Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imaginationassets.cambridge.org/052165/0488/sample/0521650488wsc00.pdf · Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination around since creation, they have surely

Theology, Hermeneutics,and ImaginationThe Crisis of Interpretation at the End ofModernity

GARRETT GREEN

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Garrett Green 2000

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisionsof relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part maytake place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2000

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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Green, Garrett.Theology, hermeneutics, and imagination: the crisis of interpretation at the

end of modernity / Garrett Green.p. cm.

A revised and expanded version of the Edward Cadbury lectures delivered atthe University of Birmingham in February and March 1998, under the title:‘The faithful imagination’.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0 521 65048 8 (hardback)1. Bible – Hermeneutics. I. Title.BS476.G72 2000220.6′01 – dc21 98-33303 CIP

ISBN 0 521 65048 8 hardback

Contents

Preface page ix1 Theological hermeneutics in the twilight of

modernity 1

Part I The modern roots of suspicion2 The scandal of positivity: the Kantian paradigm

in modern theology 253 Against purism: Hamann’s metacritique of Kant 494 Feuerbach: forgotten father of the hermeneutics

of suspicion 835 Nietzschean suspicion and the Christian

imagination 109

Part II Christian imagination in a postmodernworld

6 The hermeneutics of difference: suspicion inpostmodern guise 143

7 The hermeneutic imperative: interpretation andthe theological task 167

8 The faithful imagination: suspicion and trust ina postmodern world 187Appendix: Hamann’s letter to Kraus 207Bibliography 217Index 227

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Theological hermeneutics in the twilightof modernity

When philosophy paints its gray on gray, a form of life hasgrown old, and with gray on gray it cannot be rejuvenated butmerely recognized. The Owl of Minerva begins her flight onlyat the coming of twilight.

Hegel

. . . there are no facts, only interpretations.Nietzsche

Theological hermeneutics began in the Garden of Eden, asany careful observer of the serpent, that subtle hermeneutof suspicion, will at once recognize. In the earliest recordedmisinterpretation of a religious text, he asks the woman,‘‘Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of thegarden’?’’ We do not need to have read Foucault in orderto discern the power ploy underlying the serpent’s exegesis.And even without a Freudian or a feminist to decode thereal meaning of snakes who offer their interpretive servicesto young women, we may suspect that gender (not to men-tion sex) plays a role in the interchange. Now, whether ornot the issues we call hermeneutical have really been

The first epigraph is from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen uber Rechtsphilo-sophie 1818–1831, ed. Karl-Heinz Ilting (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich FrommannVerlag (Gunther Holzboog), 1974), vol. II, p. 74; the second is from FriedrichNietzsche, The Will To Power, § 481 (my translation).

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Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination

around since creation, they have surely been with us for avery long time indeed – as long as human beings haveappealed to oral or written texts for orientation and mean-ing in their lives.

Even though issues of textual interpretation have ancientroots, however, there is something inescapably modernabout the seemingly intractable hermeneutical questionsthat we encounter so frequently in theology and religiousstudies today; and it is the modern discussion on which Iplan to focus our attention in the following chapters. Ifwe could discover why it is that virtually every importantreligious issue from the late seventeenth century onwardleads ineluctably to hermeneutical questions, I think wewould have the key to modernity itself. Now I am not sorash as to suggest that I can deliver that key. But I think Iknow the direction in which theologians should be lookingfor it: namely, in the interpretation of the Bible, togetherwith all the attendant issues of authority, canon, and mean-ing. Moreover, the problem of scriptural interpretation isan important clue to the obsession with hermeneutics thatafflicts not only Christian theology but virtually everyhumanistic discipline today. Even though theological her-meneutics therefore has implications for various fields, Iintend to concentrate on these issues as they impinge spe-cifically on Christian theology. But that does not mean myremarks are intended only for the ears of Christians, orof academic theologians. I cannot share in the theologicalseparatism that has recently become fashionable in sometheological circles, because I do not believe that the churchexists as a distinct linguistic community separated from thesecular society that surrounds it. The line that separatesreligious language from secular, that distinguishes Chris-tian discourse from the many other forms of modern andpostmodern speech, runs not around the perimeter of theChristian community but right through the middle of thechurch itself. Speaking for myself, I can say that the lineruns through me, through my own experience and

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Theological hermeneutics and modernity

therefore through my attempts to think about what it meansto live as a follower of Jesus Christ in the present age. Think-ing Christianly about the interpretation of scripture is there-fore not something Christians can do by withdrawing fromthe secular world into a realm of allegedly pure biblical orecclesiastical discourse. Likewise, and for similar reasons,secular humanists, those who deny the Christian vision andreject its hope, cannot ignore two thousand years of theolo-gical tradition, for it has helped to shape them and remainsin important ways a part of themselves. So I invite you,whether you see yourself as a Christian insider strugglingwith the meaning of the Bible in the modern world, or as anoutsider to the Christian faith, to join me in thinking throughsome fascinating and baffling challenges to the claim that theBible should continue to be the source and norm for humanlife today, in the twilight of modernity, just as it has been forgenerations of Christians before us.

