppose, those of us who have read our Kant and Hume but are unimpressed), their problem is simple ignorance. Perhaps people generally do not march lockstep through history, but those in the know do; and right now they all or nearly all reject special divine action. But even if we chauvinistically stick to educated Westerners, this is still doubtful in excelsis. “The traditional conception of miracle,” Macquarrie says, “is irreconcilable with our modern understanding of both science and history”: to whom does this “our,” here refer? To those who have gone to university, are well-educated, know at least a little science, and have thought about the bearing of these matters on the possibility of miracles? If so, the claim is once more whoppingly false. Very many well-educated people (including even some theologians) understand science and history in a way that is entirely compatible both with the possibility and with the actuality of miracles. Many physicists and engineers understand “electrical light and the wireless” vastly better than Bultmann or his contemporary followers, but nonetheless hold precisely those New Testament beliefs Bultmann thinks incompatible with using electric lights and radios. There are large numbers of educated contemporaries (including even some with Ph.Ds!) who believe Jesus really and literally arose from the dead, that God performs miracles in the contemporary world, and even that there are both demons and spirits who are active in the contemporary world. As a matter of historical fact, there are any number of contemporaries, and contemporary intellectuals very well acquainted with science, who do not feel any problem at all in pursuing science and also believing in miracles, angels, Christ’s resurrection, the lot. Once more, however, Macquarrie, et al, must know this as well as anyone else; so what do he and his friends really mean? How can they make these claims about what “we”56—we who use the products of science and know a bit about it—can and cannot believe? How can they blithely exclude or ignore the thousands, indeed millions of contemporary Christians who do not think as they do? The answer must be that they think those Christians somehow do not count. What they really mean to say, I fear, is that they and their friends think this way, and anyone who demurs is so ignorant as to be properly ignored. But that is at best a bit slim as a reason for accepting the Troeltschian view; it is more like a nasty little piece of arrogance. Nor is it any better for being tucked away in the suggestion that somehow we just cannot help ourselves. Of course, it is possible that Gilkey and his friends cannot help themselves; in that case they can hardly be blamed for accepting the view in question.57 This incapacity on their parts, however, is no recommendation of Troeltsch’s principles. So this is at best a poor reason for thinking serious Biblical scholarship must be Troeltschian. Is there a better reason? A second suggestion, perhaps connected with the plea of inability to do otherwise, is given by the suggestion that the very practice of science presupposes rejection of the idea of miracle or special divine action in the world. “Science proceeds on the assumption that whatever events occur in the world can be accounted for in terms of other events that also belong within the world,” says

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Macquarrie; perhaps he means to suggest that the very practice of science requires that one reject (e.g.) the idea of God’s raising someone from the dead. Of course, the argument form if X were true, it would be inconvenient for science; therefore, X is false is at best moderately compelling. We are not just given that the Lord has arranged the universe for the comfort and convenience of the American Academy of Science. To think otherwise is to be like the drunk who insisted on looking for his lost car keys under the streetlight, on the grounds that the light was better there. (In fact it would be to go the drunk one better: it would be to insist that since the keys would be hard to find in the dark, they must be under the light.) But why think in the first place that we would have to embrace this semi-deism in order to do science?58 Newton certainly did some sensible science, but he thought Jesus was raised from the dead, as do many contemporary physicists. But of course that is physics; perhaps the problem would be (as Bultmann suggests) with medicine. Is the idea that one could not do medical research, or prescribe medications, if one thought that God has done miracles in the past and might even occasionally do some nowadays? To put the suggestion explicitly is to refute it; there is not the faintest reason why I could not sensibly believe that God raised Jesus from the dead and also engage in medical research into, say, Usher’s Syndrome or Multiple Sclerosis, or into ways of staving off the ravages of coronary disease. What would be the problem? That it is always possible that God should do something different, thus spoiling my experiment? But that is possible: God is omnipotent. (Or do we have here a new antitheistic argument? If God exists, he could spoil my experiment; but nothing can spoil my experiment; therefore …) No doubt if I thought God often or usually did things in an idiosyncratic way, so that there really are not much by way of discoverable regularities to be found, then perhaps I could not sensibly engage in scientific research; the latter presupposes a certain regularity, predictability, stability in the world. But that is an entirely different matter. What I must assume in order to do science, is only that ordinarily and for the most part these regularities hold.59 This reason, too, then, is monumentally insufficient as a reason for holding that we are somehow obliged to accept the principles underlying Troeltschian Biblical scholarship. It is therefore difficult indeed to see any reason for supposing that Troeltschian Scripture scholarship is somehow de rigueur or somehow forced upon us by our history.

A moral imperative? Van Harvey proposes another reason for pursuing Troeltschian scholarship and preferring it to traditional Biblical commentary;60 his reason is broadly moral or ethical.

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He begins61 by referring to a fascinating episode in Victorian intellectual history62 in which certain Victorian intellectuals found themselves wrestling with a serious problem of intellectual integrity. As Harvey sees it, they “believed that it was morally reprehensible to insist that these claims [Christian claims about the activities and teachings of Jesus] were true on faith while at the same time arguing that they were also the legitimate objects of historical inquiry.”63 Now I think this is a tendentious account of the problem these intellectuals faced—tendentious, because it makes it look as if these intellectuals were endorsing, with unerring prescience, precisely the position Harvey himself proposes to argue for. The fact is, I think, their position was both less idiosyncratic and far more plausible. After all, why should anyone think it immoral to believe by faith what could also be investigated by other sources of belief or knowledge? I am curious about your whereabouts last Friday night: were you perhaps at The Linebacker’s Bar? Perhaps I could find out in three different ways: by asking you, by asking your wife, and by examining the bar for your fingerprints (fortunately the bar is never washed). Would there be something immoral in using one of these methods when in fact the others were also available? That is not easy to believe. It was not just that that troubled the Victorians. Had they been confident that both faith and historical investigation were reliable avenues to the truths in question, they surely would not have thought it immoral to believe on the basis of one of these as opposed to the other or both. Their problem was deeper. They were troubled (among other things) by the German Scripture scholarship about which they knew relatively little; but they did know enough to think (rightly or wrongly) that it posed a real threat to the Christian beliefs that for many of them were in any event already shaky. They suspected or feared that this Scripture scholarship could show or would show or already had shown that essential elements of the Christian faith were just false. They were also troubled by what many saw as the anti-supernaturalistic and antitheistic bent of science: could one really believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles in the era of the steam engine and ocean liner? They were troubled by the advent of Darwinism, which seemed to many to contradict the Christian picture of human origins. They were convinced, following Locke and the whole classical foundationalist tradition, that the right way to hold beliefs on these topics is by following the (propositional) evidence wherever it leads; and they were deeply worried about where this evidence was in fact leading. They were troubled, in short, by a variety of factors all of which seemed to suggest that traditional Christian belief was really no more than a beautiful story: inspiring, uplifting, perhaps necessary to public morality, but just a story. Given our scientific coming of age, they feared, informed people would regretfully have to jettison traditional Christian belief, perhaps (especially on ceremonial occasions) with an occasional nostalgic backward look. But many of them also longed for the comfort and security of serious Christian belief; to lose it was like being thrown out of our Father’s house into a hostile or indifferent world. And, of course, many of the Victorians had strong moral opinions and a highly developed moral sense. They thought it weak, spineless, cowardly to refuse to face these specters, to hide them from oneself, to engage in self-deception and

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double-think. All of this, they thought, is unworthy of a serious and upright person. They abhorred the weakness and moral softness of the sort of stance in which you suspect the bitter truth, but refuse to investigate the matter, preferring to hide the truth from yourself, perhaps hoping it will somehow go away. Many of them thought this was precisely what some of the clergy and other educators were doing, and despised them for it. Far better to face the sad truth with intellectual honesty, manly courage and a stiff upper lip. So it was not just that they thought it reprehensible to believe on faith what can also be addressed by reason or historical investigation. It was rather that they suspected and deeply feared that the latter (together with the other factors I mentioned) would undermine the former. And they scorned and detested a sort of willful head-in-the-sand attitude in which, out of timidity or fear or a desire for comfort, one refuses to face the facts. It is reasons such as these that account for the moral fervor (if not stridency) of W. K. Clifford’s oft-anthologized “The Ethics of Belief.”64 However things may have stood with the Victorians, Harvey proposes the following bit of moral dogma: The gulf separating the conservative Christian believer and the New Testament scholar can be seen as the conflict between two antithetical ethics of belief … New Testament scholarship is now so specialized and requires so much preparation that the layperson has simply been disqualified from having any right to a judgment regarding the truth or falsity of certain historical claims. Insofar as the conservative Christian believer is a layperson who has no knowledge of the New Testament scholarship, he or she is simply not entitled to certain historical beliefs at all. Just as the average layperson is scarcely in a position to have an informed judgment about the seventh letter of Plato, the relationship of Montezuma to Cortez, or the authorship of the Donation of Constantine, so the average layperson has no right to an opinion about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel or the trustworthiness of the synoptics.65 “The layperson has simply been disqualified from having any right to a judgment regarding the truth or falsity of certain historical claims …” Strong words! In an earlier age, priests and ministers, often the only educated members of their congregations, would exercise a certain intellectual and spiritual leadership, hoping the flock would in fact come to see, appreciate, and of course believe the truth. On Harvey’s showing, the flock does not so much as have a right to an opinion on these points—not even an opinion purveyed by the experts! Harvey complains that many students seem unreceptive to the results of Scripture scholarship.66 But of course if he is right, the students do not have a right to believe the results of Scripture scholarship; they are therefore doing no more than their simple duty in refusing to believe them. One hopes Harvey remembers, when teaching his classes, not to put his views on these matters in an attractive and winsome fashion—after all, if he did so, some of the students might believe them, in which case they would be sinning and he himself would be giving offense in the Pauline sense (Rom. 14, not to mention I Cor. 8.9).

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But suppose we sadly avert our gaze from this elitism run amok: why does Harvey think that only the historian has a right to hold an opinion on these matters? Clearly enough, because he thinks that the only way to achieve accurate and reliable information on these matters is by way of Troeltschian scholarship. And that opinion, obviously, presupposes the philosophical and theological opinion that there is not any other epistemic avenue to these matters; it presupposes that, for example, faith (and the internal instigation or testimony of the Holy Spirit) is not a source of warranted belief or knowledge on these topics. If the latter were a source of warranted belief, and if the average layperson had access to this source (if the average layperson could have faith), then presumably there would be nothing whatever wrong with her holding views on these matters on this basis. “Just as the average layperson is scarcely in a position to have an informed judgment about the seventh letter of Plato, the relationship of Montezuma to Cortez, or the authorship of the Donation of Constantine, so the average layperson has no right to an opinion about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel or the trustworthiness of the synoptics,” says Harvey. The only way to determine the truth about the seventh letter of Plato is by way of ordinary historical investigation; the same goes, Harvey assumes, for questions about the life and ministry of Christ, whether he rose from the dead, whether he thought of himself as a Messiah, and the like. What lies at the bottom of this moral claim is really a philosophical/theological judgment: that traditional Christian belief is completely mistaken in taking it that faith is in fact a reliable source of true and warranted belief on these topics. This view is not, of course, a result of historical scholarship, Troeltschian or otherwise; nor is it supported by arguments that will appeal to anyone who does not already agree with him—or indeed by any arguments at all. Harvey’s view is rather a presupposition, a methodological prescription of the pursuit of Troeltschian historical criticism and proscription of traditional Biblical commentary. So it can hardly be thought of as an independent good reason for preferring the former to the latter. What we have are different philosophical/theological positions that dictate different ways of pursuing Scripture scholarship. A way to show that the one really is superior to the other would be to give a good argument for the one philosophical/ theological position, or against the other. Harvey does neither, simply assuming (uncritically, and without so much as mentioning the fact) the one position and rejecting the other. He assumes that there is no source of warrant or knowledge in addition to reason. This is not self-evident; millions, maybe billions of Christians and others reject it. Is it sensible, then, just to assume it, without so much as acknowledging this contrary opinion, without so much as a feeble gesture in the direction of argument or reason?

HBC more inclusive? John Collins recognizes that Troeltschian scholarship involves theological assumptions not nearly universally shared. He does not argue for the truth of these assumptions,

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but recommends them on a quite different basis. Criticizing Brevard Childs’s proposal for a “canonical” approach to Scripture scholarship,67 he claims that the problem is that the former does not provide an inclusive context for the latter: If biblical theology is to retain a place in serious scholarship, it must be … conceived broadly enough to provide a context for debate between different viewpoints. Otherwise it is likely to become a sectarian reservation, of interest only to those who hold certain confessional tenets that are not shared by the discipline at large. Childs’s dogmatic conception of the canon provides no basis for advancing dialogue. In my opinion historical criticism still provides the most satisfactory framework for discussion.68 He adds that: One criterion for the adequacy of presuppositions is the degree to which they allow dialogue between differing viewpoints and accommodate new insights … Perhaps the outstanding achievement of historical criticism in this century is that it has provided a framework within which scholars of different prejudices and commitments have been able to debate in a constructive manner.69 So why should we prefer Troeltschian Scripture scholarship over traditional Bible commentary? Because it offers a wider context, one in which people with conflicting theological opinions can all take part. We may be conservative Christians, theological liberals, or people with no theological views whatever: we can all take part in Troeltschian Scripture scholarship, provided we acquiesce in its fundamental assumptions. This is why it is to be preferred to the more traditional sort. Now this would perhaps be a reason for practicing Duhemian Scripture scholarship, but of course Troeltschian Scripture scholarship is not Duhemian: the principles upon which it proceeds are not accepted by nearly everyone. They would be accepted by only a tiny minority of contemporary Christians, for example. And this shows a fundamental confusion, so it seems to me, in Collins’s defence of Troeltschian scholarship. The defense he offers is appropriate for Duhemian scholarship; it is not at all appropriate for Troeltschian scholarship. The principles of Troeltschian historical scholarship, so interpreted as to preclude miracle, direct divine action, and special divine inspiration of the Bible, are extremely controversial philosophical and theological assumptions. Those who do not accept these controversial assumptions will not be inclined to take part in Troeltschian HBC, just as those who do not accept traditional Christian philosophical and theological views will not be likely to engage in traditional Biblical commentary. (If you do not think the Lord speaks in Scripture, you will be unlikely to spend a great deal of your time trying to figure out what it is God says there.) As John Levenson puts it, historical criticism “does not facilitate communication with those outside its boundaries: it requires fundamentalists, for example, to be born again as liberals—or to stay out of the conversation altogether.” He adds that “if inclusiveness

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is to be gauged quantitatively, then [Brevard] Childs would win the match hands down, for far more people with biblical interests share Christian faith than a thoroughgoing historicism. Were we historical critics to be classed as a religious body we should have to be judged a most minuscule sect indeed—and one with a pronounced difficulty relating to groups that do not accept our beliefs.”70

5. Nothing to be concerned about We are now prepared to return to Harvey’s original question: why is it that the person in the pew pays little attention to the contemporary HBC, and, despite those decades of research, retains rather a traditional picture of the life and ministry of Jesus? As to why in actual historical fact this is the case, this is a job for an intellectual historian. What we have seen so far, however, is that there is no compelling or even reasonably decent argument for supposing that the procedures and assumptions of HBC are to be preferred to those of traditional Biblical commentary. A little epistemological reflection enables us to see something further: the traditional Christian (whether in the pew or not) has a good reason to reject the skeptical claims of HBC and continue to hold traditional Christian belief despite the allegedly corrosive acids of HBC.

Troeltschian HBC again As we have seen, there are substantially three types of HBC. For present purposes, however, we can consider Duhemian and Spinozistic HBC together. Let us say, therefore, that we have both Troeltschian and non-Troeltschian HBC. Consider the first. The Troeltschian Scripture scholar accepts Troeltsch’s principles for historical research, under an interpretation according to which they rule out the occurrence of miracles and the divine inspiration of the Bible (along with the corollary that the latter enjoys the sort of unity accruing to a book that has one principal author). But then it is not at all surprising that the Troeltschian tends to come up with conclusions wildly at variance with those accepted by the traditional Christian. As Gilkey says, “Suddenly a vast panoply of divine deeds and events recorded in scripture are no longer regarded as having actually happened.” Now if (instead of tendentious claims about our inability to do otherwise) the Troeltschian offered some good reasons to think that in fact these Troeltschian principles are true, then the traditional Christian would certainly have to pay attention; then she might be obliged to take the skeptical claims of historical critics seriously. But Troeltschians apparently do not offer any such good reasons. They simply declare that nowadays we cannot think in any other way, or (following Harvey) that it is immoral to believe in, e.g. Christ’s resurrection on other than historical grounds. Neither of these is remotely persuasive as a reason for modifying traditional Christian belief in the light of Troeltschian results. As for the first, of course, the

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traditional Christian knows that it is quite false: she herself and many of her friends nowadays (and hundreds of millions of others) do think in precisely that proscribed way. And as far as the implicit claims for the superiority of these Troeltschian ways of thinking go, she will not be impressed by them unless some decent arguments of one sort or another are forthcoming, or some other good reason for adopting that opinion. The mere claim that this is what many contemporary experts think will not and should not intimidate her. And the second proposed reason (Harvey’s reason) seems to be itself dependent on the very claim at issue. Clearly the critic thinks it immoral to form beliefs about historical facts on grounds other than historical research because he believes that the only reliable grounds for beliefs of the former type is research of the latter type. Again, however, he offers no argument for this assumption, merely announcing it as what those in the know believe, and perhaps also adopting an air of injured puzzlement about the fact that the person in the pew does not seem to pay much attention. To see the point here, consider an analogy: suppose your friend is accused and convicted of stealing an ancient and valuable Frisian vase from the local museum. As it happens, you remember clearly that at the time this vase was stolen, your friend was in your office defending his eccentric views about the gospel of John. You have testified to this in court, but to no avail. I come along and offer to do a scientific investigation to see whether your view here is in fact correct. You are delighted, knowing as you think you do that your friend is innocent. When I explain my methods to you, however, your delight turns to dismay. For I refuse to accept the testimony of memory; I propose to ignore completely the fact that you remember your friend’s being in your office. Further, my method precludes from the start the conclusion that your friend is innocent, even if he is innocent. Could I blame you for losing interest in my “scientific” investigation? But the traditional Christian ought to view Troeltschian HBC with the same suspicion: it refuses to admit a source of warranted belief (the testimony of Scripture) the traditional Christian accepts, and is precluded in advance from coming to such conclusions as that Jesus really did arise from the dead and really is the divine Son of God.

Non-Troeltschian HBC Troeltschian HBC, therefore, has no claim on a serious Christian; it is wholly reasonable for her to form and maintain her beliefs quite independently of it. How about non-Troeltschian (Duhemian and Spinozistic) HBC? This is, of course, a very different kettle of fish. The non-Troeltschian proposes to employ only assumptions that are clearly deliverances of reason (or accepted by everyone party to the project). She does not (for purposes of scholarship) accept the traditional Christians views about the Bible or the life of Christ, but she also does not accept Troeltsch’s principles. She does not assume that miracles did or could not happen; but of course that is quite different from assuming that they did not or could not, and she does not assume that

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either. She does not assume that the Bible is in fact a word from the Lord and hence authoritative and reliable; but she also does not assume that it is not. Of course, that may not leave her a lot to go on. The non-Troeltschian is handicapped in this area in a way in which she is not in such areas as physics or chemistry. In the latter, there is little by way of theological controversy that seems relevant to the pursuit of the subject. Not so for Scripture scholarship; here the very foundations of the subject are deeply disputed. Does the Bible have one principal author, namely God himself? If not, then perhaps Jowett—”Scripture has one meaning—the meaning which it had to the mind of the prophet or evangelist who first uttered or wrote, to the hearers or readers who first received it”—is right; otherwise, he is wrong.71 Is it divinely inspired, so that what it teaches is both true and to be accepted? If it reports miraculous happenings—risings from the dead, a virgin birth, the changing of water into wine, healings of people blind or lame from birth—are these to be taken more or less at face value, or dismissed as contrary to what we now know? Is there an entry into the truth about these matters—faith or divine testimony by way of Scripture, for example—quite different from ordinary historical investigation? If we prescind from all these matters and proceed responsibly (remembering to shun the Fallacy of Creeping Certitude, for example), what we come up with is likely to be pretty slender. A. E. Harvey, for example, proposes the following as beyond reasonable doubt from everyone’s point of view, i.e. Duhemianly: “that Jesus was known in both Galilee and Jerusalem, that he was a teacher, that he carried out cures of various illnesses, particularly demon-possession and that these were widely regarded as miraculous; that he was involved in controversy with fellow Jews over questions of the law of Moses: and that he was crucified in the governorship of Pontius Pilate.”72 It is not even clear whether Harvey means that the conjunction of these propositions is beyond reasonable doubt, or only each of the conjuncts;73 in either case what we have is pretty slim. Or consider John Meiers monumental A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus.74 Meier aims to be Duhemian, or anyway Spinozistic: “My method follows a simple rule: it prescinds from what Christian faith or later Church teaching says about Jesus, without either affirming or denying such claims.”75 (I think he also means to eschew assumptions incompatible with traditional Christian belief.) Meier’s fantasy of “an unpapal conclave” of Jewish, Catholic, Protestant and agnostic scholars, locked in the basement of the Harvard Divinity School library until they come to consensus on what historical methods can show about the life and mission of Jesus, is thoroughly Duhemian. This conclave, he says, would yield “… a rough draft of what that will-o’the-wisp “all reasonable people” could say about the historical Jesus.”76 Meier sets out, judiciously, objectively, carefully, to establish that consensus.77 What is striking about his conclusions, however, is how slender they are, and how tentative—and this despite the fact that on occasion he cannot himself resist building occasional towers of probability. About all that emerges from Meier’s painstaking work is that Jesus was a prophet, a proclaimer of an eschatological message from God, someone who performs powerful deeds, signs and wonders, that announce God’s kingdom, and also

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ratify his message.78 As Duhemian or Spinozist, of course, we cannot add that these signs and miracles involve special or direct divine action; nor can we say that they do not. We cannot say that Jesus rose from the dead, or that he did not; we cannot conclude that Scripture is specially inspired, or that it is not. Now what is characteristic of non-Troeltschian HBC is just that it does not involve those Troeltschian principles: but of course it also rejects any alleged source of warranted belief in addition to reason (Spinozistic) and any theological assumptions not shared by everyone party to the discussion. Traditional Christians, rightly or wrongly, think they do have sources of warranted belief in addition to reason: faith and the work of the Holy Spirit, or divine testimony in Scripture, or the testimony of the Spirit-led church. They may of course be mistaken about that; but until someone gives a decent argument for the conclusion that they are mistaken, they need not be impressed by the result of scholarship that ignores this further source of belief. If you want to learn the truth about a given area, you should not restrict yourself to only some of the sources of warranted belief (as does the Spinozist), or only to beliefs accepted by everyone else (with the Duhemian); maybe you know something some of the others do not. Perhaps you remember that your friend was in your office expostulating about the errors of postmodernism at the very time he is supposed to have been stealing that Frisian vase; if no one else was there, then you know something the rest do not. So the traditional Christian need not be fazed by the fact that non-Troeltschian HBC does not support her views about what Jesus did and said. She thinks she knows some things by faith—that Jesus arose from the dead, for example. She may concede that if you leave out of account all that she knows in this way, then with respect to the remaining body of knowledge or belief the resurrection is not particularly probable. But that does not present her with an intellectual or spiritual crisis. We can imagine a renegade group of whimsical physicists proposing to reconstruct physics, refusing to use belief that comes from memory, say, or perhaps memory of anything more than one minute ago. Perhaps something could be done along these lines, but it would be a poor, paltry, truncated, trifling thing. And now suppose that, say, Newton’s Laws or Special Relativity turned out to be dubious and unconfirmed from this point of view: that would presumably give little pause to the more traditional physicists. This truncated physics could hardly call into question physics of the fuller variety. Similarly here. The traditional Christian thinks she knows by faith that Jesus was divine and that he rose from the dead. But then she will be unmoved by the fact that these truths are not especially probable on the evidence to which non-Troeltschian HBC limits itself. Why should that matter to her? So this is the rest of the answer to Harvey’s question: if the HBC in question is non-Troeltschian, then the fact it does not verify traditional Christian beliefs is due to its limiting itself in the way it does, to its refusing to use all the data or evidence the Christian thinks he has in his possession. For a Christian to confine himself to the results of non-Troeltschian HBC would be a little like trying to mow your lawn with nail scissors or paint your house with a

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tooth-brush; it might be an interesting experiment if you have time on your hands, but otherwise why limit yourself in this way? More generally, then: HBC is either Troeltschian or non-Troeltschian. If the former, then it begins from assumptions entailing that much of what the traditional Christian believes is false; but then it is no surprise that its conclusions are at odds with traditional belief. It is also of little direct interest to the traditional Christian. It offers her no reason at all for rejecting or modifying her beliefs; it also offers little promise of enabling her to achieve better or deeper insight into what actually happened. As for non-Troeltschian HBC, on the other hand, this variety of historical criticism omits a great deal of what she sees as relevant evidence and relevant considerations. It is therefore left with little to go on. But again, the fact that it fails to support traditional belief will be of little direct interest to the traditional believer; that is only to be expected, and casts no doubt at all upon that belief. Either way, therefore, the traditional Christian can rest easy with the claims of HBC; she need feel no obligation, intellectual or otherwise, to modify her beliefs in the light of its claims and alleged results.79

Concluding coda But is not all of this just a bit too sunny? Is not it a recipe for avoiding hard questions, for hanging onto belief no matter what, for guaranteeing that you will never have to face negative results, even if there are some? “HBC is either Troeltschian or non-Troeltschian: in the first case it proceeds from assumptions I reject; in the second it fails to take account of all of what I take to be the evidence; either way, therefore, I need not pay attention to it.” Could not I say this a priori, without even examining the results of HBC? But then there must be something defective in the line of thought in question. Is not it clearly possible that historians should discover facts that put Christian belief into serious question, count heavily against it? Well, maybe so. How could this happen? As follows. HBC limits itself to the deliverances of reason; it is possible, at any rate in the broadly logical sense, that just by following ordinary historical reason, using the methods of historical investigation endorsed or enjoined by the deliverances of reason, someone should find powerful evidence against central elements of the Christian faith;80 if this happened, Christians would face a genuine faith-reason clash. A series of letters could be discovered, letters circulated among Peter, James, John and Paul, in which the necessity for the hoax and the means of its perpetration are carefully and seriously discussed; these letters might direct workers to archeological sites in which still more material of the same sort is discovered.81 The Christian faith is a historical faith, in the sense that it essentially depends upon what did in fact happen: “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile” (1 Cor. 15.17). It could certainly happen that by the exercise of reason we come up with powerful evidence82 against something we take or took to be deliverance of the faith.83 It is conceivable that the assured results of HBC should include

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such evidence. Then Christians would have a problem, a sort of conflict between faith and reason. But, of course, nothing at all like this has emerged from HBC, whether Troeltschian or non-Troeltschian; indeed, there is little of any kind that can be considered its “assured results,” if only because of the wide-ranging disagreement among those who practice HBC.84 We do not have anything like assured results (or even reasonably well-attested results) that conflict with traditional Christian belief in such a way that belief of that sort can continue to be accepted only at considerable cost; nothing like this has happened. What would be the appropriate response if it did happen, or rather if I came to be convinced that it had happened? Would I have to give up Christian faith, or else give up the life of the mind? What would be the appropriate response? Well, what would be the appropriate response if I came to be convinced that someone had given a wholly rigorous, ineluctable disproof of the existence of God, perhaps something along the lines of J. N. Findlay’s alleged ontological disproof?85 Or what if, with David Hume (at least as understood by Thomas Reid), I come to think that my cognitive faculties are probably not reliable, and go on to note that I form this very belief on the basis of the very faculties whose reliability this belief impugns? If I did, what would or should I do—stop thinking about these things, immerse myself in practical activity (maybe playing a lot of backgammon, maybe volunteering to help build houses for Habitat for Humanity), commit intellectual suicide? I do not know the answer to any of these questions. There is no need to borrow trouble, however: we can think about crossing these bridges when (more likely, if) we come to them.86

Notes 1

“New Testament Scholarship and Christian belief” (herafter “NTS”), in Jesus in History and Myth (Buffalo, NY: Prmoetheus Books, 1986), p. 193.

2

I therefore concur (for the most part) both with C. Stephen Evans in his excellent The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: the Incarnational Narrative as History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), and with Peter van Inwagen in “Critical Studies of the New Testament and the User of the New Testament,” God, Knowledge, and Mystery (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 163–90.

3

For an account of warrant, that property which distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief (a lucky guess, for example), see my Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993).

4 See Warrant and Proper Function, pp. 34–5. 5

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 295.

6

More exactly, perhaps the probability of (1) on B is as high as .9, the probability of (2) on (1)&B as high as .9, and the same for P((3)/(B&(1)&(2))) and P((4)/(B&(1)&(2)&(3))). For more on this form of argument, see Warranted Christian Belief, chapter 8, “The Extended A/C Model: Revealed to our Minds.”

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Jonathan Edwards: “And the opening to view with such clearness, such a world of wonderful and glorious truth in the gospel, that before was unknown, being quite above the view of a natural eye, but appearing so clear and bright, has a powerful and invincible influence on the soul to persuade of the divinity of the gospel.” The Religious Affections (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 303.

8

I do not for a moment mean to suggest that teaching us truths is all that the Lord intends in Scripture: there is also raising affection, teaching us how to praise, how to pray, how to see the depth of our own sin, how marvelous the gift of salvation is, and a thousand other things.

9

See, for example, Richard Swinburne (Revelation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 192), who suggests that Paul’s Christology at Romans 1.4 should be understood in terms of the “high” Christology of the first chapter of John’s gospel. We could say the same for Paul’s Christology in his speech in Acts 13, where he seems to suggest that a special status was conferred on Jesus, as opposed to John 1, according to which Jesus is the incarnation of the preexistent Word. See also Raymond Brown, New Testament Christology (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1994), pp. 133ff.

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10 Of course this procedure, like most others, can be and has been abused; that possibility in itself, however, is nothing against it, though it should serve as a salutary caution. 11 A further complication: we cannot simply assume that there is some one thing, the same for everyone, that the Lord intends to teach in a given passage; perhaps what he intends to teach me, or my relevant sociological group, is not the same as what he intended to teach a fifth century Christian. 12 Tractatus theologico-politicus, 14. Of course, this method does not preclude a rational argument (an argument from reason alone) for the proposition that indeed there has been a divine revelation, and that the Bible (or some part of it) is precisely that revelation: exactly this was John Locke’s project. 13 To understand historical criticism and its dominance properly, says David Yeago, one must understand “the historic coupling of historical criticism with a ‘project to the Enlightenment’ aimed at liberating mind and heart from the shackles of ecclesiastical tradition. In the modern context, claims to ‘Enlightenment’ must be backed up with the claim to have achieved a proper method, capable of producing real knowledge to replace the pre-critical confusion and arbitrariness of tradition.” “The New Testament and the Nicene Dogma,” Pro Ecclesia Vol. Ill, No. 2 (Spring, 1994), p. 162. 14 The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1973), p. 6. 15 See also John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1991, two volumes), p. 1. 16 Nor can you employ a proposition which is such that the warrant it has for you comes from some proposition you know or believe by faith; we might put this by saying that in doing science you cannot employ any proposition whose epistemic provenance, for you, includes a proposition you know or believe by faith.   But is this really true? Why should we believe it? What is the status of the claim that if what you are doing is science, then you cannot employ, in your work, any proposition you believe or know by faith? Is this supposed to be true by definition? If so, whose definition? Is there a good argument for it? Or what? See my

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17 Thus Benjamin Jowett (the 19th century Master of Balliol College and eminent translator of Plato): “Scripture has one meaning—the meaning which it had to the mind of the prophet or evangelist who first uttered or wrote, to the hearers or readers who first received it.” “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” in The Interpretation of Scripture and Other Essays (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1906), p. 36. Quoted in Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), p. 78. Jowett was not a paragon of intellectual modesty, which may explain a poem composed and circulated by undergraduates at Balliol: First come I, my name is Jowett. There’s no knowledge but I know it. I am the master of the college. What I don’t know isn’t knowledge. 18 E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1985), p. 5. 19 Levenson, p. 109. 20 “Jesus Risen: Bodily Resurrection But No Empty Tomb,” Theology Vol. 89 No. 728 (March, 1986), p. 91. 21 The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p. 172. The target of much of Johnson’s criticism is the notorious “Jesus Seminar.” 22 I do not mean to suggest, of course, that the traditional Biblical commentator cannot also investigate these questions; if she does, however, it will be in the ultimate service of an effort to discern what the Lord is teaching in the passages in question. 23 See especially his “Über historische und dogmatische Methode in der Theologie” in his Gesammelte Schriften (Tubingen: Mohr, 1913) Vol. 2, pp. 729–53, and his article “Historiography” in James Hastings (ed.). Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics Vol. VI (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1925), pp. 716–23. 24 “Is Critical Biblical Theology Possible?” in The Hebrew Bible and its Interpreters, eds. William Henry Propp, Baruch Halpern and David Freedman (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990), p. 2. 25 Subtitled The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1966). 26 Loc. cit. 27 “Historiography,” p. 718. 28 Thus Descartes (part 2 of Principles of Philosophy) in stating something like a law of conservation of momentum: xxvii. The first law of nature: that each thing as far as in it lies, continues always in the same state; and that which is once moved always continues so to move. 29 An opinion preserved among such contemporary philosophers as David Armstrong (see his What is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)) and David Lewis (see, e.g. his “New Work for a Theory of Universal,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy Vol. 61 No. 4 (December 1983), pp. 343ff.). 30 See, in particular, Bas van Fraassen’s Laws and Symmetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) for an extended and powerful argument against the exercise of natural laws.

