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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2013
Most maps of theology in the twentieth century, particularly theology in North America, would include the delineation of revisionist theology and postliberal theology as mutually exclusive, opposed options in theological method. This article begins to challenge the contours of this received map through a comparison of David Tracy and Hans Frei, pre-eminent figures in revisionist and postliberal theology, respectively. I show that, for all their differences, both Tracy and Frei posit the reader–text relationship as the site and even in some sense the source of revelation. Their turn to reading is motivated by the perception of a certain loss or estrangement characterising contemporary religiosity. Though the scope and details of their description of the problem differ, there is a similarity in the vision of Christian life which stands in contrast to the contemporary situation. For both, their visions of Christian life can be articulated through the notion of orthodoxy, understood in its full sense as referring to a coherent, vibrant and all-encompassing immersion in Christian doctrine and practice. Engagement in proper reading practice becomes for each the entrance into and sign of full participation in religious life, analogous to the role of belief in traditional notions of orthodoxy. I suggest that Tracy and Frei represent two forms of ‘theology of ortholexis’ or ‘right reading’. The turn to reading is most obvious in Frei, who explicitly links the modern difficulty in attaining a sense of the coherence of Christian history, doctrine and lived life to a misconstrual of the nature of the biblical text which leads to a misguided reading practice. Yet Tracy also places the model of reading as conversation at the centre of his revisionist account of the possibility of a contemporary experience of the authority of the Bible and the power of the Christian tradition more generally. In these ‘theologies of ortholexis’, a constellation of modern anxieties concerning the limits and possibilities of our knowledge and experience of the divine are addressed through positing the reader–text relationship forged through proper reading practice as the place of and way to authentic revelation.
1 For example, the widely used introduction to theology, Ford, David (ed.), The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century (New York: Blackwell, 1989)Google Scholar, juxtaposes and contrasts ‘the Revisionists and Liberals’ to ‘Postliberal theology’ in the original 1989 edn, but then repeats this mapping virtually unchanged in the 1997 edn.
2 This essay was given as a paper at a conference on ‘the Bible and the Narrative Tradition’ held at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was first published under the title ‘The “Literal Reading” of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does it Stretch or Will it Break?’ in McConnell, Frank (ed.), The Bible and the Narrative Tradition (New York: OUP, 1986)Google Scholar. The citations here are from a later collection of Frei's writing, Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New York: OUP, 1996), pp. 117–52, 118.
3 ‘Literal Reading’, p. 118.
4 Gary Comstock, an early commentator on the so-called Yale/Chicago debate through which the postliberal/revisionist opposition solidified, also identifies, in slightly different terms, the similarity-in-difference connecting Frei and Tracy. Each instantiates a type of narrative theology, he argues. Frei, along with George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas and David Kelsey, is a pure narrative theologian, while Tracy, along with Ricoeur, Julian Hartt, and Sally McFague, is an ‘impure’ one: ‘Two Types of Narrative Theology’, JAAR 55/4 (Winter 1987), pp. 687–717.
5 Frei argues explicitly for the primacy of the literal sense for Christian interpretation and furthermore suggests that this primacy is ‘unique to Christianity’ (p. 122). He also ties the literality ascribed to sacred narratives to the continuity and autonomous validity of religious traditions, through his discussion of the fate of Jewish scriptures in Christian hands and the threat posed to Christianity by the possibility that ‘the literal sense of the New Testament only prefigures a newer reading that displaces it in turn’ (p. 123). The centrality for theology of ‘defending’ the literal sense is implied in Frei's discussions of the aims and warrants of hermeneutical theory and that theory's failure to deliver (pp. 118–19 and 129–30) and his own aims in the essay, to comment on theories ‘pertinent to the past as well as present and future conditions for the literal reading as a religious enterprise’ (p. 119).
6 The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 11.
7 Higton, Mike, Christ, Providence, History: Hans W. Frei's Public Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2004), pp. 85–7Google Scholar. It should be noted that this formulation of Frei's basic point reproduces his characteristic lack of engagement with the differences and relationship between the four separate portrayals of Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament.
8 Frei, Hans W., The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Basis of Dogmatic Theology with Theological Reflections on the Accounts of Jesus’ Death and Resurrection (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1997), pp. 164–73Google Scholar. Frei originally published the essay as ‘The Mystery of the Presence of Jesus Christ’, in Crossroads: An Adult Education Magazine of the Presbyterian Church in 1967 and it was first published in book form in 1975.
9 Identity, p. 182.
10 The ‘debate’ was in fact all on the side of Strauss, whose The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, was published in 1835, the year of Schleiermacher's death, and reflects Strauss’ reaction to Schleiermacher's lectures on the life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (Berlin: Franz Duncker, 1835)). Strauss also published a book-length review of the posthumously published volume of Schleiermacher's lectures (Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Das Leben Jesu (Berlin: K. A. Ruetenik, 1864)Google Scholar; Strauss, D. F., Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte: Eine Kritik des Schleiermacherschen Lebens Jesu (Berlin: Franz Duncker, 1865))Google Scholar.
11 Higton, Christ, Providence, History, pp. 25–35.
12 Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1949] 1984)Google Scholar.
