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Conflicts in Interpretation
By Hans W. Frei

"If I have a continuing theme, it is that I agree with structuralists and post-structuralists that we should treat textuality (what is written) and the referent or truth of the text (what is written about) as two different things and that we should be cautious about saying that one is, in principle, more important than the other... [W]hat has distinguished most recent secular interpreters of the Bible from their Christian counterparts... is that the secular interpreters want to emphasize the text itself, and they do not wish its interpretation to be governed by a criterion of meaning strongly connected to truth. Rather than risking that connection, they would drop the very notions of meaning and truth."

I begin by reflecting on a story which, while too blatant to be characteristic, is nonetheless representative of its time and social location: upper class Victorian England. It could just have well have been upper class early Augustan England several generations back. The moral is the same; only the characters have changed. In Noel Annan's biography of Leslie Stephens, he describes an argument that pitted William Gladstone, Britain's great, liberal prime minister, an ardent high churchman and biblicist who played a role somewhat like William Jennings Bryan in the fundamentalist controversy in America, against T. H. Huxley, an agnostic and the most widely known scientist of the day, the man who more than any other succeeded in popularizing Darwin's theory of evolution of species through natural selection. The argument was over how to judge what is true in history. The common ground between the antagonists, true Englishmen both, was that one studies the evidence. And what was at stake was, of course, the historical veracity and accuracy of the Bible. The text was Mark 5:11-13, the account of the expulsion of the Gerasene demon or demons ("Legion") into the herd of swine to be drowned.

Until his death in 1988, Hans W. Frei was one of the leading voices in hermeneutical theology and biblical interpretation. A member of the faculty of Yale University, Frei was the author of The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (I 974) and The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (1975). A collection of his essays, Types of Christian Theology (1992) was published posthumously. This article was given as the 1986 Thompson Lecture at Princeton Theological Seminary, titled "Conflicts in Interpretation: Resolution, Armistice, or Co-existence." The essay was prepared for publication by Richard E. Burnett, currently a research fellow at Yale University preparing a dissertation on Frei's thought.

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Huxley declared that the faithful could not have it both ways. Either the Evangelists were fabricating a story when they spoke of Jesus casting out devils and permitting them to enter a herd of swine, who immediately plunged into the sea, or Jesus had wantonly destroyed the property of others. Gladstone rose to the bait; roused by the suggestion that Jesus might have undermined the fundamental liberal principle of the sacredness of private property, he declared that this accusation against our Lord was intolerable. The destruction of the swine was legitimate because Jews were forbidden under Mosaic law to keep pigs. Huxley replied at length. He examined the authorities and, according to Annan, argued that Gadara was, in fact,

... a Hellenic and Gentile town and therefore the inhabitants had a right to keep pigs. Since we may assume that Christ would never have wrongfully harmed such men, we may dismiss the story as false-unless one chose to assume that Christ broke "the first condition of enduring liberty which is obedience to the law of the land." Further animadversions on pig-keeping habits in Galilee, the administrative boundaries, the social structure of Gadara, and Schüirer's interpretation of Josephus, lead Huxley to declare that all the best opinion agrees that the synoptic Gospels are not independent but are founded on a common source and hence the story rests on legend or the observation of a single observer; and, while, pace Hume, there is no a priori objection against the miracle, such frail evidence for its occurrence is wholly insufficient. And Huxley added the singular prophecy: "Whether the twentieth century shall see a recrudescence of the superstitions of medieval papistry, or whether it shall witness the severance from the living body of the ethical ideal of prophetic Israel from the carcase, foul with savage superstitions and cankered with false philosophy, to which the theologians have bound it, turns upon their final judgment of the Gadarene tale."

[As for] the feeding of the five thousand, why should [we] believe it to be so on contradictory evidence? ... Will Christians boast that since faith is not in touch with fact at all it will be inaccessible to infidel attacks?¹

Beyond the argument that one studies the evidence, note one further agreement between the parties. It was best formulated much later by Stephen Toulmin in The Uses of Argument and utilized by such commentators on arguments about the Bible as Van Harvey and David Kelsey.² Suppose the question of evidence is not one of supplying further data or "what've you got to go on," but of legitimizing the passage from given data to a conclusion. In this case, their claim to factual status, the bridge between data and conclusion, is called a "warrant." Gladstone and Huxley agree that their respective cases depend on the issue of the admissibility of a particular warrant, in this case the sacredness of the belief in private property. Would Jesus have to subscribe to it if he were to have any claim upon our allegiance? Yes, says Huxley (perhaps tongue in cheek, perhaps seriously). No, says

¹ Noel Arman, Leslie Stephens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 311.
² David Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975); Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962).

