Reading Faithfully, Volume 1: Writings from the Archives: Theology and Hermeneutics

Part I

Letters

1

Letter to Dr. Larry K. Nelson, August 14, 1973

Frei responds here to a draft article by Larry K. Nelson, who in

1973

had just completed a Yale PhD thesis entitled Relation of Religious and Moral Discourse: A Kantian Argument in Analytic Mode, advised by the historian of religion William Christian (

1944

– ) and the philosopher-theologian Paul Holmer (

1916

–

2004). We have been unable to identify the article in question, but the letter, after opening with some remarks about Frei’s very high evaluation of Nelson’s work, nicely sets out Frei’s stance on apologetics. (CPH

1973

e. YDS

3–68

)

My reading may have been skewed by my Barthian prejudices. I believe that apologetics, even of the no-neutral-ground variety you stipulate, usually ends up being semi-Pelagian, and confusing the very various order of how one may come to believe with the logic and intrinsic structure of Christian beliefs. Thus, I think that making apologetics a formal, systematic argument instead of an ad hoc statement depending on the many different ways people come to Christianity is a bad category error. Sin and its possible existential correlates may (or may not!) be an existential prerequisite to becoming a Christian, but it is not and should not be made a systematic presupposition to the logical structure or intelligibility or convincingness of Christian belief. It seems to me that Karl Barth, in his arguments against Brunner ( Nature and Grace vs. Nein! ) and in the Church Dogmatics (e.g. II/ 1 , III/ 2 , IV/ 1 ) has made this case so strongly that to ignore the argument completely is dangerous business. ¹ One may want to avoid his very substantial counter-argument to what he regarded as the typical apologetic stance since (at least) Schleiermacher. And he would have put you under that heading.

Has it never puzzled you that, no matter how frequently this case has been made out in almost two hundred years, it has made very little impact on morally serious philosophical people (think of Wittgenstein himself!) but has usually convinced only theologians who were already convinced and have used the argument as a conversation piece with each other? Perhaps even existentially the argument underestimates the moral toughness and integrity of an agnostic position and pari passu the towering quality and demandingness of the Christian vision.

[The letter finishes with further comments on Nelson’s work.]

1. [Emil Brunner (

1889

–

1966

), Swiss Reformed theologian.]

2

Letter to Elsabeth S. Hilke, August 5, 1974

Elsabeth S. Hilke (

1938

– ) sent Frei some of her work on Barth while working toward a PhD thesis, eventually completed as Theology as Grammar: An Inquiry into the Function of Language in the Theology of Karl Barth, Yale

1976

. This is an excerpt from Frei’s response. He begins this letter with support and encouragement for the work Hilke is doing. Frei then goes on to articulate his own understanding, providing an illuminating insight into his interpretation of Barth’s thinking on hermeneutics and theological language, and his sense of the harmony and dissonance between himself and Barth on those questions. (CPH

1974

k. YDS

2–42

)

Barth himself underscored the importance for his own thought of his Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum. It deals with some of the things you tackle. About five pages from the end of the book (p. 165 of the English translation) he says, in comment on the fool’s denial of God’s existence:

When one thinks falsely, and from the foregoing that means directing one’s thinking abstractly to the vox significans rem without knowing the id ipsum quod res est—as one must think as an insipiens—then it is really possible to do what according to the Proof of Proslogion

2

–

3

is impossible. By the miracle of foolishness it is possible to think of God as not existing. But only by this miracle. Anselm had certainly not reckoned with this. His statement, and his proof of the statement, God cannot be thought of as not existing, rests on the assumption of the intelligere id ipsum quod res est. His thinking is, as he admits, the thinking of fides quaerens intellectum. How could it think only the word God? How could the word that is spoken to it about God be but an empty word? It starts out from the knowledge of God himself whose existence it wants to know.²

