Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-24hb2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T02:38:19.733Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Barthian heritage of Hans W. Frei*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2008

John Allan Knight*
Affiliation:
Marist College, 3399 North Road, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601John.Knight@Marist.edu

Abstract

Hans Frei and the ‘Yale School’ of narrative theology are often understood to be Barthian in orientation, but only rarely have the origins and contours of Frei's engagement with Barth been treated in the secondary literature. Frei's dissertation itself remains unpublished, with the exception of an oddly edited abridgement that appeared ten years after Frei's untimely death. This lacuna is unfortunate, because Frei's dissertation on Barth, and especially his treatment of Barth's method, are of signal importance in that they set the agenda and orientation for much, if not all, of Frei's later work. Consequently, in this article I analyse Frei's dissertation on Barth, focusing primarily on his treatment of Barth's protest against ‘relationalism’. On Frei's reading, three moves constitute Barth's break with relationalism: the primacy of ontology over epistemology, the subordination of method to positive affirmations about God, and the conformance of interpretative method both to Barth's methodological commitments and to his affirmations about God. In his dissertation, Frei argues that Barth believed that, without these moves, theology would be vulnerable to Feuerbach's critique. Frei's construal of Barth's break with relationalism sets the agenda for Frei's own later work, in which he appropriates these Barthian moves by insisting on the primacy of biblical narratives in theological method. Similar to Barth, Frei takes twentieth-century hermeneutic theology to be vulnerable to deconstructionist critique. His insistence on the primacy of a literal reading of the biblical narratives is his attempt to rectify this vulnerability.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See e.g. Frei's discussion of Barth and the limitation of the task of theology to Christian self-description in Frei, Hans W., Types of Christian Theology, ed. Hunsinger, George and Placher, William C. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. Whether Frei's interpretation of Barth's various polemical statements against apologetics is the best interpretation of Barth is a question worthy of consideration, but one I cannot engage here. For my purposes, it is enough that Frei himself takes his proposal for limiting theology to Christian self-description to be a faithful continuation of Barth's project.

2 One widely read book, Demson, David E., Hans Frei and Karl Barth: Different Ways of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997)Google Scholar, limits its treatment of Frei to Frei, Hans W., The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975Google Scholar; repr. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1997) and Frei, Hans W., The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

3 For a brief biographical sketch, see Placher, ‘Introduction’, in Frei, Hans W., Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, ed. Hunsinger, George and Placher, William C. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 325Google Scholar, esp. 4–5. For a fine account relating Frei's personal journey (based not only on Frei's publications, but also on extensive interviews and conversations) to his public theological proposals, see Woolverton, John F., ‘Hans W. Frei in Context: A Theological and Historical Memoir’, Anglican Theological Review 79 (Summer 1997), pp. 369–93Google Scholar. Mike Higton has provided a more detailed sketch, drawing on Placher and Woolverton, as well as other unpublished sources. Higton, Mike, Christ, Providence and History: Hans W. Frei's Public Theology (London: T. and T. Clark International, 2004), pp. 1520Google Scholar.

4 Higton, Mike, ‘An American Theologian of History: Hans W. Frei in 1956’, Anglican and Episcopal History 71/1 (March 2002), pp. 6184Google Scholar.

5 Higton, Christ, Providence and History.

6 Frei, Hans, ‘The Doctrine of Revelation in Karl Barth’, in Olegovich, Giorgy (ed.), Ten Year Commemoration of the Life of Hans Frei (1922–1988) (New York: Semenenko Foundation, 1999), pp. 103–87Google Scholar. The excerpt of Frei's dissertation appeared along with several other papers that were presented at a conference celebrating Frei's life and work.

7 Hans Wilhelm Frei, ‘The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth, 1909–1922: The Nature of Barth's Break with Liberalism’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1956).

8 ‘No more crucial event has taken place in modern Protestant theology than Karl Barth's break with liberalism’, ibid., p. iii.