Hermeneutics demystifiedThose uninitiated into the mysteries of academic theology,philosophy, or literary criticism may be excused for palingupon seeing a phrase like ‘‘theological hermeneutics.’’ Letme hasten to assure such readers that even those of usaccustomed to chatting away in the argot of our disciplinesare not necessarily any clearer about interpretation, or ableto read texts any better, than many a lay member of thechurch or reader of books from the public library. Indeed, Ibelieve that in some cases hermeneutical theory has actuallyobscured interpretive practices that good nonspecialistreaders know implicitly. But that, of course, is the rub:scholars want to make explicit what lay people know im-plicitly. And when lay people become confused aboutpractices they once took for granted – as in the case of theBible over the past two or three centuries – scholarsattempt to shine a theoretic light into the cultural murk inthe hope that it may aid us in finding our way back to thepath. Theories of this kind generally go under the name

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hermeneutics. Hans Frei, who did so much to clarify theissues surrounding the modern interpretation of the Bible,once noted that ‘‘Hermeneutics, by and large, is a wordthat is forever chasing a meaning.’’1 He also liked to pointout that it used to mean something far more straightfor-ward in premodern times than it has come to mean in thepast couple of centuries. And unlike most theologianstoday, he also preferred to use the word in its older, morestraightforward sense.

Put most simply, hermeneutics is the ‘‘theory of inter-pretation.’’2 Even that definition may be too formal, sincehermeneutics originated, not among philosophers or theo-logians in search of a theory, but among biblical inter-preters, who compiled lists of rules one should follow inorder rightly to interpret scripture. Out of this originallypractical need for guidelines in reading the Bible, thereeventually emerged the theoretical enterprise of hermen-eutics. One reason for the widespread perception that her-meneutics is an especially dense and arcane field of inquiryis the direction taken by modern hermeneutical theory inits dominant line of development since the early nineteenthcentury. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who iswidely acknowledged to be a major figure in modern Chris-tian theology, has also been called ‘‘the father of modernhermeneutics’’ because he is the one responsible for devel-oping it into a philosophical theory of understanding.3

Schleiermacher’s approach was developed by later thinkers,the most important of whom are Wilhelm Dilthey, MartinHeidegger, and Hans Georg Gadamer. For recent theologyand religious studies, this tradition is represented by suchthinkers as Paul Ricoeur and David Tracy. In this tradi-tion – which is frequently simply identified with the

1 Hans W. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher(New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 16.

2 Ibid., p. 16; Werner G. Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance(London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 1.

3 See, for example, Jeanrond, ibid., pp. 44ff.

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enterprise called hermeneutics – the focus of attentionshifts from the interpretation of texts to the nature ofhuman understanding. From its beginnings in Schleierm-acher right up to the present day, hermeneutics as under-stood in this way has been concerned with (in Frei’s words)‘‘the notion of a unitary and systematic theory of under-standing’’ rather than ‘‘the older view of hermeneutics as aset of technical and ad hoc rules for reading.’’4 Frei offerscompelling reasons, which I shall not repeat here, forrejecting this modern sort of hermeneutical theory in favorof an approach more like the older ad hoc variety.5

There is a still more substantial reason – a specificallytheological one – for eschewing the approach of modernhermeneutical theory. One of the hallmarks of moderntheology (for which Schleiermacher is once again a para-digmatic figure) has been its tendency to preface the workof theology proper – what has been traditionally called dog-matics – with methodological prolegomena, whose purposeis to locate theology on the map of the academic disciplines,to describe its warrants and proper method of inquiry, andto justify it to the wider academic community – before oneactually begins to do theology. The first 125 pages ofSchleiermacher’s chief work of systematic theology, TheChristian Faith (or Glaubenslehre), is the classic example, inwhich he ‘‘borrows’’ theses from other disciplines in orderto describe and justify theology in terms of extratheologicalcriteria.6 One can find countless examples of similarly non-theological introductions in the works of theology pro-duced since Schleiermacher’s day. Indeed, in the twentieth

4 Hans W. Frei, Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, ed. George Hunsinger and WilliamC. Placher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 124.

5 For Frei’s argument, see his essay ‘‘The ‘Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrative in theChristian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?,’’ in Theology and Narrative, pp.117–52, and George Hunsinger’s summary of his case against Ricoeur and Tracy in thevolume introduction, pp. 15–18.

