Reading Faithfully, Volume 1

Writings from the Archives: Theology and Hermeneutics

Frei, Higton

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781498274173
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The influence of Hans Frei (1922-1988) is wide and deep in contemporary theology, even though he published little in his own lifetime. These two volumes collect a wide range of his letters, lectures, book reviews, and other items, many of them not previously available in print. Together, they display the range and richness of Frei's thinking, and provide new insights into the nature and implications of his work. They are an invaluable resource for all those interested in Frei's work, and for any interested in his central themes: the development of modern biblical hermeneutics, the interpretation of biblical narrative, and the figural interpretation of all reality in relation to the narrated identity of Jesus Christ.

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 1973e. 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 1974k. 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 Witt...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Editorial Introduction
• Abbreviations
• Approximate Chronological Listing of Pieces
• Part One: Letters
• Part Two: Hermeneutics
• Part Three: Theology
• Afterword
• Bibliography