9 Given the scope of Frei's dissertation, one might expect Barth's earlier work to have influenced Frei more substantially than the later work. And indeed, one could argue that Barth's work 1915–31 exerted substantially more influence on Frei's view of theological method than e.g. the later volumes of the Church Dogmatics. On the other hand, Frei himself states that it was Barth's figural exegesis of various Old Testament passages in the later volumes of the Dogmatics that provided Frei with his characteristic constructive response to what he took to be the principle errors of modern liberal theology. Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, p. viii. The examples Frei cites as paradigmatic are Church Dogmatics, II/2, pp. 340–409, and IV/1, pp. 224–8. Higton notes this influence as well: Christ, Providence and History, p. 12.

10 ‘Among other things, this [Barth's break with liberalism] means a total reversal of his understanding of theological epistemology’. Frei, ‘Doctrine of Revelation’, p. 118.

11 Ibid., pp. 26, 30.

12 Ibid., p. 31.

13 Ibid., pp. 42–8.

14 A related form of this dialectic can be seen in Barth's attempt to be Christocentric in the early period: ‘To Barth's thinking, the endeavor to be totally Christocentric and yet to think completely as a “man of culture” is bound to result in a clash’. Ibid., p. 69.

15 Ibid., p. 63.

16 The method of Ineinanderstellung involves an attempt to depict the nature of God and God's redemptive activity toward humanity via an articulation of human capacity. It involves, that is, an anthropological orientation to theology in general and the doctrine of God in particular.

17 Ibid., p. 199.

18 Ibid., p. 119 (citations omitted).

19 The most important of these seem to be J. C. Blumhardt and Hermann Kutter. It was biblical realism that allowed Barth to express his belief in the objective, literal truth of the events narrated in scripture, ‘without being tied thereby to a fundamentalist, literalist interpretation of these events’. Ibid., pp. 150–1. Also ibid., pp. 148–67, 434–8.

20 In Frei's view, ‘the fundamental conviction in regard to theological theory of knowledge on the part of Biblical realists is the correlation of the Holy Spirit and Scripture in the Word of God’. Ibid., p. 502.

21 ‘This, then, is the first and most important lesson which Barth learned from Biblical realism: in order to assert as normative (not only negatively but positively in dialectical fashion) that the concrete content of the limit placed on man, history, and nature is the self-revealing God, one must begin with God whose revelation is altogether founded in his freedom. Thus our relation to him is founded solely on his freedom to be for us in grace and revelation. To know this is to discover it in one source only – in Scripture.’ Ibid., p. 504.

22 ‘Here, then, is Barth's typical affirmation during this period, that the ground of the relationship with God and of the knowledge of this relationship is the correlation which lies totally within the action of God, in the correlation of Spirit and Scripture which is the Word of God’. Ibid., p. 510.

23 Ibid., p. 119 n. 161.

24 Ibid., p. 121.

25 Ibid., pp. 120–3.

26 ‘At all times Barth has firmly held to the conviction that we are always in the presence of something or someone not created, and that this relationship between creature or finite man and the infinite is the prime relation in and through which all other relations take place.’ Ibid., pp. 108–9.

27 ‘In revelation, he comes to see, there is a priority of ontic affirmation over epistemological or noetic affirmation.’ Ibid., p. 565.

28 The issue with which theology must come to terms is ‘to see the originality of the infinite as the origin and goal of the finite, to see the path from the infinite to the finite, rather than the path from the finite to the infinite’. Ibid., p. 111.

29 Ibid., p. 111 (citation omitted).

30 Ibid., p. 112.

31 ‘Barth breaks radically with his liberal past, because he refuses to acknowledge a relational nexus in which faith and its historical content meet in experience.’ Ibid., p. 113.

32 ‘Positively expressed, this means that the relationship of God to man is wholly grounded in God.’ Ibid., p. 115.