6 Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart(Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928). This work is commonly referred to as the Glaub-enslehre (‘‘Doctrine of Faith’’).

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century many works of academic theology amount to littlemore than extended prolegomena to theology. (In otherwords, theologians are forever telling us what it is theywould be doing should they ever actually do any theology!)As theology has been progressively marginalized in modernsociety and academia, one could say, its quest for identityand justification as a discipline has threatened to becomeits primary subject matter. Karl Barth, more than any othermodern theologian, exposed the self-contradictory and self-defeating character of doing theology in this way, andtaught us instead to see that theological definition andmethodology are properly theological enterprises – part ofthe subject matter of theology, not a preliminary activity inwhich one engages before starting to do theology. To seethe practical effects of this point of view, one need onlycompare the table of contents of his Church Dogmatics withthat of Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre. Barth’s first volumedoes indeed contain a discussion of the nature of the discip-line of theology and its proper method, but he calls it not‘‘Prolegomena’’ or ‘‘Introduction’’ but ‘‘The Doctrine ofthe Word of God.’’7 As such it does not precede his dog-matics but rather comprises its opening chapter. Barth alsohas much to say about the issues of theological hermen-eutics, yet he produced no work with such a title (nor onethat might appropriately be given that title) because thesereflections form an integral part of his dogmatics.

The theological character of theological hermeneutics isan instance of what is frequently called the ‘‘hermeneuticalcircle.’’ I am tempted to say ‘‘the much overrated hermen-eutical circle,’’ for I am convinced that it is neither astroublesome nor as interesting as most writers on hermen-eutics seem to assume; but that case cannot be made untila little later, when we get to the question of postmodernity

7 Karl Barth, Die kirchliche Dogmatik (Zurich: TVZ, 1932–67), vol. I, part 1; Church Dog-matics, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956–69),vol. I, part 1, 2nd edn. (1975).

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and the paradigmatic imagination. Werner Jeanrond iden-tifies two ‘‘dimensions’’ of the hermeneutical circle.8 Thefirst is produced by the fact that ‘‘we need some form ofprior understanding in order to begin our engagement witha text or work of art,’’ a situation that can be described ina way that sounds paradoxical or worse: we cannot under-stand something unless we already have a preliminaryunderstanding of it; but if we already understand it, evenpreliminarily, our understanding will be biased or ‘‘subject-ive.’’ The circularity of the situation is troublesome to theextent that one assumes there to be a neutral vantage pointfor understanding, from which one can gain an ‘‘objective’’view of things. But that is an assumption that fewer andfewer people are prepared to make (more on this later,when we venture into postmodernism). Jeanrond’s otherform of the hermeneutical circle ‘‘consists in the fact thatwe can never understand a whole without understanding allof its parts; nor can we adequately understand the partswithout seeing them functioning in the overall compositionto which they contribute.’’ In other words, understandingthe whole presupposes an understanding of the parts; butunderstanding the parts presupposes that one has under-stood the whole. This form of the hermeneutical circle ismore interesting, for it turns out to be an indicator of theholistic nature of human perception and understanding,and thus a basic clue to the paradigmatic imagination.9

Again, it is troublesome only to the extent that one remainscommitted to epistemological neutrality. At any rate, it isundeniable that interpretation has an inherently circularlogic, and Barth’s insistence on defining theology theolo-gically indicates his acknowledgment of that hermeneuticalcircularity.

I propose accordingly to discuss the issues raised by the

8 See Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics, pp. 5–6. The surprising brevity of Jeanrond’saccount is, I think, a sign of the inflated character of the ‘‘hermeneutical circle.’’

9 See Garrett Green, Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Grand Rapids,MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998), especially chapters 3 and 4.

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hermeneutics of suspicion, not as a prolegomenon or pro-paedeutic to Christian theology, but as an exercise in Chris-tian theology. This volume, in other words, might appro-priately be classified under ‘‘theological hermeneutics’’only if this phrase is preceded by no definite or indefinitearticle, expressed or implied: what you are about to read,then, is not a theological hermeneutics (much less, heavenforbid, Die theologische Hermeneutik!) but rather an ad hoctheological exploration of some pressing hermeneuticalissues confronting us today. And because we do not live inhermetically sealed linguistic universes, as I indicated earl-ier, I am hopeful that this piece of theologizing might alsobe of interest, and perhaps even of use, to those who areneither Christians nor theologians.

