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How New Is The New Hermeneutic?
By Carl E. Braaten

"The claim that there is a new hermeneutic is bound up with the judgment that Fuchs and Ebeling have, with the aid of Heidegger, rediscovered the hermeneutical import of language-perhaps for the first time since Jesus and Luther. In my opinion it is possible to call this insight 'new' to the extent that one forgets that, despite frequent aberrations in homiletical practice, the church has always regarded proclamation in the mode of witness as a kind of 'primal speech' which serves as the hermeneutics of the Word of God."

OUR theme, The New Hermeneutic, is word for word the title of the second volume of the trilogy, New Frontiers in Theology, edited by James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb. But unlike Robinson's introduction in this book, my treatment of the so-called new hermeneutic will be more a polemic than a panegyric.

I

Perhaps there are others who also detect something lamentable in our theological culture when the question of whether an idea is new becomes more fascinating than whether it is true. It must be a sign of boredom when our generation demands a steady diet of exotic entrées and has little appetite for any of the older theological staples. If a theological program has nothing else to recommend it but its claim to novelty, it will still find in our time enough people with "itching ears"¹ to make a profit for author and publisher. I am one of those with itching ears and have been a sucker for every new fashion that comes along: the new Barth, even "the new, new Barth,"

¹ II Timothy 4: 3.

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the later Heidegger, the new quest for the historical Jesus, and now the new hermeneutic. We have even heard about a "new essence of Christianity." New theologies are often like new fashions. If you have lived long enough or studied enough history, you recognize that they have been around before. We are not ready to go all the way with the preacher in Ecclesiastes who said "there is nothing new under the sun," but history does reveal constancy amidst change, continuities amidst discontinuities, and repetitions alongside of radical innovations. Without special elaboration we would comment that never before has theology thought it more commendable to be relevant to the new than to be faithful to the old. Relevance, contemporaneity, modernity-these have never in themselves been sighted as objectives of theological work. In fact, the most relevant theologies historically were those which intentionally eschewed novelty but worked for the rebirth of the ancient faith. We would hope that this might even be so today.

These preliminary exhortations only lead me to make a few more reckless remarks about our theme, the new hermeneutic. I am in the anomalous situation of having to speak on a theme which has little connection with any real situation. It took a bit of analysis too to show that the vaunted "new quest of the historical Jesus" was not so new.² There are three things wrong with the way James Robinson has introduced "the new hermeneutic" into American theology.³ (1) By using this term as a name-tag for the theology of Gerhard Ebeling and Ernst Fuchs, he obscures the fact that the hermeneutical discussion cuts across party lines and involves those who stand at opposite ends of the theological spectrum.⁴ There is no such thing as the new hermeneutic as if the Ebeling-Fuchs position has any monopoly on this concern. (2) By speaking of the new hermeneutic more is done to advance the interests of religious journalism than theological understanding, for it is clear that the terms of the present hermeneutical discussion are shaped by a continuous development that reaches back to Schleiermacher and Dilthey and

² Cf. Van A. Harvey and Schubert M. Ogden, "How New is the 'New Quest of the Historical Jesus'?" and my chapter, "Martin Kähler on the Historic Biblical Christ," in The Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ, edited by Carl E. Braaten and Roy A. Harrisville (New York: Abingdon Press, 1964).
³ James M. Robinson, "Hermeneutic Since Barth," in The New Hermeneutic, New Frontiers in Theology, edited by James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
⁴ For example, are the hermeneutical positions of Heinrich Ott or Wolfhart Pannenberg less "new" than the position of Ebeling and Fuchs? And are their theologies less hermeneutically concerned? This could hardly be maintained.

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forward through Heidegger, Bultmann, and Gadamer,⁵ a development within which Fuchs and Ebeling are more like lengthy footnotes than crucial stages. And my own opinion is that the development cannot proceed further along the Fuchs-Ebeling line, if for no other reasons than that Fuchs lacks clarity (no one understands him) and Ebeling lacks substance (the objective content of faith is reduced to a bare minimum). (3) Thirdly, the effort to use the plural form, hermeneutics, to denote the traditional understanding of biblical interpretation and the singular form, hermeneutic, to refer to the modern conception strikes me as too artificial to be taken seriously. Furthermore, Robinson has stretched the meaning of the term to the point where we may as well drop it from our vocabulary altogether, for he claims that in Ebeling and Fuchs "hermeneutic" is "coterminous with Christian theology as the statement of the meaning of Scripture for our day."⁶ He claims that "the new hermeneutic is a new theology, just as were dialectical theology and Ritschlianism before it."⁷ Thus, the word hermeneutic is preempted to refer to a special brand of existentialist theology. As we have had to be instructed on how to use the word eschatological and the differences between Historie and Geschichte, existential and existentiell, ontic and ontological, so now we are asked to be tidy in observing the difference between hermeneutic and hermeneutics-only now for the first time we are one-up on the Germans because they have no way of making this distinction. In our discussion, at least, we choose not to conform to this arbitrary ruling of one who is widely considered to be the dean of American hermeneuts of German theology. Nor do we think it justifiable to confine our attention to the hermeneutical theory of Ebeling and Fuchs, although they will necessarily figure in to a significant degree.