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31 Existence and Faith, ed. Schubert Ogden (New York, NY: Meridian Books, 1960), pp. 291–2. Writing 50 years before Troeltsch, David Strauss concurs: “…all things are linked together by a chain of causes and effects, which suffers no interruption.” Life of Jesus Critically Examined (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1972), sec. 14. (Quoted in Harvey, The Historian and the Believer, p. 15.) 32 Principles of Christian Theology, 2nd edn. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977), p. 248. 33 “Cosmology, Ontology and the Travail of Biblical Language,” reprinted in Owen C. Thomas, ed., God’s Activity in the World: the Contemporary Problem (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), p. 31. 34 “La Philosophie scientifique de M. Duhem,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, XII (July 1904, pp. 699ff. 35 See the appendix to Duhem’s The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. Philip P. Wiener, foreword by Prince Louis de Broglie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954) (the book was first published in 1906); The appendix is entitled “Physics of a Believer” and is a reprint of Duhems reply to Rey; it was originally in the Annales de Philosophie chrétienne Vol 1 (October and November 1905, pp. 44ff. and 133ff. 36 Duhem, p. 10. 37 Duhem, pp. 274–5. 38 Of course, this proposal must be qualified, nuanced, sophisticated. It makes perfect sense for me to continue to work on a hypothesis after others have decided it is a dead end; science has often benefited from such disagreements. 39 To be sure, it may be difficult to specify the relevant community. Suppose I am a Scripture scholar at a denominational seminary: what is my relevant community? Scripture scholars of any sort, all over the world? Scripture scholars in my own denomination? In western academia? The people, academics or not, in my denomination? Christians generally? The first thing to see here is that our Scripture scholar clearly belongs to many different communities, and may accordingly be involved in several different scholarly projects. 40 A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, p. 1. 41 According to Spinoza, as we saw, “The rule for [Biblical] interpretation should be nothing but the natural light of reason… .” 42 The author of The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (London: Sonnenschein, 1892), one of the earliest higher critical salvoes. 43 “Translator’s Preface,” Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol. xvi, trans. the Rev. William Pringle (Grand Rapids, MI: Balter Book House, 1979), p. vi. Pringle’s preface is dated at Auchterarder, Jan. 4, 1845. 44 John D. Levenson, “The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism” in The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism, p. 9. (An earlier version of this essay was published under the same title in Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, eds. John Collins and Roger Brooks (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).) Of course, clairvoyance is not at issue at all: the question is really whether the Scripture has one principal author, namely God. If it does, then it does not require clairvoyance on the part of a human author for a passage from a given time to refer to something that happens much later. All that is required is God’s omniscience.

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45 The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1984, 1994), p. xvii. 46 “The crisis grows out of the fact now freely admitted by both Protestant and Catholic theologians and exegetes: that as far as can be discerned from the available historical data, Jesus of Nazareth did not think he was divine [and] did not assert any of the messianic claims that the New Testament attributes to him …” Thomas Sheehan, The First Coming (New York, NY: Random House, 1986), p. 9. 47 San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. 48 Jesus the Magician (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1978). 49 What Really Happened to Jesus: A Historical Approach to the Resurrection (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995). 50 “The Historicity of Jesus” in Jesus in History and Myth, eds., R. Joseph Hoffman and Gerald A. Larue (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986), pp. 27ff. 51 The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1970). 52 Sheehan, op. cit. 53 Ibid., p. 194. 54 As we have just seen. This lack of accord is especially well documented by Stephen Evans (op. cit.), pp. 322ff. 55 Kerygma and Myth (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1961), p. 5. Compare Marcus Borg’s more recent comment: “… to a large extent, the defining characteristic of biblical scholarship in the modern period is the attempt to understand Scripture without reference to another world because in this period the visible world of space and time is the world we think of as ‘real.’” (“Root Images and the Way We See,” Fragments of Infinity (Dorset, UK, & Lindfield, Australia, 1991), p. 38. Quoted in Huston Smiths “Doing Theology in the Global Village,” Religious Studies and Theology, Vol. 13/14, No. 2/3, (December, 1995), p. 12. On the other side, note Abraham Kuyper (To Be Near Unto God, trans. John Hendrik de Vries (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1918), pp. 50–1); writing not long after the invention of the “wireless,” he saw it not as an obstacle to traditional faith but as a sort of electronic symbol of the way in which each of us can communicate instantaneously with God. 56 We might call this the preemptive “we”: those who do not agree with us on the point in question are (by comparison with us) so unenlightened that we can properly speak as if they do not so much as exist. 57 Some, however, might see here little more than an effort to gain standing and respectability in a largely secular academia by adopting a stance that is, so to say, more Catholic than the Pope. 58 Here I can be brief; William Alston has already proposed a compelling argument for the claim I propose to support, namely, that one can perfectly well do science even if one thinks God has done and even sometimes still does miracles. See his “Divine Action: Shadow or Substance?” in The God Who Acts: Philosophical and Theological Explorations, ed. Thomas F. Tracy (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1994), pp. 49–50. 59 As Alston argues. 60 I think the argument is intended to support Troeltschian HBC; it could also be used, however, to support Spinozistic or (less plausibly) Duhemian HBC.

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61 NTS, pp. 194ff. a fuller (if older) and influential presentation of his views is to be found in his The Historian and the Believer. 62 Described with insight and verve in James C. Livingston’s monograph The Ethics of Belief: An Essay on the Victorian Religious Conscience in the American Academy of Religions Studies in Religion (Tallahassee, FL, and Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1978). I thank Martin Cook for calling my attention to this monograph. 63 Harvey, NTS, p. 195. 64 First published in The Contemporary Review (XXIX, 1877); reprinted in Cliffords Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1879), pp. 354ff. 65 Harvey, NTS, p. 197. 66 Harvey, NTS, p. 193. 67 See, e.g. Childs’s The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994), pp. 3–53. 68 “Is a Critical Biblical Theology Possible?” in The Hebrew Bible and its Interpreters, pp. 6–7. Collins speaks here not of Troeltschian HBC but of HBC simpliciter; a couple of pages earlier, however, he identifies HBC with Troeltschian HBC. 69 Ibid., p. 8. 70 Levenson, p. 120. 71 See note 17 above. 72 Jesus and the Constraints of History (London and Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), p. 6. 73 It could be that each of the conjuncts is beyond reasonable doubt but that their conjunction is not. Suppose (just to choose arbitrarily a number) what is probable to degree .95 or higher is beyond reasonable doubt. Then if each of the above is beyond reasonable doubt, their conjunction might still be little more than twice as probable as its denial. 74 New York, NY: Doubleday, 1991, 1994. The first volume has 484 pages; the second has 1,055 pages; a third volume is currently expected. 75 Meier, A Marginal Jew, p. 1. 76 Ibid., p. 2. 77 “Meiers treatment, in short, is as solid and moderate and pious as Historical Jesus scholarship is ever likely to be. More important, Meier is a careful scholar. There is nothing hasty or slipshod in his analysis; he considers every opinion, weighs every option.” Johnson, p. 128. 78 See Johnson, pp. 130–1. 79 Alleged results: because of the enormous controversy and disagreement among followers of HBC, it is very difficult to find anything one could sensibly call “results” of this scholarship. 80 Or, less crucially, evidence against what appear to be the teaching of Scripture. For example, archeological evidence could undermine the traditional belief that there was such a city as Jericho. 81 See Bas van Fraassen, “Three-sided Scholarship: Comments on the Paper of John R. Donahue, S. J.,” in Hermes and Athena, eds. Eleonore Stump and Thomas Flint (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), p. 322. “Finish it [the depressing scenario] yourself, if you have the heart to do it,” says van Fraassen.

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82 Or think we come up with it; even if we are mistaken about the evidence in question, it could still precipitate this sort of problem for us. 83 See my “When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the Bible” in Christian Scholar’s Review, Vol. XXI No. 1 (September, 1991), pp. 9–15· 84 Thus Harold Attridge in “Calling Jesus Christ” in Hermes and Athena, p. 211: “There remains enormous diversity among those who attempt to describe what Jesus really did, taught, and thought about himself. For some contemporary scholars he was a Hellenistic magician; for others, a Galilean charismatic or rabbi; for yet others, a prophetic reformer; for others, a sly teller of wry and engaging tales; for some he had grandiose ideas; for others he eschewed them. In general, the inquirer finds the Jesus that her historical method allows her to see. It is as true today as it was at the end of the liberal quest for the historical Jesus catalogued by Albert Schweitzer that we moderns tend to make Jesus in our own image and likeness.” The Schweitzer reference is to his Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906), translated by W. Montgomery under the title The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1956). 85 “Can God’s Existence be Disproved?” Mind Vol. 57 No. 226 (April, 1948), pp. 176–83. 86 My thanks to Mike Bergmann, John Cooper, Kevin Corcoran, Ronald Feenstra, Marie Pannier, Neal Plantinga, Tapio Puolimatka, David Vanderlaan, James VanderKam, Calvin Van Reken, and Henry Zwaanstra. A longer version of this paper appears as chapter 12 of Warranted Christian Belief (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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18 Paul Ricœur “The Nuptial Metaphor”

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aul Ricœur (1913–2005) was a French philosopher whose works range widely. He gave significant attention to textual interpretation as a stimulus to philosophical thought, and he contributed to biblical hermeneutics and the interpretation of religion more generally. This selection, “The Nuptial Metaphor,” is part of the book Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies (1998), which Ricœur co-authored with the biblical scholar André LaCocque. This chapter on Song of Songs responds to LaCocque’s interpretation of the same text. Ricœur gives a helpful summary of LaCocque’s main argument in the course of issuing his response. Though LaCocque is a specialist in exegesis and Ricœur is first of all a hermeneutical philosopher, and thus has a special interest in the appropriation of texts, they write in the book’s preface that they are trying to avoid a strict division of labor, according to which the exegete deals only with archaeology (the past history of the text and its background) and the philosopher only with teleology (the future of the text). In this selection, Ricœur certainly does engage with the text itself before launching into a highly ramified discussion of how it has been and should be received. This selection is the most extensive worked example of interpretation within this reader. One of the hallmarks of Ricœur’s reading of Song of Songs (and of his thinking generally) is that he tries hard to find insight in a plurality of outlooks and does not assume a polemical orientation toward any approach, as long as its limitations come clearly into view. First, he gives serious consideration to the details of the text itself in its original setting. Yet his survey of some of the text’s features leads him to the conclusion that the text itself is open to the wide range of interpretations to which it has actually been subject in ecclesial and non-ecclesial contexts. Where he is most wary of his historical-critical interlocutors is in the insistence they sometimes display that a properly historical reading of the text excludes any other possible construals. It is allegory, above all, that historical readers typically attempt to cast as an illegitimate way to read the Song. Ricœur explicates the grounds for objecting to

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allegory, but he argues that the validity of the case against allegorical reading is easy to exaggerate. Ricœur offers helpful insights on how wider cultural shifts, including alterations in sexual mores, have precipitated the move away from allegory and toward an acceptance of the text as simply and literally a love poem. The question of how the Song might refer to God hangs over the whole essay, and Ricœur concludes with some cautious remarks on what a contemporary theological reading might look like. He does not align himself fully with the allegorists; instead, he bases his theological reading on the (related) phenomenon of intertextuality: the way in which texts within Scripture can become associated with one another and thereby generate “sparks of new meaning.” In pondering Ricœur’s text, it is worth considering a number of questions. What are the merits and demerits of his appeal to intertextuality as a reading strategy that displays many of the positive traits of allegory? More generally, is it genuinely possible to hold together all of the insights that he finds and commends in the various types of thinking that he canvasses? Is it really an option to be as open as he seems to be? How much has his theological reading actually said about God? How theologically rich is it?

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To retrace the trajectory of the Song of Songs is an all the more legitimate undertaking in that it is inevitable. As has often been said, few texts in the history of interpretation have had as exuberant or as encumbering a fortune. For a superficial glance, this fortune may be confused with the rise and fall of allegorical explications of the Song. Today, however, the situation seems to be as follows. Once contemporary exegesis almost unanimously had adopted the explication, which, in contrast to allegorical, has been called “naturalistic,“ and that I would prefer to call (and shall henceforth speak of as) the erotic interpretation—according to which the Song is nothing more than an epithalamium, a carnal love song in dialogue form—then the allegorical explications, which endured for so long within both the Jewish and Christian traditions, found themselves divested of their ancient credibility and relegated to the prehistory of this erotic explication. Indeed, for many commentators, these allegorical interpretations are only referred to in their introductions as examples of the prescientific antecedents of an investigation of the text that owes everything to the historical-critical method, which was unknown to the initiators of allegorical interpretation and even resisted by the last advocates of this approach. For my part, I would like to oppose a multiple, flowering history of reading, set within the framework of a theory of reception of the text, to this unilinear conception of the “trajectory” of explication of the Song of Songs. This is a history where not just ancient allegorical exegesis finds a place, but also modern scientific exegesis, and— why not?—even new theological interpretations, whether related or not to the older allegorical exegesis.

The obvious sense of the text Before characterizing this history for itself, I want first to render justice to the exegetical method that is opposed to it, at least as a first approximation, as its polar opposite, before revealing their complementarity, which I shall attempt to justify with great care. The historical-critical method, with its three faces—the history of sources, the history of composition, and the history of redaction—can be assimilated overall to a history of the writing of the texts we now read. It is noteworthy, in fact, that in the interpretation proposed here by André LaCocque, as in most contemporary commentaries on the Song of Songs, the dominant focus is that of the origin of the text, if we include under this heading the questions of author, date, and cultural setting, along with the question, which is inseparable from this dominant question, of the nature of the original audience. Thus André LaCocque, who does not venture any conclusions regarding date and place, does give a great importance to the hypothesis that the author was a woman, a hypothesis accredited by numerous indications within the text. The poem, he says, is “a woman’s song from beginning to end”. This hypothesis is solidary with the thesis toward which all his detailed explications point, namely that this beautiful erotic poem would be

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equivalent to a plea in favor of a free, socially unacceptable, and uninstitutionalized love—a plea, moreover, based on a subversive intention directed against accepted thinking, sometimes called “bourgeois” or the “establishment.” If André LaCocque tempers his radical thesis somewhat with the admission that the freedom of this free woman “consists in remaining indefectibly faithful to the one she loves,” it is no less true that the principal accent of his interpretation is placed not on the fidelity of this love so much as on its expression “outside the bonds of marriage and outside social strictures.” This interpretation could enter into a fruitful discussion with other interpretations arising from what I have called the history of the reception of the text if it could be detached from the postulate—which, by the way, it shares with the modern upholders of an allegorical reading—that there exists one true meaning of the text, namely, the one that was intended by its author, authors, or the last redactor, who are held to have somehow inscribed this meaning in the text, from which exegesis has subsequently to extract it, and, if possible, restore it to its originary meaning. Hence the true meaning, the meaning intended by the author, and the original meaning are taken as equivalent terms. And commentary thus consists in identifying this overall true, intended, and original meaning. To identify it, the text has to be explicated in a detailed manner; that is, one has to demonstrate that the solution brought to local difficulties fits with the general meaning assigned the text, coherence becoming the principal epistemological criterion indicating the adequacy of any commentary. It is striking that contemporary allegorizing commentators base themselves on the same postulates. (This was not the case for ancient typological and allegorical interpretations, as I shall show in the second section of my remarks.) Thus modern allegorists compete with the explications they call “naturalistic,“ with the same ambition to identify, to explicate in detail, the true, intended, and original meaning. And hence today’s readers find themselves confronted with an alternative that in fact stems from the quasi unanimity among commentators, even those who favor what their opponents call “naturalistic” explication. I would like to show in the second part of my study that another outcome, built on ancient allegorical interpretation on the basis of a history of the reading and the reception of our text, is possible other than the one most modern commentators reserve for our text, an outcome that relocates these interpretations into another epistemological category than the one that is implied by the notion of true, intended, and original meaning, along with the postulates of identification and explication that go with it on the methodological plane. However, before doing so, I would like to bring to light a few features of the text of the Song of Songs that, I believe, hold it open to a plurality of interpretations, among which allegorical readings, which are themselves multiple and even contrary to one another, would find a place. These features, let me say straightaway, do justify one part of André LaCocques reading, namely that the Song of Songs can be read as an erotic poem, perhaps one written by a woman (after all, why not?), a poem with several voices that celebrates the love of a man and woman, apart from any reference to the institution of marriage or to the rules of kinship that ordinarily assign to the

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father and brother of the finacée a determined social role, in this way imposing a perspective of fertility and descendants on conjugal love. On the other hand, these features fit less well with the hypothesis of a subversive intention indicated by the ironic, nonreverential connotation of those expressions that many commentators have seen as opaque. My hesitation in this regard does not result from my mistrust of too much concern for a recourse to the intention of the presumed author, but from the fact that these connotations seem to me to be compatible with an interpretation that would place the principal accent instead on the metaphorical dimension of a poem dedicated to erotic love, which is raised by its literary structure beyond any exclusive social-cultural context. These features, which I am now going to consider, seem to me to have as their effect—I do not say, intention—precisely to decontexualize erotic love and to render it in this way accessible to a plurality of readings compatible with the obvious sense of the text as an erotic poem. I propose reserving the phrase “nuptial bond” to designate this love that is rightly called free and faithful, it being understood that nuptial does not signify “matrimonial.” And I shall take as indications of the nuptial as such all those metaphorical features that have to do with the erotic, even at the level of the obvious sense of the text. Note that I say “obvious sense” in order to remain on the textual plane, without having to refer in any way to the intention of the presumed author, hence without having to say anything about the “true” or original meaning. Perhaps the metaphorics constitutive of such expressions of erotic love is such that it blocks any inquiry into such an intentional, original, univocal meaning. I would like to begin by bringing together those quite striking features of indetermination that have to with the identification of the characters, places, times, and even the emotions and actions, then next to put the accent on those features that characterize what we can call the “movements of love” and that remain relatively indifferent to their individual attribution to the people in question. Finally, remaining strictly on the literary plane, I want to underline the tendency of the whole metaphorical interplay unfolded by the poem to free itself from its proper referential, that is, sexual, function. All these features taken together constitute the indication of the nuptial in the erotic and, by implication, make possible and plausible a disentangling of the nuptial from the erotic and its new reinvestment in other variations of the amorous relation. Concerning the phenomenon of indetermination, I shall base what I have to say on a remark made by many commentators concerning the difficulty of identifying the lover and the beloved of this poem.1 Besides the fact that they never identify themselves nor are they called by a proper name, the term Shulamite in book 7 is not a proper name (cf. what André LaCocque has to say). We have to admit that we never know with certitude who is speaking, to whom, or where. We can even, without being ridiculed, imagine that there are three personages involved: a shepherd, a shepherdess, and the king, Solomon.2 Is it a question, for example, in 1.6–8 of a shepherd and a shepherdess, or in 1.4 and 3.2 and 11 of a king and a woman who might be a townswoman, or of a peasant in 1.12–14 and 7.6 and 13? What is more,

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the dialogue is rendered even more complex by internal explicit and implicit quotations. Nor is it sure that certain scenes are not dreamed or that they might consist of recounted dreams. After all, the appearance of Solomon in 3.7–11 seems to fit quite well with this indecisiveness concerning the boundary between dreaming and wakefulness. Does not the lover say in 5.2: “I am sleeping but my heart is awake. I hear my beloved who is knocking”? Is not the shepherd a king in his dreams, and why not in terms of the figure of Solomon? These features of indetermination are incontestably favorable to the freeing of the nuptial held in reserve within the erotic. But should we not simply speak of overdetermination rather than of indetermination? Paul Beauchamp, for example, emphasizes the overlapping of generations in the shifting evocation of the characters.3 If we consider the succession 1.6, 3.4, 3.11, 6.9, 8.1, 8.4, the figure of the mother returns again and again: the mother of the woman, on the one hand, referred to by the young woman in 1.6 and 3.4 (along with the “chamber of the one that conceived me”); that of the young man in 8.5 (“Under the apple tree, I awaken you, there where your mother conceived you, there where she conceived you, the one who engendered you”). Beauchamp observes, “there is no marriage, royal or otherwise, without the marriage of memories and without the couple being marked by the line of generations.”4 How can we not be struck by this coincidence between wakefulness and this access to embodied memory where innovations and rememoration overlap? (Note, too, that this insistent evocation of the mother makes all the more remarkable the absence of the father, so forcefully underscored by André LaCocque, contrary to the presence of the brothers who try to hold back the crazed lovers.) All these indeterminations and overdeterminations would be incomprehensible if we did not strongly emphasize, as does Paul Beauchamp, the distance opened between the poem and narration. It is within a narrative perspective, not a poetic one, that the question “who?” would be pertinent, or that we would be authorized to speak of individualized characters. In truth, the lover and the beloved are not identifiable characters; by this, I mean the bearers of a narrative identity. In this respect, it is not out of bounds to suggest that the question “who,” ordinarily linked to narrative identity, comes into the poem only to accentuate, in what is undoubtedly a rhetorical fashion, but one that is poetically significant, what Beauchamp calls the appearance of the origin: “who is coming up from the desert?” (3.6); “who arises like the dawn?” (6.10); “who is coming up from the desert leaning on her beloved?” (8.5). Is it not from the end of the world and the depth of time that love arises? But then no name corresponds to or answers the question “who?”5 The poetic and non-narrative character of the song is further confirmed by another kind of indetermination that affects the division into scenes. Is it a question of seven poems, as Buzy suggests, where the action in each case progresses from the admiring description of one of the lovers to their mutual possession of each other?6 Or is it really a question of action in a narrative sense?7 The reader will have a difficult time in situating exactly the alleged moment of consummation of the union in question, which, I repeat, is not recounted but rather sung. And is it not rightly said that a poem places its climax at the middle, not at the

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end, which authorizes its imminence or recent accomplishment within the void of a narrative present, occupied by the song alone?8 In this respect, what we can continue to call a denouement—“Set me like a seal on your heart / Like a seal on your arm. / For love is strong as death, / Jealousy is unyielding like Sheol …” (8.6)—must not be treated like some sapiential epilogue added to a narrative conclusion: “Under the apple tree, I awakened you, there where your mother conceived you, there where the one conceived you who gave birth to you” (8.5). It is rather the sapiential crown given to what is from one end to another a song and not in any way a narration, the covenant language (“set me like a seal on your heart, like a seal on your arm”) serving to tie together the spontaneity of the song and the meditative point of the organlike sententious declaration.9 These reflections concerning completion, which the poem places in the center, lead us to a series of comments concerning the primacy of the “movements” of love over the individual identities of the lover and the beloved. I borrow this expression, “movements of love,” from Origen, one of the initiators of allegorical interpretation.10 This phrase from the most important of the witnesses to the allegorism of the Fathers of the Church should make us attentive to what in the Song of Songs has to do with love as a kind of “movement.” For one thing, there are movements in space. Hardly has the beloved exclaimed in the Prologue: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” then she adds, “draw me in your steps, let us run.” Next there is an evocation of wandering like a vagabond “among the herds and their guardians.” And a bit further on, she says, “He led me to the storeroom and the banner he placed upon me is love.” Then she hears the beloved arrive, “leaping over the mountains, bounding over the hills.” And the lover says to her, “Come then, my beloved, my lovely one, come.” In a dream, the beloved “seeks the one that [my] heart loves.” As the poem unfolds, we come to understand that this mobility, which is sometimes disconcerting to follow with its changes of tone, is the indication of a game, which is the play of desire itself, or rather of two desires intermingled. The texture of this desire is made up of movements away from each other, then back toward each other, and once again away. In this regard, the scene set at the gate, in chapter 5, is particularly troubling. The beloved knocks and asks to enter. He reaches through the opening of the gate and then, “I opened to my Beloved, but, turning his back, he had disappeared.” And the chorus, a bit further on, mocks: “Where has your love gone, oh most beautiful of women? Where did your beloved turn away, should we look for him with you?” (6.1). And the chorus adds: “Return, return, Shulamite, return that we may look upon you.” (6.13). Then once again there is a departure: “Come, my beloved, let us go to the fields.” (7.12). This playing with distance sets off the moments of mutual possession, which the poem, let me repeat, does not describe, or show, but only evokes, in the strongest sense of this word: “His left arm is under my head and his right embraces me” (2.6 and 8.2). Or again: “My beloved is mine, and I am his. He pastures his flock among the lilies” (2.16; 6.3). Carnal love is perhaps consummated in 5.1 or 6.3, but this is not said in a descriptive mode. Rather it is sung. Hence we can ask whether the veritable consummation is not in the song itself. And if, as I suggested above, the

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true denouement is to be found in 8.6 (“set me like a seal on your heart, like a seal on your arm”), then what is important is not the carnal consummation, which is never described, never recounted, but the covenant vow, signified by the “seal,” which is the soul of the nuptial, a soul that would have as its flesh the physical consummation that is merely sung. But when the nuptial is invested in the erotic, the flesh is soul and the soul is flesh. If we follow this path, we discover other indications, both closer and farther from movement in space, that are close to the movements of love itself. This is the case with the oscillations between waking and sleep. And the movement from one pole to another is never linear or narrative. Four times, we read: “I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles, by the does of the fields, do not stir up, do not awaken my love, before he is ready” (2.7, 3.5, 5.8, 8.4). And the awakening in 8.5 (“Under the apple tree, I awaken you, there where your mother conceived you, there where the one conceived you who gave birth to you”) is not properly speaking a narrative conclusion, inasmuch as, as has been said, the awakening in 8.5 and the seal in 8.6 belong to the same economy of desires mutually accepted and acknowledged and, in this sense, fulfilled. Similarly, the stages of wakefulness—“My beloved is mine and I am his. He pastures his flock among the lilies” (2.16)—easily falls into a kind of dreaming: “On my bed, at night, I sought him whom my heart loves” (3.1), if it does not turn frankly into a dream between 3.1 and 5.1, as some commentators, such as Daniel Lys, have suggested.11 But these alternations between sleep and being awake, between dreaming and awakening, belong to the same dynamic of intersecting desires and to the interplay of distance that opens and closes. Someone may object that not everything in the poem is “movement.” Apart from the moments of repose, of possession, which we have said11 belong to the “movements” of love, to love as movement, the poem makes room for admiring descriptions of the body of the beloved and for that of the lover. This is true. And it does not suffice to reply that these pauses can be assimilated, on the linguistic level of the poem, to a stasis of desire. What we need to add to such a response is that the metaphors through which the marvels of the lovers’ bodies are sung are themselves metaphors of movement borrowed from the extraordinary bestiary that the poem draws upon, along with the luxuriant flora of an almost Edenlike countryside.12 This takes nothing away from the stasis of admiration: “You are beautiful, my beloved, and without flaw.” (4.7). However the poetic pause is all the more striking in that the poem leads without transition from the questing movement to the repose of admiration: “Come from Lebanon, my fiancée, come from Lebanon, make your entry” (4.8). In this way, the poem weaves the stasis of admiring description into the very movements of love, so as to heighten, so to speak, the energy, the power of embracing. I would like to indicate finally in what way the literary form of the poem contributes to this subtle liberation of the nuptial with regard to the erotic within which it is rightly enmeshed. Above I indicated the importance of the metaphors in the admiring descriptions of the bodies but limited myself to pointing to their origin in the marvelous flora and fauna of Creation. We need to return to them now from the

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point of view of the effect of sublimation that interests us here. Robert Alter had the genial idea of placing his reflections on the Song of Songs under the title the “Garden of Metaphor,” producing in this way his own second-degree metaphor.13 After having pointed to the unusual frequency of comparisons and the abundance of grammatical expressions that convey these comparisons (“is like,” “resembles a,” etc.), he takes up the kind of liberation that occurs through the verbal play that consists in the weaving together of these metaphors in relation to their ultimate corporeal referent. The body is not just sowed with vegetal and animal allegories, to the point of becoming a body/ landscape; the verbal play itself tends to dissociate the metaphorical network from its support in the body. Even if, as good Freudians, we can indeed give a sexual meaning to the “fountain that makes the gardens fertile” in 4.15, or the garden itself in 4.16 and 5.1, or to the “hole in the gate” in 5.4, or even to the lilies among which the beloved “pastures his flock” in 6.3, or even, why not, to the navel in 7.2 or the “mountain of myrrh” in 4.6—the all-knowing naïveté of the psychoanalyst is always joyful when it is applied to poetry!—what is important is not the euphemism that preserves the sexual referent without directly naming it, but rather the inclusion of the body itself within the overall metaphorical play of the poem, thanks to the phenomenon that Alter rightly calls “double entendre.” I do not mean to suggest, out of some hidden apologetic purpose, that the sexual referent is thereby abolished, as sexual, but rather that it is placed on hold, precisely as a referent. The verbal play thereby becomes an autonomous source of pleasure. This poetic sublimation at the very heart of the erotic removes the need for contortions meant to desexualize the referent. That it should be poetically displaced is sufficient. And it is in this way that the same metaphorical network, once freed of every realist attachment through the unique virtue of the song, is made available for other investments and disinvestments. At the end of this series of comments, we can say that through these purely literary procedures of calculated indetermination and metaphorization, a certain distance of meaning is introduced between the nuptial as such and the sexual, without thereby setting the nuptial within the matrimonial orbit. It is even this equidistance preserved between sexual realism and matrimonial moralism that will allow what I am calling the nuptial as such to serve as the analogon for other configurations of love than that of erotic love. Are these remarks compatible with André LaCocque’s interpretation? The distinction I am making between nuptial and matrimonial confirms the dissociation he so strongly emphasizes between the plea for free and faithful love and the apology for the marriage bonds in Proverbs and, even more fundamentally, in the whole Mosaic legislation. (Still why qualify as “bourgeois” the praises of conjugal fidelity in Deuteronomy 22.13–29?) Nor do I have any difficulty in making a place for irony in a celebration of love that says a pox on every institutional dimension. If the nuptial has to be sung of as distinct from the matrimonial, why shouldn’t irony, just like metaphor, be one rhetorical means of praise? Are not many metaphors, through their very exaggeration, charged with irony? I would have more hesitation about making the step from irony to derision, and even

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beyond this to subversion. Besides the reservations referred to above concerning the intentions assigned to the presumed author, derision and subversion seem to me to stem from the genre of pleading, which, unlike irony, does not fit well with that of free and joyous celebration. As for any subversive intention properly speaking, it seems to me to arise from a hypothesis about reading, a perfectly legitimate hypothesis to be sure, but one that is recognized as such as soon as its place in a history of the reception of the text is recognized. Indeed, I shall attempt to show at the end of the second section of this essay that it belongs to one precise epoch of reading, one that precisely values every sort of subversive reading. It remains to say that André LaCocque gives exegetical arguments that tend to reduce the distance I have emphasized between what the reader contributes and the obvious sense of the text. I would like to draw on those arguments in particular, however, that lead to interpreting certain expressions whose opaqueness has often been remarked—does one not speak in their regard of a crux interpretum?—expressions with an irreverent if not subtly blasphemous sense. We need to linger over these arguments inasmuch as the interpretation of these difficult passages takes on the value of evidence as regards the alleged subversive intention. When the poem seems to take up for its own use expressions that the prophets apply to the “loving” relation between Yhwh and his people, this procedure is said to stem from the polemical and liberating strategy of the poem in demetaphorizing, or more exactly in detheologizing, the poets language. Furthermore, the author’s challenge reaches its peak when the sacrosanct formulas of oaths are ironically parodied as conjurations invoking wild animals. The same parody will be also found in oaths with a religious connotation. In the same way, the separated hills of biblical geography come to designate in an irreverent way the breasts of the beloved.“We are at the antipodes of a spiritualized allegory,” says André LaCocque. His exegetical subtlety culminates in the exegesis of 6.16. With this text, it would have been quite simply impossible for anyone in Israel to miss the allusion to the Ark of the Covenant. Any theory of interpretation that does not recognize this doesn’t deserve the name.“The Shulamite joins, in the eyes of her lover, the chariot of the Ark, the most famous chariot in the history of Israel, the merkabah or throne of Yhwh, with Ammi, that is, Israel, and Nadib, the noble people. All this in an erotic evocation.” I have no grounds—nor any competence—to challenge the properly exegetical argument. But it seems to me to lose much of its unilateral—and unilaterally subversive—character if we set it back within the overall metaphorical context of the poem. I will even risk asking, in staying as close as possible to André LaCocque’s interpretation, why does a certain detheologization not belong to the rhetorical strategy placed in the service of the conquest of the nuptial dimension per se? To demetaphorize is still to metaphorize. And why can what has been demetaphorized not be remetaphorized on the basis of the general metaphorization of the nuptial, as I shall attempt to demonstrate in the third part of this essay. It is this latter suggestion that I shall attempt to develop by taking a broader view of the relations of intertextuality that lead to the intersecting of the Song of Songs with other texts in the biblical canon.