Modern or postmodern?I have already found it impossible to avoid another exasper-ating, if trendy, term: ‘‘postmodern.’’ (Professor Frei onceconfessed that ‘‘in the next life, if I have any choice, therewill be two terms that I shall eschew, one is ‘hermeneutics,’the other is ‘narrative’!’’10 I should like to add ‘‘postmod-ern’’ to the list. But just as Frei, in this life, found it neces-sary to speak frequently of both hermeneutics and narra-tive, I seem to be stuck with postmodern.) So I would liketo introduce a distinction, for the sake of clarity and sim-plicity, between two senses of ‘‘postmodern.’’ The first,which may be called descriptive postmodernism, is simply away of referring to the ‘‘nonfoundationalist’’ situation thatincreasingly characterizes our cultural world. If modernityis defined by the Enlightenment appeal to universal normsto which in principle we have access through the right useof reason, postmodernity can be defined in negative termsas the rejection of that possibility. Modernist thinkers seekto ground our knowledge and experience of the world incertain incorrigible foundational truths or experiences. If

10 Frei, Theology and Narrative, p. 155.

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we define the modern in this way, the postmodern beginswherever foundationalist certainty ends. The descriptiveuse of the term ‘‘postmodern’’ neither celebrates nor vili-fies; it simply points to the cultural-historical fact that weseem to have lost the foundationalist certainty in universalcriteria that transcend traditions, cultures, and languages.In this sense, to describe our situation as postmodern issimply to take note of the fact that fewer people today arewilling to accept the ‘‘modernist’’ axiom that there are uni-versal norms of truth and morals, transcultural and trans-historical, to which we have access through reason. Butthere is also a doctrinaire or normative postmodernism, flour-ishing especially among continental philosophers and theirdisciples, which denies that texts have any determinatemeaning of the kind that modernist interpreters presup-pose. This latter kind of postmodernism is a philosophicaldoctrine – one of several that respond to the postmodernsituation in the descriptive sense. My distinction betweendescriptive and normative postmodernism, I should pointout, is not the same as John Milbank’s attempt to distin-guish ‘‘benign’’ from ‘‘malign’’ forms of postmodernism.The former, he says, remains ‘‘optimistic about the pos-sibility of admitting irreducible difference, and the histor-ical situatedness of all truth-claims, without lapsing into aperspectivism which denies absolute truth and value alto-gether.’’11 This benign postmodernism, which Milbankfinds exemplified in Alasdair MacIntyre, represents a sym-pathetic if not finally satisfactory attempt to recover clas-sical and Christian tradition in a postmodern age. Theother, ‘‘malign’’ variety of postmodernism is Milbank’sprimary target, the avowed enemy of Christianity, whichhe also calls ‘‘Nietzschean postmodernism’’ or (more often)simply ‘‘nihilism.’’ Both of Milbank’s types fall under whatI am calling normative postmodernism, because both are

11 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell,1990), p. 61.

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philosophical responses to the situation depicted bydescriptive postmodernism. I will be exploring the roots ofnormative postmodernism in Nietzsche in chapter 5, andexamining a contemporary version in the thought of Jac-ques Derrida in chapter 6. In the meantime, I will be usingthe word in its descriptive sense, without implying any pre-dilection for the doctrinaire kind of postmodernism. As willbecome evident, however, I am not nearly as convinced asMilbank that this kind of postmodern thought can simplybe dismissed as ‘‘malign.’’

Remaining for the time being, then, at the level ofdescription, ought we to describe our cultural present aspostmodern? There can be little doubt that modernistaxioms have come increasingly under criticism, and anumber of contemporary intellectuals are proclaiming thearrival of the postmodern age. Even some of the leadingpostmodernist philosophers, however, hesitate simply todeclare the end of modernity. Jean-Francois Lyotard, forone, prefers to see the postmodern as a continuing possibil-ity arising out of the modern. Calling postmodernism ‘‘thecondition of knowledge in the most highly developed soci-eties,’’ he prefers to describe it as ‘‘undoubtedly a part ofthe modern’’ rather than an age following upon and sup-planting the modern.12 So, rather than simply describingthe contemporary cultural situation as postmodern, I willadopt a more modest discourse, employing the metaphorof twilight – an image that echoes Hegel’s Owl of Minervaas well as the language of Nietzsche’s madman – suggestingthat modernity is not simply past and gone but rather sur-vives in a state of profound crisis and self-doubt. As Hegel’sowl knew, twilight is a particularly favorable vantage pointfrom which to look back over the course we have traveledin order better to understand our present situation and the

12 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. GeoffBennington and Brian Massumi in Theory and History of Literature, vol. X (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. xxiii, 79.

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demands and choices it forces upon us. What some nowrefer to as the ‘‘project of Enlightenment’’13 (usually in thepast tense) continues to exert a powerful cultural force,though it can no longer simply be taken for granted. Fortheology to side too quickly with the enemies of Enlighten-ment would, I believe, be a grave error (a claim I will tryto substantiate in later chapters). For the time being, I willassume that we inhabit a liminal world, in which the con-fident universalism of the Enlightenment is giving way tosomething new, the precise shape of which is not yet evi-dent. Whether Christians should welcome it or not remainsan open question, but they can ignore it only at their peril.

