Chapter 1: Heideggers Existential Analytic and Bonhoeffers Theological Appropriation

Memory and Authority

After making this argument from the text of Scripture, we want to navigate contemporary philosophical and theological sources in order to answer more specific questions. First, this part of the paper will briefly introduce the broad strokes of Martin Heideggers understanding on human nature as necessarily historical. Second, Robert Brandoms treatment of historicist rationality will provide resources for putting stricter contours on Heideggers account. Third, we will employ this framework gleaned from Heidegger and Brandom to analyze contemporary theological sources: Nicholas Wolterstorff, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Daniel Treier. These philosophers and theologians will not overturn or significantly alter the conclusions gleaned from Deuteronomy, but rather they will specify and clarify its claims.Part I: Ancient Authority: Deuteronomy on MemoryI am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name. Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any workyou, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day. Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God commanded you, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. Neither shall you commit adultery. Neither shall you steal. Neither shall you bear false witness against your neighbor. Neither shall you covet your neighbors wife. Neither shall you desire your neighbors house, or field, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.[footnoteRef:1] [1: Deuteronomy 5:6-21 nrsv (all translation from nrsv unless otherwise noted). We present these passages without verse divisions in order to present them in a form closer to the original. That is, the text should be read as a continuous whole rather than as a sequence of one-liners to be cherry-picked; verse divisions have been helpful in easily referencing passages, but they have been deleterious in hermeneutics, as they encourage reading verses outside of their literary context.]

Note that interspersed throughout the commandments are various commentaries that describe the rationale for the commandments. First, verses 6 and 7 highlight Gods uniquenessHis holiness. Second, verses 9, 10, and 16 integrate life and well-being for both the individual and the generations to follow. Third, in verses 6, 14 and 15 we read the precedence for the entire the Decalogue: God brought them from Egypt; He claimed them as His people; and He, therefore, is the lord of their newly formed (national) identity. In other words, this passage links the commandments to various other concepts and ideas familiar to Israel: representing Gods holiness (Genesis 1:26f), the link between obedience and life (Genesis 3:3), and the tradition of Gods history with, and promise to, the children of Abraham (Genesis 12:1-3). In other words, the full importance of the Decalogue cannot be separated from these related themes.We see that happening here for Israel. Gods historyas the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as the God who brought them out of Egyptis here drawing upon ancient Near Eastern legal language and putting it to work to explicate the meanings of that divine history. In other words, the manifestation of God here does not take the form of a timeless, eternal deposit of truths that take on a cultural incarnation. Rather, the text presents itself as a history and a tradition and should be understood in those terms. From this we can see a general warrant for likewise subsuming contemporary ideas to that tradition, so long as conceptual coherence is sustained.Recall that three elements of rationale emerged in the intratextual commentary on the commandments. Regarding the holiness of Scripture, John Webster wants to navigate between two extremes, two disorders, as he calls them. By one disorder, Scripture has been separated from its place in its reception by the community of faith. The other disorder goes the other extreme and understands Scripture solely by virtue of its use.[footnoteRef:2] Accordingly, his account seeks to understand Scripture as simultaneously a reference to the very human process of writing, canonization, and interpretation while also referring to the divine grace by which God sanctifies those processes for His purposes. This appeal to sanctification may strike some as exclusive focus on the supernatural but he disallows that reading: Talk of the biblical texts as Holy Scripture thus indicates a two-fold conviction. On the one hand, the texts are not simply natural entities. On the other hand, the texts place in the divine economy does not entail their withdrawal from the realm of human processes.[footnoteRef:3] By this understanding of sanctification, Webster wants to fall between the two extremes; humans truly do write, canonize, and interpret Scripture, but saying that humans are active by no means excludes saying that God is also active in the same processes. [2: John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6.] [3: Webster, Holy Scripture, 27, italics original.]

