Frei’s Letter to Gary Comstock (YDS 12-184)

Frei’s Letter to Gary Comstock (YDS 12-184)

Gary Comstock wrote two articles (‘Truth or Meaning: Ricoeur versus Frei on Biblical Narrative’, The Journal of Religion 66.2, April 1986, pp.117-40 and ‘Two Types of Narrative Theology’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55.4, Winter 1987, pp.687-717) which have had a significant influence on the interpretation of Frei, despite containing (in Frei’s own opinion, and mine) serious misinterpretations. Frei corresponded with Comstock whilst one of the articles was on the way towards publication, sending him one of his own recent papers (I’m not sure which one).

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…I’m afraid you won’t find much to agree with in the present essay. You may even disagree with my assessment that Ricoeur turns biblical hermeneutics into a regional case of general hermeneutics. Well, I’m afraid I’d argue the case vigorously, despite the essay on Revelation with its (to my mind inconsistent) qualifications. A ‘pure narrativist’ I think I’m not, and I hope that will be clearer than before, but at least mildly anti-foundational I am in philosophy. Mildly? Yes: I am a Christian theologian and do not regard philosophy as ever having achieved that clearly demonstrated set of even formal certainties (and agreements) in 2500 years which would allow it the kind of authoritative status you seem to want to accord it; and yet I believe theology cannot do without philosophy. Furthermore theology cannot even invest so much in the foundational/anti-foundational debate as to come out (qua theology) in principle on the anti-foundational side. Christian theologians will have to make use of philosophy, [p.2] whichever way philosophers decide that particular issue it to be resolved. In other words, I’m saying two things simultaneously: First, Christian theology is quite distinct from philosophy; it has a kind of distinctness that Ricoeur, despite his good will, cannot see, so that – again despite his (and your) disavowals – theology becomes for him at least a quasi-philosophy of religion with a regional hermeneutics under general philosophical-hermeneutical governance. Second, despite their mutual distinctness, theology as a second-order discipline cannot dispense with philosophy, and their relation remains complex and has constantly to be worked out, rather than being of one invariable shape.

That leads me to my main criticism of your criticism of me: It’s the complexity of that interrelation that you reduce to far too systematic and simple a shape. If I suggest that, philosophically, ‘meaning’ and ‘truth’ (themselves not the only philosophical categories one may want to use for purposes of interpretive clarification) should be sharply distinguished in a hermeneutics of realistic New Testament narrative, and hermeneutics confined to the level of meaning, I’m supposed to be implying that Christians don’t make truth claims for their beliefs. But of course I’m saying nothing of the sort: I’m simply saying that the virtual running into each other of ‘meaning’ and ‘truth’ in philosophical systems like Ricoeur’s – in which semantic sense and ontological reference are embraced together under the common category of ‘meaning’ – an ironic obervse to the logical positivists’ running together of sense and verifiability under the category of meaning as pure ostensivity – is dangerous and does not allow realistic narratives a genuinely realistic status. Instead, Ricoeur’s view tends to force realistic description to become metaphor, so that its ‘meaning’ qua possible [p.3] ontological truth can be a transcendent, secondary world which is obviously not realistic. I say that’s in its own way as bad as the positivists’ obverse, which insists that any realistic description refers ostensively and univocally. Both Ricoeur and the logical positivists unite ‘meaning’ and ‘truth’ prematurely when it comes to realistic narrative, whatever may be the case in other hermeneutical situations.

Suppose I distinguish ‘meaning’ and ‘truth’, that still leaves open to me several possible explorations about the relation between them in regard to the realistic New Testament narratives, for example, the tradition of analogical predication which has been so common in the Christian tradition from St. Thomas to Barth. Again, it’s no perfect answer, if for no orther reason that that ‘analogizing’ is one thing, and having a watertight theory of analogy is another and less likely one. Still, perfectly watertight (philosophical) theories are hard to come by anywhere, and in the meantime the use of analogy may keep us from a dreadful referential, fundamentalistic literalism on the one hand and from a (to at least some of us) equally dreaded dissolution of realistic meaning into a non-realistic secondary or second-order world of truth on the other. Ricoeur often tells us that he wants to dare to be a Kantian, and hermeneutically that is doubtless the case. But his hermeneutics and his ontology are obviously on intimate terms, if indeed not systematically unified, and am I completely wrong if I see a far more Hegelian than Kantian slant in the ontology (even though perhaps in Heideggerian or even Schelling-like garb) which he thinks goes appropriately with his hermeneutics? If true being is in the unity of metaphorical language, limit experience, and meaning, just how do you recapture the world of sense and things? Just what is that secondary world which is referred to by the other part of the ‘split’ reference, the par5t that does not refer realistically? How is it different from that sublation of realistic reference in which [p.4] the latter is at once stored up and left behind, that Aufhebung which seemed to be the triumph of ontology under Hegel’s auspices?

And if I am at least partially right in my suspicion at this point, would you tell me what ‘God’s action‘ really means in such a context? And would you really want to tell me that this is how Christians intend to refer when they greet each other on Easter morning with ‘He is risen’? You tell me that I wrongly interpret that statement purely intramurally; but even if you were right (which you are not), I don’t think that’s any more incorrect than your apparent identification of the meaning of that text with the statement, ‘Jesus’ life reveals the mystery of the Kingdom of God’. especially when that phrase may be literary code for a full-orbed Idealistic-ontological use of ‘truth’, and its residual realistic element is reduced to the level of some kind of ‘powerful (poetic) presence’.