II

Traditional hermeneutics has usually been defined as the theoretical principles or rules which govern the interpretation of historical documents, especially the Scriptures. On the other hand, the definition of hermeneutics that is currently accepted in Germany makes

⁵ Since Robinson's introduction also follows the recent history of hermeneutics through the latest philosophical position proposed by Hans-Georg Gadamer, a position which becomes the basis for a quite new point of departure by Wolfhart Pannenberg, it is difficult to see why he should reserve the name, "the new hermeneutic," for only one among several contemporary schools.
⁶ The New Hermeneutic, p. 6.
⁷ Ibid., p. 67.

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it a fundamental inquiry into the conditions of understanding history as such. It reaches behind the methodological rules of interpretation to the epistemological presuppositions of historical understanding. It could be called a "critique of historical reason" in the sense in which Dilthey used the expression,⁸ namely, as investigation of the possibility of understanding documents of history. This shift in the scope of hermeneutics from mere rules of literary analysis to the art of interpretation is by common consent traced back to Schleiermacher. So it is at this point that we will begin a brief critical and selective account of the development of hermeneutical thinking from Schleiermacher to the present-day, not to demonstrate but to illustrate the failure of hermeneutics to accomplish two things that I regard as its task: (1) to describe the actual way⁹ by which contemporary believers are brought into an understanding relation to the biblical message and (2) to facilitate a full hearing of the total biblical message. We ourselves will be thinking of hermeneutics, then, as the "science" which describes the actual means of access which believers today have to the ground and content of their faith, namely, the Christ who is mediated by the Scriptures within the Christian tradition.

Schleiermacher realized that one has not yet understood the biblical texts, or any texts for that matter, when one applies merely the categories of logical and grammatical analysis. In addition to this objective, external analysis there is required a subjective, intuitive penetration of a work as the life-expression of the author. The hermeneutical problem, then, as the problem of the distance between our life today and what the text really has to say was rightly seen by Schleiermacher as insoluble by the critical-historical method as such, but his solution to supplement the grammatical-historical approach by a psychological interpretation, that is, by an imaginative reproduction of the creative art by which the work was originally produced, bars him from an appropriate interpretation of the text for two reasons. (1) The historical gap between the author's past

⁸ O. F. Bollnow, "Wilhelm Dilthey," Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1958), 3rd edition.
⁹ Cf. Gadamer's similar view of hermeneutics in "Hermeneutik und Historismus," Philosophische Rundschau, IX, 1962, p. 249. See also the reported exchange between Gadamer and Emilio Betti in The New Hermeneutic, p. 76. In speaking of hermeneutics he says, "Basically I do not propose a method, I only describe what is…. In other words, I regard acknowledging what is as the only scholarly way, rather than taking one's point of departure in what should or might be." Theological hermeneutics should also concern itself with the multiplicity of factors which are involved in the transmission of the Word of God through history.

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and our present cannot be bridged by a psychological act, for although the author and the interpreter do have a susceptibility (Empfänglichkeit) for common experiences, by virtue of their common human nature,¹⁰ the method of psychological re-creation cannot take account of the differences between historical situations. (2) What is intended to come to expression in the biblical text is not the soul of the author, but is something which he has to say that stands on its own. Thus, psychological interpretation, from the standpoint of the intention of the author himself, is quite beside the point; it shifts the object of understanding from the content of the text to the process by which the text sprang out of the author's inwardness. And thus we have the beginning of a hermeneutical trend which tries to supplement the critical-historical method by an interpretation which increasingly will evacuate the content of the text in favor of forms of human subjectivity, whether it be Schleiermacher's "divinatory intuition" or Bultmann's "existential encounter."