The hermeneutics of suspicionPaul Ricoeur, who is both a Christian in the Reformed tradi-tion and a major figure in contemporary hermeneuticaltheory, has contributed an important historical thesis aboutthe origins of the modern crisis of interpretation. His namefor this development, the ‘‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’’ hasbecome a familiar watchword employed in theology andreligious studies, and not only by those who are persuadedby his constructive hermeneutical theory. His historicalanalysis of the problem has proved even more influentialthan his own philosophical attempts to respond to it. I pro-pose to take Ricoeur’s historical insight (though not hisconstructive hermeneutics) as a point of departure, a provi-sional posing of the modern and postmodern problem ofinterpretation for which we urgently need to discover anadequate theological response.

According to Ricoeur’s historical analysis, a major breakoccurred in the nineteenth century that has fundamentallyaltered the way people today read the authoritative texts oftheir traditions, especially the Bible. This hermeneuticalrevolution, which he believes to be irreversible, is epitom-ized by the thinkers he calls ‘‘the three masters of

13 For example, Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. 260.

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suspicion – Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.’’14 Though eachtaken alone has serious flaws, together they constitute apowerful critique of culture, focusing especially on reli-gion – a critique that can be summarized in Marx’s termfalse consciousness. This critique is of an unprecedented kind,‘‘completely different from the critique of religion that isrooted in the tradition of British empiricism and Frenchpositivism.’’ According to the analyses of these masters ofsuspicion, Ricoeur writes, ‘‘Religion has a meaning thatremains unknown to the believer by virtue of a specific actof dissimulation which conceals its true origin from theinvestigation of consciousness.’’15 In Marx the concealedmeaning of religion lies in its relation to class struggle andeconomic interests, in Nietzsche to motives of resentmentand the vengeance of the weak against the strong, and inFreud to repressed desires of aggression and especiallysexuality. But Ricoeur is more interested in what they havein common, namely a suspicion of religious faith rooted in anew kind of doubt that ‘‘is totally . . . different from Carte-sian doubt.’’16 This new doubt is not so much epistemolo-gical as moral; it undermines the credibility of religion byattacking not its objects of belief (at least not directly) butrather its motives. ‘‘After the doubt about things,’’ Ricoeurstates aphoristically, ‘‘we have started to doubt con-sciousness.’’17 Merold Westphal characterizes the commonhermeneutic of suspicion in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud asfollows: ‘‘the deliberate attempt to expose the self-deceptions involved in hiding our actual operative motivesfrom ourselves, individually or collectively, in order not tonotice how and how much our behavior and our beliefs are

14 Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘The Critique of Religion,’’ Union Seminary Quarterly Review 28 (1973):205.

15 Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Religion, Atheism, and Faith,’’ in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays inHermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p.442.

16 Ricoeur, ‘‘The Critique of Religion,’’ p. 206.17 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT and

London: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 33.

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shaped by values we profess to disown.’’18 As I shall arguein chapter 5, the situation is rather more complex in thecase of Nietzsche, who is both an example of the modernhermeneutic of suspicion and the precursor of a distinctlypostmodern suspicion. Before we get to that point, how-ever, there is one more major term to be introduced intothe discussion: imagination.

Interpretation and the paradigmatic imaginationRicoeur makes a persuasive case for the seminal importanceof the three great ‘‘masters of suspicion’’; the tremendouscultural impact of the ideas of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freudwould be hard to overestimate. In order fully to grasp thesignificance of their new kind of suspicious hermeneutics,however, it is necessary to take a step back and to look atthe philosopher who deserves to be called the father of thesuspicious critique of religion – the Urmeister of suspicion,we might say – Ludwig Feuerbach. With the help of a newinterpretation of Feuerbach’s critique of religion by Van A.Harvey,19 I will argue in chapter 4 that the basic moveslater articulated by Ricoeur’s triumvirate have their originin Feuerbach – in both the famous (or infamous) argumentof The Essence of Christianity (1841) and his lesser-knownlater theory of religion, which Harvey thinks is not onlydifferent but superior. I will argue, furthermore, that evenHarvey overlooks the significance of the object of Feuer-bach’s critique, the religious imagination. The later her-meneutics of suspicion developed by Marx, Nietzsche, andFreud are unquestionably more sophisticated and (with alldue respect to Professor Harvey) more persuasive thanFeuerbach’s often heavy-handed projectionism andnaturalism. But Feuerbach in his unnuanced way enables usto see something highly significant about suspicious

18 Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (GrandRapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993), p. 13; Westphal’s italics.