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Gladstone, the principle doesn't work in this instance. Huxley, tacitly, gives ground and changes warrants: In order for a story about Jesus to be true, it cannot contravene the basic moral principle of obedience to the law of the land on which enduring liberty is founded-but this story does. We know Jesus to have been a, if not the, supreme moral teacher of humankind, therefore the story cannot be true. Right there, in packaging obedience to law with liberty and supreme ethical teaching, Huxley loses the liberationist constituency, although the orthodox Gladstone doesn't capture it. Yet, note the character of the warrant. Huxley is not arguing against miracle, at least not straightforwardly. He's saying that a "cock-in-bull" story that violates universal moral principles cannot be attributed to Jesus. This critique is a little more subtle than that of his spiritual ancestor, David Hume, who thought much as Huxley did about miracle but argued further that religious thinking in earlier days was generally a mass of primitive and superstitious fanaticism. Not so Huxley at this point. Note that the warrant about "liberty under law" plays for him another role, that of a hermeneutical principle. (In the next life, if I have any choice, there will be two terms that I shall eschew, one is "hermeneutics," the other is narrative!")

Let us say that a hermeneutical principle is a judgment concerning any concept of meaningfulness that texts and their readers, contemporary or later, have in common. Further, let us say that this common concept must be of central significance to both text and reader, and not peripheral or accidental to either." Liberty under law" will do quite well in this case. But, then, it seems that Huxley is queasy about his warrant (turned hermeneutical principle) and changes the character of the argument. He moves away from the credibility of a conclusion based not so much on certain data as on warrants for reading (or not reading) texts in a certain way, and he turns back to the other kind of argument, one in which neither warrant nor hermeneutical principle is involved. Evidence? Yes, but not evidence backed by warrant, which is at the same time an assumption of an affirmation which Jesus and readers of this text would hold in common. Instead, the evidence becomes simply a matter of "what've you got to go on." And so, Huxley turns to source criticism. The story rests on the report of a single observer and "such frail evidence for its occurrence is wholly insufficient," and so on. Amusement turns to chagrin over the trivialization of the text, and one is glad to leave the episode behind.

But before we go on our way, a couple of observations are in order. There is a distinction made by Paul Ricoeur (who cribbed it from somebody else, Jean Starobinski) between "what is written" and "what it is written about." Clearly what we have seen so far is a conflict over the "about what" of the text. Is the story true or false? Is it about something or nothing? We know the positions that were taken up in this conflict. There would be neither armistice nor resolution between rationalists of a fundamentalist or rationalists of a liberal kind.

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Conflict in interpretation, at least in this instance, involves common weapons and a common battleground on which the interpretive armies clash by night and sometimes, perhaps, by day.

I

Sometimes such direct clashes on a well-defined battleground are the worst, brooking neither compromise nor resolution. Like civil wars, they tend to be very bloody. But there is another feature to them. The controversy of which we have seen a trivial instance has always been taken as a case of Christian interpretation fighting the infidel outsider. That is partly true. On the other hand, from the Enlightenment on, the very concept of "fact," historical or physical, was adapted in the vocabulary of Christian students of the Bible. It became a constitutive part of their own common or group thinking. At the same time, we saw the growth of the core-curriculum in the German Protestant theological faculties: Old Testament, New Testament, church history, theology, and practical theology. Institutionally as well as intellectually, the biblical-critical enterprise was not nearly so much a secularization as it was an ecclesiastical-academic enterprise. It was then, and to a large extent still is, a specialists' craft within the ecclesiastical academy (or, its equivalent-the theological faculty within the secular academy). Biblical criticism is church thinking adapted to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment modes. By extension, the same observation may be made about the impact of literary-historical procedures and the history of religions on biblical studies (something that I have heard James Barr rightly stress) in the theological academy a century or more later. In short, biblical studies were largely an insider's craft, and the arguments were well-defined. When friendly and technical, they were subject to the hope, if not the reality, of consensus within the broader institutional context. When unfriendly, they were well-defined and did not often move to outright religious clashes, except in cases such as Gladstone and Huxley or evangelicals and liberals in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But in neither case, friendly or unfriendly, did the participants completely misunderstand the terms of the discussion. There was not the sense of two sides talking completely past one another. But that, in a sense, is the situation that has obtained more recently.