Wilhelm Dilthey carried further Schleiermacher's psychological hermeneutics. He agreed that the interpreter must re-live the original creative moment in which an author gives expression to life. He grasped more clearly, however, that historical events in the past have to be read as expressions of historical, personal life. In this way the scope of hermeneutics was potentially vastly increased but did not actually succeed in freeing itself from the psychological limitations of Schleiermacher's conception.¹¹ The historian today is able to interpret the past because all historical events are effects of the human spirit in whose structures and capacities the historian also participates. The person who writes history is the same kind of being as the one who makes history-otherwise historical knowledge would be an impossibility.¹²

Precisely this assumption, however, that the understanding of an historical document must be confined to the possibilities of experience which the author and the interpreter have in common means, in effect, that the historian will never find in the text anything that transcends a genuinely conceivable possibility of human experience.

¹⁰ Cf. Richard Reinhold Niebuhr, "Schleiermacher on Language and Feeling," Theology Today, 17, 1960, 150-167.
¹¹ Cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg, "Hermeneutik und Universalgeschichte," Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 60, 1963, Heft 1, 98.
¹² Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1960), p. 209.

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The Scriptures then are capable of being heard only when they echo universally human possibilities of experience and only at those points Where they have an affinity with the mind-set of the exegete.¹³ This assertion is not negated by the fact that Dilthey could also speak of history as the disclosure of the possibilities of human experience, for what is disclosed never goes beyond the potentially human. History acts only as a midwife of human possibility and not also as a medium of divine action.

III

Rudolf Bultmann's grasp of the hermeneutical problem retains continuity with Schleiermacher and Dilthey. He finds that they have properly focused upon the presupposition of all historical interpretation, namely, the basic experiential consanguinity of the author and the interpreter of a text. Bultmann only wishes to define that presupposition more clearly. He too approaches the text with a given view of the structure of human existence and its possibilities. An element of this structure is man's involvement in history as one who questions and who is addressed. The presupposition at work in historical interpretation is "the interpreter's relationship in his life to the subject which is directly or indirectly expressed in the text."¹⁴ Exactly what that subject is in a given instance depends on the interest of the historian, be it political, esthetic or religious. This interest, of whatever kind, acts as an essential pre-understanding that formulates the question to which the text will respond. These views of Bultmann are well-known and do not require further elaboration here. However, we must focus attention on what we think is the Achilles' heel of Bultmann's hermeneutics, namely, his concept of the "pre-understanding" in biblical interpretation.

Certainly, we agree with Bultmann against all naive historicism that "exegesis without presuppositions is impossible."¹⁵ We agree that every historian's interpretation of historical documents is guided by a pre-understanding. This makes it all the more urgent to be self-critical about the nature and role of the pre-understanding that is appropriate in biblical interpretation. Bultmann states: "The

¹³ Cf. Rudolf Bultmann, "The Problem of Hermeneutics," Essays (London: SCM Press, 1955), p. 238.
¹⁴ Ibid., p. 241.
¹⁵ Cf. Rudolf Bultmann, "Is Exegesis Without Presuppositions Possible?" Existence and Faith (New York: Meridian Books, 1960).

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interpretation of biblical writings is not subject to conditions different from those applying to all other kinds of literature."¹⁶ This assertion of far-reaching consequence has worked like a sovereign axiom in modern hermeneutics. The older distinction between sacred and profane hermeneutics broke down with the rise of the critical-historical method and the demise of the orthodox dogmatic control of exegesis. And since then the specifically theological dimensions of hermeneutics in biblical interpretation have not yet been re-envisaged in their difference from the merely philosophical and historical aspects of hermeneutics.

Is it true that the pre-understanding that is active in biblical interpretation is given with human existence as such, and is therefore subject to a formal, existentialist analysis; or is not rather the existential pre-understanding necessarily a specifically Christian one, one that is concretely activated by the understanding of faith given in the community of believers? The Heidelberg philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, has correctly pointed out that although Bultmann claims general validity for his pre-understanding on the grounds of existentialist philosophy, he nevertheless actually operates with a pre-understanding impregnated by theological assumptions.¹⁷ The dilemma in which Bultmann has placed hermeneutics is that to philosophy it is too theological and to theology it is too philosophical, without his having established a clear basis for a new conception of the correlation between philosophy and theology in hermeneutical theory.

Now because Bultmann does not describe the specifically theological links in the hermeneutical chain which connects the text and the interpreter, the content of the text is reduced to an existentialist interpretation which looks only for the understanding of existence reflected in the text. The magnitude of the text's message is restricted by the a priori decision that what is relevant in the text is only that which can be understood as a possibility of human existence. Under such a restriction it is doubtful that the text will be allowed to say all that it intends to say. At least to many ordinary readers and countless theologians the New Testament is concerned about many other things besides possibilities of human existence, such as the will of God in history and his works in the world.