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Fragments of a history of reading I want now, however, to give a continuation to my initial proposition of a “multiple, flowering history of reading and more generally of the reception of the text.” I want to say right away that the allegorical exegesis of modern interpreters is far from occupying the whole ground of readings, which, for lack of an appropriate vocabulary, have been called allegorical. The allegorical exegesis of the Greek fathers is unaware of any claim to compete with an exegesis based on the historical-critical method. This is why is necessary to place the allegorism of modern interpreters at the end of our history of reading and link it to the same epistemological category as that which characterizes what these interpreters call a “naturalist“ interpretation, inasmuch as they share with the proponents of such an interpretation the claim to tell us the true meaning that was intended by the author. A complete history of the reading of the Song of Songs would constitute a considerable undertaking, which is impossible within the brief compass of this essay. I will limit myself, therefore, to indicating four significant moments of this rich history.

1. Analogical transference What made allegorical interpretations plausible, acceptable, and plainly significant in the Patristic age was something other than an exhumation of a meaning inscribed in a text considered apart from any act of reading.14 Let us take the most simple case, that of citation or paraphrase, where the words, the sentences of the Song of Songs find themselves taken up into the framework of a discourse offered by other speakers or other writers. The new fact is the situation of the one who restates the text in reading, citing, or paraphrasing it. Another place for speaking than that of the text to be interpreted is presupposed as given, starting from which there takes place an exchange of meanings between the text that does the citing and the cited text. In this way are born interpretations that augment the meaning of the text, through a meaning that is, in a way, in front of the text, without necessarily claiming that this meaning preexisted in the text.15 In this regard, the allegorical interpretarions we shall refer to below have to be considered as amplified effects of reading, of the same nature as these implicit or explicit citations, where the duality of the text cited and the text that cites them remains visible. The restatement of the cited text in another situation for speaking produces a displacement, a transference, for which allegory constitutes just one special case, however considerable it may be. This displacement or transference stems from another epistemological category than the search for the true meaning, than an explication and the search for an adequation between this explication and the features that convey the obvious sense. We have to speak instead of a “use” of the text or, if one prefers, of a reuse. Citation and paraphrase constitute in this respect a simple case of reuse, the cited text conserving its identity, which is perfectly capable of being taken up into the new text. The first

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condition that this reuse depends on is the emergence of a new speech situation in relation to the one that was the original setting of the biblical poem. Citation tends in a way to fill the gap between the new speech situation and the old one, through a process of assimilation of one meaning to another. Allegory will later be cited as the justification for this abolition of the initial gap. But it was not necessary that authors or communities as a whole had at their disposal an explicit theory of allegory before they could make a practical use of the kind of correspondence or analogy that the theory will spell out. This was the case, it would seem with the form of interpretation defended by Rabbi Aquiba at the gathering at Jamnia, an interpretation that must have been current prior to him if it is true that Aquiba made use of it as an argument in favor of the canonicity of the Song of Songs. The beloved of the Song is there identified with Israel and its land, the lover with Yhwh. This will also be the case for those Christian interpretations where the beloved will be by turns identified with the Church taken as a whole, with baptized individuals, or with the mystical soul drawn in on itself, and the lover will be Christ or the God of love himself. What cannot fail to strike us in this quick overview is the mobility in the identification of the partners in the amorous dialogue—better than mobility: the substitution. It is this capacity for substitution that decomposed into the positing of a gap and the overcoming of this gap. The love between Yhwh and his people, then the love between the Christ and his Church are celebrated from places for speaking that, as regards their utterance, are different than the one in which the original epithalamium was sung. These places can be the cultus, the liturgy, meditation, prayer, study. And it is through a second movement that these places for speaking are identified by an operation stemming from the use of the text and not first of all from its explication. This audacious transfer creates a new signification, which was not necessarily contained in the originary texts, even though it is capable of being inscribed in them in an enduring fashion within a tradition of reading. It is this process of identification that we can take as an extension of citation and paraphrase, where the citing text and the cited text remain distinct. This assimilation running all the way to identification is the fruit of a meditation on the profound kinship between the objects of love, or, as I shall say below, between its “movements.” I am not saying that allegory, or what has been theorized as allegory, is the unique key to this abolition of distance, thanks to which Israel, then the baptized Christian, then the mystical soul come to occupy the place of the beloved in the Song of Songs, to the point of being able to sing as she does: “The king has brought me into his chambers.” Anne-Marie Pelletier, for example, has shown that the use of analogy, or, to use a more neutral term, the use of correspondences, preceded a theory of allegory, in a work that has here served me as a guide, on the basis of long analyses which she proposes concerning the reuse of the Song of Songs within the framework of Christian liturgy, hymnody, and epistolary exchange.16 The case of liturgy is most enlightening as regards our inquiry. The liturgy makes use of a dialogical structure, where the participation of the worshippers is constitutive of the working of the liturgical action under the imprint of a convocation that generates

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a new “us.” The practice of language within the liturgical framework has one specific intention, that of drawing near to a “mystery” that is as much enacted as said. Consequently, when the liturgy cites the texts of Scripture, the participants reassume the movement of involvement and commitment through the words and in the dialogue of the protagonists of the originary dialogue. In this way, the liturgy becomes a privileged place for the reproduction of the text. The use of the Song of Songs in the baptismal liturgy, a usage attested by the catecheses of Cyril of Jerusalem and Ambrose, marvelously illustrates the double movement of gap and abolition of this gap referred to above. It is clear, first of all, that the ceremony of baptism constitutes as such a situation initially foreign to the biblical epithalamium. The institution of baptism sets up the initial gap starting from which the text of the Song of Songs is displaced into a new framework of utterance that no feature of the originary text allows us to anticipate. This gap is then filled thanks to the nuptial signification attached to Christian initiation, under the impulse of Saint Paul himself according to Ephesians 5.25 (“Husbands, love your wives as the Christ has loved the Church”) and 2 Corinthians 11.2 (“For I promised you in marriage to one husband, like a pure virgin to present to Christ”). This nuptial initiation can be taken as a “mystery” that lacks a means of expression so long as it has not drawn upon the dialogical structure of the Song of Songs; not just its lexicon, its words, but its attitudes, its movements of approach and withdrawal, its thirst for being together and belonging to one another. The exhortation that precedes the quotations of the Song of Songs within the liturgical framework clearly shows that these quotations are not meant to be an explication of the original meaning. The case seems rather to be something like the following. The liturgical gesture would remain mute without the aid of the words from the Song of Songs, reinterpreted by the very gesture that seeks and finds its expression in these words. In this way, an exchange is brought about between the rite and the poem. The rite opens the space of “sacramental mystery” to the poem, the poem gives the rite the rightness of an appropriate word. In this sense, it is not first the Song of Songs but rather the rite that one interprets in citing the Song of Songs. This latter is thus put in the position of an “interpretant” before being itself given over to interpretation. What is more, it is not just the rite that is interpreted by the words of the poem, but the faithful people themselves who recognize themselves in the gestures of the rite. Whence the place of exhortation in catechesis, the faithful being urged to put themselves in the place of the beloved so as to be able to speak the words of the Song of Songs.17 We can thus understand why the explicit or implicit quotations of the Song of Songs in hymns also find their final justification in the disposition of those who receive the text by quoting it. In truth, it is no longer a question of an explicit quotation, but rather of a genuine reuse, of a creation of new variations in those sung prayers that make up hymns. If we add that the hymn has not ceased to be a place of theological production, as we see, for example, even today in the recent revision of the Anglican Book of Prayer, we also will recognize that the hymn is one of the privileged places

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where we can catch sight of the augmentation of meaning at work in certain forms of the reception of the biblical text. We also see then that the appropriation of the biblical text takes place in comparable ways within the frameworks of the liturgy and the hymn. A new speech situation becomes the source of a gap in relation to which the biblical epithalamium was first produced. In both cases, this gap is immediately overcome by the confession of a kinship between the two figures of the amorous dialogue. This kinship between speech situations first applies to the thematic level—the wounds of love, seeking, mutual possession—then to the vocabulary itself (kissing, touching, embracing). It is not until we come to the way in which the Song of Songs takes pleasure in describing and praising the bodies of the lover and the beloved that we find a shortfall of details for the hymn in its demand for fullness and overflowingness. From this taking up of attitudes, themes, and words is born what we may call the analogical unity of the figures of the nuptial bond.

2. Origen: Between typology and allegory We can now take the step that leads to commentaries properly speaking on the Song of Songs. We shall take this step with Origen, who, in succeeding Hyppolitus of Rome, can be taken to be the founder of the whole exegetical tradition, first Eastern then Western, that has been labeled as allegorical.18 The distinction between “homilies” and “commentaries”19 will allow us to understand this passage as commentary properly speaking in terms of two stages. It is remarkable that Origen should have presented his rereading of the Song of Songs by means of two such different literary genres. As we shall see, if the commentary seems to place its principal accent on the meaning attributed to the words spoken in the Song of Songs, its juxtaposition with the homily will help make us attentive to those attitudes of reading that in this second type of text might have gone overlooked. Like the entry into the Holy of Holies, access to the Song of Songs is not direct. It comes at the end of a passage through an ascending sequence of Songs, whose liturgical list constitutes a kind of typological hexameron.20 What I above called a situation marked by a gap here takes on the form of a mystical ascension. In this way, the initial gap between two lovers is widened. It takes on the form of an opposition between spiritual and carnal love. And yet the dialogue between the Word and the soul wounded by the Word’s arrow succeeds once again in being spoken by way of the movements of the Song of Songs. The union of the Church, understood as a body or as the members of a body, and its celestial spouse is recognizable through the nuptial dimension unfolded by the Song of Songs. In other words, the transcendence of spiritual love is compensated for by a similitude. Here is where, as a kind of mediation, the typological interpretation applied by Paul to the relationship between the two covenants (the economy of the Hebraic structure with its characters, events, and institutions) as a prefiguration of the Christian economy of salvation can be taken up. This

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gesture of typological reinscription brings into equilibrium the existential distance that separates the two modes of love and makes possible the assumption of the language of the Song of Songs into Christian discourse.21 But we need to recognize that this third moment is not yet of the nature of a commentary. It is not the relating of one sense to another for a reader who is not implicated in this process. As in liturgical and hymnic uses, the homily is addressed to the believer in the second person.22 Origen was careful to respect the dramatic form of this play with more than one character. The thread of this small drama turns out to be just as important as the spoken dialogues. It outlines the variations in distance and proximity, of approach and withdrawal along the way of mutual belonging. It is at the level of this dramatic dynamism that the transposition of the whole poem takes place, which alone allows one to reinterpret the very words (verba) of the Song of Songs in terms of all the diversity of their details. It is not to be denied that words play an essential role in this interplay of assonances. Subsequent allegorism will be swallowed in this kind of exercise,23 whose underlying conviction is that Scripture is a vast field of interrelated words, a unitary field, in which every word has a reason and where, as a consequence, every possible linkage or comparison between words is not just authorized but even called for. Here is where we come upon the moment where explicative commentary can break away from the control exercised by a similarity of speech situations, to become an arbitrary exercise, guided by the mere co-occurrence of the same words within a work that is taken to be indivisible and coherent.24 To this is added the conviction that the spiritual sense is the sense intended by the author, that is, in the last analysis by the Holy Spirit, who inspires this author. In this sense, the allegorical use of the Song of Songs is not aware of itself as an effect of reading, as the creation of new meaning through reinterpretation. Finally, we must not underestimate that the initial gap, which we have situated at the origin of the assimilation of two kinds of love, is not stated in terms of a Platonic dualism of the sensible and the intelligible, but rather than in terms of the duality of Pauline typology. This latter, as Jean Daniélou and Henri de Lubac have shown, places into relation two historical economies, not two ontological levels, and requires the reality of the first term, without any reduction of it to appearance or illusion, at least if the “type” is really to function as the basis of meaning. Hence the spiritual sense is not substituted for the carnal sense. It is not substituted because it cannot be. Whereas for Platonic philosophers, the intelligible world has its own language, its own concepts, its own dialectic, within the setting of the Christian Church, the spiritual lacks a means of expression. This is why the language of the Song of Songs turns out to be irreplaceable. Without it, mystical experience would remain mute. This is why the “nuptial“ is a necessary recourse for such experience. If, nevertheless, Origen, despite the typological basis of his allegorism, could give in to a tendency toward a Platonic kind of dualism, this was due to the fact that within the Song of Songs the carnal lacks a historical dimension that would clearly link it in an explicit way to the old covenant. It unfolds entirely within the dimension of the “sensible” from which

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Platonizing spiritualism drains its reality. Hence, what was once a restatement at the level of new situations of discourse, in particular that dramatic setting that displays the protagonists and their “movements” (of approach, withdrawal, union), becomes a substitution of meaning as soon as this interplay of correspondences frees itself from this setting and gives itself over to the explication of meaning for its own sake. Origen’s homilies bear witness to this fragile equilibrium, already on the point of breaking, between, on the one hand, a complicity that takes place on the level of utterance, a level where new protagonists can take up an old place, and, on the other hand, a correspondence between words that in the final analysis will justify the substitution of one meaning for another.25 It remains true, however, that the similitude of situations continues to govern the transference of meaning on the level of words.26 Thus, if we are to follow Origen, we must, on the one hand, hold firmly to the initial equivalence between the bearers of gesture and meaning (husband = Christ; bride = the Church or ecclesial soul), and, on the other hand, admit that the whole of Scripture is a vast field of words open to comparisons and linkages without any constraint or limit on this process, from the moment that they are made appropriate to the primordial equivalence. This way of subordinating the comparisons and linking of words to the equivalence between positions of discourse constitutes the hermeneutical key to allegorical explication. Once this subordination is loosed, commentary breaks away from the homily.27

3. Modern “allegorical” commentary The preceding remarks help us to understand the change in epistemological status that takes place in contemporary allegorical commentaries. Indifferent to the conditions of restatement of the canonical text that, within the ancient ecclesial tradition, allowed a Christian soul to occupy the place of the beloved in the Song of Songs so as to sing her epithalamium with her, the authors of these commentaries undertake to hold themselves within a kind of nonobjective place, exactly like their “naturalist” opponents. From this unmarked place, they claim to observe, within the depth of the text, the double meaning constitutive of allegory. Thus it is no longer the Song of Songs that plays the role of an interpretant in regard to an interpreted believing attitude. Instead it has become the object of explication, the allegorical meaning being taken to be the true meaning intended by the presumed author, himself or herself inspired by the Holy Spirit. It is not surprising that the weight of evidence is placed almost exclusively therefore on a comparison taking place on the level of the words of the text. Let us consider the example of the scholarly commentaries by A. Robert, R. Tournay, and A. Feuillet.28 Their commitment to philological technique is undeniable, and the so-called method of parallels is unfolded within the wide intrabiblical space marked out by the canon. These authors call the reuse of words or formulas from earlier Scripture, whether literally or as an equivalent, “anthologizing.” The rule for this procedure is

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strict: “The only significant references are those in which identical terms or synonyms are used along with a context announcing an identical or positively analogical thought” (p. 10). In order to do them justice, we need to emphasize that these authors warn us against the abuse of unfounded comparisons, such as may be found, for example, in the work of another well-known allegorist, Father Joüon. We must, they say, seek the highest possible degree of “positive resemblance founded on a sufficient convergence of subjective evidence” (p. 12). We can speak in this regard, then, of a lexical intertextuality based on synonymity. Yet we would never get under way if we did not know what we were looking for, namely, a network of allusions to the major point of the sacred history culminating in the return from Exile. The love of the beloved, with its hesitations and reprises, describes the steps in the conversion of Israel as it awaits the salvation that will be the work of Yhwh. This working hypothesis finds confirmation in all of the features of the Song of Songs, there is not one that cannot be explained in light of the nuptial allegory of the prophets. For example, in reading 1.2–4, “let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth … the king brought me into his chambers,” R. Tournay does not hesitate to say that “the lover is the king. Nothing is more central to the biblical tradition than that Yhwh should be called king” (p. 65). Along the same lines, the bed chamber designates the temple. As for the beloved, she represents the personified nation.“There are numerous texts that speak of Yhwh s ongoing love for Israel despite its unfaithfulness” (p. 67). More precisely, “On the basis of the classical themes of the Old Testament, we have assumed that the presumed situation is that of the Exile. Israel, preserving its love for Yhwh, aspires to return to Palestine and to enjoy the possession of the one from whom it is separated. This is the starting point for exegeting the Song of Songs” (p. 68). This being the general orientation, it is the details that must confirm the anthologizing procedure.29 The most noteworthy of these details, to me, is having to assume, owing to the allegory, the theme of perfect mutuality in the loving exchange, at the limit of the prophetic formulas found in Hosea, Jeremiah, and the Deuteronomist. As much as the Prophets knew the alternation of “seeking and finding,” does not Yhwh conceal himself in the presence of an imperfect penitence? Thus we can understand how in the Song the lover suddenly hides himself when the beloved, not yet fully disposed to love, gives the illusion of possessing the lover. Our commentators connect Song of Songs 5.5–6 with Isaiah 41.1, “a context that announces the return of Israel and that shows Yhwh ready to return to Palestine and reestablish the nation on the one condition that it faithfully seek him” (p. 205). They emphasize that these verses contain a “theological meaning,” for which the Prophets, particularly Hosea and Jeremiah, give us the key.“ The Shulamite cannot enter into possession of the lover because the disposition of her heart is not yet perfect” (ibid.). Nonetheless, because Yhwh becomes all the more pressing and the ardor of the beloved continues to grow, we can say that “it is clear that we are moving toward a denouement.” What denouement? It is to be found in 8.5b: “Beneath the apple tree, I awoke you.” “The meaning of this sentence is that the nation on the very land of Palestine is awakened by Yhwh and goes on to love him” (p. 297).“The certitude that God will bring about

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a total conversion” is thus made apparent. And once again this is based on Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah. Beyond this, the parenetic accent found in 8.68 (“for love is strong like death”) recalls Deuteronomy 6.6–8, which draws on Exodus 13.9 and evokes Jeremiah 31–33 where the intransigence and invincible force of love are proclaimed.30 Therefore our exegetes are not surprised that the name of Yhwh should finally be pronounced, not in passing, as though “flame of Yhwh” (8.6) were an expression as banal as, say, Gods thunder, but because on the basis of all that has preceded, the great protagonist of the quest for love can finally be named, as soon as the love between Yhwh and his people is finally consummated. In the criticism that has been brought to bear on allegorical explication in the modern period, we need to distinguish, I believe, between what stems from the techniques of exegesis and what expresses a radical change in the usage of the biblical text, a change that also governs the position of those exegetes for whom the erotic interpretation has become the obvious explanation. Let us confine ourselves, therefore, for the moment, to the objections that have arisen on the same ground where modern allegorists have taken the risk of challenging those who uphold what these allegorists call a “naturalistic” explication of our text. Usually, three vices are condemned.31 First, the arbitrary aspect of the comparisons made between words or expressions. Second, the fastidious repetition of what looks like an a priori theory, whether it be the case of the thesis that discerns the figures of Yhwh and Israel beneath all the features of the lover and the beloved or the one that sees in them Christ and the Church. Finally, there is the arbitrary imposition of an allegorical meaning by the ecclesial magisterium. Once the situation of a Jewish or Christian reader is no longer directly connected with the initial linguistic setting, this kind of commentary finds itself extremely vulnerable to this kind of threefold critique. We could even say that it offers itself imprudendy to this kind of criticism due to the very fact that it places itself on the ground of a search for the true meaning. In this regard, the anthologizing method of Robert and Feuillet is particularly vulnerable to the first criticism, owing to its very concern to isolate words or verbal bits from their context, the Bible being dealt with as one vast store of expressions and words that the exegete may draw on based solely upon the rule that there be some semantic kinship to govern the anthologizing method. Those contextual connections that resist this kind of skimming and comparisons, which such semantic kinship seems to authorize, are overlooked. Once doubts are raised concerning the anthologizing method, it is difficult not to lend an attentive ear to the second accusation. Is it not because the selection of texts placed in parallel was guided by some prior external conviction that the allegorist is able to refer to, under the appearances of an a posteriori argument, the probability of these comparisons chosen ahead of time by such a prior principle of selection? At the same time, the door is opened to the third charge, despite its perhaps overly suspicious look and its nasty thrust. Is it not because the magisteriat, in different, sometimes violent, ways has imposed an allegorical interpretation that the

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gap thereby opened between the official reading and the obvious, required one calls for the expedience of allegory, at any price—at the price, in particular of inventing slights of hand that in turn motivate an overabundance of subtlety in drawing semantic comparisons?32 Whatever the case may be, these objections, in my opinion, only apply to that one segment of the allegorical tradition where commentary that claims to be scientific has substituted itself for those usages of the biblical text where the actual position of the person stating or restating the biblical text is still conscious of itself. In this regard, the work of Anne-Marie Pelletier, by shifting back from modern commentaries to the liturgical, hymnic, and homiletic uses of the Song of Songs represents in a decisive way a complete reorientation in the argument. For anyone who wants to consider the whole trajectory of allegorical interpretations and not just the more or less artificial allegorism of modern commentators, the arguments just referred to then lose much of their force. In response to the first objection, it is possible to rediscover, at the origin of what seems to be the most arbitrary wordplay beginning with Origen, a gesture of obedience to an experience princeps: that of a pious Jew of the community of Israel, then, with Christianity, that of one baptized into this faith, and subsequently that of a mystic in quest of meaningful language. As for the second objection, we must remain attentive to the inventiveness that is never completely eliminated and that even often gives rise to commitment in the act of communal reading. Finally, as regards the third objection, which in fact is an accusation, we are not forbidden to salute the vow of confident adherence to an ongoing community of interpretation, up to and including submission to the external power of an ecclesial magisterium. This is why it still seems possible, even today, to go some distance with the Rabbinic and Patristic readings and to encounter in them the branches of a blossoming history of reading, within which we remain as the heirs of reading stances that continue to be available to us.

4. Abandoning allegorical interpretation: The change in the reader In the preceding section, I have outlined the objections that are addressed to the claim of allegorical interpretation to serve as the explication of the true meaning of the Song of Songs, that is, of its original, intended meaning which is immanent in the text. However the disfavor that today affects allegorical interpretation today does not just apply to the methodological vices that an improved science might be able to correct. If, as we have said, following Pelletier, the oldest allegorical interpretations are rooted in uses of the Song of Songs, liturgical, hymnological, and homiletic uses, where the new sites of the use of words are still visible—baptism, for example— beginning from which the words of the Song are reuttered, then the reasons for the decline in these interpretations must equally be sought at the level of such usages and, more generally, on the plane of the conditions that prevailed during the times of the re-enunciation, the reuse of the Song of Songs in an allegorical style.

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This decline can be attributed to quite heterogeneous factors. For example, an alleged misuse of the biblical sources allegorical interpretation draws on, or even an internal breakdown of the allegorical conception itself beginning already in the Patristic period, or, finally, to cultural changes, stretching from the Middle Ages to the contemporary period, which made untenable the reading stances adopted by the allegorizing exegetes. I shall not dwell on the first of these possible motives for decline, inasmuch as it would force us to anticipate what will be said below about an eventual theological meaning grafted to the erotic interpretation. The argument, however, can be briefly stated as follows. Is the love relation between God and human beings that the rabbis and the Greek fathers assumed to be metaphorically projected by the Song of Songs really akin to the one celebrated by the Prophets: Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and even the Deuteronimist? What is at issue here is the fusional and totally reciprocal character of the love celebrated by the Song of Songs. If I invoke this argument at this point, it is because it has been used by a number of exegetes against allegorical interpretations in general. The Prophets, these exegetes have observed, never risked speaking of a mutual love, a mutual possession between God and human beings, in that the reverence for the God of the Torah and the Covenant imposed a vertical distance at the very heart of the covenantal bond. This argument is extremely important. It puts a finger on the invisible line that separates an ethical religion from a mystical one. And it is in this sense that it outruns the properly exegetical plane to which we have so far confined ourselves. This is why I shall defer until my concluding section any detailed examination of this objection. The second reason for abandoning the allegorical way has to do with the very conception of allegory, which I indicated above is itself only a systematic interpretation of the analogical linkage, lived out before being brought to reflective awareness, that Jews and Christians discerned between two levels of love. Indeed, we can ask whether the allegorism professed by Origen and all the interpreters who embraced his way was not secretly discordant in relation to the typological interpretation practiced, sometimes—it is true—under the label of allegory, by Paul and the Fathers, giving rise to confusions that endured for a long time. I shall not dwell on this objection, which we have already taken into account above.33 Let me merely add here, from the perspective of a history of reading of the Song of Songs, that the mystical reading was carried out principally within a setting marked by asceticism, sometimes as practiced by laypeople, but most often it was that of clerics and monks. As was the case for Origen, access to the text of the Song of Songs was explicitly reserved to those who were already well advanced on the way of renouncing carnal life and its reading was strongly discouraged or forbidden for beginners in the spiritual life. Even if this asceticism was marked by specifically Christian features, it also borrowed from Platonic allegorism the dualism of the “sensible” and the “intelligible.” However the influence of the monastic condition on reading seems to have governed that of interpretation by an allegorism freed from the constraints of a specifically Christian typology and given over to a Platonizing spirituality. In order to speak of the nuptial beauty of the mystery

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of faith, it was necessary first to empty the erotic of its nuptial quality per se, which was then fed into the Christian “mystery” in an exclusive fashion. To assume the place of the beloved meant first of all to remove this image from its erotic setting. Whence the paradox that in order to function as an allegory, exegesis no longer had as a limit to its reach anything other than purely verbal associations, or, better, nonsexualized homonymies gleaned from throughout the biblical text. In this sense, the priority given to purely verbal analogies had as its origin the effacing of the nuptial analogy that was still felt on the level of the conditions of utterance and reutterance in older uses of the Song of Songs. Hence it is difficult not to feel this way of analogizing two heterogeneous kinds of love by means of words they have in common more as a displacement of meaning than as an increase in meaning. But these faults of allegorical exegesis on the plane of the explication of meaning would not have become so obvious to us if we had not set aside the reading stances that made allegorical exegesis possible. In this way, we come to those changes in the reader that led to encompassing in one and the same disaffection Patristic exegesis and allegorism that claims to be scientific, to a point where we no longer know how to acknowledge the real merits of the former, except by way of the filter of scholarly allegorism. Therefore it is to this change in the reader that we must now turn. I recalled above the tie between the allegorical tradition and the monastic condition. The fundamental experience for which this condition provided the basic framework is no longer paradigmatic. If, for the ascetic and mystical tradition so strongly tied to the monastic condition, the nuptial signification was first of all spiritual, for we moderns it has become carnal, to the point that we no longer see any difference between the nuptial and the erotic than the Alexandrian did between the nuptial and the mystical. I shall not attempt here a history of what I am calling the change in the reader. Nevertheless, I must say at least a few words about the role played by the Reformation, especially by Luther, in this history of reading. For one thing, in abolishing the difference between the monastic state and that of laypeople, the Lutheran Reformation broke apart the framework within which the reuttering of the Song of Songs by the baptized or by the Christian soul in quest of union with its Lord flourished. The Reformation call to live out ones faith within the setting of a worldly vocation—work and marriage—took away from monastic life its paradigmatic character and forbade seeing in it the privileged setting for the correct reading of the Song of Songs. For another, on the properly exegetical plane, the declaration that Scripture is its own interpreter had the consequence of discrediting allegorical interpretation in general, which was henceforth understood to be contingent and arbitrary. In this way, the properly exegetical argument links up with the anti-authoritarian one in such a way as to reinforce both of them, so that they become indiscernible from each other. In this sense, the Reformation paved the way for the three major objections of contemporary critics discussed above. However, the Reformation in turn only constitutes one stage in the long change in the reader that leads to the kind of assumption that today distinguishes the

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naturalistic from the allegoristic reading. The major cultural factor, in this regard, was the evaluation of sexuality as a meaningful human relation. It is true that this favorable regard as concerns sexuality was never completely absent, even during those times when the monastic condition was held to be the model of perfection. Nonetheless, an accent of condescension—recall Paul saying that “it is better to marry than to burn”—always accompanied the esteem accorded to sexuality within the setting of Christian marriage. This esteem finds its most apt expression in discourse about conjugal chastity. The evaluation of sexuality that I have in mind here has two distinctive features. First, there is what we can call a declaration of innocence as regards the value of sexuality per se. It is not that the idea of sin, guilt, or wrongdoing is excluded from this sphere, but the sexual act itself is declared innocent. The fault, if there be any, can only be henceforth assigned to the quality of relation to the other at play in the sexual relation: a lack of consent, reduction to the status of an object, exploitation, violence, etc. The second feature is the one that counts most for the history of reading of the Song of Songs. We do not find it difficult today to celebrate sexual pleasure for its own sake, without any reference to the matrimonial setting. In other words, we are ready to distinguish that mutual belonging to one another that is consummated in the erotic relation from the matrimonial institution, whether we continue to approve of the latter or not. The quotation André LaCocque cites from one of my earlier works takes this change into account. This was exactly the situation as regards the lovers in the Song of Songs. No allusion is made there to marriage or to fecundity. The glory of the nuptial bond unfolds apart from any reference to the matrimonial bond, without, it is true, excluding it or requiring it. In my opinion, it is to this major cultural change that we must attribute the almost universal triumph of the erotic reading of the Song of Songs, which has become the dominant reading. Of course, this reading is largely traceable to changes that have occurred within the sphere of exegesis itself. But it would be naive to believe that the transformations that have taken place on the level of modern culture have had no effect on the history of reading. In fact, they belong to it in two ways. First, as I emphasized at the beginning of this essay, the search for the original meaning independent of any engagement on the part of the reader is not some atemporal, ahistorical attitude, but itself stems from a history of reading. Next, the triumph of the erotic sense, taken as self-evident, is itself a fact of reading, where the technical changes within the exegetical field and cultural changes affecting public discourse about sexuality reinforce each other. May I add a final somewhat mischievous dig that the reading proposed in this volume by André LaCocque, which places the Shulamite among the “subversives,” itself arises from a “subversive” reading that we might take as typically modern?

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Toward a theological reading of the song of songs The question of a possible theological meaning of the Song of Songs thus today arises within a new setting. On the one hand, we have been able, over the course of the first part of this essay, to amass a number of indications, provided by the text itself, that we can take as marks of a nuptial bond within the erotic, yet capable of being freed from this setting. On the other hand, at the end of the second part we find ourselves with a rule for reading, illustrated by the example of allegorical interpretation among the Patriarchs, according to which it is thanks to the reuse of the poem in new situations of discourse that the Song of Songs is led to say something other than what it literally says. If we bring these two lines of analysis together, we may venture the hypothesis that the relocating of the nuptial bond in nonerotic figures of love can result from comparisons and intersections of different biblical texts, in the sense of new, originally unnoticed effects of reading. In other words, it is to the general phenomenon of intertextuality, as an effect of reading, rather than allegory, as allegedly immanent within Scripture, that we may appeal in order to generate theological readings of the Song of Songs, setting out, almost like sparks of new meaning, points of intersection among the texts that belong to the biblical canon. What is more, if allegorical interpretations can themselves be taken as effects of meaning, it then seems plausible to place them on the trajectory of a process of growth of interpretations that would begin on the plane of an intrabiblical reading. Before any reuse of these texts there would be the intersecting reading that takes places within the canon. To give some indication of such a reading, I shall not begin with a confrontation between the Song of Songs and the prophetic texts, where the nuptial symbolism is applied to the relationship between the God of Israel and his people, even though this locus theologicus is where modern criticism that takes up allegorism has focused, as I indicated earlier. Instead, I would like to test my proposal of an intersecting reading through a comparison of texts stemming from different literary genres, where the creative aspect of the process of intersecting such texts will be more clearly visible. Thus I want to begin by turning to the cry of jubilation found in Genesis 2.23—“This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called ishshah, for out of ish this one was taken.“34 Giving priority to this comparison is justified for several reasons. First, it safeguards the idea of a plurality of theological interpretations, which an overly exclusive concentration on the comparison of the Song of Songs and the texts usually cited from the prophetic cycle may hamper. The parallel of Genesis 2 invites us to make room for a theological interpretation that does not identify itself as an allegorical interpretation, at least in the usual sense of this term. In Genesis 2, human love is celebrated within the framework of a creation myth that ignores any separation of a spiritual from a carnal love and therefore does not suggest any analogy between them. Genesis 2.23 and the Song of Songs know just one love, the erotic love between a man and a woman.