It's not that structuralism and post-structuralism have not been picked-up with almost unbridled enthusiasm by some members of the biblical-critical guild. Critical theory also does not lack for hermeneutical adherence in the guild, but I think there is a strong sense that, unlike the leap from historical judgment to existential reflection and commitment, or phenomenological reduction, there is no confidence in the biblical guild about the compatibility between historical work and the other partner, literary theory and its constructs. One notes a sense of incommensurability rather than direct conflict or mutual supplementation. Members of the guild are finding that their work is

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trivialized or subverted, and the other side of the coin is that, if members of the guild become enthusiasts for these newer literary theories, they seem largely to leave behind the technical crafts-source, form, and redaction criticism-traditional hermeneutics that have shaped them in the formative stages in their careers. Under those circumstances, the outside discussion partner to the guild becomes a confusing figure to the insider. Far more confusing, say, than Karl Barth in the days of his dialectical attack on the biblical guild. Far more confusing than T. H. Huxley in his attack on Gladstone. Far more confusing than the benevolent, grandfatherly hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer with his reassuring word that "we are all linguistically incorporated into the effective history of our tradition."

The new outsider ad libs. He appropriates at will from the very fruits of the guild's investigations, while quite skeptical of the guild's framework and its aims or its canons of significant explanation. It is as though, to use Paul Ricoeur's useful, almost inescapable distinction, these outsiders are borrowing elements, even if not the whole agenda, from a "hermeneutics of suspicion," such as that of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. The guild's special vocabulary is made use of as a plausible superstructure, but then, as a whole, reinterpreted into a coherent pattern by being grafted onto a totally different infrastructure. This is in contrast to the hermeneutics of retrieval of Barth, Huxley, Gadamer, Burtmann, and all the other previous discussion partners. For all these thinkers, there is a single sense to a text, even if we find it only imperfectly at any given time, even if that single meaning varies in the reading of people of different eras, cultural settings, and, of course, ideologies.

I read somewhere in Juan Luis Segundo's The Liberation of Theology that the meaning of the biblical injunction to "turn the other cheek" under present revolutionary conditions (post-Enlightenment thinking, late capitalist hegemony) is "shoot-em between the eyes" (or words to that effect)! Well, one envies him, the hermeneutical instruments that enable him to do this. It has a long and honorable tradition.

I was unable to check a graduate student's claim that Luther interpreted the story of Legion passing into the heard of swine in the following way: They did not actually drown. They swam. They swam and they swam, and they finally went ashore-in Rome! Luther said some other things also, of course, but at this point I think there is a certain similarity between him and Segundo, the only difference being that Luther had a sense of humor.

But even then, under Segundo's rubrics and for this era, that is the sense of the passage. Now obviously some "hermeneutics of suspicion" has to take place (for example, a change in the framework of interpretation) to come up with his result and not simply a change in interpretation. And the frame has to be, to use a term of Frank Kermode, "transparent upon a known world" so that the text may also be "transparent upon a known world." What I am saying is this: Before

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this more recent hermeneutical "surge," all these earlier interpreters (Huxley, Gadamer, Barth, Burtmann, and others) and even our socio-critical commentators agree, within limits at least, with the single sense view of the meaning of texts, a single sense redolent upon a real world.

II

Now I want to take a contrast case. I choose it because I find it clear, where much structuralism and deconstruction is flamboyantly and self-indulgently opaque, and also because I find it powerfully and poignantly seductive. Finally, I choose it because the same exorcism story of the Gadarene demoniac serves as an example in it. The source is Frank Kermode's The Genesis of Secrecy: On The Interpretation of Narrative, where we read:

There is a famous parable in Kafka's The Trial It is recounted to K by a priest, and is said to come from the scriptures. A man comes and begs for admittance to the Law, but is kept out by a doorkeeper, the first of a long succession of doorkeepers, of aspect ever more terrible, who will keep the man out should the first one fail to do so. The man, who had assumed that the Law was open to all, is surprised to discover the existence of this arrangement. But he waits outside the door, sitting year after year on his stool, and conversing with the doorkeeper, whom he bribes, though without success. Eventually, when he is old and near death, the man observes an immortal radiance streaming from the door. As he dies, he asks the doorkeeper how it is that he alone has come to this entrance to seek admittance to the Law. The answer is, "This door was intended only for you. Now I am going to shut it." The outsider, though someone had "intended" to let him in, or anyway provided a door for him, remained outside.³