¹⁶ Bultmann, "The Problem of Hermeneutics," p. 256.
¹⁷ Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, pp. 314-315.

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The New Testament statements about God, the world, history, society, and the church may all in fact be nonsensical, but at least they are not all mere corollaries of human (believing) self-understanding or of human existence drawing inferences about its possibilities. Rather, I should argue that the question of the right understanding of existence is dependent on the knowledge of God, of history, society, and the world, and that this is the biblical order of thought. The point of departure of a hermeneutics that tries to trace out the conditions for a full hearing of the scriptural word today cannot be an allegedly neutral or secular philosophical system. For the pre-understanding that both actually and essentially function as the hermeneutical presupposition is concretely determined by what the history of the Bible as the canon has meant in the history of the church and in the lives of believers, and this meaning is nothing less than that the Bible is the unique medium of the message of God's salvatory action. Bultmann's pre-understanding has effected a reduction of the explicit content of that message so that everything in the Bible is divided up between presuppositions of faith or expressions of faith, with nothing left for the ground and content of faith apart from the bare assertion that faith has an objective, though not objectifiable,¹⁸ point of support outside of itself in the kerygmatic Christ. Thus, the history of Israel and the life of Jesus are relegated to the class of presuppositions and everything in the New Testament that transgresses the framework of existentialist anthropology is considered as theologoumena in the questionable form of myth.

At one point, it seems to me, Bultmann holds open the possibility for a more fruitful delineation of the hermeneutical process. For in man's encounter with history, he is not only the questioner, the one who puts existential questions to the text, but he is also questioned by the subject matter of the text and must respond with a decision. If this insight were taken seriously and developed further, hermeneutics would not force the text into the questioner's prior framework, but would leave open the possibility that the text

¹⁸ The horror of so-called "objectifying thinking and speaking" that seems omnipresent in modern theology needs to be critically examined in the light of the divine self-objectification in the incarnation. The attempt of Heinrich Ott, in particular, to overcome objectifying thinking in theology is influenced by, the language-mysticism of the later Heidegger. What is overlooked, it seems to me, is that man's capacity for objectifying thought and speech is precisely what makes understanding and knowledge possible. The alternative to objectifying thinking and speaking is silence-the deep silence of mysticism. It is not without reason that Paul Tillich can speak of Heidegger's Eckhartian mysticism.

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in its pastness and otherness might spring the frame of the interpreter's questions. Thereafter, it may happen that the history of revelation and the history of faith become drawn into the hermeneutical circle, and become materially formative of the pre-understanding in a theological hermeneutic. Hermeneutics is thus faced with the decision whether it rests on propositions borrowed from dogmatics (and thus whether it has the courage to admit this in a university setting where usually methodology is thought to be a non-theological issue) or whether it exists as a purely philosophical propaedeutic to theology (and thus whether it has enough stamina to survive for long on a starvation diet).

IV

Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling have latched on to Bultmann's idea that the subject-matter in a text also makes a claim, a demand, upon us and calls us to decision. But both of them are critical of the main line in Bultmann's hermeneutics which leads primarily to the understanding of existence underlying the language of the text. Thus, in the hermeneutics of Fuchs and Ebeling, the catch-word is not so much existential understanding as linguistic event. Fuchs uses the term Sprachereignis (language event) and Ebeling prefers the term Wortgeschehen (word event). All the talk about the difference between the "earlier" and the "later" Heidegger hinges on the question whether the shift in the hermeneutical focus within the Bultmann school from existential understanding to language event can lay claim to Heidegger's authority. After all, in certain theological circles Heidegger has commanded de facto greater authority than the Bible or the creeds. The alleged turn in Heidegger's thought since he wrote Being and Time is a turn from existentialism to ontology, that is, from an existentialist analysis of Dasein which sees language as a secondary objectification of the understanding given with existence to an understanding of man whose language is the primal, non-objectifying voice of being. Heidegger calls language "the house of being."

The claim that there is a new hermeneutic is bound up with the judgment that Fuchs and Ebeling have, with the aid of Heidegger, rediscovered the hermeneutical import of language-perhaps for the first time since Jesus and Luther. In my opinion it is possible to call this insight "new" to the extent that one forgets that, de-

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spite frequent aberrations in homiletical practice, the church has always regarded proclamation in the mode of witness as a kind of "primal speech" which serves as the hermeneutics of the Word of God.