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How then is this comparison between Genesis 2.23 and the Song of Songs significant? To ask this question is to ask what augmentation in meaning each text receives from the other through such intersecting readings, like in the case of the production of a live metaphor that conjoins heterogeneous semantic fields. In the first place, the verse from Genesis 2 carries with it the wealth of meaning that the man’s cry of jubilation in discovering the woman owes to its setting within a myth of creation. Above, I risked, following Paul Beauchamp, speaking of a “return to the beginning” in regard to the return to the maternal home in Song of Songs 8.5 and the emphasis in 3.6, 6.10, and 8.5. Genesis makes explicit and amplifies to the extreme this sense of absolute beginning attached to love, by setting birth within a “history” of beginnings, a move totally foreign to the Song of Songs whose non-narrative character I have already underscored. What is more, the “history“ that frames the cry of jubilation in Genesis 2.23 has to be read as the narrative of a sequence of absolute births: the animais, human solitude, the splitting of the human into two. Over the course of this history—which is therefore not that of a time before time, but rather of a time underlying history itself—the woman appears at the moment when the man, who is capable of naming all the animals, feels the distress of something lacking, the lack of a true partner: “but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.” The undivided one does not become two, however, except at the price of a rending for which he is not the author. The other only comes to him in the unawareness that is sleep. How can we fail here to think of the awakening of the woman by the man in Song of Songs 8.5: “Under the apple tree I awakened you …“? Paul Beauchamp has the following insight about this.35 Before the creation of the woman, language is already there, but only as language as a mere set of labels assigned to living creatures. It is only with the appearance of the woman that language is born as “speech,” or more precisely as sentences marked by deictic phrases (“this,” an expression that is repeated, “this at last”). For the man’s first discourse to be one of admiration, the woman is necessary. But, for all that, is the birth of discourse, contemporaneous with that of the woman, that of a poem? No, not at all, for, to the discourse that the man addresses to the woman, Song of Songs adds the reciprocity of speech between two lovers who are equal in their admiration for each other; even more, if we follow André LaCocque, a reciprocity whose initiative comes from the woman. A second intersection between the poem and the myth is worth reflecting on. Both speak of an innocence of the erotic bond, considered apart from its social setting and the institution of marriage. Yet the myth and the poem speak in different ways of this innocence. In the myth, innocence is marked by the significance of a good creation: “Yhwh God said: It is not good that the man should be alone” (2.18). In this way, the innocence of eros is clothed with divine approbation. It is a creaturely innocence, where creature indicates God’s creation. It is true that breakdown is near. Indeed, if we replace the narrative of the creation of the woman within the broader framework of the complete “history” of beginnings, this birth and this discourse occur within a significant interval between a prohibition—“You shall not eat. (Gen. 2.17)—and the act that transgresses it (Gen. 3). Yet this interval does not constitute a mere rapid

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narrative transition, but rather a key time within the “history” or origins, namely the one where the status of being a creature—a good creature—is sovereignly affirmed. The man’s cry of jubilation sets the erotic bond beyond good and evil, for it exists prior to their distinction. May we not then say that the Song of Songs reopens this enclave of innocence and gives it the space that allows for the autonomy of the poem as a whole?36 The poem, in turn, when placed alongside the myth, confers on the interval of innocence the glory of a poetic pause.37 Ought we then, in order to bind the poem of innocent love more closely to the myth a good creation, assign to the Song of Songs an eschatological significance, following Karl Barth, the innocence sung by the Song anticipating the Kingdom to come, like the eschatological banquet? This interpretation clearly stems from a theology that means to be systematic and that has to be received in this way. Its force is that of a coherent theological discourse, where the song of beginning and that of fulfillment frame the history that this theology calls the “history of salvation,” marked by the Fall and the disgrace that goes with a mutilated love, as well as by the warnings and the promises of the Prophets. This interpretation is perfectly acceptable within the setting of a systematic theology whose central thread is a history of Salvation, itself centered on a Christology. But is it necessary to be systematic at this point, given the diversity of the biblical texts? In a more polycentric conception of the biblical writings, like the one I am advocating in my essays in this volume, it may be preferable to allow each text to speak to the reader from its particular setting and to entrust the chorus of voices to the chance encounters that are one of the joys of reading. By assigning an eschatological status to the Song of Songs, symmetrical to the origin, we perhaps strip it of its most noteworthy feature, which is to sing of the innocence of love within the very heart of everyday life. Far from being diminished, the theological significance may even then be strengthened. The poem, reread in light of Genesis 2.23 may suggest that creaturely innocence was not abolished by the Fall, but that it underlies even the history of evil, which the erotic relation never completely avoids. A theological way of reading the poem would then consist in proclaiming and celebrating the indestructibility at the base of the innocence of the creature, despite the history of evil and of victimization. This proclamation and celebration need not be placed at the end of time, it can be sung today. If we still want to speak of allegory in the broad sense of saying-other, or in another manner, this allegory is not born from a split between spirit and flesh but from a split, in some way on the same level, between two ways of speaking about innocence: that of the myth that recounts immemorial birth and that of the epithalamium that sings of an ongoing rebirth at the very heart of profane, everyday existence. A last intersection between the poem and the myth is also intriguing. One may challenge the theological character of these two texts where God is not named or referred to. To this we can reply that it is the myth of creation as a whole that names God. Did we not refer above to the verse that says that “Yhwh God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone … .’”? This divine approbation authorizes us to say that love is innocent before God. But, someone may say, can God be the witness of

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a declaration for which he is not the intended audience? Perhaps we should answer, in an exploratory vein, that the origin has no need of being distinguished, named, or referred to insofar as it inhabits the creature? Man loves, beginning from God.38 If so, when reread in light of Genesis, the Song of Songs becomes a religious text insofar as we can hear in it the word of a silent, unnamed God, who is not discerned owing to the force of attestation of a love caught up in itself. This is confirmed by the truncated naming of Yhwh in the sapiential denouement of the Song of Songs,39 which we can risk setting in paralell with that other, also sapiential denouement that says, “This is why a man leaves his father and his mother [even though there is not yet either a father or a mother during the time of Creation!] and clings to his wife and they become one flesh” (Gen. 2.24). Does not the seal of the Covenant in Song of Songs 8.6 have the same sapiential flavor? In both cases, we do not know who is speaking: the masterless voice of Wisdom? A hidden God? Or a discrete God who respects the incognito of intimacy, the privacy of one body with another body? Armed in this way so as to arbitrate the struggle between the accord and disaccord among texts, we can also risk taking up again the discussion concerning the relation between the Song of Songs and the prophetic texts that celebrate in apparently erotic terms the love between the God of Israel and his people. The heterogeneity, even the apparent incompatibility, between these two series of texts constituted a strong argument on the part of the adversaries of allegorical explication. I shall not take up this argument using the terms of the older discussion, which for the opposed camps had as its stake the actual meaning of the Song of Songs, its original, intended meaning, which is immanent in the text. For the allegorists, the Song of Songs could have an allegorical meaning since the Prophets had already applied the nuptial metaphor to the relation between Yhwh and his people. The author of the Song of Songs must have had this same nuptial metaphor in mind, which she or he concealed under what appears to be a profane poem. To which the adversaries of such allegorical explication reply: (1) in the Prophets, Hosea, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and for the Deuteronomist the metaphorical intention is clearly indicated by the context, which is not the case with the Song of Songs; (2) that the classification of the Song of Songs among the Wisdom writings ought to set us on guard against what may be an abusive mixing of genres; and (3) that the Prophets had in mind a covenantal bond that respects the distance and hierarchy between the partners and that, moreover, denied any sexual signification to the love between Yhwh and his people. It seems to me, however, that if we approach the relation between the Song of Songs and the prophetic texts with the same kind of thinking that we applied to the relation between it and Genesis 2, we escape the preceding dilemma and its arguments. The question—at least for a hermeneutic centered on reading rather than on the writing of a text—is not whether the Prophets inspired the author of the Song of Songs, and whether he (or she) intentionally reinscribed the Prophets’ conjugal metaphor within the idiom of a popular song, even at the price of an eventual “detheologization” of the erotic metaphor found in the Prophets, and with the intention

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obviously marked by derision and provocation, as André LaCocque thinks. In other words, the question is not, at least here, that of some filiation at the level of the origin, hence of the writing of the text, even if this question has its legitimacy within the framework of a historical-critical inquiry into the composition of the Song of Songs. The question for me is, as in the case of Genesis 2, that of an intersecting reading that respects the difference in the setting of the texts under consideration. Following this pathway of intertextuality, many rich insights can be discovered. First of all, the metaphorization at work takes place in two opposed directions, in a mirrorlike relation. For the Prophets, it is the love of God that is spoken through the nuptial metaphor. In the Song of Songs, the nuptial dimension of love first loses its erotic cloak thanks to those virtues of the poem discussed earlier, so as to reinsert them in new discourse situations, thanks to a shift in the place of utterance (the baptismal liturgy, for example). In this sense, bringing these texts near to one another gives birth to what we might call an intersecting metaphor: on the one side, the prophets “see“ the love between God and his people “as” conjugal love; on the other side, the erotic love sung in the Song of Songs is “seen as like” the love of god for his creature, at least if we interpret it with reference to the Prophets’ language. This “seeing as” is the organon of every metaphorical process, whether it works in one direction or the other. Next, to speak of an intersecting metaphor is to give allegory a much broader field than that of Platonizing allegorism conceived of as the vertical transfer from the sensible to the intelligible, at the risk of abolishing, denying, even of defaming the sensible. The idea of an intersecting metaphor instead invites us to consider the different and original regions of love, each with its symbolic play. On the one side, the divine love is invested in the Covenant with Israel and later in the Christic bond, along with its absolutely original nuptial metaphorics; on the other, there is human love invested in the erotic bond and its equally original metaphorics, which transforms the body into something like a landscape. The double “seeing as“ of intersecting metaphors then finds itself as the source of the “saying otherwise“ constitutive of allegory. It is the power of love to be able to move in both senses along the ascending and descending spiral of metaphor, allowing in this way for every level of the emotional investment of love to signify, to intersignify every other level. Finally, if we respect the different tonalities of the texts, we become attentive to the corrective action that they exercise on one another. And we need especially to emphasize here the recoil effect of the Song of Songs on the prophetic texts. If the prophetic reading of the Song of Songs—conjoined, it is true, with the exegesis of Genesis 2—brings out the so-to-speak sacred innocence of the erotic bond, the reinterpretation of the prophetic texts tends, in return, to inflect the Covenant relation in the direction of a mutual belonging of equal partners to each other. Regarding this point, the objection raised by the adversaries of every allegorical reading has to be taken into account. Prophecy is inscribed in an ethical sphere where every relation of familiarity, even that of a tender partnership, seems to be excluded. Therefore it is important to allow each series of texts its own setting. Here, the reverential love

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of the Yahwehist believer for his God; there, the mutual sharing of lovers placed on a plane of equality by their mutual exchange of desire and pleasure. The reinterpretation of the prophetic texts in light of the Song of Songs can only proceed owing to a veritable passage to the limit, even owing to a subtle subversion, in another sense than that intended by André LaCocque, at the end of which ethical religion moves toward mystical religion. Here, perhaps, we cross a frontier beyond which only a few fools for God will want to venture. Returning one last time to our methodological considerations, it seems as though the objections raised against treating the allegorical sense as the literal sense lose their pertinence just as do those contrary arguments of the allegorists. (1) For an intersecting reading, it does not matter whether the allegorical meaning was intended by the authors of the Song of Songs, nor that the text itself give objective indications of such a reading. (2) The frontier between prophecy and wisdom also loses its pertinence inasmuch as an intersecting reading deliberately crosses it, in the very name of the principle of intertextuality at work within the canonical framework. (3) As for the shift in meaning of the Covenant between Yhwh and his people that results from the rapprochement with the Song of Songs, we have shown that it has to be reckoned among the meaning effects of an intersecting reading. More important than the arguments of the older quarrel is the freedom to move among the biblical writings that inspires an intersecting reading freed from the constraints of a concern for influences and filiations. In this sense, an intersecting reading must come at the Song of Songs from both sides. Along the second way we shall encounter the New Testament texts that the historical-critical method tries to classify as certain (Rev. 3.20, Jn 20.18), likely (Rev. 12.1, 15.6, Eph. 5.27), or simply possible (Rev. 22.17, Jn 3.29, 13.2). These texts, read in the Second Testament, would be in some manner symmetrical to those in the First Testament, playing freely with the nuptial symbolism. Let us therefore allow all these texts to project themselves on one another and let us gather those sparks of meaning that fly up at their points of friction. Why shouldn’t we end this round of metaphors with the one that is most outlandish, the most impertinent, in every sense of the word: “the wife of the Lamb” (Rev. 21.9)? That this is a completely unexpected association is the least that one can say. Let us instead, with Paul Beauchamp, speak of hyperbole and condensation:40 hyperbole through which “the sense is taken to its excess,“ condensation “through which the alimentary code of the Banquet (the slaughtered Lamb) and the code of sexual union (the wife) come together thanks to the hyperbolic collision.“ If the places where we speak of love are so diverse, even dispersed, the figures of no one of them can be said to be superior to any other. They intersignify one another instead of arranging themselves in some hierarchy. May we not then suggest that what I have called the nuptial is the virtual or real point of intersection where these figures of love all cross? If such be the case, may we not then also say that the nuptial as such is an effect of reading, issuing from the intersecting of texts, only because it is the hidden root, the forgotten root of the great metaphorcal interplay that makes all the figures of love refer to one another?

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Notes 1

Daniel Lys, Le plus beau chant de la création. Commentaire du Cantique des Cantiques (Paris: Cerf, 1968), p. 16.

2

G. Pouget and J. Guitton, Le Cantique des Cantiques (Paris: Gabalda, 1934).“We can assume that it was Jacobi who, in 1771, really inaugurated the strict interpretation of the Song of Songs as a drama” (Lys, Le plus beau chant, p. 35).

3

Paul Beauchamp, L’un et l’autre Testament, vol. 2, Accomplir les Ecritures (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 177.

4 Ibid. 5

Ibid., pp. 184–91.

6

Cf., for example, the division into seven poems proposed by Denis Buzy, Le Cantique des Cantiques (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1949), or that into eight segments by Daniel Lys, or the division into two developments and ten sections distributed around a center (“eat, friends, drink 5.1“) of Paul Beauchamp, L’un et l’autre Testament, pp. 161ff.

7

Ibid., pp. 173–80.

8

As Beauchamp says, “In a way, love is in the song itself” (ibid., p. 164).

9

Ibid., pp. 180–4.

10 His second Homily on the Song of Songs begins as follows: “All the movements of the soul (motiones animae), God, the author of all things, created for the good, but in practice it often happens that good objects lead us to sin because we use them badly. Now one of the movements of the soul is love. We use it rightly to love when we love wisdom and truth, but when our love lowers itself toward things less good, it is flesh and blood that we love … . You, therefore, who are spiritual, spiritually listen to the song of these words and learn to raise yourself to what is better as regards the movement of your soul as much as the embrace (incendium) of your natural love.” 11 Lys, Le plus beau chant, p. 79. 12 The beloved is said to be like a gazelle, a young stag (2.8). The hair of the female is beautiful like a troop of goats (4.2); her teeth, a troop of shorn ewes coming up from being washed; her breasts, “two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies” (4.5); etc. 13 Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1986), Ch. 8, “The Garden of Metaphor,” pp. 185–203. 14 Anne-Marie Pelletier, Lecture du Cantique des Cantiques: de l’énigme du sens aux figures du lecteur (Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1989), contains a detailed presentation of the linguistic and hermeneutical presuppositions that preside over the contrast between an exegetical method that assimilates the search for meaning to that of a search for the origin and one that connects the destiny of meaning to a history of reading of the text. On the linguistic side, there is the distinction between a statement (or proposition), independent of any subjective commitmenton the part of the reader, and an utterance, which is the act of the speaking subject understood in terms of his or her personal, historical, and communal setting. This distinction is warranted by the linguistic theory of Emile Benveniste and by the speech-act theory of J. L. Austin and John Searle. It is necessary for any treatment of a dialogical poem

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THEOLOGY, HISTORY, AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION where the subjective involvement of the speakers is an integral part of the meaning of their words. On the hermeneutic side, there is the work of the theoreticians of the historicity of understanding (Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wirkungsgeschichte) and of the reception of the text (Hans-Robert Jauss). Pelletier draws the “methodological consequences“ of these presuppositions for the study of the Song of Songs (ibid., pp. 124–42), namely, an initial displacement, shifting the supposed originary meaning of the text in the direction of the “forms of existence of the text in history” (ibid., p. 125); then a second displacement, operating within this very history of transmission, which leads the commentary that claims to be explanatory toward those usages of the text that bring into “play, as equal, the text and the subjects that appropriate it” (ibid., p. 127). I am all the more willing to build on the general theory of interpretation proposed and practiced by Pelletier in that I share the same linguistic and hermeneutic assumptions.

15 Cf. the formula used a number of times by Gregory the Great, whose history is recounted by Pier Cesare Bori, L’interpretazione infinita: l’ermeneutica cristiana antica e le sue trasformazioni (Bologna: II Mulino, 1987): “Scripture progresses (crescat) along with those who read it.” 16 Re this whole second part, cf. Pelletier, “Le Cantique des Cantiques à l’âge patristique: lectures et usages,” in Lecture du Cantique des Cantiques, pp. 143–287. 17 Thus we read in Ambrose, in De sacramentis, IV.5: “Following this, you must approach the altar. You have begun to move forward. The angels are watching, they have seen you approaching … Thus they have asked: ‘Who is this who rises so white from the desert?’” “You have approach the altar. The Lord Jesus calls you or calls your soul or the Church, and says, ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.’” Cited by Pelletier, Lecture du Cantique des Cantiques, p. 157, n. 33. Re the general relationship between theology and liturgy in the fathers, cf. Jean Daniélou, Bible et liturgie (Paris: Cerf, 1951). This work includes a whole chapter devoted to the Song of Songs (pp. 259–80). 18 For a detailed study of Origen’s exegesis, cf. Jean Danielou, ibid.; Henri de Lubac, Histoire et esprit, l’intelligence de I’écriture d’après Origène (Paris: Aubier, 1950); Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, les quatre sens de l’Ecriture (Paris: Aubier, 1959), vol. 1; H. Crouzel, Origène et la connaissance mystique (Paris: D.D.B., 1961). 19 We have access to his two homilies on the Song of Songs only in the Latin version by Jerome. According to Eusebius, of Origen’s long commentary, which was made up of ten books, only one book remains in the partial translation we owe to Rufinius. Scholars have more confidence in Jerome’s strict translation than in Rufinius’s more free one. Re all this, cf. the Introduction by O. Rousseau to the translation of the homilies on the Song of Songs in Sources chrétiennes (Paris: Cerf, 1953), which I am using here. 20 This typological hexameron is made up of Exodus 15.1f (the song of praise after the crossing of the Red Sea); Numbers 21.17–18 (the song at the well); Deuteronomy 32.1f. (Moses’s song); Judges 5:2 (Deborah’s song); 2 Samuel 22.2f. (David’s song); and Isaiah 5.1f. (the song of the vineyard). Each of these provides the occasion for an allegorical interpretation similar to that of Pauline typology. Had Exodus not already provided the basic metaphor of liberation taken up into the baptismal liturgy? In a similar way, each of the songs borrowed from the Hebrew Bible marks a stage in the mystical journey. 21 I shall discuss below the question to what point Origen’s allegorism remains within

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the limits of Pauline typology. It will suffice here to note that each step in his homily is addressed to the believing soul in the second person.“You must leave Egypt and, having left the land of Egypt, cross the Red Sea, in order to sing the first song, saying, ‘Sing to the Lord because he has triumphed gloriously.’” And further along: “And when you shall have surpassed all of them, you shall rise even higher, so that you may, with a soul henceforth shining beautifully, also sing with the husband of the Song of Songs.” “Sing with”—this indicates the foundational operation of language for an allegorical reading, governed by one underlying identification: “Recognize Christ in the husband, in the spotless, unblemished wife, the Church,” following the suggestion found in 1 Corinthians 1.21 and Ephesians 5.27. 22 Here is an example from Song of Songs 1.2, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” The interpreter understands this as follows. In the time of Moses and the Prophets, the Word only sent its kisses; in Christ there is no distance in the kiss of the Word. As for the “aroma of your perfumes,” which follows, the interpretation consists of a movement through a series of canonical texts, both Hebraic and Christian, that speak of smells, perfumes, and odors, and that point toward the words of praise: “Your name is perfume poured out.” The chorus of maidens can thus receive the approbation of the lover: “This is why maidens love you and lure you on.” The maidens reply: “We run after you in the fragrance of your perfume,” a saying that brings in its wake 2 Timothy 4.7 and 1 Corinthians 9.24. 23 Consider the example of what is said about the blackness of the beloved: “I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem” (1.5). This blackness without the beauty would be the ugliness of sin, but penitence confers upon it that beauty that leads one to ask, “Who is coming up clothed in whiteness?” (8.5). 24 Discussing the “nard” (“my nard gave forth its fragrance”), Origen assures us, “The Holy Spirit did not have the intention (non de nardo propositum) to speak about nard. Nor does the Gospel speak of that perfume we can see with our eyes, but rather of a spiritual nard, a nard that is fragrant.” The second Homily again rings all the biblical changes concerning nard: Matthew 26.6; Luke 7.37; Mark 14.5; up to 2 Corinthians 2.15, “For we are the aroma of Christ for those who are being saved.” A contrast is also drawn with Psalm 38.5, “my wounds grow foul and fester because of my foolishness.” 25 We have seen how in the Song of Song’s description and praise of corporeal beauty interweave through a highly elaborate and refined metaphorical interplay. But whereas in the poem this interplay constantly moves from external analogies (tower, tree, bird, ewe) toward carnal intimacy, allegorical exegesis shifts the trajectory of these comparisons, thanks to the fact that the same words belong to other semantic networks capable of reorienting them toward the spiritual sphere. This is the case as regards the well-known declaration of the lover, “Ah you are beautiful, my love, you are beautiful, your eyes are doves” (1.15). Origen takes great care first to emphasize the variations in proximity whose importance we have already seen for the parallelism between utterances.“If the beloved is far from the lover, she is not beautiful; but she becomes so when she is united to the Word of God” (Homilies, 86). It is our aspiration to become the bride that allows the believing soul to take up the words of the Song of Songs, “your eyes are doves.” “If you understand the law spiritually, your eyes are doves” (Homilies, 87). The whole metaphorics of eyes and seeing is brought into play here, reinforced by the particular one of the eyes of the dove—to have the eyes of a dove is to see aright, and the one who sees rightly deserves mercy (Ps. 107.42)—as well as that of the dove in the theophany

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THEOLOGY, HISTORY, AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION of Matthew 3.16. Another example: the wound of love, “sustain me with apples because I am wounded with charity” (2.5) with the embrace that follows: “his left hand is under my head and his right hand embraces me.” For Origen, the arrow that wounds can only be the one indicated by Isaiah 49.2 and 6, and Luke 24.32. Yet, here too, the transfer in meaning only holds if the hearer feels himself or herself wounded by this arrow. “If someone is wounded by our words, by the teaching of divine Scripture, and can say, ‘I am wounded by charity this may perhaps apply to him. But why do I say perhaps’? Is it not clear?” As for the embrace, it unfolds its spiritual meaning only for someone who sets himself on its path. Whence the exhortation: “O would that the law of the Lord should entirely embrace you.” (Homilies, 96).

26 For example, the sleep of the beloved: “The Word of God still sleeps in unbelievers and in those whose heart is filled with doubt. It awakes in the saints. It sleeps in those who are tossed about by storms (Mt. 8:23f.), but it awakes at the cry of those who want to be saved by the awakened lover” (Homilies, 97). The same conjoining of attitudes and the same transfer on the plane of words occurs regarding the verse, “the voice of my beloved. Look he comes leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills” (2.8). Origen claims, “Here we are to understand the soul of the loved one, happy and perfect …. If you are a mountain, the Word of God leaps onto you; if you cannot be a mountain, but if you are a hill, inferior to a mountain, he steps over you. How lovely and appropriate (conventientia rebus) are these words.” (Homilies, 98). And just below, concerning 2.9: “Be an ecclesial mountain, the mountain of the house of God and the lover will come to you, like a gazelle or a young stag on the mountains of Bethel” (Homilies, 99). Only with the “windows” of 2.9 does the interpretation become clearly spiritual: “One of our senses is a window. Through it, the beloved looks at us. Each other sense will be another window through which the beloved regards us. Indeed, through what sense does the Word of God not regard us? What does it mean to look through these windows? And how does the lover look through them? The following example will show you. There where the lover does not look, we see death enter, as we read in Jeremiah, ‘Death enters through your windows’ (9.20). Whenever you look at a woman coveting her, death enters through your windows.” 27 Did this already occur with Origen? It doesn’t seem so. According to Pelletier, the Commentary is intended to answer the question, “how are we to read the Song of Songs?” as much as it is meant to explicate the poem (Lectures du Cantique des Cantiques, p. 265). The Song of Songs, it is said, is “strong food,” suitable for the “perfected.” “For whoever reads it apart from this understanding, the Song of Songs can only be an object of scandal” (ibid., p. 266). If the text is difficult, it is owing to the homonymy of words expressing the two kinds of love: spiritual love would be impoverished when it comes to words if carnal love did not provide its richness. But the transfer of meaning borrows its dynamism from the mystical ascension in virtue of which the text is significant only “at the height of one’s capacities, that is, owing to the spiritual advancement of the one who is reading it” (ibid., p. 257).

If it is true that it is a theory of reading the Commentary sets out here, it is in Peri Archon, book IV, that we have to seek the principles of this reading. (Re the correlations between the Peri Archon and the allegorical doctrine of the Homilies and the Commentary, cf. the works already cited by H. Crozel and Jean Danielou, as well as M. Harl, Origène et la fonction révélatrice du Verbe incarné [Paris: Seuil, 1958].) There we find the materials drawn upon (whether Stoic or Platonic, etc.),

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and, furthermore, the rule for their reuse in Origen’s hermeneutic. I shall not take up this inquiry in this essay. Allow me only to say that the theory of interpretation we find in the Peri Archon, book IV, has to be evaluated in terms of the practice of interpretation for which the Homilies and the Commentary provide the leading examples. It cannot be denied that his controversies with Judaism and the Gnostics led the great Alexandrian to give a theoretical turn to the hermeneutical question: the theory of the threefold meaning, set in parallel with the triad body/soul/spirit; the role of obscurities and incongruities in the text commented upon; the assumption that these had been planted in the text as stones one tripped over in order to encourage the reader to push still further ahead; the link between understanding texts and the spiritual commitment of the reader. However this polemical turn ought not to obscure the determining fact, namely, that the reader worthy of the biblical text is a reader who has previously acquired a christological sense of the whole of Scripture. If Origen could seem to exercise a mastery over the whole biblical text equal to that of the Hellenistic rhetoricians, it was because he knew himself to be submissive to a requirement that preceded him. This was the mysterium that governed and warranted what seemed arbitrary, fantastic, even an aestheticizing complacence in the face of the obscure. 28 A. Robert and R. Tournay, with the assistance of A. Feuillet, Le Cantique des Cantiques, traduction et commentaire (Paris: Gabalda, 1963). 29 Thus, in the first poem (1.5, 2.7), when the young woman says, “I am black and yet beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem,” we are to understand that “it was the sufferings of the Exile that darkened the taint of the woman, without altering her beauty.” Does the text speak of the mother (“The sons of my mother”)? It must refer to the country of the ancestors of Abraham. The vine? It would be shocking if it meant the chastity of a woman. The expression refers to the land of Canaan and to the true religion, following a metaphor much used by Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Psalms: “the beloveds vine is Palestine” (ibid., p. 75). Is she unguarded? It has to be an allusion to the faults that led to the Exile. Where will the shepherd lead his flock? Again, into Palestine. If the woman compares herself to a mare attached to Pharaoh’s chariot? The condition of being a “mare of Yhwh” can only signify a state of humiliation according to Jeremiah 22.78 and Second Isaiah. What is more, we are meant to hear an implicit exhortation to wait with confidence the lifting of the yoke, that is, the return to Palestine. Does the lover speak of the breasts of his beloved? “One can ask whether the image of breasts does not symbolize the tribes of the North and the South” (ibid., p. 89). If so, “on my breasts” means “on my heart,” that is, the “center of Israel.” As for the “bed of green” in 1.16, it refers to Palestine covered with olive and fig trees, as celebrated in Deuteronomy 8.7–10 and in numerous other passages of the Old Testament. Similarly, when 3.1 says, “upon my bed at night,” “this bed is Palestine” (ibid., p. 130). We understand how the woman can say of herself in 2.1, “I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valleys,” if we admit that Israel and its land are embraced within a unique eschatological oath of union with Yhwh. Does the woman say, “He brought me to the storeroom” (2.4)? We are not to stop at the image of a nuptial chamber (or even less to ferret out an allusion to a sanctuary of Ishtar). The biblical texts that depict Palestine as a land of vineyards are sufficient to sustain the fundamental allegory. Nor are our authors shocked by the erotic appearance of 2.6, “his left hand …” However they do not follow Joüon who refers to the presence of Yhwh in his tabernacle. No, “there is nothing to be seen in this scene beyond the reciprocal demonstration of a passionate love” (ibid., p. 106). As for the difficult verse, “do not awake … before the hour” (used as a

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THEOLOGY, HISTORY, AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION refrain in 3.5 and 8.4), the awakening in question is that spoken of in Isaiah 41.17; 42.d, and 43.1. It is a question, after the torpor of the Exile, of the awakening and return to Yhwh. When set with the prophetic context, especially that of the Exile and the postexilic period, this verse discretely places us on guard against an imperfect repentance.

30 Numerous texts in the Old Testament emphasize divine jealousy in any encounter with idols.“To say that love is as strong as death is therefore to emphasize how ready it is to claim its right, its claim wholly to possess its object and to defend it against any alien touch” (ibid., p. 301). 31 Cf. Todorov, Symbolism et Interpétation (Paris: Seuil, 1978); A. Compagnon, La seconde main ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979). 32 The arguments of modern critics concerning patristic interpretation are summarized and discussed in Pelletier, Lectures du Cantique des Cantiques, pp. 291–300. 33 Again I refer the reader to the works by Daniélou and de Lubac cited above. 34 The connection between the Song of Songs and Genesis 2 is forcefully presented in Karl Barth, Dogmatique (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1960), vol. 3:1, pp. 337–40; 3:3, pp. 317ff., and vol. 4, p. 225. See also Georges Casalis, Helmut Gollwitzer, and Roland de Pury, Un chant d’amour insolite, Le Cantique’des Cantiques (D.D.B., 1984); Lys, Le plus beau chant; Beauchamp, L’un et l’autre Testament, vol. 2, Accomplir les Ecritures, pp. 115–37 (“L’homme, la femme, et le serpent”). 35 Ibid., p. 129. 36 This suggestion finds full support in André LaCocque’s analysis of the poem. 37 There is another feature common to Genesis 2 and the Song of Songs. If, like Daniel Lys, we make use of the categories of the sacred and the profane, principally in the perspective of a comparison with Oriental hierogamies, we see in the Song of Songs a reconciliation between the sexual and the sacred. This is a tie that is dissociated by those for whom the sexual is especially profane, even obscene, for whom only the process of allegorization can save our text and its canonical status. It is also dissociated by those for whom only the sacred dimension of love is saved by the allegory. The lesson of the Song of Songs is to “live the covenantal relation even in one’s sex life” (Leplus beau chant, p. 52). Lys sees in the Song of Songs the result of a double demythologization, both of the divine, under the pressure of the theology of the Covenant, and of the human freed from its linkage to sacred hierogamies.“The best way to demythicize pagan eros is to describe human love not just in the manner of profane Egyptian songs, but also on the model of God’s love for his people” (ibid., p. 53). The power of demythization seems here to be assigned to the theology of the Covenant, which allows Lys to write that sex becomes sacred when it “demystifies pagan love and reflects the Covenant” (ibid., p. 54). Without objecting to the comparison with the Prophets, which I shall return to below, it is worth noting that the Covenant is signified implicitly in the Song of Songs by the “seal” in 8.6, It remains true that the explicit sense of the Covenant with God requires the bringing together of the Song of Songs and the Prophets. 38 “If we say that there is an allegory in these love poems, it is in a quite precise sense. Not because the words have to be decoded, but because the things of men signify those of God. They go together. In the sense that we have said that the first words of Adam to his wife are spoken beginning from God and in God, without naming him. This is where we have to begin” (Beauchamp, Uun et Vautre Testament, p. 186).