I draw your attention to that passage—typical of the thrust of the book—because it seems to me to illustrate something quite typical in Barth: some things he says are compatible with two quite different, possibly contrary ways of commenting on what he is doing, and yet the two contrary ways may in his case be properly complementary rather than contradictory. For what he seems to me to be saying in effect is that indeed essence is expressed by grammar, but for a peculiar reason: when one thinks rightly about God (and the conditions for that may include a lot of things, such as ordering one’s life rightly) one knows not merely the signifying word but the reality itself to which the word refers. Let us for a moment ignore the fact that in many cases (including the hermeneutical remarks in I/2) Barth obviously operates with a signifying or referential theory or at least use of language—the kind that Wittgenstein, in the opening remarks of the Investigations, finds so misleading and limited. That’s an important matter, but I’ll come back to it under the third point I want to make. So in this context Barth could be understood to be saying, Yes, essence is expressed by grammar, but that is because the real object fits itself to our concepts and words. In other words, Barth has—in the example cited as in many other places—something suspiciously like a correspondence theory of truth. In regard to language about God he makes a logical distinction—though not a material separation—between language (understood as functioning conceptually rather than semantically) and knowledge, between depth grammar and epistemology. Then he claims material agreement or correspondence between our concept of God and the reality to which the concept refers. There is correspondence between concept and God, and between language and concept used referringly. The upshot of the situation is that one can say that, for Barth, in this instance, grammar expresses essence because that’s the way God has arranged the relation between reality, knowledge, and linguistic use or meaning. It is as much an ontological affirmation and an epistemological one (Barth might call it noetic) as a grammatical one: you can pick it up at either end, I understand Barth to suggest. It makes no difference because (per analogiam fidei) there is, in the proper use of God, material agreement where there is logical distinction. But the logical distinction is there: let me remind you that Barth obviously believes that there is material agreement between a proper doctrine of the Word of God and a proper way of talking about the knowability and knowledge of God. The former is a way of rightly arranging our thinking about the church’s language (and in a way it is a slant on his whole enterprise), the language of proclamation. But then (once again, logically distinctly though in material agreement) in KD II, he talks about how it is that in, with, and through the Word of God it makes sense to say that we know God—not how we arrange our language about him—and there he refers the reader to the Anselm book (KD II/1, 2). And that book so clearly indicates not only a reference theory of language but a correspondence theory of knowledge and truth (over and above language as grammar.)

[At this point Frei turns to offer some general suggestions for the improvement of her essay, and then returns to exposition of Wittgenstein and Barth:]

Wittgenstein’s religious followers, precisely because they have a descriptive rather than an explanatory theory to work with, tend to deny that they are using a general theory, or that they have a meta-level operation. I have always been dubious about that claim, and because of that dubiety of mine and Barth’s (to me sound) suspicion of every general philosophical theory either to explain what he was doing or convict him of wrongdoing, I have always felt that Wittgenstein taken as more than suggestive, taken very systematically, is perhaps not a good guide for describing what Barth does after all! You see, to put it in a nutshell, there are times when Barth really wants to make very strong and specific truth claims, and times when he uses language clearly cognitively, in sharp dissent from those who claim it operates that way only when also used self-involvingly (or existentially). There are times when he just doesn’t seem to be using language in a way that one can fit under the rule, language is a form of life. Now that doesn’t mean—for example—that he feels that the theologian isn’t bound to have to be qualified personally in order to do theology: he or she has to be so qualified! But Barth has no theory—and I think he would strenuously resist any theory—of language that explains how he can get his personal statements about the theologian and his conceptual statements about theology into one framework. Thus, I think you are wrong on p. 183 when you claim that he substitutes a statement about the theologian for a hermeneutics. Admittedly he has no special biblical hermeneutics, but he does most decidedly have a general hermeneutical procedure in I/2 (§19.1; §21.2), and he doesn’t think that talking about a theologian’s personal qualifications eliminates the need to talk about hermeneutics. The question is not whether he believes that theological language is both self-involving and (for example) referential or cognitive or descriptive. He does. The question is how he wants to ground that coherence between vastly different uses of language all appropriate to the Word of God. I think he wants to leave it with the Word of God and does not want to bolster it by any meta-level theory, even a minimally-descriptive one of how we actually use language, such that it can be both self-involving or performative or a form of life, and also cognitive or descriptive. My hunch is that he would regard any theory as reductive, grounding one’s use of language in another—and usually making the distinctly religious self-involving use the more basic. Well, he might not be right about himself, were he to say that sort of thing. And I may be wrong about him.