Ebeling wrote the important article on hermeneutics in the third edition of the encyclopedia, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegewart, and there shows by way of etymological reflection that the term possesses several directions of meaning which highlight the complexity of the hermeneutical problem. The term can mean to bring to speech, to clarify meanings, and to translate into another medium. The hermeneutical problem for Fuchs and Ebeling is: How can the Word of God which once took the form of human speech in a given time and place be understood and translated without abridgement of power and meaning into a different time and place? I think they have correctly defined the problem. I will have to argue, however, that their solution to the hermeneutical problem in terms of language is an almost unbelievable over-simplification. Their solution suffers from the tyranny of reduction to a single principle.¹⁹

As Bultmann interrogates the New Testament texts for expressions of inauthentic and authentic existence-a merely anthropological version of the Lutheran law-gospel dialectic-Fuchs finds in them utterances of inauthentic or authentic language. Man is by nature a linguistic being, answering the call of being, and thereby constituting his existence. This call comes to man through history, for history is basically the history of language, of being coming to expression through language. The coming of the Word of God is the coming of true language, the language of love, especially in Jesus' language of love. As such Jesus can be called the "language event." Jesus as the "language event" creates a new language tradition, the language of faith. For this reason, theology can no longer abide by Bultmann's refusal of interest in the historical Jesus, but must go behind the language-response of faith to the language-event itself, that is, behind the christological kerygma to the historical Jesus.

The only means at our disposal to ground faith in the historical

¹⁹ No attempt will be made here to discern fine points of difference in the positions of Ebeling and Fuchs. We agree with James Robinson's statement that there has grown up between them "not only a unique personal friendship but also a material unity of position that has made of the new hermeneutic a single school of thought with a shared leadership." (Robinson and Cobb, The New Hermeneutic, p. 65.

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Jesus is by means of historical research. Ebeling asks, "Would it not be significant if it could be historically shown that Jesus and faith are inseparably joined together, so that whoever has to do with the historical Jesus has to do with him from whom and in view of whom faith comes?"²⁰ Here we have the most fragile link in the hermeneutical system of Ebeling and Fuchs. While it was Käsemann who in 1954 issued the call for a new quest of the historical Jesus, it was Ebeling and Fuchs who enthusiastically responded to the call.²¹ Since then Käsemann and Conzelmann have recoiled from the project as they soon observed how this stimulated the urge to undergird faith by historical demonstrations. Ebeling's and Fuchs's interest in the new quest is to exhibit that faith is not related to a mere kerygmatic cipher or symbol (as they fear is the case with Bultmann), but is tied to the historical Jesus. The christology of the early church must be legitimized by tracing its roots back into the historical Jesus. Christian faith would lose its grounds, says Ebeling, if faith could be shown to be a misunderstanding of the significance of the historical Jesus. This drive to get back to the historical Jesus is motivated by the conviction that Jesus is the source of faith in God. We have God only through our relation to Jesus, for God comes near in Jesus' offer of salvation to mankind. The coming of the kingdom of God is bound up with the appearance of Jesus.

The hermeneutics of Ebeling and Fuchs does not only have to reach back by historical research into the original speech of Jesus but also forward into the "world come of age" which requires a new language, a "non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts."²² The hermeneutical problem includes the unfinished task of translation, not in the superficial sense of reduplicating the words of one language into more or less equivalent words of another language, but in the sense of a radical transference of meaning, a transculturation of the Word in new words. Ebeling and Fuchs seem to agree with Heidegger that we are living in a time of counterfeit language, of inauthentic speech, when the language of the western tradition has degenerated into the corruptible, objectifying language

²⁰ Gerhard Ebeling, "Jesus and Faith," Word and Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963), p. 205.
²¹ Cf. Ernst Fuchs, Zur Frage nach dem historischen Jesus (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1960). Also, Gerhard Ebeling, "Jesus and Faith," and "The Question of the Historical Jesus and the Problem of Christology," in Word and Faith.
²² Cf. Gerhard Ebeling's essay on Bonhoeffer, "The Non-religious Interpretation of Biblical Concepts," Word and Faith, pp. 98-161.