33 Ibid., p. 126 (emphasis in original).

34 Ibid., pp. 128–9. ‘Double predestination is the unique act of God in Jesus Christ alone . . .’ Ibid., p. 129.

35 Ibid., p. 127. When Barth broke with liberalism, what he opposed most fundamentally was liberalism's ‘confusion or synthesis of Christocentric revelation with religion’. Ibid., p. iv. To resist this, Barth attempted ‘to express the sovereignty of God in his self-revelation over the very means and the mode of reception of revelation’. Ibid. Frei argues that Barth had no choice but to try to express this notion of sovereignty through the available traditions, which were academic liberalism, biblical realism and scepticism. Ibid., pp. iv–vii. Through these conceptual traditions, or some combination of them, Barth sought ‘to found the doctrine of revelation solely upon the doctrine of God, and to do so without violating the freedom and subjectivity and spontaneity of man’. Ibid., p. vii.

36 Ibid., pp. 65–6. ‘Barth in his early days equates Christ with history and faith with experience . . .’ Ibid., p. 72. The question formulated by Frei and quoted in the text, it seems to me, anticipates Frei's understanding of the central problem not only of christology, but of theological method.

37 Ibid., pp. 554–5.

38 Ibid., p. 439.

39 Ibid., pp. 431–2. Further, on Frei's reading, Barth incorporates to a large degree the thought forms of German idealism, particularly as used by Hegel and Schleiermacher.

40 This does not change even after 1931, though at that point Barth no longer understood the Word of God dialectically, but through an analogy between grace and nature that ‘is based solely on the congruence of grace and nature given uniquely and miraculously in the Incarnation’. Ibid., p. 433.

41 Barth faced ‘diametrically opposed dangers at the same time in his radical realism’. Ibid., p. 187.

42 Ibid., p. 188.

43 Ibid., p. 193.

44 Ibid., p. 194.

45 Frei states that ‘content torn from its form is no longer the same’. Ibid., p. 546.

46 ‘But one must go further and state that no conceptual content is “given” in itself. Its meaning, on the contrary, consists in its relation to other judgements and (in principle) to the totality of thought content.’ Ibid., p. 109.

47 ‘There is thus a constant choice, an inconclusive dialogue between one type of language which, however inadequately, represents its object, and another type which is only a negative pointer to its object or subject and is more interested in indicating the distance between itself and its object.’ Ibid., p. 537.

48 Ibid., p. 539.

49 Ibid., p. 443.

50 Ibid., p. 455.

51 Ibid., pp. 452–8. This dual foundation in the Word of God can tend to collapse ontology and epistemology, and in Frei's view this is what happens in the 2nd edn of Der Römerbrief: the Word of God remains both the object and the means of knowledge. Ibid., pp. 460–1. It is not until Barth turns to a positive doctrine of analogy that he is able to prevent the collapse of epistemology and ontology and reassert the primacy of ontology.

52 ‘He wanted to emphasize the primacy of objective intention and norms over methodological considerations without committing himself thereby to a system; for he thought, then as well as subsequently, that a theological “system” is a contradiction in terms.’ Ibid., p. 547.

53 Ibid., pp. 462–3.

54 Ibid., p. 499.

55 Ibid., pp. 566–7.

56 Frei states this insight as follows: ‘Barth discovered that the object, revelation or the Word in the Scripture, is never understood except through the guidance of the author. In fact one must put the matter more strongly than that: the Word is not understood except through the author's letter. To assume that for an understanding of the author's objective intention, his words or concepts have but “symbolic” meaning, that they are as remote from the object as they are near to it, that they deflect to the same extent that they reflect meaning, is to assume an independent position from that of the author toward the object of his own intention. One assumes then that he has prior knowledge of that which is also the author's objective intention. But just this is impossible, especially in the case of Scripture: it is simply true that we do need the letter of Scripture to tell us of revelation. We have no independent information of this normative object.’ Ibid., p. 542.