And, of course, the moral of the lesson for Kermode is that we are all finally "outsiders" to the truth:

K engages the priest in a discussion concerning the interpretation of this parable. He is continually reproved for his departures from the literal sense, and is offered a number of priestly glosses, all of which seem somehow trivial or absurd, unsatisfying or unfair, as when the doorkeeper is said to be more deserving of pity than the suppliant, since the suppliant was there of his own free will, as the porter was not. Nevertheless it is claimed that the doorkeeper belongs to the Law, and the man does not. K points out that to assume the integrity of the doorkeeper, or indeed that of the Law, as the priest does, involves contradictions. No, replies the priest: "It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary...... A melancholy conclusion," says K." It turns lying into a universal principle."⁴

Next, Kermode observes, quoting some analytical philosophers of history, that history, like story, has to have the property of "followability," that a history is a narrative structure imposed upon

³ Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 27-28.
⁴ Ibid., p. 28.

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events. Such narratives will have the logical structure of other stories, though their purpose is to provide explanations by establishing connections other than those immediately suggested by a chronicle sequence. Under those rubrics, "a convincing narrative convinces mainly because it is well-formed and followable, though sometimes for other reasons also."⁵

At this point, Kermode argues as follows: When history writing is, as it were, a replication of a story redolent upon a transparent world (in other words, if followability is by reason of transparency upon the real, and the real is the "followable," having sequence and aim in it), when this is the heart of the interpretation of stories, then all we do is " recognize" what we have already said.

And then he comes to his conclusion, and, for me, this is of striking significance. I must say, I tend to identify myself with it: "All modern interpretation [speaking of himself and, I think also, of deconstructionists, though he doesn't like them] that is not merely an attempt at 'recognition' involves some effort to divorce meaning and truth." Notice that is precisely what our previous arguers never did. Certainly not Gladstone and Huxley. They were united in that.

Kermode states:

This accounts for both the splendors and the miseries of the art. Insofar as we can treat a text as not referring to what is outside or beyond it, we more easily understand that it has internal relationships independent of the coding procedures by which we may find it transparent upon a known world. We see why it has latent mysteries, intermittant radiances. But in acquiring this privilege, the interpreters lose the possibility of consensus, and of access to a single truth at the heart of the thing. No one, however special his point of vantage, can get past all those doorkeepers into the shrine of the single sense. I make an allegory, once more, of Kafka's parable; but some such position is the starting point of all modern hermeneutics except those which are consciously reactionary. The pleasures of interpretation are henceforth linked to loss and disappointment, so that most of us will find the task too hard, or simply repugnant; and then, abandoning meaning, we slip back into the old comfortable fictions of transparency, the single sense, the truth.⁶

In the process, of course, Kermode has explicitly denied the difference that Christian interpreters have both inherited and been troubled by: the difference between inside interpreters (biblical critics plus the right religious hermeneutics), who know the truth esoterically, and outsiders, who know it either not at all or exoterically. And he has denied its strongest, earliest, Markan form, which is even more ironic since his book is largely on Mark: "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables so that they may indeed see but not perceive and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn again and be forgiven" (Mark

⁵ Ibid., p. 118.
⁶ Ibid., p. 123.

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4:11-12). That is our situation as interpreters and we are all, according to Kermode, outsiders.

But then, in his last chapter, Kermode draws his own conclusions about interpreting narrative in the Gospel of Mark. He proposes very tentatively that the pattern in Mark is one of "intercalation" or " analeptic story-telling," that is to say, of interupting one sequence with another that strengthens the earlier sequence by being a contrasting supplement to it. And this pattern is neither moral nor thematic in content, that is to say, it has no didactic aim. Nor is it in any other way a mirror of a followable world. In this he follows another Swiss literary-historian, Jean Starobinski. Let me return to Kermode's text:

The demoniac, presumably Gentile, is possessed by an unclean spirit named legion, who, as is the custom of unclean spirits in Mark at once recognizes Jesus as the Son of God. Mark emphasizes the enormous strength of the madman. Matthew leaves that out. In Mark he haunts tombs and no fetter or chain can bind him. When legion is expelled he or they occupy a herd of swine which promptly destroys itself. This cure promotes terror among the Garazenes who implore Jesus to go away. He does so leaving the madman cured and docile. But he tells the man, whom he will not allow to accompany him, to proclaim his cure. The Garazene displayed a demonic excess of male strength, but his violence leaves him with the demonic spirit. That it goes into pigs merely confirms its uncleanliness. The man is now ordered and civil. Formerly naked, he is now dressed. Formerly dangerous in his strength he is now fit for society.⁷