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39 This poses a difficult problem for exegetes. As Paul Beauchamp says, regarding the syllable that says God in 8.6 (shalhevet Yah), “commentators are right to respect the discretion of the text. But to suppose that Yah coming here really says almost nothing is to make light of the poem“ (L’un et l’autre Testament, p. 180). We can understand that the complete name of God should be absent from the epithalamium yet return in a truncated form in the passage from the lyrical to the sapiential. However, it is also true that this truncated name stems from the impertinence that André LaCocque points to. I have suggested that the alleged detheologization itself belongs to the metaphorical interplay that unfolds across the whole poem on the basis of many different rhetorical variations. 40 L’un et l’autre Testament, pp. 191–5 (“L’Epouse de l’ Agneau”).

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19 James Barr The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective. Chapter 12, “Evaluation, Commitment, Objectivity”*

J

ames Barr (1924–2006) was a Scottish scholar of the Hebrew Bible. He pioneered the application of modern linguistics to the study of biblical literature, wrote widely on proper and improper methods in exegesis and theology, and engaged with modern religious issues, such as fundamentalism. This piece is a chapter excerpted from the massive work Barr produced at the end of his career, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective (1999). This selection, in brief, is an argument for a “cool, objective” or a “cool, descriptive” approach to determining biblical meaning and theology. The text takes the form of a reflective dialogue with Krister Stendahl’s statement on biblical theology, which is re-printed in this reader as Chapter 10. Barr defends the gist of Stendahl’s position against common criticisms, and, at the conclusion of this selection, offers his own refinements to the original formulations in that classic article. Throughout this chapter, Barr does battle with those who hold something like the view that exegesis of the Bible cannot succeed unless the reader possesses a biblical faith. For Barr himself, it suffices that readers of the text have an interest in what it has to say, or perhaps an empathy with its message; following proper exegetical method by no means requires them to have faith of any kind, or to consider the text they are reading authoritative for belief. The essential insight behind Stendahl’s means/meant distinction that Barr intends to preserve is its differentiation, in principle, between

All original notes have been removed.

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what the text says and how its teaching should be related to the present. Without distinguishing between meaning and appropriation, without creating a hermeneutical moment in engagements with the Bible, the beliefs of the reader and the meaning of the text all too easily become conflated. (This polemical tactic echoes through many of the chapters of this reader.) If this distinction is not in place, it becomes conceptually impossible to critique elements of biblical teaching. This was important for Stendahl himself, since, as Barr points out, he read the New Testament as prohibiting the ordination of women, while he himself thought there were good reasons that women in the modern world should be eligible for ordination. Crucially, the ultimate rationale for distinguishing between the sense of a biblical text and how it should be used in a contemporary context has to do with faith. If faith is to be informed by what the text of the Bible actually says, then it must be read without the assumption that it necessarily matches up with any faith the reader of the text already holds. Hence, Barr’s argument for objectivity ultimately has a religious basis: having a cool, objective stance toward the contents of the Bible is necessary in order genuinely to listen to it. It is worth noting that the rhetoric in which Barr couches his defense of objectivity is toned down in comparison with the language of some of the early modern proponents of a “scientific” approach to the Bible. Barr’s goal of “limited but adequate” objectivity seems chastened in relation to the ambitions of his predecessors. The reasons for this shift are worth pondering. Another critical question for consideration is why Barr’s opponents, such as Childs, feel that a properly Christian reading of the Bible is not compatible with the notion of objectivity that Barr advocates. Both define their programs as religiously motivated, but the reading programs themselves are quite different. Why? Finally, do Barr’s attempts to improve Stendahl’s wording succeed?

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The sixth “face” of biblical theology has been the conflict between those who think of it as an “objective” discipline which describes what historically was the theology of biblical people, and those who think of it as a faith-committed discipline. This latter view insists on personal religious involvement. In addition, it tends to assert that biblical theology should not only state what was there in biblical times but should provide interpretations for the present day. Interpretations for the present day require, however, personal identification with the life and needs of the present-day community of faith. An introductory survey of possible arguments has been given in Chapter 1, Section 6. We now return to look at them more fully. We may begin by noting that this particular question is one of the most hotly disputed in all biblical theology, and especially so in the modern American discussion. The “cool, descriptive” historical and objective position was classically stated by Krister Stendahl in a famous article in the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible.’ Central representatives of the contrary view have been, at an earlier stage, James D. Smart, and, more recently, Brevard Childs. Very strong opinions, often approaching personal insults, have been expressed. Smart not only said that Stendahl was wrong about this but went on to suggest that his teaching had gone far towards destroying his students’ ability to interpret the Bible. “Why,” he asked, “do the preachers of today, trained by the Stendahls in biblical exegesis, find a veritable abyss between the Then and the Now, between the original meaning and the contemporary meaning, an abyss which they did not even discover until they were faced with the task of preaching?” Childs for his part asserts outright that Stendahl’s approach “destroys from the outset the possibility of genuine theological exegesis”—a drastic judgment on one of the greatest exegetical thinkers of twentieth-century America. Given this atmosphere, it will not be easy to achieve sweet reasonableness or compromise. There seem to be the following different elements involved in the argument for faith-commitment: 1 Biblical theology dealing with revelation, its data and contours is not

perceptible except to committed faith. An “objective” approach makes this sort of insight unattainable. 2 Biblical theology should not simply “describe objectively” what was there in

the Bible but should evaluate it, explain why it is good and show how it is a positive theological resource. 3 Biblical theology should not only state what was there in biblical times but

should provide an interpretation for modern times or at least the key to, or the method for, such an interpretation. 4 The biblical theologian is the servant of the modern community of faith and

cannot fulfil this task except through sharing in the faith of that community. In favour of the faith-commitment approach one must say that it is the one that fits in better with modern ideas, at least in much of the world of religion. In it the person

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who claims to speak “with objectivity” is likely to be laughed at: objectivity is an old idea, a outmoded fallacy long ago exploded. Everyone, it is thought, has some kind of personal “agenda” that he or she is pursuing. Not only is this so, but this is how it ought to be. It is fashionable to emphasize existential involvement and political activism and to look with scepticism at all thoughts of “objectivity.” The argument for faith-commitment thus has the wide support of current popular ideology. This opinion may surprise some and may indeed be disputed. Nevertheless I think it is right. I was surprised therefore to find that Ollenburger in his valuable article referred to above thinks that Stendahl’s opinions have been generally accepted. He writes that “they have profoundly affected the way biblical theologians, particularly in this country, think about their work and reflect on certain central, methodological questions. In fact, the distinctions for which Stendahl pleaded have come to be seen as virtually axiomatic, and self-evidently so, particularly for distinguishing biblical from systematic theology and the other theological disciplines. It is in locating biblical theology within the theological curriculum, and in providing a rationale for this location, that Stendahl’s proposal has proved most persuasive.” This may be right, but my impression is the opposite. I have heard far more dissent from Stendahl’s position than acceptance of it; and, as he himself saw it, his proposal was deliberately made as in opposition to what was normal among biblical theologians. I certainly do not agree that his ideas have been seen as “virtually axiomatic”: this seems to me remote from reality. I am more inclined to agree with Walter Brueggemann’s opinion that Stendahl’s distinction between “what it meant” and “what it means” is “increasingly disregarded, overlooked, or denied” whether such a judgment is right or wrong. It is certainly possible that the “curricular location of biblical theology,” as referred to by Ollenburger, has had a certain resemblance to Stendahl’s ideas. Biblical theology is indeed commonly taught for the most part—rightly in my opinion—as a study of the theology implied in the context of biblical times and cultures. This, however, is not necessarily the result of persuasion by Stendahl’s arguments. It could be the effect rather of classroom practicalities. For faith-commitment cannot easily be introduced as an essential into the classroom situation unless all participants are of the same faith, and indeed the same form of the same faith, in which case biblical theology would have to become an explicitly denominational activity. It is not easy to insist on faith-commitments as an essential in biblical theology when one is instructing a class that includes some Lutherans, some Anglicans of different currents, some Barthians, some progressive/liberationist/feminist Presbyterians, some Roman Catholics, some conservative Baptists, some liberal Methodists, some Mennonites and Disciples of Christ, perhaps two or three Jews and a few enquirers who are searching for a faith rather than possessing one. If pedagogical practice has seemed to agree with Stendahl’s ideas, this may be a result of such educational practicalities rather than the influence of his arguments. Indeed these same practicalities may well have been an important factor in the formation of Stendahl’s own mind, for he has been an experienced educational administrator as well as a theologian.

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Even where scholars have found that educational practice made it easier or necessary to teach along something like part of Stendahl’s lines, I think that many of these scholars remained personally unwilling to adopt his principles as their own. In spite, therefore, of respect for Ollenburger’s opinion cited above, I continue to think that the common ideology is more on the side of faith-commitment. Moreover, it can be argued that faith-commitment has the support of present and recent practice on its side in another way. In general, one must say, the whole operation of biblical theology, like that of biblical exegesis as a whole (including critical and historical exegesis), has been massively driven and motivated by faith. There have been exceptions here and there, but as a whole the enterprise has been the work of persons who understood themselves to be standing behind the Bible, identifying with its essentials, and advancing its potentialities for the nourishment of faith and true religion. And to start at the lowest level of argument how many people, if they were without lively religious faith and uninterested in the life of synagogue or church, would be likely to want to become involved in biblical theology at all? Biblical theology is likely to continue as a field of faith and commitment through sheer lack of interest from any other quarter. The vision, sometimes conjured up, of numerous sceptics and agnostics entering biblical theology and seeking to write Theologies of the Old or New Testament, is not a serious cause for worry. People interested in biblical theology are likely to continue to be religious believers, as they always have been. This, however, does not prove that faith-commitments are logically or methodologically necessary for the operations which biblical theology in fact undertakes. We may begin by illustrating this again from the case of Vriezen. As we have seen, in his extensive introductory section he emphasizes the essential place of faith and the task of evaluating the Old Testament by theological standards and seeking the element of revelation in it. But when we turn to the content section, which occupies the main part of his volume, it is not clear what parts of that discussion actually depend upon faith or commitment. So far as I can see, though occasional final evaluations and comments may be so dependent, the general exposé of material and the main argument do not so depend at all. In principle, anyone could do it. If you take typical sentences like The holiness of God does not only imply a consciousness of his unapproachableness, his being completely different, his glory and majesty, but also his self-assertion, or This idea of the jealousy of Yahweh is closely connected with the religious exclusiveness of the religion of Israel and must be recognized as inherent in Yahwism; it is the main cause of the development of theoretical monotheism, which does not only forbid the worship of other gods but also denies their existence,

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these observations, whether right or not, seem not to have any logical dependence on the faith of the writer or reader: they are comments that any intelligent and interested person who had read the Old Testament might make. Later, in the “canonical approach” of Childs, something of the same kind happens. As we have seen, he strongly rejects the “cool, descriptive, historical” approach supported by Stendahl (which will be discussed in more detail below). According to Childs, it “destroys from the outset the possibility of genuine theological exegesis.” The arguments which he puts forward at this point are three. First, that “the text must be seen as a witness beyond itself to the divine purpose of God”; secondly, that “the analogy between the two [Testaments] is to be sought on the ontological [as over against a historical] level”; and thirdly, that “there must be movement from the level of the witness to the reality itself.” These arguments may be quite reasonable in themselves, though I shall later question their relevance to this point in the dispute. Stendahl answers reasonably and moderately, saying that these points made by Childs are “useful formulations of the step from the descriptive to the normative and theological,” but do nothing to substantiate Childs’ main point, i.e. “the fallacy in isolating the descriptive task.” Childs’ own canonical approach is said to belong within faith-committed Christian theology. This would suggest that it contained insights that would be invisible or untenable for anyone without this commitment. But what happens in fact is otherwise. The actual procedures of the canonical approach are methods that can be adopted by anyone, whether they have theological commitment or not. In effect, many of them were accepted by literary critics who thought it right to move in this direction, but who were by no means believers in the theological sense. Believing in the virtues of a literary canon, being interested in the final form of the text and not in its historical location, and seeking a holistic “construal” of the whole, they could follow out or produce exactly the same kinds of exegesis. It must have been an embarrassment to Childs to find his proposals supported from this quarter. Like Vriezen before him, Childs was not able, or did not try, to point to interpretative decisions made under his method which could not have been made by intelligent unbelievers interested in canonical and holistic method. Moreover, Childs’ argument, if valid, must count not only against Stendahl’s view but against that of Eichrodt and, indeed, against those of many leading representatives of biblical theology. Incidentally, the reader should bear in mind that Childs may have either changed his mind about some of this, or contradicted himself. In the later OTTCC, 12, he tells us that “the canonical approach envisions the discipline of Old Testament theology as combining both descriptive and constructive features. It recognizes the descriptive task of correctly interpreting an ancient text which bears testimony to historic Israel’s faith. Yet it also understands that the theological enterprise involves a construal by the modern interpreter, whose stance to the text affects its meaning.” But this (with some question perhaps about the final phrase) is just what Stendahl maintained. Exactly both these steps were the centre of his proposal. The only difference might be over how much of one or the other is to be included under the term “biblical theology.”

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Certainly they are so close here that, if Stendahl’s proposal destroys the possibility of theological exegesis, the same is true of Childs’ own, and Childs owes him an apology for the very drastic judgment he expressed. In view of many other passages, it might seem more likely that the opinion expressed in OTTCC, 12 was a slip and that Childs’ original statement represents his continuing position. But in the still later Biblical Theology, Childs discusses the need “to describe carefully both the continuity and discontinuity between these two different witnesses of the Christian Bible”. He points out the variety of modes in which Old Testament and New Testament materials may be related to one another. Then he continues: “Only after this descriptive task has been done will it be possible to turn to the larger task of trying to engage in theological reflection of [sic!—is ‘on’ meant?] the whole Christian Bible in the light of its subject matter of which it is a witness” (my italics). He goes on to refer to the following sections of his massive work “as part of this descriptive task.” How does this differ from Stendahl’s programme? In this respect the position of Eichrodt seems to be more accurate in defining what has actually happened in biblical theology. The subject, according to him, is not dependent on faith or on any special mode of cognition, but lies within the field of traditional Old Testament studies: it differs from historical studies not through moving to a different plane altogether but only in that it is structural or systematic rather than diachronic (and, of course, as I have argued, structural study of this sort was always inherent in historical study in any case, so that there is at the most only a difference of emphasis). The operation works in the same way and on the same logical basis as any other of the normal scholarly operations practised by Old Testament scholars. In other words, though Eichrodt himself did not express it in exactly this way, it no more depends on faith-commitment than does historical criticism or any other operation of biblical scholarship. To put it in another way: it may be argued that theology by its nature depends on faith and revelation. Of course. But this applies only to theology proper, “authentic” or “real theology”; it is for the moment uncertain, however, whether biblical theology can necessarily claim to be theology in the authentic sense at all, and therefore the argument cannot yet be legitimately extended to it. Put it again in these terms: it can be said that biblical theology is part of Christian theology, and several have argued in this way. But the argument is indecisive. For there is both a wider and a narrower definition of what is comprised in “Christian theology.” In a narrower sense it may be that “Christian theology” means “Christian doctrinal theology” or “Christian practical theology,” and in that case one might argue that one cannot work in that area without personal faith and commitment (though even then it would be a stiflingly narrow and exclusivist view, which many active theologians would repudiate). But in the wider sense “Christian theology” would include all the subjects studied in a course of Christian theological study. These would include such disciplines as church history or Hebrew grammar, and it is doubtful whether personal faith and commitment is a necessity for serious work in these areas. Biblical theology might be like church history, or it might be like history of doctrine. Thus just to claim that it is

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“part of Christian theology,” even if true, does not prove anything. Christian theology in the wider sense includes many subjects which can be studied, and indeed must be studied, independently of personal faith. In order to justify the claim that one cannot work in biblical theology without personal faith-commitments, it has to be shown that there are observations, insights and conclusions that could not be made by persons who did not have these commitments. Thus far this has not been shown, or indeed been attempted. The material thus far written under the heading of biblical theology— including the material written by those who insist on a faith-commitment—suggests the reverse: that it requires an interest in theology and an empathy with it, but not a personal faith-commitment. What might with more justice be said in favour of faith-commitment is something else: namely, that a biblical theology worked out with a faith-commitment will be a somewhat different biblical theology from that written with the cool, objective, descriptive approach. The argument is not for or against a biblical theology but for or against a particular kind of biblical theology. Thus, to cite again Childs’ sentence written against Stendahl, “that the text must be seen as a witness beyond itself to the divine purpose of God” simply does not touch the intended target: for Stendahl’s proposal stands whether Childs’ objection is true or not. The point raised by Stendahl’s position is: even if the text is seen as a witness beyond itself, how do we know what it is witnessing to? We have to know what the theology of the text is before we can tell what aspect of “the divine purpose of God” it is saying something about. Childs’ objection therefore stands only if it is already known what “the divine purpose of God” is. It is therefore an argument not for theological exegesis as such, but for his own personal theological position, or, more precisely, a call for all biblical theologians to presuppose that by their own personal faith they know exactly what the divine purpose of God is. There is another way in which the difference between accurate “description” and faith-related “commitment” to the “normative” tends to dissolve in practice. Obviously, for those who hold a strong enough view of the authority of the Bible, if something is a good “description” of biblical beliefs and attitudes, then it is ipso facto “normative” and they are committed to it. In terms of method of discovery, there is no difference. Sermons, for instance, which by their own nature are appeals for commitment, contain constant claims that they are giving an accurate description of persons, entities, situations and doctrines of the Bible. Those who assume “committed” faith-attitudes are continually uttering what they claim to be accurate descriptions of situations within the Bible. Because they are accurate descriptions, they are normative. The difference is not one of method in the knowledge of the biblical situation, but one of the view of biblical authority. This is why those who deplore the idea of description continually return to using it themselves. The same applies in another aspect, namely the special position of Old Testament theology. For how can a theology of part of the Old Testament, or even of the whole of it, be “normative” in itself for Christianity? How can it be normative for Christianity except as it is considered in relation to the New Testament and the basic patristic sources of Christian theology? It would obviously be reasonable to think of it as

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normative for the Jewish reader, but for the Christian it could hardly be normative in itself, unless one takes the view that all theological positions of the Old Testament are identical with those of the New and with those of mature Christian theology. Unless this is so, one would have to have a view of the “normative” which is itself relative: that is, it is normative in so far as any Old Testament information, taken in itself, can be normative for Christianity. Here again the question of normativity is not an indication of a method or attitude with which to approach the theology, but is rather a function of the view of biblical authority with which one works. And even within the most orthodox currents of theological tradition such views are numerous and variable. Another way in which our problems can be formulated is by use of the temporal distinction of past and present, the distinction between “what it meant” and “what it means.” This distinction is best known from the famous and clear or perhaps one should say “at first sight fairly clear”—formulation of it by Krister Stendahl. Stendahl thought that biblical theology in itself should not be primarily evaluative. According to his view, biblical theology is a descriptive undertaking which, historically, and as objectively as possible, tells us what sort of “theology” existed in ancient times. “Objectively” here means: independently of whether one advocates this theology or disapproves of it, or thinks it is the ultimate divine revelation, or thinks it does not matter. These issues do not matter: we are concerned only with knowing what was there at the appropriate stage in biblical times. What the corresponding biblical texts mean for our time is a different affair. Take, let us say, the New Testament picture of a world of demons: it would be very wrong if we allowed our description of that time to be affected by the question whether or not we ourselves think it is good to believe in demons or a personal devil for today. We have to say, as honestly as we can, what they thought at the time. Or, to take the example which actually, I believe, was very seminal in forming Stendahl’s mind on this matter: the role of women in the church. When the ordination of women was discussed, a commission of the Church of Sweden discussed the matter and came to the conclusion that, on the basis of the New Testament, there was no case for women’s ordination. Stendahl agreed that, as descriptive biblical theology of the New Testament regarding this matter, this was quite correct. But, he thought, this was not decisive for the present day. A multitude of factors had altered the social setting since New Testament times: simply to repeat the New Testament judgment in modern times would be to falsify it. Thus it would be wrong, just because one thought the ordination of women to be right for the present day, to read back this opinion into the New Testament and to obscure the theology of the matter which they had actually held. It would be equally wrong, just because one knew (correctly) that the New Testament opinion was against this sort of thing, to suppose that this in itself settled the interpretative issue for modern times. Biblical theology is in principle historical and descriptive; the move to interpretation for the present day is a separate matter and involves other factors. Biblical theology concerns “what it meant”; a

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further and different hermeneutical step is involved in deciding “what it means.” Such is the position taken by Stendahl. Stendah’s own work illustrates the problems very well. His study on the place of women in the church has been a major example; to this we may add two others of his most important areas of impact on biblical interpretation: first, his support for an emphasis on bodily resurrection and his opposition to the idea of immortality of the soul, and secondly his essay on “St Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.” I. In the matter of resurrection and immortality, Stendahl maintains that the biblical books show little, or practically no, interest in the immortality of the soul, and says that this result is the product of “cool, descriptive biblical theology” exactly the correct terms of his own programme as described above. But in fact his thoughts on the matter are very deeply and passionately intermingled with what, as he sees it, “it means.” He thinks or then thought, for he might have adjusted his opinion later that people nowadays have factually lost interest in the immortality of the soul, that they were right to lose interest in it, and that it is good for them that they have done so or will do so. I believe I have shown that these strongly held sentiments about the modern relevance of the theme have distorted his treatment of the biblical material itself. In the second case Stendahl basically argues that St Paul in his thoughts about “justification by faith” was talking about something very different from the introspective problems of individual sin and guilt which became the dominant Western inheritance from Paul especially after Augustine and Luther. A shift to an understanding of what Paul was “really” talking about—the status of communities in relation to the church—would clearly, in Stendah’s mind, be very salutary for modern theology and religion. Here, without claiming to be an expert, I think that Stendahl is very likely right, and I do not see that his convictions about the present have distorted the biblical evidence. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that, on this occasion, “what it means” is very much mixed up with “what it meant,” and it is the importance of the modern message perceived that has in part prompted and fired this particular presentation of “what it meant.” Stendahl’s principle is thus somewhat compromised in its actual working out. Nevertheless in general he is emphatically in the right in this whole matter, although certain modifications will be suggested below. It would be quite wrong to suppose that, even if he had not universally succeeded in maintaining the distinction for which he pleads, this shows that the distinction is wrong. On the contrary, the fact that we are able to criticize his exegesis on these grounds shows that his principle is right. It would be fatal to biblical theology if every worker in the field felt at liberty to “discover” in the biblical material whatever message or implication he or she thought to be “good for” modern humanity to hear. Individual failures on Stendahl’s part to observe his own principle do not at all prove that the principle is wrong: indeed, the possibility of detecting that they are failures is dependent on the rightness of the principle itself. Particularly important is the principle in those cases where there is some element in the Bible which is distasteful to the biblical theologian. “I don’t much like this, why shouldn’t I leave it out?” is a temptation that many of us have felt from time to time.

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That it can be successfully resisted is shown by Stendahl’s own work on the place of women in the church. He was himself convinced that women should be ordained, that this was theologically right. But he made it clear that he agreed with the view of the Swedish theological commission, to the effect that the biblical evidence, taken for itself, pointed in the opposite direction. This recognition of a difference between what one oneself believes and what one perceives to have been the case in the Bible can be illustrated from other instances. Thus Albert Schweitzer is often credited with having discredited the “liberal” picture of the historical Jesus, and justifiably so. But it would be wrong to suppose that Schweitzer’s own theology was opposed to liberalism. On the contrary, he was very much a liberal. But he was able to paint the picture of the “eschatological fanatic” Jesus, one quite dissimilar to his own belief. We can conjoin with him the name of Johannes Weiss. Räisänen rightly takes them as an example of how relative (not absolute) objectivity works: “they dared to paint a Jesus who held a faith different from their own.” To put it in another way, a hermeneutic that will tell us “what it means” for today must be prepared to include an element of critique. This aspect has been missed by many biblical theologians, because they thought that, the more deeply the biblical theology was probed, the more obviously, directly and profoundly it will supply the correct and relevant meaning for today. Again Stendahl grasped this point well. Characteristic biblical theology of the 1940s and 1950s, he thought, worked out the biblical or Hebraic thought-forms of biblical times, indicated the complicated network of concepts and ideas that they implied, and then dumped the whole thing on the lap of twentieth-century theology, declaring that it was all authoritative as it stood and had to be accepted as such. And, in spite of the alleged “decline” of biblical theology, some people are still doing the same. As I have just said, Stendahl himself to some extent did it with the immortal soul. This view of Stendahl’s, indeed, has been much resisted by others. The opposition has argued, perhaps, from two angles, different but perhaps complementary. On the one hand, the ideal of objective description has been contested: the Bible could not be studied with cold objectivity, one could not enter into it without personal involvement and decision. According to this point of view,objective historical examination is illusory. James D. Smart went so far as to suggest that the ideal of objectivity is an actual obstacle to the discovery of truth about the Bible, and that passionate commitment was the sure way to true knowledge a notion that flies in the face of all experience of the workings of religious enthusiasm. On the other hand, biblical theology, it has been argued, is above all a mode in which the Bible is made more alive and relevant for today. Much of the discussion of the subject has shown the influence of homiletic needs and the pressure of rhetorical techniques: if one can come to perceive certain aspects as central to the Bible, how can one possibly rest content with observing that fact and not at once go out to proclaim that essential message to modern humanity? And, if biblical theology cannot show us how to preach the Christian message for today, what use is it? Note the emphasis on utility implied by this part of the argument.

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Actually, of course, it may well be that biblical theology will have a great deal of utility for questions of today. Nevertheless the approach to it must not be governed by expectations of utility, otherwise these considerations will inevitably corrupt its accuracy in representing the biblical material itself. In any case, even continuing with the matter of utility, arguments depending on faith-commitment are bound to lose their own utility if they are honestly presented as such. For those, whether scholars or preachers or laypersons, who build an argument on the basis of biblical material and add, “of course, this is the biblical view only because I approach it as a faith-committed liberal or evangelical, or Lutheran or Presbyterian,” have in effect destroyed their own argument and its utility. For the faithcommitment arguments to have force and utility, they have to be presented as if they were built upon the descriptive model which the faith-commitment supporter denies. Stendahl’s argument has sometimes been so read as if to suggest that, in his opinion, biblical scholarship should do nothing to provide interpretation for today. It should have been obvious that this was not so. His whole scheme was intended precisely to provide interpretation for today, and clearly did so in all the three cases I have cited above. Arguments against his thinking on the ground that it is “purely historical” or “antiquarian” or the like are complete misrepresentations. The centre of his scheme is that there are two distinct stages: we have to know correctly what the theology of the Bible was before we go on to state its meaning for the present day. This first stage he calls “biblical theology,” but the naming of it does not seem to be so essential. It would not much alter Stendahl’s scheme if we were to use “biblical theology” for the two stages combined, so long as the distinction between them were clearly observed. But in using “biblical theology” strictly for the first stage only Stendahl was, I suggest, following the main line of what has been understood by this term in the twentieth century. In interpreting for the present day we have to be clear and honest in indicating those points at which the modern interpretation is distinct from the theology of ancient times. Stendahl’s position has often been misunderstood, and a discussion of some of these misunderstandings may be helpful. It seems to be misunderstood by Tsevat, a Jewish scholar whose important contributions to our subject will be discussed below. He takes the investigation of “what it meant” to be, for Stendahl, purely history of religion, while “what it means” is real and normative Christian theology. The reverse is the case: for him the biblical theology was the objective description of the theology as it existed in biblical times. The move to “what it means” for today is the task of a hermeneutic procedure which can lead to results that are, at least on the surface, very different from “what it meant” in biblical times. The hermeneutic procedure very definitely takes into account the changed situation of people in medieval and modern times. For another possible misunderstanding see F. Mildenberger’s article “Biblische Theologie versus Dogmatik?”. He works mainly from Stendahl’s early paper in Hyatt, The Bible in Modern Scholarship. He appears to think that Stendahl is attacking the possibility of dogmatic thinking and insisting that his own historical-descriptive

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method is final. Actually Stendahl is seeking to limit the claims of biblical theology, which he describes as (at least potentially) “imperialistic,” in order to increase the freedom of dogmatics to take decisions which lie beyond the proper scope of biblical theology. This is an important positive emphasis, in view of the tendency of biblical theology, as already seen above in Chapters 5 and 6, to raise itself from the position of an ancillary discipline to one of superior authority over all other forms of theology. A grosser and more serious misrepresentation of Stendahl’s thought appears in Francis Watson’s Text, Church and World. He follows an early reaction of Childs in describing Stendahl’s position as “a naive empiricism”. Stendahl’s argument “is important not because it is original but as a clear statement of the self-understanding of most practitioners of historical-critical exegesis”. Watson emphasizes the contrast between the descriptive task, which is relatively simply and straightforward (“we can all join in and check each other’s results against the original”), and the task of interpretation for the present day, “an arduous road towards a goal that we glimpse only from afar.” The emphasis is “on the autonomy of the historical task and on the need for great circumspection in undertaking the theological one”. All of this is wrong. First of all, “naive empiricism” is mere abuse, for I do not see anything empirical in Stendahl’s approach. It presupposes, if anything, the categories of biblical theology and of hermeneutics as then understood, and if it has a fault it lies on that side and not in “empiricism.” Nowhere, so far as I can see, does Stendahl speak of, or advocate, an empirical procedure. Nor does Stendahl state the selfunderstanding of practitioners of historical-critical exegesis. Historical criticism, as a matter of fact, scarcely enters into his presentation. His position is predicated upon the concept of biblical theology. Admittedly, he does not make it very clear how one reaches that biblical theology in the first place. But his main point is that if there is a biblical theology, then it is a theology that existed in the past. This would be the same for a biblical theology built upon a quite anti-critical basis, denying historical criticism entirely: it would still, as purporting to be a biblical theology, be a theology intended as the theology of the people of biblical times. Again, if Stendahl’s position was “a clear statement of the self-understanding of most practitioners of historical-critical exegesis,” it is surprising that most such practitioners found it highly controversial and were unable to agree on whether they supported it or not. Moreover, Watson’s criticism on the grounds that for Stendahl theological assessment and construction were extremely remote and difficult of access is obviously untrue. As has been shown by all the examples I have put forward, the matter of ordination of women, the matter of soul and immortality, and the matter of justification by faith, Stendahl was swift to perceive and express present-day theological decisions arising from biblical exegesis. On one of these matters, that of justification by faith, the importance of his initiative for contemporary theology has been widely recognized by a variety of exegetes, including Watson himself, as indicated above.