[The letter then closes with more personal advice.]

2. Barth, Fides Quarens Intellectum,

165

–

66

.

3

Letter to D. Cameron Murchison Jr., Late 1974

Frei wrote this letter to comment on a draft of Murchison’s PhD thesis, Theology and Hermeneutics: A Critical Study in the Thought of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. Murchison, who retired as Professor of Ministry at Columbia Theological Seminary in 2011, had faulted Barth for exegesis that failed to yield results that are understandable in terms of the contemporary experience of reality (thesis abstract). Frei closes with some thoughts about Bultmann’s hermeneutics, and notes that he expects a paper he had given at the Barth Society meetings in Toronto earlier that year to be published. That paper, titled Scripture as Realistic Narrative: Karl Barth as a Critic of Historical Criticism, is included in this volume below. (YDS 3–62)

Is self-understanding the modern way of understanding past historical and religious texts? And suppose the whole model of reconceptualization is dubious? It may very well be the case, as I heard Professor Karsten Harries of our Philosophy Department say in connection with a Bultmann dissertation, that the problem of understanding qua translation of the New Testament into modern idiom is not the problem for modern man. It’s the problem of truth that bugs him.

[Frei then offers some advice on what to do with the manuscript, before continuing.]

My Toronto paper was more of a talk than a paper. It was taped and will eventually be published. But it was not great shakes. You covered the same material from CD I/2 and IV/1 better than I did. My Crossroads essays from 1967 will be republished in January by Fortress Press.³ I provide a vigorous new preface that comes to rather different conclusions from yours, but you may want to say that I have falsely compared apples and oranges. I fault Bultmann and followers for claiming to have (through pre-understanding, etc.) a general hermeneutical theory that is simply not general because it fails to account for some kinds of exegesis that can be done.

[The letter closes with personal greetings.]

3. [These are the articles that served as the basis for The Identity of Jesus Christ.]

4

Letter to Leander Keck, May 22, 1975

Leander Keck (

1929

– ) was, in

1975

, Professor of New Testament at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. In

1980

he was to join Frei in Yale, as Dean of the Divinity School. Keck appears to have sent Frei a draft of his review of The Identity of Jesus Christ, that was eventually published in the October

1975

issue of Theology Today. Frei’s letter comments on the troublesome issue of the relation of history-likeness to history. (CPH

1975

e. YDS

3–52

)

Dear Lee,

Your good letter and review arrived today. The mail is getting slower all the time. I thought that a hurried response would therefore be better than one well pondered and long delayed. After your careful review of The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative⁴ and your suspension of judgment about the cash value of a realistic reading of the Gospels, I was naturally very curious about how you would react to the second book.⁵ I am most grateful to you for your careful, perceptive, and generous estimate of it. I am aware of the difficult and cryptic nature of the book and therefore deeply appreciate your clear and insightful reading of it.

Were I to comment at length it would be on the troublesome issue of the relation of history-likeness to history. Not only is it intrinsically of crucial importance (even if theological debate right now shuns it), but I have been sensitive to your own significant contribution to the question of access to the historical figure. It’s too much to tackle in a brief letter. I do agree that Christians cannot be indifferent to the relation of what is history-like to history.⁶ But I also think that the way the Christian qua Christian sees the connection between them is different from the way the historian qua historian sees it. Since my conviction is that in the logic of the Christian faith the connection would have to be made at the point of the crucifixion-resurrection sequence I see no way, again as a theologian, to do it except by way of the kind of ontological argumentation I suggest: Seeing who Christians believe Jesus is, they are bound to believe him to have been raised. This does not, I hope, prejudice what the historian can try to do from his or her side to establish the facts of Jesus’ career. I believe that the relation between story and event is of the greatest christological importance but that one has to disentangle very carefully how one sees the logic of that relation as theologian and as historian. The problem, and I agree it is very difficult, is to ask where the two perspectives come together. On that matter, I make a stab—vague as it is—in my suggestion that historical and trans-historical judgments overlap on the issue of the falsifiability of the resurrection.