Then Kermode refers to two earlier interpretations in adjoining chapters, which he previously discussed, namely, the woman with the issue of blood and the raising of Jairus' daughter:

In the case of the woman with the hemorrhage, the going out of power into the unclean was effected through a garment. Here the going out of strength or spirit, this time unclean as signaled by the adoption of clothes, the tombs are unclean, the man now healthy leaves them. He is free of the unclean spirit and from the unclean place and wears an unsoiled garment. This is a Gentile cure as the other was Jewish (Jairus was a "ruler of the synagogue"). In both there is an emission of spirits, clean and unclean. One is followed by an injunction to proclaim, the other by a command to silence. One cure is of an excess of maleness, the other of related effects of femaleness. The lake divides the two like a slash and the cured demoniac is forbidden to cross it.⁸

And, then, he takes in some similar interpretation from Starobinski, who is interested in the conflict with legion, in his New Literary History for 1973:

It seems useless therefore to predict the fate of Starobinski's method or mine which is different but which depends equally on the effectiveness of its difference from the methods of the insiders. I have been proposing that the device of intercalation [supplementation, interruption, and supplementation] in Mark's narrative is an emblem of many conjunctions and oppositions which are found at all levels of the discourse. I think these

⁷ Ibid., p. 134.
⁸ Ibid., p. 135.

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should be attended to and not dissolved by recognitive hermeneutical tricks. For these conjunctions and oppositions reflect something of what the Gospel presupposes of its own structure and the structure of the world.⁹

In short, attend above all to what is written, not to what is written about, not to any structure of the gospel patterned upon chronology whether in the text, in the world, in the human constitution, or any of them in conjunction; above all, attend to nothing that is redolent upon historicity.

Here then we seem to have several incommensurabilities between insider interpretation and outsider interpretation. Let me simply suggest a few of them. There are many senses of which insiders sense only one, and not the basic one. The Markan messianic secret is attended to, but it is simply one more case of an intercalated contrast. There is no relation, of clash or congruity, between the meaning or textuality of the text and its truth. Neither clash nor congruity. Text and truth are simply incommensurable. Additionally, there is a resuscitation of something like the four-fold method of preEnlightenment (Christian or Church) hermeneutics, which had been so alarming to the Reformation and equally alarming to Enlightenment, critical interpretation. There is (1) the literal sense, but equivalent to it is (2) the allegorical sense, and, if you wish (and, of course, he does not, because he is a literary critic and not a moral interpreter), there is (3) the tropological or moral sense, and, finally, there is (4) a forlorn, sober aspect of the anagogical sense. There are the literal sense, the allegorical sense (what we believe), the tropological sense (what we must do), and the anagogical sense (what we must hope or must not hope)-the latter is actually the one Kermode holds." Hope," he says, "is the fatal disease of the interpreter," just like it is with "the person with terminal tuberculosis."

III

I return, then, to one of the themes that has been obliterated here, the relation between meaning and truth. The textuality of the text goes down the drain when what it is about is identified as the meaning of the text to which all the rest, its semantic sense and its semiotic structure, is subservient. This is a tricky problem. For instance, we may say that a text like Mark 5:1-20, especially verses 11-13, possibly contains history-like elements. Perhaps it was not the demons but the maniac behavior of the possessed man that frightened a herd of swine into a stampede, so Holtzmarm and Weiss argued a long time ago." History-like" here means "possibly historical," rather than having a textual shape like a historical account, the linguistic form of verisimilitude. What counts is the possible truth, not the textual form.

If I have a continuing theme, it is that I agree with structuralists and post-structuralists that we should treat textuality (what is written) and

⁹ Ibid., p. 137.

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the referent or truth of the text (what it is written about) as two different things and that we should be cautious about saying that one is, in principle, more important than the other. I do not say, finally, that they have no bearing on one another. I do not even say that they are wrong categories. I want to suggest that what has distinguished most recent secular interpreters of the Bible from their Christian counterparts-I am not at all sure about rabbinic readers in this connection-is that the secular interpreters want to emphasize the text itself, and they do not wish its interpretation to be governed by a criterion of meaning strongly connected to truth. Rather than risking that connection, they would drop the very notions of meaning and truth. This is certainly the case with deconstructionists, and Jacques Derrida's hyperbole, "there is no outside to the text," is a drastic summary expression of it.