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Historical critics, Watson alleges, “find that theology subjects the text to alien norms”. The reality, however, is quite the reverse: it is the tradition of biblical theology itself, as we have seen, that has repeatedly emphasized the danger that (traditional) theology subjects the text to alien norms. Watson asserts that historical-critical description “is dependent on a prior interpretation of these texts as historical artefacts chance remnants of a previous stage of human history whose meaning is wholly determined by their historical circumstances of origin.” Of course they are historical artefacts—even Watson probably does not deny this—but his argument is really that they are understood as only historical artefacts and nothing more at all, having no meaning at all beyond their historical circumstances of origin. This is rubbish and only shows how far the force of his argument has made him remote from the actualities of the people he is talking about. Finally, Watson instructs us: To appeal for an autonomous “description” is to ignore the fact that there is no such thing as a pure description of a neutral object; description always pre supposes a prior construction of the object in terms of a given interpretative paradigm. How amazingly original a thought! Who in the hermeneutical discussion has not heard it proclaimed a hundred times? To suppose that Stendahl, who had his finger uniquely on the pulse of exegetical discussions, was unaware of this elementary argument is only one part of the contemptuous superiority with which Watson approaches his subject. In spite of my support for Stendahl’s position, however, there are important modifications and corrections which ought to be suggested. In particular, I shall argue that his definition of biblical theology was excessively hermeneutical in character. It was dependent on a hermeneutical model based on meanings—”what it meant” against “what it means”—and on a hermeneutical model that is faulty. On the one hand it is somewhat misleading to define the object of biblical theology as “what it meant.” Probably Stendahl did not intend his distinction to be taken too exactly: for him the point was the distinction between “meant” and “means,” and the temporal distinction is very clearly conveyed by his formula. But the word “meant” suggests the meaning of the text, or of the Bible, in ancient times, what it then meant to people. What it meant to people could be a variety of things, but in any case it does not seem to coincide with the theology of the Bible (or of its various texts). Biblical theology is not looking for what it meant, but for what it was: what the theology of the Bible, or underlying the Bible, was (or perhaps is?—for it could be argued that, if a biblical theology can be discovered and stated, then that theology not only was but is and remains the theology of the Bible). The question is therefore about the “it” rather than about the tense of “means” or “meant.” If Stendahl’s formula had been expressed in this way, it might have received wider acceptance.

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A more serious and far-reaching observation is this: what “it” means (for the present) is never in fact what the Bible alone means. Theological interpretation of the Bible for today, which is what Stendahl had in mind, is never interpretation of one thing only, namely the Bible. In this assertion there are two elements. First, interpretation for today is interpretation in which the Bible is related to other relevant elements: the theological traditions, philosophy, modern religious and social situations and—very likely—natural theology. Or, to put it more vividly, it is not we who interpret the Bible but the Bible which interprets us and our world: cf. the title of Perlitt’s article “Auslegung der Bibel Auslegung der Welt.” What is normally intended when we talk about interpretation for today is not interpretation of the Bible alone. This means—still more important—that the model of an interpretation which takes the ancient biblical message or material and transfers or translates this into the modern world is a mistaken one not only from the historical but also from the religious/theological point of view. This is not a new idea, for it has been explored by Dietrich Ritschl and others, but its potential is as yet insufficiently realized. We cannot take an ancient passage or an ancient work like the Bible and say that its meaning has to be up-dated, brought into the modern world. “What it meant” in Stendahl’s terms is its only meaning. The process of religious appropriation of the Bible is not that we produce a new meaning, “what it means” for today. It is, on the contrary, that we, the modern religious community, sink ourselves increasingly into its past meaning. In the doing of this, that past meaning, which is the only meaning, interprets and criticizes our modern life as it comes into contact with our modern thoughts, traditions, experiences and histories. This process can inaccurately be called the finding of “the meaning of the Bible for today” but it is not really that, for the Bible has this “new” meaning only because it is brought into contact with a mass of non-biblical knowledge (or pseudo-knowledge). In other words, we are saying that the traditional idea of hermeneutics, as applied in much modern theology, has worked in a biblicistic manner, as if the thing being interpreted was (uniquely) the Bible and the process involved was (uniquely or primarily) one of overcoming the temporal distance and producing from the one source, the Bible, a meaning of that source for today. These thoughts, if valid, are of great importance for our general subject. For they mean that the religious appropriation of the Bible is much closer, much more analogous, to the historical study of it than has generally been perceived. It is not at all that the religious use of the Bible is identical with the research of the historian or the historical critic, but the historian’s penetration into biblical times is a more technical and methodically controlled process which operates in a mode analogical to the basic religious use of “what it meant.” In this respect Stendahl was mistaken in expressing his distinction, in itself a right one, in terms related to the “actualizing” hermeneutics then current. And, to forestall an obvious objection, the analogy with theology is also valid. The tendency to place theology in serious contrast with history—a tendency very visible in much biblical theology and particularly so in Childs’ canonical approach is certainly a deep contradiction. This is shown not so much by abstract arguments about history and theology but above all by the fact that the very approach which so

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sets theology apart from history is one whose theology is overwhelmingly historical in character. Childs’ own argumentation, as is obvious, is not really theological argumentation, but is above all historical argumentation, which uses the history of theology as a grid upon which value judgments are fixed. There remains one other criticism of Stendahl’s formulation which is also relevant for other wide areas of biblical theology. The question is: can the term “descriptive” be accepted for use without further qualification? Let us agree with the term “descriptive” as against the opposing faith-commitment position. And let us accept that the description of the (implied) theology of the Bible is the aim of biblical theology. Stendahl is therefore basically in the right. But his term “descriptive” does not well describe the process by which the work has to be done. The reality with which biblical theology is concerned is not an accessible entity, the contours of which are readily available for description. The process is essentially an imaginative one, which involves imaginative construction. It is indeed historical, as Stendahl rightly puts it, in the sense that it works within a historical framework and is subject to historical questioning and verification; but historical description, without the additional specification of imaginative construction, will not suffice to provide an answer. If Stendahl had modified his formula in this sense, some of the objections voiced against it might have been avoided. Again, it may be questioned whether “description” is the right term for some of the relations that biblical theology seeks to express. Given an entity with an apparent unity, one may speak of “describing” aspects of that entity: thus, let us say, we may try to describe the tendencies of the book of Deuteronomy or the thought of the prophet Amos, or to describe how terms for “soul” and “spirit” are used throughout the Bible, if there is in fact some unity in this group of terms. But the relations between the Old and New Testaments are not an entity of that kind. To use “describe” as the term for the way in which one may seek to relate the Old Testament to the New is a strange use of language. Thus it is not surprising that Preuss in the concluding sentences of his recent Old Testament Theology looks back on his main work as one of “pure description” but goes on to add: “the discovery and unfolding of these basic structures of Old Testament faith can … not remain only a historically orientated and purely descriptive [undertaking].” For then he goes on to speak of a “biblical theology” (in my terms a pan-biblical theology) which would open out into the basic structures or structural analogies of the complete (Christian) Bible. The perception and expression of these larger structures and wider analogies seems to go beyond what can be properly counted as “description.” Moreover, description requires the use of terms and categories belonging to our modern speech. Only in the most extreme formalistic approaches can we describe biblical texts and realities without some reference to our own categories. Formalism can be valuable because it gives us some important data, but for most purposes we have to go beyond that. If we set out to “describe” the meaning of Hebrew nephesh, we can do much of value with sheer statistics, with syntactical matrices, with parallelisms and so on, but we soon come to a point where we use English words of today,

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and then we have to start explaining that it does not mean exactly “soul” (and there is a question what that word means in English today, if it means anything) and yet in certain contexts it really is rather like “soul” after all a familiar exercise to everyone who tries to talk about such things. There is an unavoidable element of comparison with the way we think about things today, whether religiously or unreligiously. And so “description” of ancient things involves a certain critical examination of modern things, and “what it meant” comes to be somewhat mixed up with what something or other means today. We have to discuss more fully the matter of objectivity. Those who insist on faithcommitment are commonly very hostile to the idea of objectivity, and argue that perfect objectivity is an unrealistic notion which cannot be realized in this world. Everyone who says anything has some purpose or agenda which influences and possibly distorts the subject spoken about. Quite so. But this argument is irrelevant, for we are not speaking about perfect objectivity. We are speaking about the willingness to seek some limited but adequate measure of objectivity. We are asking for the admission that some limited degree of objectivity is better than a complete abandonment of objectivity. The faith-commitment argument is commonly so extremely hostile to objectivity that it is unwilling to set any limits at all to prejudice, special pleading and propaganda. Thus fairness and open-mindedness are seldom mentioned in works on biblical theology. Stendahl’s argument does not ask for perfect objectivity or for the objectivity of natural science. But it does ask, and rightly, that the person of faith-commitment should, in the face of the biblical material, to some extent hold his or her faith-commitment in suspense, place it, as it were, in a state of questioning, in which one asks oneself: does the biblical material really fit in with my existing faith-commitment, or may it be that my faith-commitment has to be adjusted in view of my new insights into the biblical material? There is another way in which the anti-objectivist arguments should be discounted. They are, as we have seen, part of the set of existentialist ideas which have been so influential in the entire base of biblical theology (and in many quarters are now being superseded by “postmodern” ideas, which are slightly different). It should not be believed, however, that these ideas are employed consistently. A consistent antiobjectivism might well be found in Bultmann; but just at this point many Old Testament theologians will turn away from him and look in another direction. Barthianism, which, as we have seen, was more influential in Old Testament theology, has also often had an anti-objectivist air and has opposed the supposed objectivist aims of historians. But Barthians who follow this line are not against objectivity all the way. They deny it to historians for a quite different reason: it is not that they are against objectivity—on the contrary they are in favour of it—but that they want it for themselves. That the Barthian theological vision has objectivity has been a basic conviction, and the same is true of the canonical approach as developed by Childs. Unquestionably much of the attraction of the canonical approach lies in the impression that here, in the canon, at last, in contrast with the varieties and speculative theories of critical interpretation, we

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have something objective as a foundation. The tirades of biblical theologians against objectivity are therefore by no means always to be taken too seriously. That these have inner contradictions can easily be seen. In his Introduction, Childs announces that it “seeks to describe as objectively as possible the canonical literature”. But his Exodus commentary began with a solemn declaration that he “does not share the hermeneutical position of those who suggest that biblical exegesis is an objective, descriptive enterprise.” In his later Biblical Theology he tells us that he attempts in this volume “to focus in more detail on the descriptive task of relating the Old Testament witness to the history of Israel, of course, according to its canonical form”. He wants to “describe” a trajectory of psalmic tradition. He refers to “a careful descriptive reading of the two Testaments in reference to the law.” However, he refers disparagingly to a “purely descriptive, sociological explanation” as the “least satisfactory approach” to questions about the historical Jesus. Referring to Hermisson’s study of faith, he tells us that “the appeal within the Old Testament to a reality called faith is a feature constitutive of Christian theology and is hardly a neutral descriptive reading of the literature”. These contradictions are a surface symptom of a contradiction about objectivity in deep structure. Those who despise and attack the value of objectivity are desperately in need of it for themselves. Another matter that may be mentioned in this connection is the question of the “time-conditioned quality” of interpretation. It has often been argued that attempts at “objective” work involved the illusion of standing outside the stream of time and producing a result wholly independent of one’s own modern position. This argument is often used in order to discredit historical-critical studies. It is one of the many myths thought up by the fertile imaginations of anti-historical writers. For, of course, it is entirely untrue that the great historical critics like Harnack, or the great theorists of critical history like Troeltsch, had any such idea of themselves. And as applied in justification of more modern exegetical proposals, the notion is a hypocritical one. Thus to take one example, Childs uses this argument repeatedly (“the canonical approach … rejects a method which is unaware of its own time-conditioned quality,” OTTCC ). But nowhere in the literature of the canonical approach are we told that this novel approach is conditioned by the background of the writer and by the social, economic and political situations of the period 1960–90. Still less are we told that the value of the canonical approach will be merely one phase which will last for one generation at most, and that by the end of that time people will all have become historicists again or return to some other non-canonical stance. In fact the “time-­conditioned” argument is an important element in the present-day trend towards complete relativism, which rightly distresses Childs. But if it distresses him, he should not use the arguments that sustain it. Arguments like this were used because they seemed to be a good stick with which to beat the historical emphasis; those who used them often did not consider how they would rebound upon themselves. A conclusion to this difficult controversy may now be attempted. First, as I have said, few are likely to embark on biblical theology without a faith-commitment. If any do, well, that is fine. They may surely be welcomed, for they may well come

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upon insights which the religious believer might not think of. Biblical theology should certainly not seek to be a religiously or denominationally closed and exclusive preserve. But, if most workers certainly work from a faith position, their faith-commitment in this case can properly be only a commitment to discover what is really there in the Bible, even if what is found disagrees with our present faith-commitments, extends them in a quite unexpected way, or goes in a quite different direction from them. Otherwise commitment tends very easily to mean that we see in the Bible what we already consider to be right, or useful, or in agreement with a particular church tradition, or relevant, or “good for” other people or useful for preaching. Examples of this are richly demonstrable in the literature of biblical theology. In this sense Stendahl’s position, though in part wrongly expressed, seems to be right. It is particularly important in the sort of cases on which he himself worked, cases where the biblical evidence reveals something that seriously clashes with current faith-commitments. On the other hand, those who have opposed Stendahl have often spoken as if faith-commitments meant that everything in the Bible must be directly right, acceptable, relevant and authoritative just as it stood. The value of his ideas appears best when we consider cases where this is not so. A good example is the case of natural theology. For many twentieth-century Christians—if they are theologically trained, since otherwise they will probably never have heard of the question—it is a faith-commitment that natural theology is totally wrong. But what if there are passages in the Bible which use natural theology and depend upon it? Those who oppose Stendahl’s position will also tend to ignore these passages, or to explain them away, or to deny their obvious meaning. This may then be an indirect denial of an important element of scripture. Now it may still be a right faith-commitment to say that natural theology is wrong. But if so, Stendahl’s approach provides a way of working. One can state and describe historically a body of ideas that are there in the Bible, while at a separate (doctrinal or hermeneutic) stage one will have to explain how or why these elements are of limited value, or limited to their own time, or in some other way not finally authoritative. [I myself would not do this, but this is just an explanation of a possible example.] Thus it is far from the case that the task of biblical theology is to explain what the text “means for the present day” or how it fits with the various more recent theological traditions or how it determines what should be done about modern socioethical questions. It is far from the duty of the biblical scholar to judge on these matters, though of course he or she may incidentally do so. This is, or should be, the judgment of the church or religious community itself. The church has plenty of people who are competent and ready to tell whether an interpretation of a part of the Bible is meaningful for the present day, or whether it fits in with Lutheran, Calvinist, Methodist or Catholic traditions, or what it means for modern social questions. All these people are ready and willing to be heard. What the church requires from biblical scholars is not that they should join them in this vociferous pleading, but that they should make clear how far these various resultant interpretations, whether apparently “relevant” or not, whether in accord with church tradition or not, whether socially meaningful for

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today or not, are firmly based in the Bible itself. Biblical scholars, therefore, whatever their allegiance in these matters, work usefully in so far as they ask the question: granted that I believe this or that to be in accord with my theological tradition, to be relevant for today, to be socially and ethically desirable, my duty to the church or community is to put into brackets, into parenthesis, these my own convictions and to ask whether or not the Bible itself supports them. If it does, then one can continue as one has been; if not, then a process of theological change may have to begin. The apparent conflict between personal commitment and objective description is therefore a poor model, which can lead only to severe and irreconcilable conflicts between opposed and partially valid positions. In essence, faith-commitment requires and supports a search for adequately objective description.

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20 John Webster Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch. Chapter 1, “Revelation, Sanctification, and Inspiration”

J

ohn Webster (b. 1955) is an English systematic theologian who has written major historical studies of Reformed Protestant theology, particularly the theology of Karl Barth, as well as his own constructive theological works. This selection constitutes the opening chapter of his book Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (2003). The piece is a brief contemporary re-articulation of Reformed teaching on the nature of the Bible, one that is indebted to Barth, and is also leavened with insights from earlier Protestant theologians. There is a focus in this work on specifying the relationship between the biblical text as conceived from a historical vantage point and the Bible as construed in relationship to God—two things Webster strives to hold together, and indeed to hold together in a theological way, though pressures in modern intellectual life render this aim easier to state than to fulfill. That this work concentrates on this issue makes it pertinent to this reader. Webster is determined not to allow what he sees as a specific contemporary problem to determine how he frames his doctrine of Scripture, lest attempting to address a current issue wrest him out of the tradition from within which he seeks to speak. Yet his articulation of the nature of Scripture does attempt to overcome what might loosely be termed “dualism”: any view that creates a disjunction between the immanent features of the Bible that bespeak its origin at a specific place and time in history, and the way in which the text, precisely as one with a contingent history, is a field of divine speech that presents to its readers the transcendent reality of God. This chapter intends to replace an either/or (either history or theology) with a both/and. The centerpiece of this reading is the doctrine of sanctification, the means by which Webster seeks to express how a creaturely text comes to be taken up into God’s self-presentation. Readers of Christian theology will be familiar with seeing the

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term “sanctification” used with primary reference to the way in which human beings break out of sinful practices and become holy. Applying the term to the Bible is an extension of this customary usage. In the new sense, sanctification is “the act of God the Holy Spirit in hallowing creaturely processes, employing them in the service of the taking form of revelation within the history of the creation.” To construe the text of the Bible thus undercuts views that suggest the Bible somehow dropped straight from heaven and has no natural features at all (supernaturalism). Likewise, however, it is also an antidote to reducing an account of the Bible to the point that only the Bible’s contingent, human features are included or deemed real (naturalism). This text is probably the most widely discussed contemporary Christian doctrine of Scripture. It has had some influence in the current discussion of theological interpretation of Scripture. Readers may want to inquire into whether the notion of sanctification works better than the five alternative notions that Webster mentions (or better than others that he perhaps omits) as a way of relating human and divine. Another question that proceeds from within the basic framework of assumptions that is operative in the text is how this doctrine of Scripture is itself based upon Scripture. There is some exegesis of 2 Peter 1.21 in connection with the doctrine of inspiration, together with occasional reference to other biblical texts. How precisely does the overall proposal base itself on Scripture? Perhaps its main biblical basis is simply indirect insofar as the text consists of reflection done from within a tradition that deeply values the Bible. From outside Webster’s framework altogether, one might ask how a determined naturalist would reply to his work.

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Holy Scripture is not a single or simple entity. The term “Holy Scripture” refers primarily to a set of texts but importantly and secondarily to its divine origin and its use by the church. Thus the content of the term can only be thoroughly mapped by seeing this set of texts in connection with purposive divine action in its interaction with an assemblage of creaturely events, communities, agents, practices and attitudes. To talk of the biblical writings as Holy Scripture is ultimately to refer to more (but not to less!) than those writings per se. It is, on the one hand, to depict these texts in the light of their origin, function and end in divine self-communication, and, on the other hand, to make recommendations about the kinds of responses to these texts which are fitting in view of their origin, function and end. “Holy Scripture” is a shorthand term for the nature and function of the biblical writings in a set of communicative acts which stretch from God’s merciful self-manifestation to the obedient hearing of the community of faith. The sufficiency of Scripture, that is, not quite the same as its “self-sufficiency.”1 Yet whilst “Holy Scripture” does refer to a composite reality (texts in relation to revelation and reception), there is a definite order to its elements. Most of all, both the texts and the processes surrounding their reception are subservient to the self-presentation of the triune God, of which the text is a servant and by which readers are accosted, as by a word of supreme dignity, legitimacy and effectiveness. This order is critically important because, unless their strict subservience to communicative divine activity is stated with some firmness, both text and practices of reading and reception may break loose and become matters for independent or quasi-independent investigation and explanation. When that is allowed to take place, the result is a disorderly ontology of Holy Scripture. One type of disorder—the isolation of the text both from its place in God’s revelatory activity and from its reception in the community of faith—has, as we shall see, long been a problem in Western divinity since the Reformation. A somewhat different kind of disorder results when the term “Holy Scripture” is expounded in such a way that its primary (or sometimes exclusive) reference is to the uses of the biblical texts made by readers, and only secondarily (if at all) to the place of the texts in the economy of God’s communicative grace. By way of example: in What is Scripture? Wilfred Cantwell Smith presents a sustained argument that “Scriptures are not texts!”2—that the term “Scripture” is a way of talking about human practices vis-à-vis texts rather than about texts themselves: There is no ontology of scripture. The concept has no metaphysical, nor logical, referent; there is nothing that scripture finally “is” … [A]t issue is not the texts of scripture that are to be understood and about which a theory is to be sought, but the dynamic of human involvement with them … Scripture has been … a human activity: it has been also a human propensity, a potentiality. There is no ontology of scripture; just as, at a lower level, there is no ontology of art, nor of language, nor of other things that we human beings do, and are. Rather than existing independently of us, all these are subsections of the ontology of our being persons.3

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A much more theologically complex examination of the issues is offered by Ingolf Dalferth, who explores a distinction between the singular term “Scripture” (Schrift) and the plural term “scriptures” or “writings” (Schriften). Where the latter refers to the biblical writings per se, the former refers to these writings in their use by the faith community. “Scripture” is thus “the use made of the scriptures of the Bible in … the event of the church’s proclamation”4 hence ingredient within the concept of “Scripture” is “the Christian community or church” which uses the biblical writings as Scripture.5 Dalferth’s concern is, clearly, a legitimate Reformation point of conscience: the desire to avoid any account of the nature of Scripture extra usum and to insist on determining the nature of Scripture in usu et actione. The difficulty arises when use and action are identified too closely with “kerygmatic-doxological use” of Scripture by the church.6 Dalferth certainly avoids Cantwell Smiths collapse of the notion of Scripture into that of community usage by insisting on the coinherence of Scripture, church and faith with communicative divine presence; but his claim that, nevertheless, the term “Scripture” identifies an aspect of Christian Lebenspraxis without empirical content7 points in a quite different direction, one in which the corporate subjectivity of the church looms very large. What is required, and what this book tries to sketch, is a dogmatic account of the nature of Holy Scripture which neither restricts the scope of what the term indicates (texts in relation to God’s communication and its hearing) nor allows the element of creaturely reception to become inflated. The first three chapters undertake such an account by looking at the relation of Scripture to the divine acts of revelation, sanctification and inspriration, and then at the churchly and readerly acts of receiving the Word of God. Crucially, my suggestion is that the proper connections between the various elements (revelation, text, community, faithful reception) can only be retained by their careful dogmatic specification. This first chapter begins the task of mapping Christian talk of the Bible as Holy Scripture in a dogmatic projection by arguing that an essential task of the term “Holy Scripture” is to indicate the place occupied by the biblical texts in the revealing, sanctifying and inspiring acts of the triune God. Holy Scripture is dogmatically explicated in terms of its role in god’s self-communication, that is, the acts of Father, Son and Spirit which establish and maintain that saving fellowship with humankind in which God makes himself know to us and by us.8 The “sanctification” of Scripture (its “holiness”) and its “inspiration” (its proceeding from God) are aspects of the process whereby God employs creaturely reality in his service, for the attestation of his saving self-revelation. Thus, what is said about the sanctification and inspiration of Scripture is an extension of what is said about revelation; but what is said about revelation is an extension of what is said about the triune God. What Scripture is as sanctified and inspired is a function of divine revelatory activity, and divine revelatory activity is God’s triune being in its external orientation, its gracious and self-bestowing turn to the creation. The first task, then, is to offer an overall sketch of the doctrine of Holy Scripture by examining three primary concepts: revelation, sanctification and inspiration. The first and third terms are familiar in theological discussion of the nature of Scripture, and,

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although I argue that some careful dogmatic specification of these terms is required if they are to be serviceable, appeal to them should hold no surprises. However, the second term, “sanctification,” may seem somewhat out of place, since its more usual application is in discussion of soteriology, specifically in giving a theological account of the application of salvation, that is, the effectiveness of Christ in the lives of believers. But although the primary field in which the term is deployed remains that of the relation between divine and human persons, it may legitimately be extended to non-personal realities in so far as they are instruments of the personal relations between God and humankind. “Sanctification” is not improperly used in this way in, for example, sacramental theology, to indicate the segregation of creaturely realities by virtue of their moulding and use by God to undertake specific tasks in the economy of salvation. In this sense, a “sanctified” reality is most generally described as set apart by God as a means of divine self-communication. In the context of discussing the relation between divine self-revelation and the nature of Holy Scripture, sanctification functions as a middle term, indicating in a general way God’s activity of appointing and ordering the creaturely realities of the biblical texts towards the end of the divine self-manifestation.The scope of its application is thus wider than the term “inspiration,” which is best restricted to discussion of the more specific question of the relation between divine self-communicative acts and Scripture as textual entity. It is certainly true that, with declining confidence in the viability of a dogmatic notion of verbal inspiration, the range of the term “inspiration” has in some modern theology been considerably broadened, to become equivalent to, for example, a supposed intuitive awareness of the divine on the part of the biblical authors, or the illumination of the readers of the biblical text. A more orderly account of the matter will, however, restrict the application of the term to the specific set of divine acts in respect of the production of the biblical texts, and look for a term of wider reach to indicate the overall process of God’s ordering of creaturely realities as servants of his self-presentation. For this wider task, I suggest the adoption of the term “sanctification.” As used here, it is closely related to two other tracts of theological doctrine, namely providence and the theology of mediation. “Providence” speaks of the divine activities of ordering creaturely realities to their ends; “mediation” speaks of the instrumentality of created realities in the divine working. Both terms are readily applicable in the context of discussing the nature of Scripture. God’s work of overseeing such processes as tradition-history, redaction, authorship and canonisation could well be described in terms of the divine providential acts of preserving, accompanying and ruling creaturely activities, annexing them to his self-revelation. And the function of these providentially ordered texts in the divine economy could be depicted as mediatorial. If the term “sanctification” is still to be preferred, it is, as I hope to show, because it covers much of the same ground as both of these terms, whilst also addressing in a direct way the relation of divine activity to creaturely process, without sliding into dualism. But the terms are certainly porous, and in and of themselves they are of little consequence; all that matters is their fittingness for the task of orderly explication of the matter itself.

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Revelation Like many other stretches of Christian teaching, the Christian doctrine of revelation suffers from the distortions of its shape introduced by attempts to formulate and expound it in relation to and, in some measure, in dependence upon, dominant modern intellectual and spiritual conventions. Indeed, this locus of Christian theology is a particularly acute register of the distress felt by modern Christian theology when faced by the collapse of the cultural metaphysic in which classical Christianity had developed and which, indeed, it helped to form. As that overarching framework crumbled, Christian theological teaching about revelation became at one and the same time desperately unworkable and desperately necessary: unworkable, because of what was feared to be irrefutable philosophical and moral challenge; necessary, because any possible response to that challenge seemed ultimately to require a defence of Christian claims by a reconstruction of the possibility of revelation, a reconstruction in which the guiding hand was very often philosophical rather than dogmatic. Both the lack of viability and the urgent need for reconstruction are symptomatic, however, of the severe doctrinal disarray in which Christian teaching found itself in modernity. If the doctrine of revelation has stumbled and fallen, it has not only been because Christian theology was tongue-tied in trying to answer its critics to their satisfaction; it has also been because Christian theology found itself largely incapable of following and deploying the inner logic of Christian conviction in its apologetic and polemical undertakings. And the reason for that failure on the part of Christian theology is that theology itself had in important respects already lost touch with an orderly understanding of God’s self-communication, and in its place offered rather stripped-down or misshapen versions of the topic. Most tellingly, these reduced accounts of revelation were seriously under-determined by the specifically Christian content of Christian teaching about God. “Revelation,” that is, was transposed rather readily into a feature of generally “theistic” metaphysical outlooks. As such it could be expounded generically, without much by way of concrete material reference to those aspects of the Christian apprehension about God which mark out its positivity: Christology, pneumatology, soteriology and—embracing them all—the doctrine of the Trinity. Understood in this dogmatically minimalistic way, language about revelation became a way of talking, not about the life-giving and loving presence of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Spirit’s power among the worshipping and witnessing assembly, but instead of an arcane process of causality whereby persons acquire knowledge through opaque, non-natural operations. In short: failure to talk with much by way of Christian determinacy about revelation—whether on the part of its opponents or of its defenders—left the doctrine pitifully weak, and scarcely able to extricate itself from the web of objections in which it was entangled. Yet at the very same time that the doctrine was eviscerated in this way, the demands placed upon it increased to a point where they became insupportable.

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Perhaps the most significant symptom of this is the way in which Christian theological talk of revelation migrates to the beginning of the dogmatic corpus, and has to take on the job of furnishing the epistemological warrants for Christian claims. This absorption of revelation into foundations has two effects. First, it promotes the hypertrophy of revelation by making it responsible for providing the platform on which all subsequent Christian teaching is erected; and thereby, second, it exacerbates the isolation of talk of revelation from the material dogmatic considerations (Trinity, incarnation, Spirit, church) through its mislocation and its reassignment to undertake duties which it was not intended to perform. This latter aspect of the fate of Christian teaching about revelation had particularly damaging consequences for Christian theological thinking about the nature of Scripture. For alongside the hypertrophy of revelation and its migration into epistemology, there develops a parallel process whereby revelation and Scripture are strictly identified. As this happens, then Scripture’s role as the principium cognoscendi of Christian faith and theology comes to be thought of in such a way that Scripture precedes and warrants all other Christian doctrines as the formal principle from which those other doctrines are deduced. If this unhappy process is to be countered, what is required is not more effective defence of the viability of Christian talk about revelation before the tribunal of impartial reason: the common doctrinal slenderness of such defences nearly always serves to inflame rather than reduce the dogmatic difficulties. The doctrinal under-determination and mislocation of the idea of revelation can only be overcome by its reintegration into the comprehensive structure of Christian doctrine, and most especially the Christian doctrine of God. The most important consequence of this reintegration will be to call into question the idea that the doctrine of revelation is a tract of Christian teaching with quasi-independent status; this will in turn offer the possibility of an orderly exposition of revelation as a corollary of more primary Christian affirmations about the nature, purposes and saving presence of the triune God. Moreover, straightening out some of the disorder of the theology of revelation will release Christian teaching about Holy Scripture from some of the inhibitions under which it has operated, and so encourage a more fruitful exposition of that locus. In thesis form, the argument to be set out here may be stated thus: revelation is the self-presentation of the triune God, the free work of sovereign mercy in which God wills, establishes and perfects saving fellowship with himself in which humankind comes to know, love and fear him above all things. Revelation, first, is the self-presentation of the triune God. Revelation, that is, is a way of talking about those acts in which God makes himself present; indeed, “[r]evelation is … divine presence.”9 This may be expanded in two directions. First, the content of revelation is God’s own proper reality. Revelation is not to be thought of as the communication of arcane information or hidden truths, as if in revelation God were lifting the veil on something other than his own self and indicating it to us. Talk of revelation is not talk of some reality separable from God’s own being, something which God as it were deposits in the world and which then becomes manipulable. Revelation is divine self-presentation; its content is identical with God.

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To speak of revelation is simply to point to the divine self-utterance: I am who I am. “[R]evelation … is nothing less than God Himself.”10 Second, the agent of revelation is God himself: God presents himself. The realisation of the presence of God is not an undertaking of an agent other than God; God is not inert or inactive but eloquent, “speaking out” of himself. Part of the force, indeed, of the use of the metaphor of speech in talking of divine revelation as “God’s Word” is to indicate that God is outgoing, communicative, antecedently one who comes to and addresses creaturely reality, making himself present as that which conditions and determines that reality in its entirety. Revelation, therefore is identical with God’s triune being in its active self-presence. As Father, God is the personal will or origin of this self-presence; as Son, God actualises his self-presence, upholding it and establishing it against all opposition; as Holy Spirit, God perfects that self-presence by making it real and effective to and in the history of humankind. To speak of “revelation” is to say that God is one whose being is directed towards his creatures, and the goal of whose free self-movement is his presence with us. Second, as God’s free self-presentation, revelation is a free work of sovereign mercy. God’s revelation is God’s spiritual presence: God is the personal subject of the act of revelation, and therefore revelation can in no way be commodified. God is—as Gérard Siegwalt puts it—revelation’s “unattainable content.”11 As spiritual presence, the presence of God is free: it is not called forth by any reality other than itself; it is majestically spontaneous and uncaused. Its origin, actualisation and accomplishment require nothing beyond God. Like the entire history of the divine mercy of which it is part, revelation is unexpected, undeserved, possible only as and because God is, and present after the manner of God. In Barth’s curious phrase, “God is the Lord in the wording of His Word.”12 This is why revelation is mystery, a making known of “the mystery of God’s will” (Eph. 1.9). That is to say, revelation is the manifest presence of God which can only be had on its own terms, and which cannot be converted into something plain and available for classification. Revelation is God’s presence; but because it is God’s presence, it is not direct and unambiguous openness such that henceforth God is plain. To think in such terms of an “open and directly given revelation”13 would be to historicise or naturalise God’s personal revelatory activity, reducing it to an intra-mundane phenomenon—a danger which, as we shall see, has afflicted much Christian theological talk about the nature of Holy Scripture. “The holy that is obvious, the sacral, is never the true holy. The true holy is spirit, not thing. The Deus dixit is revelation, not revealedness.”14 So far, then, revelation is God’s self-presentation in free mercy. As this selfpresentation, revelation is, third, the establishment of saving fellowship. Revelation is purposive. Its end is not simply divine self-display, but the overcoming of human opposition, alienation and pride, and their replacement by knowledge, love and fear of God. In short: revelation is reconciliation. “This is what revelation means,” writes Barth, “this is its content and dynamic: Reconciliation has been made and accomplished.