To retrace in order to go on: I think I have good reasons for distinguishing sharply at the philosophical level between the meaning and truth of realistic narrative: I want to avoid both the reduction which A.J. Ayer and Christian Fundamentalists share on the one hand and the ontologically non-realist dissolution of New Testament realistic narrative that you and Ricoeur undertake on the other. That kind of straightforward philosophical revision of New Testament truth claims is simply not open to me; the mode of New Testament truth claiming has to be more complex for me, i.e., more complex at the second-order philosophical-theological level, not in the first-order religious confession.

As for the character, then, of the truth claim, I admit quite candidly that it is logically, theoretically or philosophically ‘odd’ (which is not the same as ‘meaningless’ so far as I’m concerned). That seems to make me some kind of privatizing ‘fideist’ in your view. It is precisely at this point where the philosopher can apparentlt apply reductionist cliches [p.5] (which allows him to stop thinking right there), that the theologian has to utilize most strongly what Hegel called die Anstrengung des Begriffs and think both hard and delicately about the distinction but also the interrelation of Christian faith and philosophy. I admit I have so far not done very well there, but I know the issue has to be tackled, and that it is a very complex one which, for someone like myself who cannot be reductionist on the theology/philosophy matter, cannot be an either/or choice, especially since I also believe that the very alternative, public/private discourse, in which you couch the issue, is erroneous. For me, ‘meaning’ in the gospel narratives is more and more a combination of 1) the communal-religious interpretive tradition and what it has seen as their primary meaning; 2) the fact that the tradition has given primacy to their realistic, ascriptive sense (see the accompanying paper); 3) that outside of that tradition there is no reason to think of any single interpretive move or scheme as the meaning of these stories; 4) and even within it there is room for others, provided they do not conflict with the primary, realistic or literal sense; 5) that subordination of understanding to the text, within the descriptive schema explicatio/meditatio/applicatio (see Charles Wood’s book) is in no way the same as the elimination of interpretive understanding and of a possible multiplicity of interpretations. (Again, the matter is far more complex for me than your exposition of my supposed stance of ‘autonomous meaning’ of realistic narrative makes it appear.) Philosophically, meaning cannot be identified with truth but must be kept distinct: What these stories refer to or how they refer remains a philosophical puzzle, but it has to be in a way congruent with their realistic, history-like chracter (and history-likeness of course means the ministry, death and resurrection narratives are the chief topics, not the ‘mystery of the Kingdom of God’, which is not a realistic, fictional or historical, item in the same sense as [p.6] these others). When I ask the question of their truth I am much more clearly (more than that I cannot say) on theological ground, but even there not without a reshaped philosophical form. As for me view of the relation between meaning and truth and the character of the gospel narratives’ truth claims: For me, ‘divine truth’ is at least in part a referential statement, but I do not have a correspondence theory and description with which to back it in this ‘odd’ instance. Rather, it is backed by a coherence procedure: It is contrary to Jesus’s very identity in the stories to be conceived of as not having been raised from the dead; therefore he really – and not merely in the stories – lives. I admit the oddity and believe it is due to the uniqueness of the case. Is this the same as ‘private’ meaning? Anslem’s distinctively Christian version of the ontological argument has always been philosophically puzzling – but private? It seems to me that that argument and the status of discourse about the resurrection of Jesus Christ belong together. I’m suggesting that in this case and this case only a straightforward referential truth inference is to be made from a formal coherence description. Further, this cannot be an instance of a general procedural rule, and yet the procedure should not violate general procedure in relating meaning and truth: it is therefore imperative at the philosophical level to suspend judgment about their relation, i.e., to keep them separate at least in this case, perhaps even generally. Philosophically, the gospel narratives are not self-referential; their reference is indeterminate, and that indeterminacy is exactly what they share with realistic fiction. The referential status of the latter is notoriously difficult to determine (except if one cancels its character out in effect by Idealist or quasi-Idealist Aufhebung). But even if it is so ambiguous, so diificult to pin down, we do not therefore declare such fiction to be either private, purely autonomous, or self-referential.

Many of these things are at least hinted at, though not fully expounded [p.7] in the accompanying paper. I suppose these last remarks may have alerted you to the fact – which, I suspect, will horrify you most of all – that I believe strongly in a careful, restrained and almost aesthetic applicability of typology or analogy to the relation between divine and more general ‘truth’ for Christian theological reflection. The textual universe of the gospel is that perfect coherence of reference and meaning, albeit always imperfectly and partially glimpsed, which allows us to analogize from there to the imperfect, secondary and analogous coherence or cohesion of the two in other cases. In an admittedlt exaggerated fashion one might say that this is the only perfectly ‘public’ case of truth which allows all our other limited and private truths to become at least semi-public. But of course, I have no philosophical warrant for this claim, since I have proposed that it is not backed by any general theory: Hence its status must remain extremely awkward, at once grandly if not ludicrously imperialistic, and yet totally mired in collectively private Christian discourse in the eyes of those for whom philosophy is a foundational and, in respect of formal canons for meaning and truth, theuniversal, normative discipline. For me this is the risk Christian theology has to take if it is to recapture its character as theology of faith, and specifically of incarnation-oriented faith. If it aims at less, is it worth having? Does it do justice to the gospel that commands the life and language of the Christian community? Does it do anything that a good philosophy of religion – or perhaps even better a sympathetic and restrained interpretive social scientific view of religions as distinctive religions [cultures?], like that of Clifford Geertz – could not accomplish instead?

As I read through all of this it is not only terribly repetitious but equipped with every possible sign of haste, and it sounds irascible – which it is not [p.8] meant to be. I suppose it is also not a direct reply to your article but more nearly a gloss on some of your points, mainly in light of the enclosed essay. Well, no use starting over, so I hope this may get us into conversation one way or another.

Sincerely yours, 

Hans W. Frei