There is a point here even (if I may now turn to myself) for Christians to note, though they may ultimately want to dissent. Modern interpreters have been so ardent, so hot in pursuit of the truth of the text that texts were often left little "breathing space." I would suggest that a good interpretation of a text is one that has "breathing space," one in which finally no hermeneutic allows you to resolve the text. There is something that is left to bother; something is wrong; something is not yet interpreted.

The history-likeness of a text as equivalent to its possible historical truth is only one of a number of similar moves. What is so striking about the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and theological disciples of his hermeneutics, such as David Tracy or Sallie McFague, is the very strong connection they see between the language of the parables and their extravagance. The text's intention, its metaphoric character, and therefore, its own thrust beyond itself, aims beyond the literal shape to a re-description of reality. Since reality and language are united in human beings as bearers of metaphor, one may also call reality "a mode of being in the world." The natural affinity between, or ineluctable movement from, meaning to truth, is not, in this case, the movement from the history-like shape of the text to its possible historical referent but, rather, from textual language to an ontological referent. The text means as possible truth; it means as the world of which it is the text. Of course, Christians want to live and speak truth or speak truthfully, but we ought to be careful at what point and in what way. There may be Christian reasons, if no other kinds, to exercise reticence about the transition. The move from text to truth or from language to reality, whatever form it takes, is almost always premature, and some of us have found the secular literary readers of the Bible very helpful in reminding us of the fact. At the very least, the Christian reader has to stop soberly in front of a barrier which, in its own way, is as impenetrable as the "death strips" that separate two countries at cold war with one another.

The Reformers tell us that the text is the Word of God: "Do not seek

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God beyond the text" for you may find, instead of the God of grace, the Deus absconditus or Deus nudos on the other side of the limit-that sinister force of devouring consumation rather than enlightenment. Alternately, to have a limit-language expressing limit-experience is to reach beyond ourselves to where we hope to espy transcendence, but where we may well end-up discerning our own mirror image instead. And these two things, our mirror image and the Deus nudos or absconditus, may not be that far apart.

The Reformers also propose that, even though the text is "sufficient," we ought not to worship it. And so it is rightly proposed that they also implied that the text is "witness" to the Word of God and that its authority derives from that witness rather than from any inherent, divinized quality. And is that Word which is witnessed to, is that not the Truth, at once ontologically transcendent and historically incarnate?

Karl Barth is the modern theologian who has asserted this dual claim regarding Scripture. For Barth, following the Reformers, this dual affirmation has meant the primacy of the literal sense. What is written is the Word of God. The divine touch on it is not extravagance, by which the written word might be transformed into that about which it is written. Christians do have to speak of the referent of the text. They have to speak historically and ontologically, but in each case, it must be the notion of truth, or reference, that is reshaped extravagantly, not the reading of the literal text. Any notion of truth that disallows the condescension of truth to the depiction in the text, to its own self-identification, with, let us say, the four-fold story of Jesus of Nazareth taken as an ordinary story, has itself to be viewed with profound skepticism by a Christian interpreter. The textual world, as witness, is not identical to the Word of God and, yet, by the Spirit's grace, it is "sufficient" for the witnessing. Perhaps I hammer this theme too vigorously. If I do so, the reason is that in much modern theology the primacy of the subject-matter, the referent or the truth, over the text has usually meant that the text is adequate to the task by virtue of pointing to the subject-matter, that is to say, what is hidden within or implied by the text, and not by virtue of the literal sense. My own understanding of the matter, then, is that those who want to preserve Luther's fine, tense balance between Scripture as witness and as literal sense today may well be giving up one side of it. In modernity or, as they like to say in Chicago, "post-modernity," the temporary condition of the balance is to stress the sufficiency of the literal sense, without, of course, the "fundamentalist" correspondence between the literal and its ostensive reference.

