639 - The Text as Thou: Martin Buber's Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology

The Text as Thou: Martin Buber's Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology
By Steven Kepnes
Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1992. 221 pp. $35.00.

This book touches on a number of important debates in contemporary theology: hermeneutics, narrative, and the implications of Martin Buber's thought. That it brings these debates together in one account is perhaps its greatest strength. But that it fails to provide a compelling conceptual account of those debates is its greatest weakness.

The book certainly succeeds in displaying the rich resources Buber's thought offers to contemporary theology in general and hermeneutics in particular. Kepnes shows that, far from being an existentialist (as Buber too often has been taken to be), Buber developed quite sophisticated hermeneutical accounts that are congruent with, and sometimes anticipate, currently more prominent positions developed by such theorists as Mikhail Bakhtin and Hans-Georg Gadamer. These arguments form the overarching structure of Part I of the book.

In Part II, Kepnes turns his attention from hermeneutics to "Buber's Narrative Theology." There is much in these chapters that is interesting and significant. For example, he discusses particular features of Buber's "Autobiographical Fragments," and he also shows how Buber uses narrative as a response to "'the eclipse of God" in contemporary life. For Buber, that eclipse is a feature that afflicts modern humanity in general, but it takes on particular poignancy in the wake of the Holocaust. Buber's deployment of (what Kepnes calls) "narrative biblical theology" gives expression to suffering and enables people to persevere in faith while awaiting the world's redemption.

Kepnes rightly notes at the outset of his book that Buber's thought is fertile and in need of being "recast." From such a perspective, Kepnes has succeeded admirably. His arguments reflect the continuing importance of Buber's thought.

However, Kepnes' book is marred by conceptual weakness in three interrelated ways. First, he tries to do too much too quickly. The text is only one hundred and fifty pages, yet he seeks not only to explicate Buber's thought but also to bring Buber into conversation with a wide range of figures and issues in contemporary theology and religious studies, including not only hermeneutics and biblical narrative but also autobiographical theory. What is gained in breadth, however, is lost in depth and coherence. For example, while Gadamer merits considerable attention, Jürgen Habermas is only adverted to at a couple of places. And little attention is given to their disputes about hermeneutics and ideology.

Secondly, Kepnes does not adequately establish links between his section on hermeneutics and his section on narrative. So, for example,

640 - The Text as Thou: Martin Buber's Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology

there is an interesting comparison of Buber and Bakhtin in Chapter Four, and a discussion of both Frank Kermode and Paul Ricoeur in Chapter Five, but no engagement with the differences among Bakhtin, Kermode, and Ricoeur on issues of both hermeneutics and narrative. Even more, Kepnes makes almost no reference to the work of Hans Frei (only two brief footnotes). Yet Frei's argument represents a challenge to the very presumption that "narrative" and "hermeneutics" are separate and independent categories.

Thus, Kepnes' constructive argument is weakened by his lack of attention to the controversial status of his terminology. While he provides insightful accounts of Buber's use of narratives, he does not adequately engage the debates about whether Jews and Christians ought to think in terms of "narrative theology" as a general category at all-much less one that is distinct from hermeneutics. Indeed Kepnes' use of Gary Comstock's distinction between "pure" and "impure" narrative theologies actually obscures rather than illumines the issues at stake.

These conceptual problems limit the overall persuasiveness of Kepnes' argument, and that is unfortunate. Had he written a book that simply sought to explicate a coherent account of Buber's thought, or had he written a much larger book that sought both to provide such an account and to develop a constructive proposal about Buber's contributions to debates in contemporary thought, his argument would have been more compelling. But that should not obscure the important contribution Kepnes has made to recovering and reclaiming Buber's contemporary significance not only for Jewish theologians but for others as well.

L. Gregory Jones

Loyola College
Baltimore, MD