Appendix A: Some Theoretical Attempts to Bridge Understanding
Some Theoretical Attempts to Bridge Understanding
Scholars have often sought to bridge the hermeneutical gaps between the ancient sense and contemporary application. Approaches to bridging the gap vary, from postmodern theological readings of the Bible as the church’s book (harking back to patristic arguments) 1 to Bultmann’s existential approach and so forth. Wilhelm Dilthey recognized that everyone is shaped by their contexts, 2 but he approached the possibility of understanding by presupposing some shared structures in our common humanity. 3 Dilthey was one of several influences on both Rudolf Bultmann and Hans-Georg Gadamer, although both were more deeply influenced by their associate Martin Heidegger. 4
Hans-Georg Gadamer rightly noted that historical contexts shape all interpreters and that interpretation is impossible without such contexts. Biases in the sense of prejudgments are inevitable; 5 acknowledging them allows one to learn from and engage others who also work from biases and presuppositions. For Gadamer, all engagement with other perspectives or texts involves fusing horizons between the text’s world and our own. 6 Temporal distance does exist, requiring the most competent readers to learn languages and so forth, 7 but, with Aristotle, one must relate the text to one’s situation. 8
Bultmann wanted to make New Testament theology relevant to a twentieth-century world. 9 Wedding it to a particular twentieth-century approach, however, would ultimately doom Bultmann’s approach to the same fate as earlier attempts to conform Jesus to the dominant values of the interpreters’ era. 10 Most scholars agree that the early Heidegger was a major influence on the thought of Rudolf Bultmann, 11 though Bultmann thought that Heidegger instead discovered a picture that accords with what Bultmann found in the NT. 12 Bultmann viewed existential interpretation not as a bias, but as a necessary perspective, like any other approach to history. 13 He insisted on beginning with grammatical, formal, and historical analysis, 14 so long as one recognized the role of preunderstanding in any interpretive work. 15
Bultmann’s philosophic assumptions, however, shaped not only how he presented his exegetical results but also the limitations on his academic theology. Although Bultmann rejects Barth’s charges that the former’s theology is anthropocentric rather than theocentric, 16 Bultmann argues that philosophy and theology both have humanity as their object. 17
More problematic is his understanding of history. Although God has acted decisively in Christ, 18 Bultmann views this acting as existential and not historical. 19 Explaining theology to an antisupernatural world, Bultmann accepts rather than challenges its premise; thus no mature person can “seriously maintain” the New Testament worldview. 20 For him, whatever involves supernatural forces is “myth”; 21 the historical continuum cannot be interrupted by supernatural interventions. 22
Many scholars recognize the reuse of some “mythical” language and imagery in the New Testament, perhaps most obviously in such symbolism as Rev 12:1–4. In such cases, one might describe “demythologization” as translation from one genre to another, rather than creating a new sense unintelligible to the ideal authors’ ideal contexts. Does one use modern criteria, freighted with their own cultural baggage, to determine what is “myth”?
For Bultmann, myth often demands an existential interpretation, 23 but this is not the only way to appropriate myth, especially where the original sense points in a different direction. In many cultures myths communicate aetiology, cosmology, moral lessons, and so forth. Why, for example, must the three-story universe, in terms of which virtually none of us think today, be reinterpreted in existential terms 24 rather than in spatial ones? Granted that “heaven” may be “out” rather than “up,” but even from the standpoint of our geocentric experience, it remains gravitationally “up.” Ancients had no reason to distinguish troposphere, ionosphere, and more distant forms of “out,” but do the ranges most naturally translate into existential terms?
Likewise, for Bultmann the “future” represents an “authentic possibility of being.” 25 Although Bultmann’s present eschatology often correctly recites the New Testament picture, 26 in the New Testament realized eschatology anticipates rather than supplants future eschatology. Suggesting that the New Testament should be demythologized like apocalyptic and gnostic literature 27 offers an incongruous comparison. Early apocalyptic imagery had sociopolitical or mystical meanings, not “existential” ones. One might translate some gnostic texts into “existential” language, 28 but these texts postdate the New Testament and do not directly inform the earliest Christian approaches. 29 Contextually relevant, twentieth-century North Americans would likely not have written about spiritual powers the way that Paul does in Rom 8:38 or Eph 6:12, but a purely “existential” interpretation of those passages would strip them of their continuing relevance to spiritism in Brazil, Haiti, the Philippines, Nigeria, or Iceland.
If all texts translate into the same essential, existential meaning, why bother using different texts? Has not the locus of authority shifted in this case from the text (and thus its complex of symbols designed to make sense in a given historical context) to the interpreter’s existential preunderstanding? 30 Bultmann has borrowed premises from a nontheistic worldview; Jaspers and other existentialists thus question whether Bultmann has gone far enough. 31 His content criticism has rendered his position unfalsifiable, 32 just as he averred that faith itself cannot be verified or falsified by history. 33 Bultmann’s fideism cannot eliminate the offense of the cross.
Many other approaches to contextualization exist, but what these samples illustrate is the academic guild’s recognition of the gap between comprehending grammar and embracing the message.