There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

One Tuesday afternoon in June of 1936, the newly installed Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge set out to deliver his inaugural lecture (Dodd 1936). As he stepped up to the podium, his subject stretched out before him in a wide open vista, clear and uncluttered, inviting him to enter into the inheritance of a century or more of successful scientific investigation. The man was C.H. Dodd; his title, ‘The Present Task in New Testament Studies’.

The territory indicated by my title is impossibly vast, and some delimitations are in order at the beginning. What follows does not attempt any kind of thorough or nuanced historical analysis of the great tangle of issues to which the terms of the title refer. ‘Hermeneutics’ and ‘modern theology’ don't exist as simple entities; the terms are shorthand ways of identifying very complex traditions of thought and cultural practices, and a serious attempt to trace those traditions and the variations in their relationship would be little short of a history of Western Christian thought since the rise of nominalism. What is offered here is more restricted and precise, chiefly an essay in Christian dogmatics. At its simplest, my proposal is that the Christian activity of reading the Bible is most properly (that is, Christianly) understood as a spiritual affair, and accordingly as a matter for theological description. That is to say, a Christian description of the Christian reading of the Bible will be the kind of description which talks of God and therefore talks of all other realities sub specie divinitatis. There is certainly an historical corollary to this proposal — namely, the need for some account of why the dominant traditions of Western Protestantism (and more recently of Western Catholicism) have largely laid aside, or at least lost confidence in, this kind of dogmatic depiction of the church's reading of the Bible, replacing it with, or annexing it to, hermeneutical theory of greater or lesser degrees of sophistication and greater or lesser degrees of theological content.

About ten years ago, just before his death, Hans Frei added a new section, ‘Convergence’, to essay bearing the main title ‘Barth and Schleiermacher’, which has appeared in print more recently. In the proposal that gave its name to Types of Christian Thought, Frei stated the convergence in another way. Barth and Schleiermacher represented theologies of adjoining rather than opposing types in Frei's array.