IV

I plead then for the textuality of Scripture, the importance of its linguistic-depictive shape this side of metaphor (or better, with metaphor as a secondary instrument under the governance of the

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literal sense, rather than the other way around). The difficulty of uniting thematically the preaching pericopes of the synoptic Gospels with the accounts of the Passion is a notorious one. One will read the parables of the kingdom and the Passion disparately or will read the Passion through the parables or, reversely, will read the parables in light of the Passion. Neither of these latter two ways is adequate. A residue of puzzlement, of the fit being less than perfect at best, remains, and those interpretations are best that allow the fit to remain in large part a matter of puzzlement. But, choice is something one has to make, unless one is, literally, a deconstructionist. The identification of Jesus through his self-enactment in suffering, obedience, death, and resurrection is not unresidually identifiable with the kingdom of God in his preaching. The crucial form of the primacy of the literal sense, nonetheless, is that the parables are to be seen more in the light of the identification of Jesus than the reverse. While they are descriptively metaphorical, they contribute indirectly to the identification of the person who spoke them "with authority." Their meaning in this procedure is primarily ascriptive. (I take that to be the basic sense of what, in precritical New Testament interpretation, one means by the "literal sense": It is literally "about" Jesus, and certain descriptions are literally ascribed. It is not that they are literally descriptive, appropriately or rightly, but that they have for their subject matter this storied person, Jesus, and not a concept. It is the literal ascriptiveness that is the basic sense of the literal in the Christian tradition.) Our reading of the parables' description of the kingdom of God must be consonate with their being part and parcel of the identification of this storied person and not of someone else or of no one in particular. They have some meaning without any need for ascription to the bearer of that meaning, and that ascriptive literalism has descriptive consequences. The marvel or miracle of at least some of the parables is not that their ordinary and everyday referential descriptions are subverted by a metaphorical extravagance, which provides us and them a new secondary referent (what Professor Ricoeur suggests in that secondary reference as it comes to be transcendence or "a mode of being in the world"), but rather the reverse: The reign of the One who is beyond all description, beyond all metaphorical thrusts, is depicted fitly by ordinary, realistic, literally referential language-"The kingdom of heaven is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal." The text does not say "unlike." Metaphorical extravagance? Of course, but subordinate to and in the service of literal, ordinary descriptive language within the text. That is the marvel of at least some of the parables, although not without residue, as part of the indirect identification of Jesus, an ordinary man who was the presence of God. In one interpretive way, Jesus is identified through the parables as " parable of God" (to quote Sallie McFague); in the other, the parables are finally coherent because he chooses them as part of the way in which he identifies himself or veils himself from his hearers. Is there an

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irresolvable conflict between these two ways-going either from the parables to the Passion or going from the Passion to the parables? Not necessarily. It is irresolvable; it becomes warfare only if it becomes systemetized into a parody of two mutually exclusive approaches. Instead, one has constantly to ask oneself, Which of these can more easily accommodate the other in a subordinate position, that is, keep on using it and not leave it behind in the deployment of the more dominant procedure? The point is that in such complex cases as the parables, singularly or as a genre or a set of overlapping genres, the best reading is the reading in which the text is not interpreted without residue, where a surd or problem of reading always remains. Does the text resist being totally resolved by any hermeneutical solvent applied to it? That is a good reading of the text, and my suggestion is that, to do that and try to keep the two things together, one moves better from the self-identification of Jesus through the passion and resurrection stories toward the parables rather than the other way around. As for the rest, close attention to the textuality of the text would allow one to suggest (and this is the only point at which I would disagree with the Reformers) that if the literal ascriptive sense that has been the tradition of the church is guarded, then why not a recrudescence of other internal textual devices? Why, then, cannot the critic and the ordinary reader accommodate to such purely textual modes as structuralism or post-structuralism, that is to say, those modern versions of the allegorical sense?

I plead, then, for the primacy of the literal sense and its puzzling but firm relationship to a truth towards which we cannot thrust. The modus significandi will never allow us to say what the res significata is. Nonetheless, we can affirm that, in the Christian confession of divine grace, the truth is such that the text is sufficient. There is a fit due to the mystery of grace between truth and text. But that, of course, is a very delicate and very constant operation to find that fit between textuality and truth. The Reformers saw the place where that fit was realized in the constant reconstitution of the church where the word is rightly preached and where the sacraments are rightly administered. There is where that fit takes place, and there alone. And there without any guarantees. It is a very straight path. It is a tightrope walk towards a very narrow gate. One constantly has to look with unease on the right where referential truth theories abound or, at a more humble level, where neo-conservatives beckon us. Or, we look to the left, where pragmatists tell us that we have no problem of truth or, at a more mundane level, where liberationists explode. And in between is the witness of the church within the text of the Bible.