19 Van A. Harvey, Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1995).

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hermeneutics – namely, the object of suspicion. By ratheringenuously combining the descriptive claim that imagina-tion is the engine of religion with the tendentious judgmentthat religious consciousness is therefore false consciousness,Feuerbach gives us the clue to the mainspring of modernistsuspicion about religion.

Here the shift from a modern to a postmodern contextbecomes hermeneutically significant. For the modernist –and Feuerbach is a virtually pure example of the species –imagination, unless it remains securely subject to criticalreason, has the potential to become the source of specula-tion, fantasy, and illusion. As such, ‘‘imagination’’ is thediametric opposite of ‘‘reality’’; it is the organ of fiction anderror. At the root of the modernist hermeneutic of suspi-cion is the following assumption: religion is the product ofimagination; therefore religious claims are untrue. In Feuer-bach this reasoning appears on the surface; but it is thereas well in Marx and Freud, though usually presented inmore sophisticated language and often disguised in subtleways. It is also evident in the ‘‘modernist Nietzsche,’’ whorails against Jews’ and Christians’ hatred of ‘‘reality.’’ Assoon as one makes the postmodern turn, however, the firstthing to go is the foundational confidence that we havereliable access to a ‘‘reality’’ against which imaginationmight be judged ‘‘illusory.’’ Imagination now becomes theunavoidable means of apprehending ‘‘reality,’’ though thereis, of course, no guarantee that it will succeed.

The new place of imagination is nowhere more evidentthan in recent philosophy of science, which one might sum-marize by saying that the history of science is the historyof the scientific imagination, the narrative of the successiveparadigms that have held sway in communities of scientistsfor shorter or longer periods, enabling them to agree aboutthe theory, methods, and results of their research. At thepopular level there is no better indicator of the shift frommodern to postmodern than the fate of interest in ‘‘scienceand religion.’’ In the heyday of modernism a century ago,

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military metaphors prevailed: the ‘‘warfare between scienceand religion’’; the ‘‘conflict between science and theol-ogy.’’20 One of the strongest indicators that modernity sur-vives in our world is the persistent popular assumption thatscience and religion are somehow fundamentally opposed.For those on the postmodern side of the divide, on theother hand, scientific discovery increasingly appears as ananalog of religious conversion – and vice versa. Modernculture – virtually by definition, as I see it – has taken itsauthoritative paradigms from modern science. From Gali-leo and Newton to Einstein and Stephen Hawking, thereigning scientific models of the cosmos have provided thelarger culture with powerful analogies and metaphors thatshape its epistemology, its poetry, its politics, and its reli-gion. Here the postmodern shows itself in continuity withmodernity, for many of the leading postmodernist ideasborrow much of their imagery and not a little of their socialprestige from scientific notions of relativity, uncertainty,and incommensurability. It is therefore prudent for theolo-gians to ponder the relation of their work to the world ofmodern science.

As dangerous as it sounds to orthodox believers who stillhear with ‘‘modern’’ ears, the thesis that religion – includ-ing the Christian religion – is a product of human imagina-tion ought to be accepted, and even welcomed, by theolo-gians today.21 For, if we have truly left the security offoundationalist apologetics behind, what else could it be?To insist that our truth claims are not mediated by imag-ination is to claim unique exemption from the limits of

20 These phrases come from the titles of two influential works, John William Draper’sHistory of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’sHistory of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 2 vols. (1896). See JohnKent, ‘‘Religion & Science,’’ in Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, ed.Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Steven Katz and Patrick Sherry (Cambridge UniversityPress, 1985), vol. III, pp. 1–36.

21 My book Imagining God is an attempt to articulate and defend this thesis. The argumentin this paragraph amounts to a summary of conclusions that are more fully presentedand argued in that book.

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bodily and historical existence to which our contemporariesare subject. It is also – as I shall try to show in the last twochapters – a sign of faithlessness toward the God whom weacknowledge to be the author and guarantor of thosetruths, a claim of ownership over goods that we have beengranted in trust. To acknowledge, on the other hand, thatwe hold those truths as stewards rather than as masters, inthe earthen vessels of imaginative paradigms, is a sign thatwe have indeed heard the gospel message contained inthose very truths. The mark of the Christian in the twilightof modernity is therefore imaginative faithfulness, trust inthe faithfulness of the God who alone guarantees the con-formity of our images to reality, and who has given himselfto us in forms that may only be grasped by imagination.