The comparison obviously fails on some levels, but the main point shows that Klemick can write speaking for me, and I can write speaking for him. The tradition of human response to divine grace often works in a similar form, especially in the cases of prophetic authorization. The initial giving of the Decalogue exemplifies this well. God spoke to Moses and Aaron so that they would in turn speak on Gods behalf to Israel. Often, this would come in the form of God giving Moses specific messages to take to Israel; other times, the sermons of Deuteronomy for example, Moses would speak of his own choice of words but led by what God had explicitly said.The structure of the Decalogue exemplifies this scope of obedience, first and foremost to God and then by repercussions to all of familial, social, and personal life. Verses 6-11 all pertain to Israels relationship to God; verses 12-16 thematically segue between relationship toward God and natural relationships; and verses 18-21 begin with the waw-conjunction, showing that 17-21 textually belong together as a unity, briefly stating norms for a functional faithful society, with 21 cutting past externally visible actions and even commanding against specific intentions. You shall not make for yourself an idol. Where the first commandment tells Israel to remember that the Lord, rather than other national gods, rescued them, this one warns them not to forget that the Lord, rather than their own innovated deities, rescued them. They are to keep themselves from other nations gods and from those they might invent. Rather, they are to consistently represent God as His priestly kingdom.But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any workyou, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt. Here the faithful representation of God links up with the tradition of divine grace. God redeemed them from Egypt so that they might rest and flourish. Thus, they are to also treat their own slaves, livestock, and children with the grace shown to them; as they are now in a position of power, they are to remember that they had been overpowered and oppressed. Thus, they are to emulate the grace of God rather than the powers from which He saved them.You shall not murder. Neither shall you commit adultery. Neither shall you steal. Neither shall you bear false witness against your neighbor. Neither shall you covet your neighbors wife. Neither shall you desire your neighbors house, or field, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. This grace learned and fostered in the family unity then extends to other social and judicial relationships. Relating to God and representing Him require consistent fidelity in word and deed, not only in the temple or in the family but also in the full scope in interpersonal relationships. As an exegetical point, not that these verses all appear with conjunctions to link them; they are to be read, heard, and understood as a united network of commands. However, note that the final commandment presses obedience past external performance. Ending on this note rings the chord by which they are to understand the depth of true obedience. Let no mistake be made: Gods commandments extend not only to word and deed but even to thought and desire. Jesus Sermon on the Mount famously accentuated this dynamic of the Torah. He did not, as some read it, radicalize the commandments regarding murder, adultery, and so on. Rather, he reminded them of an inchoate motif undergirding the entire Decalogue and prophetic movement: obedience cannot merely be performed. To put it in contemporary terms, obedience has an existential meaning rather than a behaviorist one.This explicates in tandem the motifs of holiness and life by way of appealing to the tradition of Gods grace to Israel. But this explication so far does not yet say how Israel is expected to norm itself to that tradition. For this, we keep reading.Deuteronomy 6: Holy History and Traditioned Thought

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. As if the final line of the Decalogue were not clear enough about the depth of what obedience means, this reinforces the point. Following that track of Augustinian psychology, some have read heart, soul, and might here as evidence for a tripartite structure to the human person. While it could be read as implying that, such a reading loses sight of the rhetorical force of the three terms. First, heart (lev) refers first and foremost to the deepest corners of the human person, her desires, drives, and fundamental orientation toward life. Or, allowing for a philosophers idiosyncrasies, this could be read to mean with all your being. Second, soul (nephesh) means the life of the creature,[footnoteRef:11] so this clause most likely means to love God with all ones life.[footnoteRef:12] Another angle on the term is that nephashim are often described in terms of needy creatures.[footnoteRef:13] We cannot derive from the text that Moses had this connotation in mind, but allowing ourselves to see it as within the network of the terms meaning, this clause can be read to say with all your passions, needs, and desires. Therefore, we could justifiable read this as meaning with all you seek. Third, might (meod) leaves translators scratching their heads. The word is only once elsewhere[footnoteRef:14] used as a noun but is elsewhere always used as an adjective or adverb, denoting fullness or abundance.[footnoteRef:15] Accordingly, Daniel I. Block opts for translating meod as resources.[footnoteRef:16] Bringing these translation choices together, we might see the full force of Moses meaning by interpreting the verse as You are to love ywhw with your full existence: all you seek and all you posses. [11: Animals are often likewise described as nephesh. See Genesis 1:20, 21, and 24.] [12: See Genesis 19:17 for this use.] [13: Brown-Driver-Briggs offers seat of the appetites (46 times) as a possible translation, with appetites here meaning needs (especially, hunger) as well as desires. Seat of emotions and passions also appears (151) times.] [14: 2 Kings 23:25, which mimics the language here.] [15: For example, Genesis 1:31: . . . it was very good.] [16: Daniel I. Block, The Gospel according to Moses: Theological and Ethical Reflections on the Book of Deuteronomy (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2012), 92.]