13 Ibid., pp. 136–7. Frei also discusses Ryle in the introduction to Eclipse. For a full discussion of how Frei deploys Ryle, the limits of that deployment and its connection to other philosophical influences, see Springs, Jason A., Toward a Generous Orthodoxy: Prospects for Hans Frei's Postliberal Theology (Oxford: OUP, 2010), pp. 34–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Identity, pp. 133–4. Frei does not provide much discussion of what exactly ‘literal reading’ is as a procedure. In a later discussion of the sensus literalis, Frei defines it as a ‘descriptive fit between verbum and res’, in which the signifier and the signified fit together at an ‘intralinguistic, semiotic’ level rather than an epistemological or referential level. This is the kind of reading he ascribes to the magisterial Reformers and advocates (Hans Frei, ‘Theology and the Interpretation of Narrative: Some Hermeneutical Considerations’, in Theology and Narrative, pp. 103–5).
15 Eclipse, p. 10.
16 This flexibility about actual procedure is somewhat unusual in those who bemoan the effects of modern criticism. See e.g. the excellent discussion of medieval hermeneutics in Steinmetz, David, ‘The Superiority of Pre-critical Exegesis’, reprint of the original 1980 article in Fowl, Stephan E. (ed.), The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 26–38Google Scholar.
17 There is a sense in which Frei's construal of the problem allows him to avoid this question because it appeals to a kind of scientific conscience: there is an element of the object of inquiry which is going unnoticed because we don't have the right method of inquiry. It sort of goes without saying that we have to come up with the right method.
18 Eclipse, p. 23.
19 Ibid., p. 24. Whether Calvin does indeed understand the doctrinal content as belonging as essentially to the text as its historical reference or moral lesson is questionable, as will be discussed below.
20 Ibid., p. 23.
21 Steinmetz, David, Calvin in Context (Oxford: OUP, 1995), p. 64Google Scholar.
22 Ibid., p. 106.
23 Hans Frei, ‘Conflicts in Interpretation: Resolution, Armistice, or Co-existence?’, in Theology and Narrative, p. 164. The essay is a transcript of a lecture given in 1986 at Princeton.
24 The watershed piece signalling this change in direction is ‘The “Literal Reading” of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does it Stretch or Will it Break?’, the essay with which my discussion began.
25 Tracy, David, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), pp. 4–5Google Scholar (henceforth, AI).
26 Tracy refers to this as a dilemma at once intellectual and existential. The isomorphism is the basis of the function of the theologian as a kind of exemplar of the believer: to live with the ambiguity of multiple loyalties and conflicting canons of plausibility is incumbent upon every Christian, to try to think honestly, critically and clearly in relation to it is incumbent upon every theologian. AI, p. 51.
27 AI, p. 105.
28 Tracy is aware, following Andrew Greeley and others, that some caution needs to be exercised in the generalisation to the average Christian practitioner of problems encountered by religious intellectuals. But he is not willing to relegate the situation he is describing to the ivory tower. The ‘porousness’ of ostensibly distinct traditions and publics in the situation as described in The Analogical Imagination suggests still that the kind of estrangement he is talking about, though certainly raised to a level of heightened consciousness in the theologian, is felt in some form by all contemporary religious practitioners.
29 AI, pp. 99–100.
30 Gadamer, Hans Georg, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Weinsheimer, Joel and Marshall, Donald G. (New York: Continuum, 1989 [1975]), pp. 277–82Google Scholar.
31 See Ricoeur, Paul, ‘The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation’, Philosophy Today 17/2 (1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Texas University Christian Press, 1976).
32 AI, p. 126.
33 AI, p. 102.
34 AI, p. 68.
35 Tracy is on new ground here in terms of his foundations in philosophical hermeneutics – the distinction is not made by either Gadamer or Ricoeur.
36 AI, p. 163.
37 AI, p. 163.
38 AI, p. 173.
39 AI, p. 255, italics added.
40 The roots of nineteenth-century biblical criticism, with its thorough-going critique of the divinity of the biblical text, in these rationalist theologies is clearly laid out in Reventlow, Henning Graf, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, trans. Bowdon, John (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984)Google Scholar. Reventlow also traces various earlier developments in late medieval spiritualism and the ‘left wing’ of the Reformation which anticipate in certain ways rationalist critiques. The ‘space’ between the text and God can be argued to be acknowledged by the earliest allegorists such as Origen. My specific interest is in the understanding of this gap as one that calls the authoritative and revelatory character of the Bible into question rather than simply legitimating supplemental access to God.
41 I state this position more as a logical outcome than as the actual stance taken up by any major figure. In general, the practitioners of the higher criticism continue to be informed by an awareness of the Bible as the book of the church.
42 Tracy, David, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975)Google Scholar.
43 AI, p. 175.
44 AI, p. 177.
45 AI, p. 176.
46 AI, pp. 163–4.
47 AI, p. 185, n. 34.
48 AI, p. 164.
49 AI, pp. 248–9.
50 AI, p. 255.
51 Ibid.
52 AI, p. 258.
53 Lindbeck, George, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), pp. 114–20Google Scholar.