The emerging postmodern context, especially as itappears in the sciences, may thus be more hospitable totheological work than the modern world it is rapidly sup-planting. The reason can be simply stated: an intellectualculture that thought it had achieved access to secure, secu-lar foundations for human knowledge and behavior – andsaw itself therefore as the legitimate successor to an anti-quated religious enterprise – is giving way to a culture thatacknowledges that all data are theory-laden, all theoriesbased on paradigms, all knowing dependent on imagina-tion. In short, the postmodern sensibility acknowledgesthat the use of reason not only does not oppose, but neces-sarily entails, some kind of faith. Nietzsche’s claim thatthere are no facts but only interpretations is an emblem ofthat sensibility. Taken in one direction (the one usuallyassociated with postmodernism), the point sounds eithercynical or playful, depending on the mood of the postmod-ernist. If you are John Milbank, it sounds positively malign,the nihilistic opposite to the peaceable kingdom of Chris-tian social theory. Since there are no facts, say the post-modernists, there is no ‘‘truth,’’ and we are left with anendless spinning out of interpretations – which is either (in

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the cynical version) grounds for despair or (in the playfulversion) the occasion to delight in the creativity of the ima-gination. Neither of these options holds much promise forreading the Bible as scripture.

There is another way, however, to read the Nietzscheanaphorism, and it runs like this: There are no facts – thatis, there is no theory-neutral foundation against which tomeasure interpretations – because ‘‘facts’’ are themselves afunction of interpretation. We can continue to appeal tothe facts, to aim at a truth beyond our own subjectivity, aslong as we remember that all theoretical concepts, even theconcept of facts, are paradigm-dependent. In other words,right interpretation depends on right imagination; whetherwe get things right or not is a function not only of ourintelligence and powers of observation but also of the lensesthrough which we observe. If this situation epitomizes thepostmodern world, then theologians may hope once againto become serious participants in the cultural conversation.An Enlightenment that thought it had discovered thefoundation of all knowledge marginalized theology as thedomain of mere faith. A postmodernity that acknowledgesthe fiduciary element inherent in all human activity cannotreasonably exclude theology on the grounds that it appealsto faith. Modernists are quick to label as ‘‘fideist’’ anyenterprise that does not play by their rules; postmodernistsknow that the Enlightenment is no longer the only gamein town. In Judaism, because it has always been a minorityreligion, the relationship between religious commitmentand the modern world has been clearer than it has been forChristians, who until fairly recently could identify theirown norms with those of the wider community. The emer-gence of Jewish Orthodoxy, as Jacob Katz has pointed out,is not simply the perpetuation of earlier Jewish traditioninto modernity but rather a self-conscious commitment toa tradition that can no longer simply be taken for granted.The experience of Jews in the modern world foreshadows

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the stance of faith for Christians in a postmodern age: ‘‘loy-alty to tradition [is] the result of a conscious decision.’’22

The properly biblical metaphor for minority existence forboth Jews and Christians, as I shall develop in the finalchapter, is exile. And exile is not as dire a situation as mightbe supposed, as long as we continue to hold in imagina-tion’s eye the vision that enlightens our present darkness –or twilight – and draws us forward into the future that ourLord has gone ahead to prepare for us.

Intimations of things to comeFinally, let me offer a brief overview of the arguments pre-sented in the following chapters.

Debates about postmodernity have focused, for goodreason, on the interpretation of texts – especially culturallyauthoritative texts, among which scriptures represent themost authoritative of all. The point at which the latemodern crisis of interpretation touches theology most dir-ectly, therefore, is the authority and interpretation of theBible. I plan accordingly first to take an owl’s-eye look at afew of the major figures who have influenced the way weread the Bible in the twilight of modernity. The purposeof this exercise (like all historical theology) will be twofold:to better understand our situation by grasping how we gotinto it in the first place, and at the same time to reopenquestions which have seemed to be closed for us duringthe reign of Enlightenment modernism. Nietzsche is surelyright that something central to European culture and civil-ization has died, or is dying; whether it is a God or an idol,however, is not nearly so clear. (Even here, Nietzsche mayhave got it right despite himself: for he speaks not only ofthe death of God but also of the twilight of the idols.)

The first voice we will hear belongs to that supremedefiner and advocate of Enlightenment himself, Immanuel

22 Jacob Katz, ‘‘Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective,’’ in Studies in Contemporary Jewry II,ed. Peter Y. Medding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 4.

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Kant. A closer look with our twilight-sensitized eyes atwhat he says about religion, and about the Christian reli-gion in particular, will bring into view the central theolog-ical issue of modernity: what in the eighteenth century wascalled ‘‘positive religion.’’ Kant’s attempt to ‘‘interpretaway’’ the offensive positivity of the gospel thus comes toepitomize the modernist way in theology, becoming themodel for what I call accommodationist theology. Ourunique vantage point at the end of modernity also makesus able to hear clearly for perhaps the first time a uniquelyChristian voice crying in the enlightened wilderness ofeighteenth-century Konigsberg: Johann Georg Hamann,the ‘‘Wise Man from the North.’’ His uncannily prescientmetacritique of Enlightenment criticism in its heyday offersus some useful hermeneutical hints now that the main-stream of European culture is catching up at last with hisinsights.