The childrens question presumes knowledge of the Torah, but when they ask the second-order question of why; they are asking the rationale of normative force of these commandments. As Moses accordingly articulates the answer to this question of authority, the meaning and content thereof are fully expressed in terms of what God has done and so what they do in response. The particular acts of God and the particular responses of His people establish a chain of normative beliefs, which the Torah succinctly states in a pedagogical form so that the cultural memory can be passed on and normative for future generations.Part II: Recent MemoryIn the preceding two sections, we argued from Deuteronomy 5 and 6 that Moses treats the history of Gods dealings with the ancestors as definitive of Israels existence and thus the meaning of the Torahs authority. To conclude this chapter, we want to take this basic impulse as our guide for the conceptual architecture we build around the theological matter of authority for contemporary use. But as is, the text is not terribly specific as to how we are to carry out that sense of authority. To thus clarify our use of this authority in this sense, we will turn to Heidegger and Brandom to explicate deeper elements of the logic behind the account we have been simultaneously developing and employing. To conclude, we will revisit Vanhoozers and Treiers writings. Vanhoozers account with the adaptations suggested above will provide the larger basic framework, and Treier (in conversation with Heidegger and Brandom) will provide us more specific detail and an example of this model at work. Heritage and Historical RationalityThese themes become sharpened in Being and Time with his understanding of heritage:[footnoteRef:22] [22: We will footnote definitions of technical terms here to shortcut to the main points of the claim.]

Now it would be inappropriate to read authenticity anachronistically into Moses sermon, but the parallels between Heideggers heritage and the catechesis in Deuteronomy deserves comment. For Heideggers authenticity, one does not emulate a role model in the sense of living according to a literal rote repetition of all that role model says and does. Rather, one models ones life on the basic drives and rationale that governed that role models life. That is, one critically appropriates not the role models life but the norms by which the role model lived. In a similar fashion, Moses exhorts parents to teach their children the Torah and the meaning of the Torahwhy they should live according to those testimonies and statutes. But, one may ask, what warrants a proper appropriation of a role model, or in Israels case the Torah and its tacit logic of priestly existence? What are the guides by which this process keeps from devolving into cherry picking from historical precedence and adapting it at whim?Again, without reading inferentialism back into Moses sermon on the Decalogue, we see sufficient similarity between Brandom and the logic of 6:20-23 that Brandoms descriptions illuminate the rationale employed in Deuteronomys catechesis. The past expressions of Gods commitment to, and redemption of, Israel elicit particular responses and judgments that then set the norms for future theological judgments. Without appeal to eternal, (i.e. ahistorical) truth, Moses directs attention to Gods particular promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as manifested in the particular act of release from slavery. These past particulars in turn set no explicit rules for future judgment. However, traditioned thought can study the history in such a way as to uncover the tacit norms for future uses and adaptations of the prior judgments.Second, Moses switches the commandments about coveting. In Exodus 20 You shall not covet your neighbors house precedes You shall not covet your neighbors wife, but in Deuteronomy the latter appears first. We can only speculate as to the reason, but the following seems likely: the Exodus version misled Israelites to thinking that the house was to prioritized over the house, so Moses switched the order later so that the underlying norm that persons take priority over possession manifests more clearly.What concerns us now is whether we can cohere post-biblical theological development under this rubric. For this, we return to topics usually not discussed in studies of method but rather reserved for historical theology.Divine Discourse, Drama, and the Regula FideiThe tension in Wolterstorffs account pertains to his theory of meaning. As his basis, he adopts J. L. Austins speech act theory, which makes distinctions between the locution (the utterance), the illocution (what is done by the utterance), and the perlocution (what effect the illocution has on ones audience),[footnoteRef:33] to argue that speaking is doing something. As per the tension in his account, on the one hand, early on he makes the distinction between revelation and discourse: Speaking consists . . . in taking up a normative stance,[footnoteRef:34] and on the other hand, he claims that sentences of a language have meaningthat they come with meanings.[footnoteRef:35] So, as per meaning, it is unclear on Wolterstorffs account whether the normative stance or sentential meaning carries the meaning of a given utterance. Later, he writes that literality and metaphoricity are a matter of use rather than of meaning,[footnoteRef:36] but never does he clarify this separation of use and meaning. In other words, he makes the relationship between an agents normative stance toward a sentence and its consequent effect of meaning rather ambiguous. On the one hand, he acknowledges that utterances take place within speech acts, so that we are to understand what the person is doing with what they say, which would seem to imply that meaning is constituted at least partly by use. On the other hand, the two citations above separate the two. [33: J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 94-101.] [34: Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 35, italics original.] [35: Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse, 140, italics original.] [36: Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse, 193, italics original.]