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Reconciliation is not a truth which revelation makes known to us; reconciliation is the truth of God Himself who grants Himself freely to us in His revelation.”15 As the gracious presence of God, revelation is itself the establishment of fellowship. It is not so much an action in which God informs us of other acts of his through which we are reconciled to him; rather, revelation is a way of indicating the communicative force of God’s saving, fellowship-creating presence. God is present as saviour, and so communicatively present. The notions of God as revealer and God as reconciler are sometimes thought to tug in different directions: “revealer” suggests an excessively noetic understanding of our relation to God, and “reconciler” corrects this by emphasising participation or communion in the life of God.16 But the contrast is specious. For, on the one hand, fellowship with God is communicative fellowship in which God is known; it is not a mere unconscious ontological participation in God. And, on the other hand, knowledge of God in his revelation is no mere cognitive affair: it is to know God and therefore to love and fear the God who appoints us to fellowship with himself, and not merely to entertain God as a mental object, however exalted. Revelation is thus not simply the bridging of a noetic divide (though it includes that), but is reconciliation, salvation and therefore fellowship. The idiom of revelation is as much moral and relational as it is cognitional. Revelation is the self-giving presence of God which overthrows opposition to God, and, in reconciling, brings us into the light of the knowledge of God. If we stand back a pace from this brief sketch of revelation as presence, grace and reconciliation, we notice particularly that the proper doctrinal location for talk of revelation is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and, in particular, the outgoing, communicative mercy of the triune God in the economy of salvation. Revelation is the corollary of trinitarian theology and soteriology. “The centre is not divine self-identification but divine saving action. Thus it is preferable to say that revelation is first of all a function of that divine action by which the redemption of the creation is achieved in such a way that human blindness and ignorance are also removed. To that extent the doctrine of revelation should be understood as a function of the doctrine of salvation.”17 What Christian theology has to say about revelation is not simply deployed as a means of dealing with epistemological questions, or primarily as an answer to questions of the sources and norms of church and theological discourse. It may address these concerns, but it does so as an application or extension of its material content, which is the sovereign goodness of Father, Son and Spirit in willing, realising and perfecting saving fellowship. “Revelation” denotes the communicative, fellowship-establishing trajectory of the acts of God in the election, creation, providential ordering, reconciliation, judgment and glorification of God’s creatures.

Sanctification The argument so far can be summed up by saying that a Christian theology of revelation becomes dysfunctional when its bonds to the doctrine of the Trinity disintegrate; consequently, that rebuilding a doctrine of revelation is inseparable from

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attention to the properly Christian doctrine of God. From here, we turn to sketch in general terms the way in which the creaturely reality of Scripture serves in the saving economy of God’s self-communication, by explicating the term “sanctification.” In briefest form, sanctification is the act of God the Holy Spirit in hallowing creaturely processes, employing them in the service of the taking form of revelation within the history of the creation. As with revelation, so here: the doctrine of the Trinity proves itself to be of critical importance in giving an account of the relation of God’s selfcommunication to the creaturely reality of the biblical text. For—to put the matter at its simplest—the tendency of modern intellectual culture to bifurcate the transcendent reality of God and the creaturely texts of the Bible can only be countered by appeal to a Christian doctrine of the trinitarian works of God. In particular, an account of the relation between revelation and the Bible needs to draw heavily upon the resources of the theology of the Spirit of the risen Christ as the free, active self-presence of the triune God in creation, sanctifying creaturely realities for the divine service and, more specifically, inspiring the biblical writings. Such Christological-pneumatological considerations help prevent the theology of Scripture from being overwhelmed by a burden which has sorely afflicted the intellectual conscience of modern Western divinity (especially Protestant divinity), which continues to haunt us, and for which there has emerged no commonly agreed resolution. That burden is the question of how we are to conceive the relation between the biblical texts as so-called “natural” or “historical” entities and theological claims about the self-manifesting activity of God. The problems referred to here are neither single nor stable, and a full exposition of them would require very considerable historical delicacy. But the core of the problem maybe indicated in the following rather rough terms. Much modern study of the Bible has understood its task as that of the investigation of what early on in the development of critical scholarship Spinoza called “the ‘history’ of Scripture.”18 That is, the job of the biblical scholar consists in inquiry into and interpretation of the text as a natural entity through the investigation of its language, provenance, authorship, reception and subsequent career. Though some modern critical strategies of investigation may have greater sophistication than that of Spinoza (in, for example, analysing rhetorical, socio-economic or ideological aspects of the history of Scripture), the basic historical naturalism remains. Affirmations of the role played by the text in the revelatory economy of God are not considered germane to determining what the text is; if considerations of any such role are entertained, it is only after fundamental determinations of the substance of the text have been reached on historical grounds. For a Christian theological account of Scripture, the problem raised here is a matter not so much of what is affirmed but of what is denied. The problem, that is, is not the affirmation that the biblical texts have a “natural history,” but the denial that texts with a “natural history” may function within the communicative divine economy, and that such a function is ontologically definitive of the text. It is this denial—rather than any purely methodological questions—which has to form the focus of dogmatic critique.19

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Part of what lies behind this denial is the complex legacy of dualism and nominalism in Western Christian theology, through which the sensible and intelligible realms, history and eternity, were thrust away from each other, and creaturely forms (language, action, institutions) denied any capacity to indicate the presence and activity of the transcendent God. The ramifications are felt throughout the corpus of Christian teaching: in debates about justification, about the nature of the church, about divine grace and human free will, or about the nature of political society. But they are seen with special vividness in Christian teaching about the nature of the Bible, for at least three reasons: the prominence of Scripture as a norm in Protestant church life and theology; the particular construals of the inspiration of Scripture which emerged in post-Reformation confessional theology; and the extraordinary prestige which historical science acquired in the course of its application to canonical Christian texts. All these factors conspired to exacerbate the distress felt by Christian theology once critical history came to dominate its intellectual culture. The problem, however, was not restricted to naturalistic biblical critics, for the dualistic framework of modern historical naturalism as applied to the study of the biblical texts was in many respects shared by those who resisted the claims of critical history. The disorder of Christian theological language about the Bible in modernity, that is, was further compounded by the way in which some theologians leapt to the defence of Scripture by espousing a strident supernaturalism, defending the relation of the Bible to divine revelation by almost entirely removing it from the sphere of historical contingency, through the elaboration of an increasingly formalised and doctrinally isolated theory of inspiration. Rather than deploying theological resources to demonstrate how creaturely entities maybe the servants of the divine selfpresence, they sought to dissolve the problem by as good as eliminating one of its terms: the creatureliness of the text. From one angle, the result is docetic—a text without any kind of home in natural history. From another angle, the result is ironically historicising, a de-eschatologizing of the text’s relation to revelation by envisaging the text as an apparently creaturely object endowed with divine properties. Both naturalism and supernaturalism are trapped, however, in a competitive understanding of the transcendent and the historical. Either the naturalness of the text is safeguarded by extracting it from any role in God’s self-communication, or the relation of the text to revelation is affirmed by removing the text from the historical conditions of its production. Pure naturalism and pure supernaturalism are mirror images of each other; and both are fatally flawed by the lack of a thoroughly theological ontology of the biblical texts. The plunge into dualism is inseparable from the retrenchment of the doctrine of Trinity in theological talk of God’s relation to the world. When God’s action towards the world is conceived in a non-trinitarian fashion, and, in particular, when Christian talk of the presence of the risen Christ and the activity of the Holy Spirit does not inform conceptions of divine action in the world, then that action comes to be understood as external, interruptive, and bearing no real relations to creaturely realities. God, in effect, becomes causal will, intervening in creaturely reality from outside but

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unconnected to the creation. This frankly dualistic framework can only be broken by replacing the monistic and monergistic idea of divine causality with an understanding of God’s continuing free presence and relation to the creation through the risen Son in the Spirit’s power. In this continuing relation, creaturely activities and products can be made to serve the saving self-presentation of God without forfeiting their creaturely substance, and without compromise to the eschatological freedom of God. It is precisely here that the notion of sanctification proves its utility. For the notion of Scripture as “sanctified” addresses the cluster of problems we have been reviewing by offering a dogmatic ontology of the biblical texts which elides neither their creatureliness nor their relation to the free self-communication of God. At its most basic, the notion states that the biblical texts are creaturely realities set apart by the triune God to serve his self-presence. Thereby, talk of sanctification moves discussion of the nature of Scripture out of the dualisms of what Gordon Spykman calls “two-factor theologies,”20 which continue to force a choice between either a divine or a human text, either inspiration or naturalism. Before moving to explore the notion of sanctification in more detail, however, it is important to review a number of different terms which might be deployed to state the relation of a creaturely text to divine revelation. Five terms are of particular significance. First, a long tradition of Protestant dogmatics appealed to the notion of the divine act of accommodation or condescension in the use of human language and texts for the communication of divine verities. However, as expounded in Protestant scholasticism, the notion of accommodation is tied to an excessively neat distinction between, on the one hand, the form, manner or mode of revelation and, on the other hand, the content of revelation. The first (form) is associated with the human character of the biblical texts, the second (content) with the matter of divine wisdom to which this form is external. Although accommodation and (especially) condescension give proper emphasis to the way in which the biblical texts are what they are in the economy of God’s self-revelation, the distinction between form and content can have the effect of inflaming the problem of dualism by reinforcing the idea that the creatureliness of the text is simply external and contingent. A related difficulty arises with the use of the analogy of the hypostatic union to conceptualise the relation of the divine and human elements in Scripture: in the same way that divine and human natures are united in the incarnate Word, so in the scriptural word divine and human are brought together without confusion and without separation. Like any extension of the notion of incarnation (in ecclesiology or ethics, for example) the result can be Christologically disastrous, in that it may threaten the uniqueness of the Word’s becoming flesh by making “incarnation” a general principle or characteristic of divine action in, through or under creaturely reality. But the Word made flesh and the scriptural word are in no way equivalent realities. Moreover, the application of an analogy from the hypostatic union can scarcely avoid divinising the Bible by claiming some sort of ontological identity between the biblical texts and the self-communication of God. Over against this, it has to be asserted that no

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divine nature or properties are to be predicated of Scripture; its substance is that of a creaturely reality (even if it is a creaturely reality annexed to the self-presentation of God); and its relation to God is instrumental. In the case of the Bible, there can be no question of “a union of divine and human factors,” but only of “the mystery of the human words as God’s Word.”21 Much less likely to beguile us into such problems is a third concept, namely that of Scripture as prophetic and apostolic testimony, much used by Barth throughout his writings, but found elsewhere in Reformed theology. What makes this a particularly helpful term is the way in which it retains the human character of the biblical materials without neglect of their reference to the Word and work of God. The very genre of “testimony”—as language which attests a reality other than itself—is especially fitting for depicting how a creaturely entity may undertake a function in the divine economy, without resort to concepts which threaten to divinise the text, since—like prophecy or apostolic witness—testimony is not about itself but is a reference beyond itself. However, some careful specification is needed, because the notion of Scripture as human testimony to God’s revealing activity can suggest a somewhat accidental relation between the text and revelation. This is especially the case when the essential unsuitability or creaturely fragility of the testimony is so stressed (in order to protect the purity of the divine Word) that there appears to be little intrinsic relation between the texts and the revelation to which they witness. In this way, the annexation of the Bible to revelation can appear almost arbitrary: the text is considered a complete and purely natural entity taken up into the self-communication of God. The result is a curious textual equivalent of adoptionism. If the difficulty is to be retarded, however, it has to be by careful dogmatic depiction of the wider scope of the relation between God and the text, most of all by offering a theological description of the activity of God the Holy Spirit in sanctifying all the processes of the text’s production, preservation and interpretation. Thereby the rather slender account of divine action vis-à-vis the text is filled out, without falling into the problems of undermining the creatureliness of the text which afflict talk of accommodation or the analogy of the hypostatic union. Some of the same strengths are found in a fourth concept, that of Scripture as a “means of grace.” The advantage of this concept is its soteriological idiom, its exposition of the nature of Scripture in terms of Scripture’s place in the saving dealings of God with humankind, rather than simply as authority or epistemological norm.22 Much hangs, however, on the way in which “means” is understood. Like the notion of Scripture as testimony, it affords a way of affirming the instrumental role of Scripture in God’s self-communication without rendering the means divine in itself. However, there is a tendency in any theology of mediation (sacramental, ministerial and symbolic as well as textual) to allow the mediating reality to eclipse the self-mediation of God in Christ and Spirit. Any notion of “means,” that is, has to be purged of the assumption that the mediated divine reality is itself inert or absent until “presented” by that which mediates. Here the notion of testimony has some advantages, in that it conceives of Scripture as a reference to the active presence of another communicative agent rather than as an intermediary, bridging the gap between divine reality and human historical

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experience. Once again: Christology and pneumatology are crucial to orderly dogmatic exposition. A final concept, very close in many respects to that of “sanctification,” is that of the “servant-form” of Scripture, developed by Berkouwer in his fine study Holy Scripture, but owing much to his forbear Herman Bavinck. Throughout his book, Berkouwer argues against an unwarranted transcendentalism in talk of divine revelation, which, he argues, “cannot be viewed as merely touching the circle of our reality and leaving it immediately thereafter.”23 Rather, revelation—God’s active presence as Word—is to be understood as “treasure in earthen vessels” (2 Cor. 5.7), Scripture being the fitting creaturely servant of the divine act. “The Word of God, Scripture in the form of a servant, is not known to us in the outlines of a supernatural miracle lifted out of time and human weakness … but in the human form of word and writing.”24 The advantage of the concept of Scripture as servant is its affirmation that the creatureliness of the text is not an inhibition of its role in the communicative self-presentation of God; and so the text does not have to assume divine properties as a protection against contingency. To draw the threads together: although the notion of “accommodation” and the analogy from the hypostatic union may find it difficult to offer an account of the relation of creaturely texts to divine revelation without falling into transcendentalism, the notions of “testimony,” “means of grace” and the “servant-character” of Scripture are all resources to resist the drift into dualism. Here, however, we choose to make particular use of the conception of the text as a “sanctified” reality, largely because, applied to the biblical texts, the concept of sanctification has greater range. Where notions like testimony, means of grace and service tend to apply most naturally to the text as finished entity, sanctification can more readily be applied to the full range of processes in which the text is caught up from pre-textual tradition to interpretation, thus reserving the term “inspiration” to describe the specifically textual aspects of Scripture’s service in the economy of grace. In its broadest sense, sanctification refers to the work of the Spirit of Christ through which creaturely realities are elected, shaped and preserved to undertake a role in the economy of salvation: creaturely realities are sanctified by divine use. But it is important to emphasise that the divine “use,” though utterly gratuitous, is not simply occasional or punctiliar, an act from above which arrests and over-whelms the creaturely reality, employs it, and then puts it to one side. The sanctity of creaturely realities is certainly unthinkable without reference to the event of sanctification, for the creature’s holiness is God’s “living work, the fruit of his intervention and the effect of his presence … the event of his coming, the personal and decisive gesture corresponding to his love and freedom.”25 But precisely in its free transcendence of that which it employs in its service, divine use has a properly “horizontal” dimension as well as a sheerly “vertical” dimension. There is an election and overseeing of the entire historical course of the creaturely reality so that it becomes a creature which may serve the purposes of God. Sanctification is thus not the extraction of creaturely reality from its creatureliness, but the annexing and ordering of its course so that it may fittingly assist in that work which is proper to God.

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Ingredient within the idea of sanctification is thus an understanding of God which is neither deist nor dualist. As the Holy Spirit’s work, sanctification is a process in which, in the limitless freedom of God, the creaturely element is given its own genuine reality as it is commanded and moulded to enter into the divine service. God the sanctifying Spirit is both Lord and Life-giver. The sanctifying Spirit is Lord; that is, sanctification is not in any straightforward sense a process of cooperation or coordination between God and the creature, a drawing out or building upon some inherent holiness of the creature’s own. Sanctification is making holy. Holiness is properly an incommunicable divine attribute; if creaturely realities become holy, it is by virtue of election, that is, by a sovereign act of segregation or separation by the Spirit as Lord. In this sense, therefore, the sanctitas of sancta scriptura is aliena. But the Spirit is Life-giver, the bestower of genuine and inalienable creaturely substance. From the vertical of “lordship” there flows the horizontal of life which is truly given. Segregation, election to holiness, is not the abolition of creatureliness but its creation and preservation. In this sense, the sanctitas of sancta scriptura is infusa. How does this notion of sanctification find particular application to the nature and function of the biblical texts in the economy of grace? As the work of the Spirit, sanctification integrates communicative divine action and the creatureliness of those elements which are appointed to the service of God’s self-presentation. Talk of the biblical texts as Holy Scripture thus indicates a two-fold conviction about their place in divine revelation. First, because they are sanctified, the texts are not simply “natural” entities, to be defined and interpreted exhaustively as such. They are fields of the Spirit’s activity in the publication of the knowledge of God. Second, because sanctification does not diminish creatureliness, the texts’ place in the divine economy does not entail their withdrawal from the realm of human processes. It is as—not despite— the creaturely realities that they are that they serve God.26 So used, the language of sanctification may help shake theology free from some of those sorry dualisms in which talk of Scripture has become enmeshed. A sanctified text is creaturely, not divine. Scripture’s place in the economy of saving grace does not need to be secured by its divinisation through the unambiguous ascription of divine properties to the text. But as creaturely, the text is not thereby less serviceable, precisely because as creature it is sanctified (set apart, fashioned and maintained) for God’s service. Crucially, “creatureliness” is not to be confused with “naturalness.” The latter concept is easily caught within the antithesis of nature and supernature; the former (pneumatological) concept allows that the creature (in this case, the text) can be a means of divine action without cost to its own substance. As sanctified creature, the text is not a quasi-divine artefact: sanctification is not transubstantiation. Nor is it an exclusively natural product arbitrarily commandeered by a supernatural agent. Sanctification is the Spirit’s act of ordering creaturely history and being to the end of acting as ancilla Domini. On this basis, what may be said of the ontology of the text? In its ordering by the Spirit’s sanctifying work, the text has its being; its ontology is defined out of the formative economy of the Spirit of God. If this is difficult for us to grasp, it is because

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of a convention which so often presents itself to us as self-evidently authoritative, namely the convention that all texts are simply natural, historical entities, and that the Bible is to be read “like any other text” because it is a text, and all texts are fundamentally the same kind of entity. But a general theory of texts has shown itself to have only scant theological utility. Such theory customarily determines what texts are in general and moves on from there to apply the resulting definitions and rules to specific texts. Thus Werner Jeanrond’s Text and Interpretation as Categories of Theological Thinking 27—surely a most sophisticated example of this argument— proposes to inquire into “the textuality of texts”28 as part of the “development of a theory of understanding of texts in order to ground theological text interpretation in an appropriate foundational theory.”29 What is problematic about this strategy is not only the foundationalism which inevitably accompanies assertions of the “transcendental status of the theory of interpretation.”30 There is a deeper, ontological, problem: the assumption that a text’s being is defined by reference to its occupation of a space in a natural field of communicative activity. Both modern critical biblical scholar-ship and modern philosophical-theological hermeneutics are largely predicated on such a naturalist ontological assumption. Yet it is just the assumption that the biblical writings are instances of the natural class of texts which is to be resisted. Hermeneutically, it is a ruinous, even ludicrous, assumption, because it leads to the absurdity of developing a sophisticated critical apparatus to read biblical texts, not as what they are (texts which address the hearer in the name of God) but simply as textual clues in the business of reconstructing the matrices from which they emerged. Dogmatically, the assumption is to be controverted because of its claim that a “natural” understanding of the text is more basic than an understanding of the text as “scriptural.” In sum: the biblical text is Scripture; its being is defined, not simply by its membership of the class of texts, but by the fact that it is this text—sanctified, that is, Spirit-generated and preserved—in this field of action—the communicative economy of God’s merciful friendship with his lost creatures. Sanctification is not to be restricted to the text as finished product; it may legitimately be extended to the larger field of agents and actions of which the text is part. The Spirit’s relation to the text broadens out into the Spirit’s activity in the life of the people of God which forms the environment within which the text takes shape and serves the divine self-presence. Sanctification can thus properly be extended to the processes of the production of the text—not simply authorship (as, so often, in older theories of inspiration) but also the complex histories of pre-literary and literary tradition, redaction and compilation. It will, likewise, be extended to the post-history of the text, most particularly to canonisation (understood as the church’s Spirit-produced acknowledgment of the testimony of Scripture) and to interpretation (understood as Spirit-illumined repentant and faithful attention to the presence of God). Westcott once wrote in connection with the process of canonisation of Scripture that “we cannot understand the history of Christianity unless we recognize the action of the Holy Spirit in the Christian Society,”31 and his point—that a theological account of Scripture requires a pneumatological reading of the entire expanse of the life and acts of God’s

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people—is of fundamental importance to our theme. This does not, of course, mean that the history of the processes surrounding the preand post-history of the biblical writings is to be reduced to an “inert conduit,”32 any more than inspiration can be reduced to puppetry. Once again, the rule is: sanctification establishes and does not abolish creatureliness. With this in mind, we turn to look in more detail at the notion of the inspiration of Scripture.

Inspiration Inspiration is the specific textual application of the broader notion of sanctification as the hallowing of creaturely realities to serve revelation’s taking form. Where sanctification indicates the dogmatic ontology of the text as the servant of the divine self-communicative presence, inspiration indicates the specific work of the Spirit of Christ with respect to the text. However, like the notion of revelation, that of inspiration is easily caught in some conceptual snares if it is displaced from its proper dogmatic location. The crucial task, therefore, is to “clarify the logic of the term ‘inspire’ as predicated of God.”33 Such clarification, of course, is not merely conceptual; it is primarily dogmatic, that is, an orderly and well-proportioned arrangement of the thought and speech of the church in deference to the self-ordering truth of the gospel. Three particular requirements must be met if an account of inspiration is to be dogmatically profitable. First, theological talk of the inspiration of Scripture needs to be strictly subordinate to and dependent upon the broader concept of revelation. Disorder threatens a theology of Scripture if the notion of inspiration is allowed to aggrandise itself and usurp the central place in bibliology. The disorder creeps in when the precise mode of Scripture’s production and, most of all, the role played by the Holy Spirit in the inscripturation of revelation become the hinges on which all else turns. On such an account of the matter, inspiration is not an extrapolation from revelation and its taking form; on the contrary, it is foundational: Scripture is revelatory because it is inspired. The precise historical point at which this disorder begins to appear—whether in European Protestantism at the beginning of the seventeenth century, or in nineteenth-century American Reformed theology—is not at issue here. Whatever the genesis of the disorder, its effect is to warp the dogmatic framework of the theology of Scripture, as revelatory divine action is dislodged from its proper primacy, its place assumed by a particular construal of the Spirit’s work in generating the biblical text. As Heppe puts it (he is criticising the Reformed scholastics, but what he says has wide application): on this model, “the ‘divineness’ of Scripture [is] derived purely—not from the participation of its authors in the facts of revelation and God’s saving activity, but from the manner of its recording.”34 Properly understood, however, inspiration is not foundational but derivative, a corollary of the self-presence of God which takes form through the providential ordering and sanctification of creaturely auxiliaries. Talk of biblical inspiration follows from the

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fact that through Holy Scripture God addresses the church with the gospel of salvation. To reverse this direction, by arguing that the church knows that what Scripture declares is a word of salvation because Scripture is inspired, is to allow the pressure of the need for epistemological reassurance to distort the whole. Indeed, it is to make inspiration into a formal property insufficiently coordinated to the gospel content of Scripture, and to render the communicative presence of God contingent upon proven conviction of the text’s inspiredness. In Calvin’s 1542 Antidote to the Paris Articles, the matter is handled quite differently: “since certainty of faith should be sought from none but God only,” he says, “we conclude that true faith is founded only on the Scriptures which proceeded from him, since therein he has been pleased to teach not partially, but fully, whatever he would have us know, and knew to be useful.”35 Faith’s certainty is grounded in God alone, not in inspiration; faith is “founded” on Scripture, not because of its formal property as inspired but because Scripture is the instrument of divine teaching which proceeds from God. Within such a context, talk of inspiration will have its place; detached from that context, it goes awry.36 Second, consequently, the notion of inspiration needs to be expounded in a way which avoids both objectifying and spiritualising this divine activity. Objectification happens when biblical inspiration is expounded in such a way that it makes revelation available after the manner of a worldly entity and not after the manner of God. In an objectified account of revelation, the inspired product is given priority over the revelatory, sanctifying and inspiring activities of the divine agent. But properly understood, inspiration does not mean that the truth of the gospel which Scripture sets before us becomes something to hand, constantly available independent of the Word and work of God, an entity which embodies rather than serves the presence of God. Inspiration does not spell the end of the mystery of God; it is simply that act of the Spirit through which this set of texts proceeds from God to attest his ineffable presence. Inspiration is a mode of the Spirit’s freedom, not its inhibition by the letter. Once again, pressure to move in a different direction often comes from epistemological concerns—from the need to secure Scripture’s foundational status as inconcussum fundamentum veritatis and principium cognoscendi by reference to inspiration. In effect, inspiration can become “the purest form of epistemological apocalyptic,”37 knowledge without eschatology; and this dogmatics must eschew. Spiritualisation of the notion of inspiration avoids objectification by shifting the centre of gravity away from the text and towards the persons associated with the text, whether authors or readers. Thus the nineteenth-century Danish bishop Martensen expounds the inspiration of Scripture as a function of “the inspiration of the apostles” or “apostolic consciousness”;38 it is not so much the case that Scripture is inspired but that it is “the ripened fruit of inspiration.”39 Or again, John Macquarrie proposes an account of the inspiration of Scripture which associates it with the community’s reception of the text rather than with the text itself: “Inspiration” is a way of talking of the “power of bringing again or re-presenting the disclosure of the primordial revelation so that it speaks to us in our present experience,” and as such “does not lie

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in the words (it is not ‘verbal inspiration’), but belongs to the scriptures only as they are set in the context of the whole life of faith in the community.”40 More recently, David Law has constructed an account of inspiration oriented not to the biblical text per se but to its readers “‘Inspiration’ … does not describe a specific feature of the text but indicates rather how the reader should handle the Bible. It articulates the insight that the appropriate relation to the Bible on the part of the human being is submission to the Word of God which the Bible mediates”41 Thus “the reader’s role in the construction of textual meaning in reading the Bible entails the return of the concept of inspiration, but now inspiration is situated primarily in the reader”42 In effect, the term “inspiration” gives a fairly light theological gloss to the subjective dispositions of the reader, eschewing any “objective approach to the question of inspiration,” which the book judges on other grounds to be an “impossibility.”43 There are a number of dogmatic difficulties in such accounts. There is inevitably an immanentist cast in the notion of inspiration when we “take the reader’s relationship to the biblical writings as the starting-point for the construction of a theology of inspiration”44 (though at least in Martensen’s case the notion of “apostolic consciousness” is backed up by a quite vigorously operative pneumatology45). But there is also, more seriously, a certain docetism in such accounts: the danger of objectification is countered by limiting the sphere of the Spirit’s work to the psychic life of the apostles (Martensen), the community (Macquarrie) or the reader (Law) in such a way that the text itself is not touched by the inspiring action of God. And underlying both problems is a third, namely a reticence about talking of divine action through the textual service of Scripture, a sense of what Law calls the “elusiveness” and “inaccessibility” of the divine author.45 As so often in the modern history of Scripture and its interpretation, the gap left by the withdrawal of the self-communicatiye divine presence is filled by readerly activity. Both objectification and spiritualisation tend to repeat the dualism which the notion of sanctification was intended to eliminate; both, moreover, are pneumatologically deficient, whether by identifying the Spirit’s relation to the text as a textual property tout court, or by excessive separation of Spirit and text. A more orderly model account of inspiration will thus refuse to identify inspiration either with textual properties or with the experience of author, community46 or reader, and instead give an account of inspiration which is primarily concerned with the communicative function of texts in the field of God’s spiritual self-presence. Third, the theological notion of inspiration needs to be expounded in clear connection to the end or purpose of Holy Scripture, which is service to God’s self-manifestation. Like some kinds of crude cultic sacramental realism (of which it is a close cousin), a crass notion of verbal inspiration can abstract creaturely reality from its soteriological context, and so break its coinherence with Word, Spirit and faith. When this is allowed to happen, the scriptural word—like the sacramental element in isolation—becomes the Word, the Word made text, formalised, decontextualised and so dogmatically displaced. The pressures of polemic loom large in this process. Once the location of theological talk of the inspiration of Scripture shifts from sacra doctrina to foundations,

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and the purpose of such talk is the establishment of an inerrant doctrinal source and norm, then inspiration can be construed merely as a warrant for Scripture’s theological authority, and therefore for its role in controversy. This process, of course, is an aspect of the larger historical shift of theology and theological thinking about the nature of the Bible away from practical-soteriological concerns to theoretical-polemical matters, a shift whose reverberations are felt throughout the corpus of Christian dogmatics but which has especially egregious effects in discussion of Scripture which, once again, orderly dogmatics must avoid. With these three preliminaries in mind, we move to a more positive account of the nature of inspiration by way of commenting on one of the basic New Testament statements on the matter: “Those moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Pet. 1.21). Four things maybe said by way of conceptual paraphrase. First, the leading theme of any account of inspiration must be ἀπὸ θεοῦ (from God): inspiration is not primarily a textual property but a divine movement and therefore a divine moving. In any theologically adequate account of inspiration, therefore, the element of ἀπὸ θεοῦ must be operative and non-convertible. It must be operative in the sense that language about the purpose and activity of God is not simply kept in the background, indicating a remote causal process with no present or immediate effectiveness. Accounts of scriptural inspiration are not infrequently curiously deistic, in so far as the biblical text can itself become a revelatory agent by virtue of an act of divine inspiration in the past. Thereby, however, ἀπὸ θεοῦ is converted into a material condition; the “movement” is arrested, objectified and commodified. But to talk of inspiration is not to suspend language of divine self-presentation but to trace one of its extensions into the creaturely realm. Second, this “from God” carries with it a negation: “no prophecy ever came by the human will” (οὐ … θελήματι ἀνθρώπου). Talk of inspiration indicates that the generative impulse of the biblical text is not human spontaneity. Scripture as text is not in any fundamental sense a fruit of human poetics; its relation to human willing (here, that is, to literary creativity) is of a quite different order. This is because the domain in which the text has its rise is not that of the religious genius, but that of “the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 1.16). This coming, in its self-unfolding majesty, means that attestation of the divine glory is not a matter of “cleverly devised myths” (v. 16); it is not a voluntary, self-originating movement, but a “being moved.” Third, this “being moved” is particularly appropriated to the Holy Spirit. Language about the Spirit extends talk of God into the creaturely realm, in two ways. It ensures that creaturely objects and causes are indeed moved realities; their creaturely movement is not such that they are closed off from God, for that would be to deny the basic character of the gospel as a divine coming (παρουσία, verse 16). And it ensures that the divine coming is not purely transcendent; language about the Spirit is equally a protest against the secularisation of prophecy and the elimination of creatureliness. Fourth, the Spirit generates language. Though what is said in this section of 2 Peter about scripture (γραφή) is said in relation to the more primary concern with prophecy

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(προφητεία), its applicability is evident: the moving of the Spirit, the direction of the ἀπὸ θεοῦ, is to human communicative acts. Those moved by the Spirit spoke. Here we reach the particula veri of the notion of verbal inspiration. Because verbal inspiration was routinely misconstrued (sometimes by its defenders and nearly always by its detractors) as entailing divine dictation, the notion of inspiration has been “personalised” or “deverbalised” and redefined as authorial illumination. This distancing of inspiration from the verbal character of the text is considered to ease the difficulties of offering an account of inspiration by thinking of the words of the text as a purely human arena of activity, whether of authors, redactors or tradents. But the result is, again, docetic. The implied distinction between (inspired) content and (creaturely) form is awkward, and very easily makes authorial (or perhaps community) consciousness or experience the real substance of the text, of which words are external expressions. This is uncomfortably close to those styles of eucharistic theology in which the sacrament is considered to be a transaction between the gospel and the religious consciousness, to which visible forms are accidentally attached. No less than consecration, inspiration concerns the relation of God’s communication and specific creaturely forms; inspiration, that is, involves words. How, then, are we to understand what the older Protestant divines termed the mandatum scribendi or impulsum scribendi, the command or impulse to write? The relation of the words of Scripture to the communicative self-presence of God is not merely contingent; what revelation impels is writing. And because, therefore, we may not consider the words of Scripture as a purely natural product, it is proper to speak of the Spirit’s impulse as involving the suggestio verborum. What is inspired is not simply the matter (res) of Scripture but its verbal form (forma). However, suggestion, mandate, impulse are acts of the Holy Spirit of the risen Jesus who is present to his creatures; they are not the causal working of a mute and remote power. The acts of the Spirit of the risen Christ entail no suspension of creatureliness. The prophets and apostles are not “mere passive agents, mentally and volitionally inactive, and serving the Holy Spirit as a sort of speaking-tube … [Although the prophets were moved, or driven, by the Holy Spirit, they themselves also spoke … their own activity was not suppressed by the moving of the Spirit but is lifted up, energized and purged.”47 Being “moved” by the Spirit is not simply being passively impelled; the Spirit’s suggestio and human authorship are directly, not inversely, proportional; the action of the inspiring Spirit and the work of the inspired creature are concursive rather than antithetical. What is problematic about the language of dictation, or of the biblical writers as amanuenses of the Spirit, is not only that such notions make the text unrecognisable as a human historical product, but that they trade upon a confusion of God’s omnicausality with Gods sole causality. Furthermore, the mandatum scribendi is not to be construed in purely “vertical” terms, as happens when “writing” is confused with “dictation,” or when inspiration is conceived as a kind of possession or trance, lifting the subject out of the life-connections of history and culture. The mandatum is certainly transcendent; it drives the writer. Yet it is not mere intrusive and erratic impelling, but the ordering and formation

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of culture, tradition, occasion and author. Properly understood, “verbal” inspiration does not extract words from their field of production or reception, does not make the text a less than historical entity, or make the text itself a divine agent. Nor does it entail neglect of the revelatory presence of God in favour of an account of originary inspiration. It simply indicates the inclusion of texts in the sanctifying work of the Spirit so that they may become fitting vessels of the treasure of the gospel.

