Hans Frei on Textual Referentiality

It's been said that Frei rejects the idea of textual referentiality, that the meaning of a story is the story itself and that questions of any reality outside of the text are irrelevant to interpretation.

In reality his understanding of the issue was far more subtle. In his essay "Conflicts in Interpretation," he points out the necessity of textual referentiality for Christian faith. His chief concern, however, is an over-easy rush to the referent which overlooks the nature of the text doing the referencing, as well as a proper understanding of the relationship between text and referent. Here's what he has to say:

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 re-shaped 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. (1992: 355).

...

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. (356)

Tomorrow I'll post Frei's thoughts on this in relation to the "historicity" of the gospels.

Literary and Canonical Approaches

I'm grateful to have Dave Beldman as a dialogue partner. He has recently posted an essay in which he looks at the possible implications of newer literary approaches to biblical interpretation, especially as these impact historical critical theories concerning the development of texts. He asked me to compare this literary approach with Childs' canonical approach, as I have recently outlined it in my last thread. Though I answered him in the comments (here), I've touched my response up a bit in order to post it here.

Though there are many similarities between a canonical approach which privileges the final form of the biblical text and literary approaches which work with the assumption of unity, Childs explicitly distances himself from such approaches. The difference is in the starting point.

Childs starts from a theological premise, rather than an aesthetic or literary one: the God of creation has elected for himself a concrete people and has chosen to relate to that people in space and time (see here). This historical relationship has brought the text of Scripture into being , a text whose function within God's economy is to point to Him and his ways (see forthcoming thread). Just as our four different gospels are diverse textual witnesses to the one Gospel outside the text, so the whole of scripture testifies in diverse ways to the reality of the one God, the Gospel, or Jesus (or however you wish to define the text's ultimate subject matter). This kerygmatic function of the text means that its reality is not self-contained. Though one can posit a world 'in' the text as a useful hermeneutical tool, it is not the case that the world in the text exhausts the truth of the text. That text is part of a greater whole which points beyond itself to what really matters: 'divine reality', Jesus, or whatever. This is how I understand Vanhoozer's statement about theological interpretation: it is interpretation oriented to the knowledge, not of the text (literary approaches), nor of historical circumstances (historical critical approaches), but of the God who called the text into being in the first place (JTI vol. 1, Intro).

As a result, interpretation which is to do justice to the nature of the text must be theological. A literary approach, which looks at structure and rhetorical devices can only be one step in comprehending what the text is about. We need to be piercing 'through' the text to its ultimate subject matter. This subject matter is outside the text (I'm not sure I would say 'behind' ... ), it is the ultimate subject matter of the text, what the text is really all about, and is not reducible to the level of the text itself.

This has implications for heremeneutics. A realization that the text is a 'witness' and not the reality itself frees the Christian from what Childs calls 'biblicism', the need to reduce the reality of God to the level of the text itself. Because the Bible is not about itself but about God, it is OK if there are contradictions and disjunctions at the surface level, and I mean real contradictions, not just artfully placed ones that actually fulfil some subtle literary purpose. The unity of the Bible is not a literary unity, but rather a theological unity. It lies in the subject matter to which the text points. The one Gospel to which the four gospels point is where the unity should lie, not in attempts to reconcile contradictions amongst the gospel witnesses themselves.

As such, focusing on the text in the literary fashion that Josipovici recommends is just one part of the overall activity of theological exegesis. The literary approach of Josipovici is useful only to the degree that it helps us understand the kerygmatic intentionality of the text of Judges or Job. Using it as a tool to iron our tensions is fine to the degree that it gives an adequate account of the text itself (as I'm sure you will agree). But I think it bears pointing out that a theological approach, at least the one that Childs recommends, requires attention to the kerygmatic/canonical intentionality of the text, and this in turn means attending to the historical dimension. Escaping from the real world into a narrative world is, according to the theological premise of Childs, to contradict the foundational assumptions of a God who dwells with us (not that Josipovici is necessarily doing this, though many narrative theologians such as Frei and Linbeck come close). History and commitment to a certain type of authorial intentionality are necessary parts of exegesis oriented to knowledge of God. That the unity of scripture is outside of it means we are not required to get rid of editorial additions and surface level contradictions.

Childs wryly notes the theological agnosticism present in much narrative theology. It is possible for theologians from both the extreme right and extreme left of the discipline to do narrative theology, coming to similar conclusions, while sharing fundamentally different views about the actual world in which we live.

I wrote a post on the way Childs' understanding of the formation of the text provides the grounds for broadening theological reflection beyond the horizon of the Old Testament here. Here we have something of the marriage of history and theology that theological exegesis needs to maintain.

(For the record, I think Sternberg does a good job of providing a literary approach which takes seriously the historical world 'behind' the text. Childs cites him approvingly.)