We can clarify this relationship by making the following move. We can understand meaning, not as an entity whether metaphysical or ideal, but as a process of understanding or more specifically as the conclusion of that process. That is, we want to understand meaning not as a property of texts but as a function of the linguistically adept reader as she reads the text. This pushes meaning into the locus of interaction between reader and text, so that neither authors nor readers need to die.[footnoteRef:44] With such a minor modification, to which we presume both would assent, we can navigate their respective commitments and concerns. On one hand, Derrida would reject a reader-takes-all hermeneutic.[footnoteRef:45] On the other hand, Wolterstorff concedes that a sentence or text can have multiple meanings.[footnoteRef:46] Wolterstorff wants to preserve some objectivity for meaning against what he sees as a dangerously constructivist treatment of the text, a violence against authors.[footnoteRef:47] As located between reader and author,[footnoteRef:48] we can say that both must achieve specific statuses in order for meaning to arise. As per the reader, this requires a specific form of rationality such that she can see markings or hear sounds and understand them to be part of another rational agents attempts to communicate. Accordingly, so also must the writer construct those markings in such as way that she might reasonably expect a literate person to understand them as attempts at communication. For example, I can say nice weather, right? with variant possible meanings; said during a storm the utterance is a joke, but said during blue skies its an adoration of beauty. However, sejskdidsj cannot be taken to mean anything, because no one could be expected to recognize those markings as a pattern of agential-intellectual content. [44: An allusion to Roland Barthes oft-quoted and oft-misread [T]he birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. (Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath [London: HarperCollins, 1977], 148).] [45: See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158-164.] [46: Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse, 173.] [47: Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse, 169.] [48: Wolterstorff would grant this move of meanings locus: Interpretation occurs in the space between a scores specifications and its realizations (Divine Discourse, 176).]

Moreover, this modification to Wolterstorffs account bring us closer to Vanhoozers description of Christian doctrine in terms of a divine drama, which perhaps carries the text-score metaphor farther but by way of a drama metaphor instead. According to his Drama-of-Redemption approach, we should interpret Scripture not propositionally but primarily in terms of the story God scripts in Scripture: we live and breath in Act 4: after creation (Act 1), law (Act 2), and incarnation (Act 3) but before consummation (Act 5).[footnoteRef:50] So for Vanhoozer, he takes what God is doing with his divine perloctionsScripturemore consistently than Wolterstorff does by situating those speech acts within the larger trajectory of the canonical story that God is writing. We agree with Vanhoozer in his theological impulse to prioritize the story over the proposition, but we take speech act theory to employ unnecessary distinctions, thereby making a robust account of how discourse functions problematic. (We gather that, on a tacit level, the distinction between locution and perlocution facilitated the use and meaning separation that led to a tension in Wolterstorffs account.) Now, one should know that Vanhoozer generally develops his position with reference to speech act theory[footnoteRef:51] but does not require it: Look Ma: no speech acts![footnoteRef:52] Thus, we will not treat it as essential to Vanhoozers core theory. [50: Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama-of-Redemption Model in Four Views on Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology, ed. Stanley M. Gundry and Gary T. Meadors (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 174.] [51: See his Is There Meaning in this Text?: The Bible, The Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 10; First Theology: God, Scripture and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove: IVP, 2002), 8; and The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Lousvill: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 44, n. 31.] [52: Vanhoozer, The Drama-of-Redemption, 184, n. 75. See also Is There Meaning in this Text?, 6.]