These and other problems need, as you rightly suggest, a lot of elaboration. After your careful review of The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, I was immensely curious to know whether you would think that the second book spoke pertinently to any of the questions you had posed. I am therefore doubly grateful for your insightful understanding of The Identity of Jesus Christ. I am very, very much in your debt for so perceptive a review and critique. I do hope we can talk at length before long. How about the next SBL/AAR meeting, since the last one didn’t work out so well? I am not sure yet but will probably attend.

4. [In Theology Today in January

1975

.]

5. [This second book is The Identity of Jesus Christ. Although Frei refers to it as his second book the material that is included in it was composed by him several years prior to Eclipse. See letter to Nelson above.]

6. [Keck, Review of Identity,

319

.]

5

Letter to John Woolverton, July 7, 1975

John Woolverton (

1926

–

2014

) was a close friend of Frei’s, who at the time of this letter was in the midst of his long stint teaching church history at Virginia Theological Seminary, from

1958

to

1983

. He was at this time also reviews editor for the Virginia Seminary Journal. See also letter

10

, below, and the sermon that forms chapter

9

of Part

3

. Frei sent this letter to accompany to his review of James Barr’s The Bible in the Modern World (included as chapter

2

in Part

2

of this volume), and it provides some additional insight into his evaluation of Barr’s work. Woolverton’s papers, including this letter, are held by the Virginia Theological Seminary library.

Dear John,

With much embarrassment and apology I enclose a book review you asked me to have ready last fall. I have no ready excuse to plead, so I won’t try. I did get to it just as soon as I could after getting out of the Yale infirmary where I had gone at the end of May to try to get rid of a ruptured disk problem that, unfortunately, does not seem to want to go away. I’m afraid I chew over book reviews forever. That’s why I do so few. I tried to get as much content as possible into this one.

But now it’s not only long overdue but overduly long. You may recall you had asked me to do 800 words. Well, here I am with nearly 1,300, and my request, Mr. Editor, is that you wield your blue pencil. In short, do as you will with this: either throw it away, if the delay means that you can no longer use it, or cut it down to size as you wish, or return it to me with stern orders to do the pruning work myself, or else use it as it stands. I’m agreeable to anything you want to do. I’m afraid it’s not really a critical review. I just didn’t think I could do that in the space available, because I wanted to give something of the historical reasons that make Barr so important. That made it essential to refer to his two earlier books. The only hint of a critique is my parenthetical reference to Dave Kelsey’s book,⁷ which is, I think, very important indeed and includes, in its striking argument, a telling criticism of just about everybody, Barr included. His point is that theological use of the Bible has precious little (demonstrably so!) to do with exegesis of the usual interpretative kind, but is always governed by a prior insight into the essence of Christianity. This insight is never derived from a theology neutral normative reading of Scripture, as though Scripture had a specific theological content we then translate conceptually out of it for our own modern, theological purposes. That is, says Kelsey, indeed the consensus among all sorts of otherwise mutually contentious theological positions—but this standard picture is all wrong. His book is done with frightening convincingness. Frightening, because the results may be incredibly relativistic. It is the most important study in theological method and biblical authority to appear in years. I wanted at least to refer to it. I could have done two other critical jobs: one from my own specific point of view. Barr himself, in Old and New, suggests that the aspect of cumulative narrative is very important for the Bible as a whole. But then he converts it, even in that book, into a logically quite different question about the historical continuity between Jewish and Christian religious tradition, and I do not see why this has to be done if one inquires into the unity and canonicity of the Bible. Besides, he leaves the matter out altogether in the latest book and consigns to the literary (narrative and otherwise) form of interpretation an unduly subordinate place. Then, finally, I might have pointed out how thoroughly liberal (i.e., detached and tentative) his biblical inquiry is and wondered how many present day theological moods (e.g., charismatic, liberationist) could buy that mood and hence makes use of his analysis. Not that I necessarily disagree altogether with his mood. But this tiny, rational voice may get easily submerged today when everybody is shouting, even in the churches. Anyway, let me know whether you can still use the review and, once again, accept my apologies please.

[The letter closes with personal greetings.]

7. [Frei is referring here to The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology, by David Kelsey (

1932

– ), a Yale colleague.]