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of a technical society Which turns man into an object to be controlled and manipulated like other things.²³

V

While we are fully aware that this telescoping of the Ebeling-Fuchs hermeneutic might blur or ignore some of their distinctive themes, we are going to proceed to offer some critical observations of their position. And perhaps thereby in an oblique way we will further the understanding of the hermeneutical problem, recalling that we have said, for what it might be worth, that the test of an adequate hermeneutic is the accuracy of its description of the actual means of bridging the distance between the present and the past, and its capacity to open up the full dimension of the past, without reducing it to some aspect of contemporaneity.

1. I think that their concentration on language is an advance on Bultmann whose moralistic rationalism-the legacy of the neo-Kantian Marburg School-prevented him from seeing the positive significance of language and drove him to a negative evaluation of myth as primitive science or a secondary objectification of man's self-understanding. Thus, the demythologizing debate can be allowed to cool off as a less doctrinaire attitude to mythical speech is adopted. This does not mean that Ebeling and Fuchs do not also see that every preacher is faced With the question of a genuine translation of biblical concepts and that the mere recital of the myths is not enough. Especially Ebeling speaks very boldly of the need for a worldly, non-religious language of God,²⁴ but here he only joins the growing company of those who write very religious books about the new secular Christianity.²⁵

2. It is unfortunate that this continental linguistic hermeneutic makes no attempt to escape its confinement within Heidegger's

²³ Cf. Martin Heidegger's paper (unpublished) which was read at the Second Consultation on Hermeneutics at Drew Theological Seminary, entitled "Some Suggestions concerning Principal Perspectives for the Theological Consultation on 'The Problem of a Non-objectifying Thinking and Speaking in Contemporary Theology."' In this paper he said, "Today, however, the danger exists and is growing that the scientific-technological mode of thinking is expanding to all areas of life . . . language itself and its destiny is now affected by this process of unbounded technological objectification. Language is distorted into an instrument of reporting and calculable information."
²⁴ Cf. Ebeling, "Worldly Talk of God," Word and Faith.
²⁵ I have in mind, of course, Paul van Buren's book, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963). It should be obvious that all of the categories which he uses in describing the content of the Gospel derive from the church's tradition of religious language, and that in the last analysis he does not succeed in dispensing with metaphysics and religion. However, to the extent that he does effect a translation of the Gospel into categories of history and ethics, the result is a reduction. But what arouses pity is that even this reduction is "too much" for the secular man.

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mystagogical speculations about language, especially when across the waters another philosophy of language has developed. What kind of little ones a wedding between the later-Wittgenstein and the later-Heidegger would produce is a question to be referred to a specialist in philosophical eugenics. To the by-stander it is distressing to see two such schools ignore each other, especially when each seems to need what the other has.

3. Another serious question is the dependence of this hermeneutical program on Heidegger's philosophy, whether the earlier or later version. Is it really meaningful to appropriate Heidegger's notion of being's relation to language as the model or secular analogy to theology's doctrine of the advent of God's Word in human language?²⁶ It was Hans Jonas, the Jewish philosopher, who had to speak a word of reproach to Christian theologians at the second Drew consultation on hermeneutics for borrowing from Heidegger what Heidegger had first borrowed from the Christian tradition, without theologians showing much concern about the degree of its corruption in the process of being secularized.²⁷ Because of this dependence on Heidegger, theology's doctrine of language takes along with it Heidegger's mystical ontology,²⁸ and when Heidegger speaks of "being," theologians translate it as "God." But Heidegger's "being" is not God, nor is it analogous to God. It is a concept of this world about this world. And when Heidegger speaks about being unveiling itself, this is not a demythologized form of the biblical view of revelation, for Heidegger's being lacks both the transcendence of the biblical God who reveals himself and the essential christological focus.

4. The stress on the event-character of language can be useful, but the content of Christian theology undergoes the most serious distortion when language becomes the single vehicle of the biblical revelation. For all their attempt to go back to the historical Jesus, in Ebeling's and Fuchs's theology Jesus has ceased to be a person, and has become a language event. His significance as a

²⁶ Cf. Heinrich Ott, "What is Systematic Theology," The Later Heidegger and Theology, New Frontiers in Theology, edited by James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
²⁷ Cf. Robert W. Funk, "Logic and the Logos," The Christian Century, September 23, 1964, 1175-77. Hans Jonas's paper
as entitled, "Heidegger and Theology," and is presented in such a way that those against whom he directed his accusations will De required to reply. So far we have heard no word.
²⁸ Cf. Carl Michalson's discussion of the connection between mysticism and existentialism in The Hinge of History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959).