57 ‘But the relation between the “word” and the Word of God is paradoxical. It goes without saying that there is no systematic coincidence between them. The fact that they do become correlated is due to the non-dialectical, free activity of God in his Word.’ Ibid., p. 543. This failure of systematisation also means that there is no direct or immediate presence of the Spirit to the reader, and possibly not to Paul, either: ‘The Spirit is not then directly or immediately present to both Paul and commentator, nor do the thoughts of Paul and of the commentator merge into each other in a timeless dimension of truth above history. There is no “merging’, there is only pointing from each to the other, from Paul to the Spirit to the commentator; from the Spirit to Paul to the commentator.’ Ibid., p. 545.

58 ‘The doctrine of revelation gradually evolves after the second edition of Der Römerbrief, and true to indications already present in that period it has positive content even though that content must be dialectically presented for the most part. But there is no such positive content as a counter-part in a doctrine of man. With regard to the doctrine of God and of revelation (the two tend to merge in the dialectical period) systematization and abstractness are guarded against successfully, and the positive, purely objective intention shines through with eminent success. This is not nearly so true of the doctrine of man and of human understanding, which tend to be sublated.’ Ibid., p. 568. Consequently, in Frei's view, ‘even though he later denies, in his understanding of the doctrine of man, any coalescence between Christology and anthropology, it is only in the light of Christology that any and all content of anthropology may be understood’. Ibid., pp. 569–70 (citations omitted).

59 Ibid., p. 571.

60 Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.

61 Ibid., p. 10.

62 Ibid., p. 1.

63 Ibid., p. 2.

64 Ibid., pp. 2–3.

65 Ibid., pp. 3–4.

66 Ibid., p. 5.

67 Ibid., p. 6 (emphasis in original).

68 Ibid., p. 6.

69 Ibid., p. 7. Under this new separation of literal and figural reading, the closest successor to literal reading became historical reconstruction, while the closest successor to figural reading became biblical theology. Ibid., p. 8.

70 Ibid., p. 9.

71 Ibid., p. 10. ‘Attention continued to be paid to the verbal sense of the stories. In the course of the eighteenth century it came to signify not so much a literary depiction which was literal rather than metaphorical, allegorical, or symbolic, but rather the single meaning of a grammatically and logically sound propositional statement.’ Ibid., p. 9.

72 Ibid., pp. 10–12, 16, 27. Frei's thesis about the causes of the eclipse (as distinct from the eclipse itself) has not gone unchallenged. Nicholas Wolterstorff e.g. thinks it more likely that alternatives to realistic interpretation were sought because of rising scepticism about the propositional content of the literal sense of an increasing number of parts of the biblical narratives. Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Will Narrativity Work as Linchpin? Reflections on the Hermeneutic of Hans Frei’, in Charles M. Lewis (ed.), Relativism and Religion (London: Macmillan Press, 1995), pp. 71–107, esp. pp. 92–3.

73 Frei, Identity of Jesus Christ.

74 I have not discussed these essays in the interest of space, but it is important to note that Frei's view of the meaning of the biblical texts underwent a shift after the publication of the Identity. In the later essays, the ‘literal sense’ of the biblical texts replaces the narrative form as the primary determinant of their meaning. Nonetheless, Frei remains committed to the Barthian themes discussed herein. Indeed, his shift to the literal sense was motivated by his conclusion that it served his construal of Barth's agenda better than the narrative structure.

75 These criticisms are prominent both in Eclipse and in the essays collected in Frei, Theology and Narrative, ed. Hunsinger and Placher.

76 See esp. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, ed. Hunsinger and Placher.

77 Frei's formative influences include not only Barth, but also Gilbert Ryle and Erich Auerbach. Considerations of these influences exceed the scope of this paper. Barth, however, was fundamental in this sense: what Frei gained from Ryle and Auerbach were additional argumentative or conceptual tools for advancing his Barthian agenda.