6

Letter to Professor Ray L. Hart, January 12, 1976

Ray Hart was editor of The Journal of the American Academy of Religion from

1969

to

1979. In that capacity, he sent Frei an article by John Zuck, then Assistant Professor of Religion at Lafayette College. Frei’s response explores the relation of his claims about narrative to Zuck’s claims about myth, and distances himself from a wide range of theological uses of story as a central category. (CPH

1976

a. YDS

2–36

)

Dear Ray,

For weeks, I wallowed in indecision about John Zucks’ article, Tales of Wonder: Biblical Narrative, Myth, and Fairy-Stories,⁸ and how I should respond to your intention to use it as a review-essay with my own comments attached. I wrote three drafts of a letter to you and discarded them all.

I am flattered by the attention you and Zuck are paying to my book, and I’m grateful to you both.

May I then seem inexcusably ungrateful nonetheless? (Honestly, I’m not!) I assume Zuck’s essay was not intended by him as a review-essay. I’m simply a useful and significant foil for him to do his own thing. There is nothing wrong with that, and it’s well done. However, given the standing of JAAR, I would really like—if I’m not too late now—to see a genuine review that deals with the book and its various themes, including its historical arguments, in their own right—and not only with one or two themes, leaving out most of the book’s subject matter. And if I am too late, I guess I’ll forego with thanks the chance for a response. I would have to argue too much on grounds that draw attention away from the things I wanted to say and did say; I would instead have to play in a very different ball park, and also with a lot of preparation I am not presently ready to put in.

So here is my non-response: Zuck’s chief criticism of my book is my inadequate view of myth, leading him to Eliade’s better understanding of it and its use in religious talk and talk about religion.⁹ In the historical arena about which I was writing, an Eliade-like notion of myth was simply not there in the literature (unlike realism, which was present all over the place, whether properly or improperly understood). The one or two ways in which myth was understood in philological, historical-critical, and philosophical-theological discussion from the middle of the eighteenth century to Rudolf Bultmann (no need to stop with Strauss¹⁰ for continuity on this concept) has so little in common with Eliade that I would have had to introduce the magister from Chicago as a deus ex machina to make what he has to say pertinent at all within the context. What would Zuck have me do? Declare, in a mainly historical study, a whole discussion from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century out of order, because the authors didn’t use myth the way he thinks they should have done?

But to infer from my policy of staying in context either that I assume that archaic thought [and presumably myth] is intellectually naïve and untenable in its own terms¹¹ or that I mean to issue a blanket denial that it ever applies to biblical narratives is not only unwarranted but incorrect. The first accusation I deny. About the second I can only say that I try never to make blanket and global generalizations. If Zuck were to take a look at my The Identity of Jesus Christ I think he would find backing for both the assertions I have just made.

On the other hand I do not wish to deny that in some respects I have grave doubts about Zuck’s claim that for Eliade mythical stories speak in their own right and about the implication that Eliade’s account of myth is not heavily theory-laden. But to show that would take me far afield from my book and from a fruitful discussion of what I was doing in it. Nor do I wish to deny that I think Eliade is global and reductionistic in much of his analysis, and that in effect every genre of religious literature that differs from his all-encompassing scheme is (for him and Zuck) allowed to do so only relatively.¹² But again, I would have to undertake a major examination of Eliade to show that, and I’m not in a position to do so. I can only say that what he regards as a relative difference in genre, overcome by identity of the various differences in a more encompassing field, is for me a distinction that in certain cases I can’t overlook or gloss over that easily.

For example, I don’t deny that there are affinities between Genesis 1–3 or Luke 24 and certain mythical stories. Who in his right mind would want to? But there are also enormous literary differences between them, e.g., the comparatively unadorned and meager biblical accounts, the comparatively unexalted and straightforward manner in which the divine or supernatural enters an ordinary world and ordinary experience, in contrast to a rightly proliferated, mysterious exaltation of the ordinary into unity with primal mystery. This distinctive characteristic I designated realistic. It is manifestly a misunderstanding of what I was saying when Zuck claims that the two kinds of accounts do not differ because both have to do with events that are extraordinary compared to our life and experience. Of course they do, but the point is that they do it rather differently. To denigrate and relativize the literary difference so easily and include these stories under another category, and a global one at that, is, to use Zuck’s own words, very shortsighted on his part.¹³