The question before us now is whether Vanhoozers account can be brought under the basic impulses of the picture developed from Heidegger and Brandom and if so how that would amend the theological use of their analyses. First of all, we should note that despite the dominance of the drama metaphor, Vanhoozer explicitly shows that history and participation in that history are in fact the operative drives of his work: What the church seeks to understand is a true story: the history of Gods dealings with his creatures. . . . Going beyond the Bible biblically is ultimately a matter of participating in the great drama of redemption.[footnoteRef:53] Notice how he unpacks the metaphor; as noted above the drama is already underway before we enter into it. Accordingly, this is not a play or performance that we initiate and direct. Rather, God has already begun directing history and invited His people to participate in the work. Such is a meaning of being a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. Israel was to embody and exemplify yhwh to the neighboring peoples and thereby take part in the history God directs. Likewise, New Testament Christians continue that same trajectory and history of participating in the history as priests to the nations. Put otherwise, God created a world and invites us to be His image in its midst as participants in His redemption of it: The world of the text . . . is in fact a description of the way the world really is and is becoming.[footnoteRef:54] Or, to adapt language from Heidegger cited above, the world has been undone and, like the selves who navigate it, receives its unity through what it ought to become. [53: Vanhoozer, A Drama-of-Redemption model, 155f, italics added.] [54: Vanhoozer, A Drama-of-Redemption model, 168.]

For Treier, the Rule opens various readings yet also constrains them: [R]eading with the Rule of Faith elicits creative interpretationswithin limits.[footnoteRef:58] To provide an example of this, he draws from David Yeagos treatment of homoousion [of one being] as neither deduced from nor imposed on the text but describing a pattern of judgments present in the text.[footnoteRef:59] What he means by that is that when the early church theologians were navigating between the high Christology of Philippians 2:6-11[footnoteRef:60] and the traditional monotheism of Judaism as crystallized in Deuteronomy 6:4,[footnoteRef:61] they appealed to Isaiah 45:22-23.[footnoteRef:62] By linking Philippians 2:6-11 to Isaiah 45:22-23, the Nicene theologians concluded that the line to the glory of God the Father demonstrated that Jesus and God were not in conflict for supremacy as competing deities but rather that God the Father is most glorified precisely through the confession of Jesus Christ as Lord. From this they concluded a pattern within Judaic faith that warranted a bond between the Risen Jesus and the God of Israel. Accordingly the judgment to declare Jesus as homoousion with the Father fits within the pattern of judgments warranted by the text. [58: Daniel J. Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice (Grand Rapids: Baker Aademic, 2008), 60.] [59: David S. Yeago, The New Testament and the Nicene Dogma: A Contribution to the Recovery of Theological Exegesis, in The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Stephen E. Fowl (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 88, quoted in Treier, Theological Interpretation of Scripture, 60.] [60: [Jesus Christ], though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of deatheven death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.] [61: Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.] [62: Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. By myself I have sworn, from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return: To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear. ]

In this way, the Nicene theologians subordinated not only personal life but even the traditions that in part defined their lives. They, therefore, demonstrated traditioned thought in a way that lived out the authority of Scripture over their lives, even unto dominating and regulating traditions beyond the text of Scripture and its post-biblical heritage, to which they subordinated extra-biblical traditions. That is, they saw the particular judgments of past saints as they responded to particular acts of grace. They then deciphered the norm at work in that and related judgments, appropriating that as the standardthe Rule of Faithaccording to which they determined the propriety of their own judgments, a hermeneutical practice that dates back to Moses Deuteronomy sermons.

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