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person is swallowed up into the power of his language in terms of its effect upon persons. Theology is again referred away from the crucifixion and the resurrection as the kerygmatic center and is lured into a hopeless quest of the authentic and authenticating speech of the pre-Easter Jesus. Surely we do not understand Good Friday and Easter Sunday as "language events." They were historic events creative of language, and are revelatory of God only when the historic action and the kerygmatic word are kept indissolubly together, with neither side being collapsed into the other. At least we are not interested in the role the historical Jesus plays in the new hermeneutic. The figure of Jesus that we see in Fuchs' and Ebeling's writings on Jesus is as much the mouthpiece of their theology as ever the "Lives of Jesus" were in the eighteenth or nineteenth century.²⁹ Furthermore, the fundamental christological assumption and result of their new quest is in conflict with the total picture of Jesus Christ which the Bible portrays and with faith's estimate of Jesus as very God and very man which received its classic formulation in the ecumenical creeds.³⁰

5. This last point may be taken as symptomatic of an indifferent or even negative attitude to the formative power of tradition and the contextual function of the church in the work of theology. All theology is shriveled up to this eventful exchange between the Word and faith. And because the word is defined as formative power and not as informative statement and faith is defined as decision or resolution,³¹ there results a loss of interest in the rich variety of biblical content which cannot swing merely between the poles of language and faith. In such categories the Bible as a book of history can never be given its due³² nor can the Old Testament serve more than as a questionable preamble to this kind of theology.³³ A theological hermeneutics that attempts to open up the meaning of the New Testament without seeing that the hermeneutical door into the New Testament from the one side is the Old

²⁹ Cf. my introduction, "Revelation, History, and Faith in Martin Kähler," in The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ, translated and edited by Carl E. Braaten (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964), pp. 1-38.
³⁰ CL Walter Künneth's intemperate but relevant attacks upon the christology of Ebeling and Fuchs in Glauben an Jesus? (Hamburg: Friedrich Wittig Verlag, 1962).
³¹ Gerhard Ebeling, "Word of God and Hermeneutics, " Word and Faith, p. 326.
³² Cf. Gerhard von Rad, "Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament," Old Testament Hermeneutics, edited by Claus Westermann (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1964), p. 25.
³³ Cf. Alan Richardson, "Is the Old Testament the Propaedeutic to Christian Faith?" The Old Testament and Christian Faith, edited by Bernhard Anderson (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

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Testament and from the other side is church tradition is doomed to failure. From out of the full history of revelatory tradition³⁴ in which both the church and Israel have played a definitive role, the new hermeneutic repeats the Marcionitic error of Bultmann's theology by³⁵ allowing the philosophy of Heidegger to take the place of the Old Testament as propaedeutic to New Testament theology and transferring the hermeneutical function of church tradition to the critical-historical method-the hallmark of liberal theology. I do not suggest that we are faced by an either/or in either instance; it is unfortunately members of the Bultmann school who have made it either/or.

VI

We will conclude with a few reflections that are too sketchy to be called a proposal or an alternative program.

Modern hermeneutical thinking has been intensified by the divorce between the historical and theological approaches to the Bible. Modern theology was ushered in by Karl Barth's effort to overcome this separation. In the preface to the first edition of his Romans Commentary he wrote: "The historical-critical method of Biblical investigation has its rightful place. . . . 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. . . . Fortunately, I am not compelled to choose between the two."³⁶ Karl Barth has never been conscious of having made a choice, but the consensus of theologians, by and large, is that in fact Barth did choose against the critical-historical method and in favor of inspiration-his own inspiration. Bultmann was equally unsuccessful in achieving a relation of significant connection between the historical method and kerygmatic interpretation. We can concur with Krister Stendahl's statement in The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible that "it thus

³⁴ We prefer this expression to the more common one "the tradition of revelatory history," because we are inclined to agree with James Barr's point that the formula "revelation through history" which dominates modern theology can scarcely do justice to the complex variety of revelatory media in the Bible. Provocatively he states that the category of history is non-biblical. James Barr, "Revelation through History in the Old Testament and in Modern Theology," Interpretation, 17, 1963, 193-205.
³⁵ I do not believe that Carl Michalson succeeds in rescuing Bultmann's theology from the charge of Marcionitism in his essay, "Bultmann against Marcion," in The Old Testament and Christian Faith. Michalson is right; some of the features of Marcion's theology are absent. But the root of Marcionitism is present in the evaluation of the Old Testament merely as Vorverständnis.
³⁶ Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 1.