Conclusion The force of this chapter has been to suggest that the proper location for a Christian theological account of the nature of Holy Scripture is the Christian doctrine of God. In particular, theological assertions about Scripture are a function of Christian convictions about God’s making himself present as saviour and his establishing of covenant fellowship.48 As Preus puts it in his study of the bibliology of the orthodox Lutheran divines, the doctrine of Scripture “assumes its true significance only when viewed soteriologically, when considered as an operative factor in God’s plan of salvation.”49 This saving self-manifestation of God includes within its scope those acts whereby the Spirit of Christ sanctifies and inspires creaturely realities as servants of God’s presence. Such Christological-pneumatological clarification of the nature of Scripture enables theology to make the all-important move, that of giving an account of the being of the biblical texts which distinguishes but does not separate them from revelation.50 Is all this anything more than a bad case of onto-theology, with logocentric complications? Is it simply one more claim to have the Word of God “without courrier”?51 The purpose of meticulous dogmatic specification of concepts such as revelation, sanctification and inspiration is precisely to demonstrate that such a charge may only be levelled against coarsely reductive talk of the nature of Holy Scripture. And besides, the Spirit’s sanctifying and inspiring work can never be just one more possessed object, one more bit of the Christian cultural climate. Scripture, sanctified and inspired, is the vessel which bears God’s majestic presence and is broken in so doing. “Let not God speak to us, lest we die,” say the people of Israel assembled at Sinai (Exod. 20.19); and whatever is said of Scripture must not contravene the eschatological transcendence of the self-revealing God. Of course, a trinitarian account of the matter will not set God’s transcendence against his election of creaturely servants, including textual servants. The freedom of God does not annul “the promise of being able to serve the Word as the Spirit declares it to us.”52 Yet the tension between “Spirit” and “letter” may never be completely dissolved, for, like kingship, temple and cult, text also can be lifted out of the history of salvation, isolated from the divine presence, and positivised into a means of handling God. Sanctification and inspiration are not, however, ways of reducing the terror of God’s speech, but ways of indicating that what we encounter in Scripture is the terrifying mercy of God’s address.

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Notes 1

The distinction between “sufficiency” and “self-sufficiency” is drawn firmly by T. Ward in Word and Supplement. Speech Acts, Biblical Texts, and Sufficiency of Scripture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), who seeks to clarify “in theological and hermeneutical terms the senses in which ‘the sufficiency of Scripture’ is necessarily a circumscribed concept.” Hence he criticises both the iconic theories of text in the “New Criticism” and the highly formalist understanding of scripture in Hans Frei, which he terms “hyper-sufficiency” (p. 150), and which confuses the objectivity of a text with its self-sufficiency (see p. 198). Ward’s counter-suggestion is to appeal to Derrida’s notion of textual “supplements” and, most especially, to Wolterstorff’s deployment of speech-act theory, which “shows how authors, their texts and meanings, and readers, exist meaningfully only in that they are related to one another, without the otherness of any one element being subsumed into another” (pp. 198f.). Ward’s ordering of the relation of divine action to the human activities of authorship and reading rightly prioritises the divine agent. Yet—almost inevitably in a work which invests a good deal in the conceptual resources afforded by a philosophical theory of communicative action—Ward’s deployment of dogmatic materials is decidedly modest. One may legitimately wonder whether speech-act theory can furnish all that is required for a “critical retrieval” of the classical Protestant doctrine of Scripture, and whether much more extensive appeal to such concepts as revelation and inspiration (and so, therefore, to the doctrine of the Trinity) is required.

2

W. Cantwell Smith, What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (London: SCM, 1993), p. 223. By contrast, T. Ward is entirely correct to insist on the need for an ontology of Scripture, and on the need to root the use of the text in the properties of the text: Word and Supplement, pp. 300–2.

3

Cantwell Smith, What is Scripture? p. 237.

4

I. U. Dalferth, “Die Mitte ist außen. Anmerkungen zum Wirklichkeitsbezug evangelischer Schriftauslegung,” in C. Landmesser et al., eds, Jesus Christus als die Mitte der Schrift. Studien zur Hermeneutik des Evangeliums (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), p. 183.

5

Ibid.; see also I. U. Dalferth, “Von der Vieldeutigkeit der Schrift und der Eindeutigkeit des Wortes Gottes” in R. Ziegert, ed., Die Zukunft des Schriftprinzips (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), p. 169.

6

Dalferth, “Von der Vieldeutigkeit,” p. 163; cf. “Die Mitte ist außen,” p. 183.

7

“Die Mitte ist außen,” p. 185.

8

The rooting of the doctrine of Scripture in the doctrine of the triune God is consistently emphasised in A. Wenz, Das Wort Gottes—Gericht und Rettung. Untersuchungen zur Autorität der Heiligen Schrift in Bekenntnis und Lehre der Kirche.

9

K. Barth, “Revelation,” in God in Action (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936), p. 8; on the coinherence of revelation and divine presence, see again Ingolf Dalferth: “Von der Vieldeutigkeit,” “Die Mitte ist außen,” and, more generally, his essay “Theologie und Gottes Gegenwart,” in Gedeutete Gegenwart. Zur Wahrnehmung Gottes in den Erfahrungen der Zeit (Tübingen: Mohr, 1997), pp. 268–85; see also D. Ritschl’s earlier study Memory and Hope. An Inquiry into the Presence of Christ (New York: Macmillan, 1967).

10 Barth, “Revelation,” p. 12.

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11 G. Siegwalt, “Le canon biblique et la révélation,” in Le christianisme, est-t-il une religion du livre? (Strasbourg: Faculté de théologie protestante, 1984), p. 46. 12 K. Barth, Church Dogmatics 1/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), p. 139· This more material account of revelation as the exercise of divine freedom is to be preferred to the rather formal explication of revelation out of the notion of divine prevenience offered by R. Thiemann in his otherwise helpful account Revelation and Theology. The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1985), e.g. pp. 6f., 9. 13 K. Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991), p. 59. 14 Ibid. 15 Barth, “Revelation,” p. 17. 16 Barth is the usual culprit; the most sensitive account of his crimes is A. Torrance, Persons in Communion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996). 17 C. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), p. 111. 18 B. de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, in The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1951), p. 103. 19 This is not to overlook the important political aspects of the rise of historical interpretation of Scripture, emphasised By H. G. Reventlow in The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (London: SCM, 1980) and more fully by J. Samuel Preus in an important essay Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), where it is argued that one of the crucial ways in which Spinoza undermined the legitimating function of Scripture for theocratic government was by challenging the office of the authoritative public interpreter of Scripture: naturalizing’ Scripture rendered redundant the claims of privileged interpreters to be able to make public law, and thereby contributed to the cause of liberty. Preus’ handling of the dogmatic issues is less than secure; and one might question the underlying unambiguously positive evaluation of modern traditions of libertarian thought (the undifferentiated use of the term “fundamentalist” to describe Spinoza’s opponents—in his day and our own—gives the game away). Nevertheless, the centrality of the relationship of the exegetical and the political to an understanding of modernity is beyond dispute (and could be traced back at least as far as Bacon: see A. Grafton, Defenders of the Text. The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 20 G. Spykman, Reformational Theology, A New Paradigm for Doing Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), p. 122. 21 G. C. Berkouwer, Holy Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), p. 203. J. de Senarclens, who makes much use of the analogy from the hypostatic union in his account of the nature of Scripture in Heirs of the Reformation, avoids the problems associated with this strategy by a strongly actualist insistence on the “event” character of the relation of Scripture’s humanity to its “holiness”; yet it is at just this point that the analogy with the incarnation breaks down, for if this stress on event were transferred into the ontology of the person of Christ, the result would almost certainly be adoptionist. Further in criticism of the analogy, see L. Ayres and S. E. Fowl, “(Mis)reading the Face of God: The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church,” Theological Studies 60 (1999), pp. 513–28.

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22 For a recent strong defence of the notion of “means of grace” as the primary theological category for talking of the nature of Scripture, see W. J. Abraham, Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology. From the Fathers to Feminism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Some problems remain in Abraham’s account, both historical (at a number of points his narrative of the place of Scripture in theology is open to serious challenge) and dogmatic (his assertion that Scripture is only one of a range of “means of grace,” and his consequent difficulties with making much sense of the notion of sola scriptura). See my essay “Canon and Criterion: Some Reflections on a Recent Proposal,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54 (2001), pp. 67–83. 23 Berkouwer, Holy Scripture, p. 195. 24 Ibid., p. 207. 25 J. de Senarclens, Heirs of the Reformation (London: SCM, 1963), p. 276. 26 Cf. the proposal of A. Wenz (Das Wort Gottes, p. 303) that “God’s speech and action occurs in, with and under creaturely means and historical processes—yet always in such a way that it takes place as speech and action which is strange, other, coming to the world and humankind from outside.” 27 W. Jeanrond, Text and Interpretation as Categories of Theological Thinking (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988). 28 Ibid., p. xvi. 29 Ibid., pp. xvif. 30 Ibid., p. xvii. 31 B. F. Westcott, A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1881), p. xliv. 32 B. Childs, “On Reclaiming the Bible for Christian Theology,” in C. Braaten and R. Jenson, eds, Reclaiming the Bible for the Church (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1995), p. 9. 33 W. J. Abraham, The Divine Inspiration of Holy Scripture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 57. 34 H. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950), p. 18. 35 J. Calvin, Articles Agreed Upon by the Faculty of Sacred Theology of Paris, with the Antidote in Tracts and Treatises, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1958), p. 106. 36 From this point of view, one of the major difficulties in David Law’s recent study Inspiration (London: Continuum, 2001) is the way in which an account of inspiration is developed in what is primarily an apologetic context; theological language about inspiration attempts to provide a justification of the believer’s acceptance of Scripture as authoritative (see, for example, p. 34n. 68). The result is a curiously existentialist reworking of a common strategy amongst baroque Protestant theologians, namely the deployment of the doctrine of inspiration to furnish the epistemological grounds for the acceptance of Scripture’s normative status, to describe, in other words, “the processes by which the believer arrives at acceptance of biblical authority” (p. 35). Behind such a strategy lies a further difficulty, namely the inflammation of the notion of biblical into the primary dogmatic concept in bibliology, taking precedence even over such concepts as revelation or Word of God. 37 G. Fackre, The Doctrine of Revelation. A Narrative Interpretation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 170. 38 H. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1898), p. 402.

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39 Ibid. 40 J. Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology (London: SCM, 1966), p. 8. 41 Law, Inspiration, p. 140. 42 Ibid., p. 50. Law is drawing on U. H. J. Körtner, Der inspirierter Leser. Zentrale Aspekte biblischer Hermeneutik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1994)· 43 Law, Inspiration, p. 143. 44 Ibid., p. 144. 45 Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, pp. 338–44. 46 Law, Inspiration, p. 151. 47 H. Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), p. 102. 48 The importance of God’s covenant-forming activity as the context for a doctrine of Scripture has been recently emphasised in M. S. Horton, Covenant and Eschatology. The Divine Drama (Louisville: WJKP, 2002), pp. 121–219, and in K. Vanhoozer, First Theology. God, Scripture and Hermeneutics (Leicester: Apollos, 2002), pp. 127–203. 49 R. Preus, The Inspiration of Scripture. A Study of the Theology of the Seventeenth Century Lutheran Dogmaticians (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1957), p. 170. 50 Cf. Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith, p. 95. 51 J. Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 23. Much use is made of Derrida in J. K. A. Smith’s somewhat undifferentiated critique of some aspects of the theology of Scripture in The Fall of Interpretation. Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000). 52 de Senarclens, Heirs of the Reformation, p. 295.

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Index Abraham 38, 47, 52, 53, 232, 274, 343, 349, 351, 358, 359 Abrahamic faiths 8 agnostics/agnosticism 254, 380, 393, 443 allegory/allegorists 42, 220, 226–9, 237, 271, 345, 349, 403–4, 412–14, 416–30 analogy 49, 56, 58, 74, 90, 92–4, 98, 107, 174, 225, 227, 252–3, 328, 347, 355, 376, 392, 414, 423, 425, 444, 453, 470–2 apocalypticism 94, 134, 142, 145–6, 262, 345, 356, 370, 476 Aquinas, Thomas 125, 268, 272, 274, 275, 276, 278, 356, 367, 371 Ascension 138, 156, 250, 251, 416 atheism 219, 303 Augustine 165, 168, 172, 179, 223, 228, 234, 236, 249, 267, 270, 271, 272, 367, 371, 448 love criteria 280 Barr, James 439–40 Concept of Biblical Theology, The 439 Barth, Heinrich 113 Barth, Karl 3, 70, 109–10, 111, 138, 159, 190, 191, 239–40, 241, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 252, 255, 367, 427, 459, 466, 471 Epistle to the Romans, The 109 biblical studies guild 322 biblical study 89 biblical theology 239 blood 119, 137, 156, 157, 187, 226, 313 body 33, 64, 123, 138, 143,157–8, 160, 162, 187, 199, 228, 242, 310, 311, 313, 344, 371, 410, 411, 416, 428, 429 Bultmann, Rudolf 6, 70, 121, 122, 123, 124, 131–2, 187, 190, 191, 239–40, 241, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248,

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253, 284, 327, 329, 377, 384, 385, 386, 455 popularity 132 Calvin, John 115, 123, 124, 126, 245, 249, 252, 267, 354, 367, 371, 457, 476, Calvinism 354, 457 canonical approach 256, 257, 258, 259–60, 261, 263, 265, 266, 390, 444, 453, 455, 456, Cassain, John 271 Catholics/Catholicism see Roman Catholics/Catholicism Childs, Brevard 255–6, 355, 382, 390, 391, 440, 441, 444–6, 451, 453–4, 455–6 Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture 255 Christology 247, 250, 355, 427, 464, 472 church fathers 37, 42–3, 165, 169, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176, 179, 180, 223, 226, 227, 235, 236, 252, 409, 413, 422, Climacus, Johannes 69 Concept of Biblical Theology, The 439 Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments 69 Critique of Judgment 237 cross 131, 133, 156–61, 285, 292, 307, 354, 372 Crucifixion 51, 132, 145, 155, 156–61, 250, 290, 367, 393 Daniel 61, 371 Daniélou, Jean 417 De Lubac, Henri 132, 219–20, 417 History and Spirit 219–20 Dei Verbum 165 Descartes, René 11 Diet of Worms 343 Divine Spirit see Spirit Divine Word see Word

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Divino Afflante Spiritu 165–6, 188, 264 documentary hypothesis 70, 350 dogmatics 99, 148, 194, 195, 202, 215–16, 296, 451, 470, 476, 478 dualism 101, 417, 422, 459, 463, 469, 470, 472, 473, 477 Ebeling, Gerhard 187–8 ecumenism 239 eisegesis 6, 110, 273 Elias 52, 55, 67, 68 encyclicals, papal 165, 167, 168, 171, 174, 264 eschatology 114, 135, 138, 142, 145–6, 151, 154, 157, 159–63, 215, 242, 244, 247, 249, 251, 292, 393, 427, 449, 469–70, 476, 480 ethics 11, 95, 103, 242, 322, 324, 326, 330–3, 388, 470 Eucharist 187, 226, 304, 311–17, 479 exegesis 1, 2, 6, 19, 48, 81, 82, 109, 115, 116, 118, 122, 123, 124, 169, 171, 174, 176, 178, 179, 189, 197, 200, 219–20, 221–4, 227, 228, 232, 235–8, 245, 247, 251, 257–9, 262, 263, 265, 266, 267, 268, 271, 273, 277, 279, 280, 281–8, 290, 291, 293–6, 304, 308, 313, 314, 324, 327, 328, 339, 340, 342, 345, 349, 362, 403, 405, 406, 412, 413, 420, 423, 424, 429, 439, 441, 443–6, 448, 451, 456, 460 existentialism 131, 139, 142–3, 147, 149, 247, 248, 283, 284, 289, 315, 378, 384, 417, 442, 455 faiths, Abrahamic 8 fathers of the church see church fathers Frye, Northrop 2–3, 278 fundamentalism 311, 332, 357, 439 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 4–5, 279, 282, 283, 285, 287, 288–9 Truth and Method 4, 279 gender 321, 331 gender essentialism 322 gnosticism 134, 137, 142–3, 145–6, 152, 160, 343, 344, 345 Gospels 29, 30, 34–5, 40, 50–1, 61–2, 63, 67, 68, 156, 170, 171, 181, 182, 242,

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244, 251, 269, 287, 315, 340, 342, 344, 361, 375 inaccuracies 30 myth 30 grace 99, 124, 145, 149, 168, 175, 182, 199, 219, 245, 270, 272, 275, 276, 306, 343, 353, 354, 355, 357, 427, 461, 467, 469, 471, 472, 473 Harvard Divinity School 239, 380, 393 HBC see Historical Biblical Criticism heaven 22, 43, 64, 107, 117, 119, 131, 133, 135, 142, 146, 198, 226, 250, 251, 270, 274, 307, 317, 371, 460 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 30, 86, 87, 90, 94, 97, 103, 237, 242, 289, 347, 356 hell 119, 131, 133, 135 Hellenism 32, 36, 116, 122, 123, 155, 252, 359 hermeneutics 12, 187, 194, 195, 197–202, 204, 210, 213, 214, 216, 239, 241, 247–8, 249–54, 261–3, 267, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 278, 282, 284–8, 289, 294, 307, 308–17, 323, 326, 329, 330, 333, 342, 343, 361, 372, 403, 418, 428, 440, 448, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 456, 457, 474, Historical Biblical Criticism (HBC) see also historical criticism 365, 367, 373–82, 389–95 historical criticism see also Historical Biblical Criticism (HBC) 2, 66, 68, 90–5, 97–8, 100–1, 105–7, 109–10, 114, 115–18, 122, 165, 174, 188, 200, 205, 209, 211–12, 214–16, 222–3, 233, 242–3, 247–8, 251–2, 255–6, 259–60, 263, 265, 279, 282, 295, 323, 325, 331, 337–63, 445, 451, 454 historicity 29, 79, 99, 135, 148, 149, 188, 195, 197, 198, 210, 236, 283, 289, 290, 330, 339, History and Spirit 219–20 History of Religions School 89, 132, 141, 147, 239, 242 holism 280, 282, 284, 291–2, 294, 296, 444 Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch 459 Holy Spirit see Spirit Homer 32, 61, 345

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Index imagination 30, 40, 41, 42, 45, 47, 56, 57, 59, 67, 221, 254, 269, 271, 273, 276, 278, 456 incarnation 54, 196, 199, 202, 250, 303, 304, 306, 307, 344, 373, 465, 470, interconnection 90, 96 interfaith relations 239 intertextuality 404, 412, 419, 429 Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture 255, 456 James 72, 371, 395 Jerome 165, 170, 172, 176, 182 Jewish authors 6, 7 Jewish tradition 19, 38, 95, 265, 287, 337, 339, 341, 351, 352, 354, 405 Jews 1, 33, 49, 60, 61, 65, 66, 68, 83, 152, 224, 234, 253, 256, 257, 274–5, 337, 338, 339, 342, 344, 345, 347, 352, 354, 356, 357, 360, 361, 393, 422, 442 John 51, 60, 75, 131, 138, 146, 151, 154, 156, 159, 161, 162, 225, 246, 250, 251, 290, 291, 292, 303, 305, 351, 352, 370, 372, 373, 392, 395 John the Baptist 38, 65, 66, 67, 344 John Chrysostom 178, 282 Jowett, Benjamin 267, 269, 272, 273, 277, 278, 393 Judaism 6–7, 36, 43, 94, 116, 224, 226, 287, 331, 341, 342, 347–9, 351, 352–4, 356, 360–3 Kant, Immanuel 42–4, 97, 106, 113, 237, 283, 385 Critique of Judgment 237 Kierkegaard, Søren 69–70, 113, 117, 126, 149, 150 Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments 69 King, Martin Luther 327 LaCocque, André 403, 405, 406, 407, 408, 411, 412, 424, 426, 429, 430 Leo XIII 167–71, 174, 179, 180 Levenson, Jon 337–8, 374, 390 liberals/liberalism 30, 116, 140, 141, 189, 191, 215–17, 241–5, 248, 249, 264, 343, 390, 442, 449–50 literary criticism 2–3, 123, 172, 243, 256,

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259, 277–8, 324, 329, 330, 331, 342, 407, 410, 444 Living Word see Word logic 95, 96, 103, 305, 365, 395, 443, 444, 445, 461, 464, 475 Lord’s Supper 133, 136, 138, 157 Luke 60, 66, 76, 156, 251, 285, 304, 305, 311, 312, 344, 375 Luther, Martin 72, 115, 126, 150, 187, 190, 203, 244, 245, 267, 275–7, 282, 343, 356, 423, 448 theology 187, 196, 252 Lutherans/Lutheranism 7, 78, 203, 244, 346, 349, 357, 358, 423, 442, 450, 457, 480 Luz, Ulrich 4–5, 279–80 Marion, Jean-Luc 303–4 “They Recognized Him; and He Became Invisible to Them” 304 Mark 133, 251, 285, 344, 356, 367 Mary 67, 198 Mary Magdalene 382 mass 187–8, 199 Matthew 23, 51, 65, 66, 156, 268, 273, 274, 276, 279, 280, 292, 342, 343, 344, 345, 371, 373 reception 279 memory 16, 20, 30, 64, 92, 128, 308, 375, 392, 394, 408 Messiah 30, 54, 60–2, 65–8, 139–40, 142, 226, 234, 250–1, 355, 382, 389 metaphysics 100,–103, 195–6, 198–9, 201, 207–9, 237, 303, 304, 365, 379–80, 461, 464 Methodism 7 modernity 6, 132, 464, 469 Moses 15–19, 24, 27, 35–6, 38, 40, 52, 54,55, 56, 60, 67, 68, 232, 234, 250, 310, 340, 343, 346, 349, 359, 393 Muslim theology 101 Muslims 1 mystery 220, 225–6, 230, 231, 233, 235, 236, 244, 270, 415, 422–3, 466, 471, 476 mysticism 141, 198, 199, 231, 237, 244 myth/mythology 29–30, 34, 35, 38, 39, 42, 44–54, 56–67, 93, 131, 133–48, 153, 155–60, 162–3, 228, 242, 246, 247,

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248, 253, 270, 352, 362, 378, 425–7, 456, 478 mythological constructs 131 naturalism 3, 12, 136, 460, 468–70 Neo-Lutheranism 191 Niebergall, Ernst Elias 89, 91–2, 98, 99, 102–6, 117 Nietzsche, Friedrich 95, 126 Noah 52, 53, 271, 274 objectivity 73, 74, 76, 81, 82, 106, 231, 329, 440, 442, 449, 455–6 ontology 4, 148, 153, 195–6, 201, 202, 209, 213, 249, 265, 283, 323, 396, 417, 444, 461, 467, 468–70, 473–4, 475 oral sources 32, 42, 44, 50, 51, 58, 63, 177, 255, 262, 375 Origen 33– 5, 36, 37, 219–20, 221–4, 229, 230, 232, 236, 237, 267, 269, 270, 274, 345, 409, 416–18, 421, 422 exegesis 219 Orthodoxy 35, 94, 112, 116, 140, 166, 189, 196, 214, 243, 244, 246, 249, 250, 251–2, 264, 282, 342, 343, 344, 352, 447, 480 Pacelli, Eugenio see Pius XII Paul 3, 40, 109, 111–13, 115–16, 118–20, 122–4, 126–9, 133, 138, 140, 143–7, 149, 151–4, 156, 157, 159, 160, 225–6, 228–9, 234, 242, 245, 246, 250, 251, 253, 270, 286, 288, 290, 342–5, 347–50, 352, 357–9, 361, 371–3, 388, 395, 415–17, 422, 424, 448 Pentateuch 41, 46, 70, 234, 261, 340, 346, 359, 361 documentary hypothesis 70 Peter 285, 395, 460, 478 phenomenology 101, 303 Pindar 32 Pius X 169, 170 Pius XI 169 Pius XII 165–6 Divino Afflante Spiritu 165–6 Plantinga, Alvin 365–6 Plato/Platonism 32, 113, 211, 223, 372, 388–9, 417–18, 422, 429

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polemics 36, 72, 121, 149, 205, 219, 234, 261, 263, 338, 341, 353, 403, 412, 440, 464, 477, 478 postmodernism 303, 394, 455 preachers/preaching 24, 26, 65, 98, 138, 141, 161–2, 166, 170, 174, 175, 181, 183, 188, 192, 200, 204, 215, 216, 239, 240, 241, 248, 252–4, 275, 282, 347, 371, 441, 449, 450, 457 Preachers, Sacred Order of 168 Protestants/Protestantism 7, 77, 101, 116, 125, 127, 128, 166, 187–217, 249, 263, 264, 282, 290, 293, 343, 349, 357, 366, 369, 380, 393, 459, 468, 469, 470, 475, 479 Reformed 7, 366, 459 theology 459 proto-existentialism 70 proto-orthodoxy 344 Providentissimus Deus 167, 168, 171, 174 rabbinic teaching 285, 337 rational method 11, 294, 311 rationalists/rationalism 38–42, 43, 97, 148, 168, 217, 237, 283, 294, 311 reception 8, 277, 279, 288, 292, 405–6, 412, 413, 416, 461, 462, 468, 476, 480 redaction criticism 256, 263, 340, 360, 361, 362, 405, 463, 474 redemption 105, 106, 119, 134, 142, 146, 182, 195, 198, 226, 273, 343, 467 Reformation 1, 36, 109, 126, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 196, 199, 200, 202–6, 212–14, 267, 268, 275, 277, 282, 357, 361, 423, 461, 462, 469 Reformers 125, 188, 189, 191, 195, 196, 200, 201, 203, 204, 212–14, 245, 249, 252, 263, 264, 325, 357 religionsgeschichtliche Schule see History of Religion Schools religious communities 4, 8, 59, 89, 262, 278, 279, 337, 338, 350, 380, 453, 457 Resurrection 37, 61, 93, 114, 124, 132, 133, 134, 137, 146, 156, 158–62, 242, 250, 251, 253–4, 274, 308, 309, 339, 343, 369, 382, 385, 391, 394, 448 revelation 14, 18, 36, 38–9, 43, 57, 91–2,

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Index 98, 105–7, 149–50, 154–5, 167–8, 187–8, 194–202, 204, 211, 213–14, 216, 225–6, 243–5, 249, 252, 255, 257–8, 260, 269, 316, 326, 339, 353, 357, 359, 371, 374, 441, 443, 445, 447, 459–80 rhetoric 8, 20, 75, 84, 85, 90, 217, 239, 252, 259, 265, 322, 323–4, 326, 327–33, 408, 411, 412, 440, 449, 468 Ricœur, Paul 8–9, 261, 403–4 Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies 403 Roman Catholics/Catholicism 7, 19, 27, 77, 101, 125, 165–76, 178–82, 187–8, 196, 198–205, 206, 211–13, 216, 219–20, 263–4, 277, 304, 325, 379–80, 393, 442, 457 sacraments 78, 82, 119, 136, 137, 157, 160, 187, 188, 199, 200, 201, 213, 217, 314, 415, 463, 471, 477, 479 Sacred Order of Preachers 168 salvation 3, 13, 23, 26, 99–101, 103, 133–4, 137, 138, 141, 142, 145, 147–55, 156–8, 160–2, 167, 168, 180, 182, 195, 200, 214, 223, 226, 227, 233, 249, 253, 274–6, 309, 349, 355, 361, 375, 416, 419, 427, 463, 467, 472, 476, 480 sanctification 182, 220, 459–60, 462–3, 467–75, 477, 480. doctrine 459 Sanhedrin 64 Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth 321–2 Scriptural Reasoning 1, 8 sexual mores 404, 411, 424 Society of Biblical Literature 321, 324–6, 329–30, 332–3, 343 sola fide 188, 199–200, 213–14 Song of Songs 9, 315, 403–4, 405–30 soul/souls 33, 99, 104, 107, 141–3, 146, 167, 171, 174–5, 181–3, 222–3, 226, 228, 230, 232, 237, 242, 272, 327, 347, 410, 414, 416, 418, 423, 448–9, 451, 454–5 source/sources oral 32, 42, 44, 50, 51, 58, 63, 177, 255, 262, 375 written 31, 32, 42, 44, 49, 50, 58, 62, 171, 177, 255, 261, 262, 277, 288

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Spinoza, Benedict de 7, 11–12, 283, 342, 365, 366, 373, 380–1, 468 Theological-Political Treatise 11 Spirit 1, 8, 13, 17, 18, 33–5, 43, 50, 54, 55, 76, 78, 81, 111, 122–4, 133–6, 145–7, 151, 167–8, 172, 175–6, 183, 221–38, 259, 263, 270, 273, 283, 293, 307, 309, 311, 313, 316, 342, 347, 368, 369–70, 389, 394, 460, 462, 464–80 Steinmetz, David 132, 267–8 Taking the Long View 268 Stendahl, Krister 239–30, 439, 440, 441–57 Strauss, David 29–30, 94, 243, 245, 381 supernatural/supernaturalism 11, 24, 33, 35, 39–42, 45, 47–50, 55, 63, 64, 66–8, 99–100, 102, 105–6, 133, 136, 146, 148, 150, 162, 195, 373, 377–8, 387, 460, 469, 472, 473 Taking the Long View 268 TBC see Traditional Biblical Commentary teleology 403 Theological-Political Treatise 11 “They Recognized Him; and He Became Invisible to Them” 304 Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies 403 Torah 245, 270, 287, 340, 343, 344–5, 347–9, 358–9, 362, 422 Tracy, David 3, 4 Traditional Biblical Commentary (TBC) 365–6, 370–3, 375, 383, 384, 386, 389, 390–1 transcendence 5, 104, 163, 225, 283, 416, 472, 480 translation/translations 12, 114, 120, 165, 166, 172, 174, 193, 194, 204, 245, 247, 248, 249, 252, 253, 254, 325 Trinity 274, 307, 367, 464, 465, 467, 468, 469 Troeltsch, Ernst 3, 89–90, 205, 213, 365, 366, 376–8, 380–1, 382, 383–6, 389–96, 456 Truth and Method 4, 279 Vatican I 356 Vatican II 165, 167, 219, 264, 356 Virgil 345

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virgin birth 131, 138, 140, 156, 250, 393 Volf, Miroslav 2 Vulgate 165, 167, 169, 172–4 Webster, John 459–60 Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch 459 Wellhausen, Julius 70, 346–50, 354–61 documentary hypothesis 70, 350 Wirkungsgeschichte 279 women 321, 322, 324–6, 440, 447–8, 449, 451

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ordination 440, 447, 449, 451 Word 13, 78, 80, 110, 116, 117, 162, 163, 165, 169, 175–6, 178, 180–1, 183, 196, 200–1, 204, 213, 223, 226–31, 233, 236, 249, 258, 263–4, 288, 293, 303–4, 305–8, 310–17, 341, 367, 369–70, 393, 462, 466, 470–2, 476, 477, 480 Worms, Diet of 343 written sources 31, 32, 42, 44, 49, 50, 58, 62, 171, 177, 255, 261, 262, 277, 288

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