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appears that the tension between 'what it (the Bible) meant' and I what it means' is of a competitive nature,"³⁷ and that as historical description and theological interpretation are not absorbed into each other, as a liberal historicism and a conservative dogmaticism are prone to do, we are driven to find a hermeneutical resolution of this tension. Where is the actual hermeneutical bridge that spans the wide chasm of the centuries between biblical salvation-history and contemporary history? I don't believe the concept of "language event" indicates anything more than a part, albeit an essential part of this bridge. The actual bridge is in history itself, not in the history of language-which is an abstraction-but in the history of the new people of God, in the ecclesia as an integral part of ongoing salvation-history. The bridge is not to be found in concepts like "the historicity of existence" or "the linguisticality of existence" or "existential encounter" for these structural elements of existence share in the universal existential predicament.

If hermeneutics is to describe the conditions involved in the actualization of the salvation process today, it will get nowhere if it labors under the combined limitations of the critical-historical method and existentialist theology. For the critical-historical method, the biblical canon has no significance as such and for existentialist theology the church as an ordered community with continuity in history is dissolved by an individualistically-and mystically-oriented eschatology. In this new hermeneutic there is, to be sure, a dialogue going on between the individual and history. The individual has his encounters and moments. But that is an abstraction. The actual dialogue is going on between the church as a listening and answering community and the Word of God which the Spirit of Christ delivered once to the church in its normative apostolic period and whose collective witness is the church's canon today.³⁸ The gap between then and now is not bridged by our becoming contemporary with the biblical authors, as you have in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Kierkegaard too. No leap that we make from "here" to "there" by intuition or research or some philosophical principle will unify the horizons of biblical faith and

³⁷ Krister Stendahl, "Contemporary Biblical Theology, "The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Abingdon Press, 1962), p. 421.
³⁸ I believe that the canonicity of the Bible must in fact be derived from the apostolicity of the church. Ebeling's rather militant Protestant interpretation of the sola scriptura principle does not retain the positive attitude toward the tradition of the church characteristic of the Lutheran Reformation. Cf. Arthur Olson, "Martin Chemnitz and the Council of Trent," Dialog, Vol. II, 1963, pp. 60-67.

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contemporary life. True, the text can only be understood if the interpreter has something in common with the text. The hermeneutical tradition from Schleiermacher to Fuchs rightly sees that a pre-condition of understanding is that the text and the interpreter share in a common human nature. This is the basis for a general (profane) hermeneutic in which both philosophy and historical methodology indisputably play an essential role. The interpreter is not merely an individual, however, but is the church. And the church is also the context in which the text is interpreted and understood as something more than a text. It becomes the proclamation of the divine Word of the church and through the church to the world under the active guidance of the Holy Spirit. It is finally the Spirit who "merges the horizons"³⁹ of the biblical text and the church today. The Spirit mediated through the Word in the Scriptures is the same Spirit who mediates the Word in the church. Otherwise the text is a dead letter, or at best appears as law and not Gospel to the church.

Hermeneutical reflection today will have to expand its attention to include factors which cannot be encompassed within historical science and philosophical analysis. The question of the meaning of the Bible in the modern world will have to turn also on a more adequate theological appraisal of the hermeneutical significance of the testimonium spiritus sancti internum, of the living church which has a past and remembers it, of church tradition, its creeds and confessions, of the Bible as the church's canon, of the history of the people of God in Old and New Testament, without reducing that history to existential historicity (Bultmannianism) or to objective facts abstracted from the biblical history of tradition⁴⁰ which interprets the history of God with his people. Such an abstraction is carried on under the aegis of positivistic historicism which dismantles the interpretative frame within which the biblical events proclaim their redemptive meaning. And finally hermeneutics will again have to ask about the connection between Jesus Christ as the end of history and world history, for the biblical Christ possesses

³⁹ Cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg's discussion of Gadamer's concept of "Horizontverschmelzung" in "Hermeneutik und Universalgeschichte," Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 60, 1963, Heft 1, pp. 105 ff.
⁴⁰ Cf. the concept of "Überlieferungsgeschichte" in the Pannenberg school, which serves to withstand both the existential dissolution of history and the positivistic objectification of history. Offenbarung als Geschichte, edited by Wolfhart Pannenberg, et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1961).

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world-historical significance and is not merely the answer to my existential problems. Jesus Christ is not only Savior, but also the Lord of history. Wolfhart Pannenberg's challenge to modern hermeneutics takes the form of reintroducing the concept of universal history as the ultimate dimension of the hermeneutical problem. And if there is anything that should be called a "new hermeneutic" it is his proposals, for the hermeneutic of Ebeling and Fuchs is already getting old.