The next historical figure to whom we shall listen intro-duces the issue of suspicion, which Ricoeur takes as thehallmark of the great hermeneutical sea-change in modernculture. As I have already indicated, I will argue that thecorrosive suspicion that Ricoeur has taught us to associatewith the triumvirate of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in factreceived its original impulse from Feuerbach, the forgottenfather of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Attending to hisvoice with late modern ears will allow us to hear moreclearly the source and target of his suspicion, the imagina-tion. Imagination, according to Feuerbach, is both theengine of religion and the ground of its falsity. The suspi-cion of imagination (or perhaps we should say the suspi-cious imagination) in the nineteenth century achieves itsmost brilliant and extreme expression in the figure ofFriedrich Nietzsche, who makes the Christian vision of theworld into the Great Lie. At the same time, this foe of thegospel focuses attention on the crucial issues that theologymust face, and does so with greater clarity than most ofChristianity’s ‘‘friends.’’

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Before turning explicitly to the theology of suspicion andtrust in our late modern present, we will need to considerthe most recent variety of hermeneutical suspicion – onethat takes Nietzsche as its inspiration and claims for itselfthe label ‘‘postmodern.’’ Of the several voices we mightusefully consider, I have chosen Jacques Derrida as repre-sentative of the most influential and hermeneutically inter-esting form of postmodernism. The perspective of decon-struction, by apparently undermining the claims of everytext to stability, let alone self-sufficiency, appears to presentthe ultimate threat to any acknowledgment of biblicalauthority. Nevertheless, the striking if unexpected hermen-eutical similarities between Derrida’s philosophy of signsand Karl Barth’s theology of signs show that deconstructionought not to be viewed simply as a threat to theology butrather as the secular counterpart to some of its own deepesthermeneutical convictions.

The cumulative effect of the various forms that the her-meneutics of suspicion has taken over the past two centur-ies has been to call into question the very possibility oftaking a set of written texts as the norm for life andthought – something that most, if not all, of the world’sreligions do in one form or another. Under the suspiciouseye of (post)modern critique, every faith in scripturalauthority appears as a form of false consciousness, everysacred text as a surreptitious rhetoric of power. The rise ofsuspicion in the nineteenth century is integrally related toa major shift in the way modern Christian culture has readthe Bible: it is the other face of what Hans Frei has identi-fied as the eclipse of biblical narrative. As Christiansstopped imagining the world through the lens of scripture,they began trying to accommodate the Bible to secularvisions of reality – thus reversing the direction of inter-pretation and preparing the way for the radically suspicioushermeneutical projects of Feuerbach and his spiritual chil-dren, and precipitating the hermeneutical crisis of modernand postmodern culture that we have been investigating. A

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Christian hermeneutics suited to the twilight of modernitymust begin by taking the sensus literalis of the biblical textwith renewed seriousness – that is, by appropriating thescriptural paradigm of the world as the place where Godmakes himself available to human imagination. ImaginingGod and the world scripturally requires the hard work ofnever-completed interpretation, under the pressure of thehermeneutic imperative. As Hamann recognized in theeighteenth century, the world imagined Christianly isdeutungsbedurftig, continually in need of interpretation.This task is not an onerous one imposed upon us, whetherby sin or the critique of unbelief, but is the hermeneuticalconsequence of living in a divinely created world, theyearning of the human spirit for its source in God.

Christian theologians have responded to the hermen-eutics of suspicion in various ways: by treating it as a usefultool that can be adapted to theological purposes (liberationand feminist theologies); by attempting to appropriate thesuspicious perspective by redescribing it in Christian cat-egories (Westphal); or by subjecting the hermeneutics ofsuspicion to a kind of metasuspicion that attempts to turnthe tables on the critics by exposing their own presupposi-tions to doubt (Milbank). While each of these responsesoffers useful insights that can contribute to a Christiantheology of suspicion and trust, none is finally adequate. Aproperly theological response cannot treat suspicion merelyas a positive or a negative impulse from outside the sourceof theology. When theology attends to its proper task ofdescribing the grammar of scriptural imagination, it dis-covers a source of suspicion potentially and actually moreradical than that advocated by any of the secular ‘‘mastersof suspicion.’’ The final chapter will thus examine, first ofall, the biblical grounds for that suspicion in what I callthe ‘‘hermeneutics of the cross.’’ But since every kind ofsuspicion depends, whether explicitly or implicitly, upon atrust of some kind, the real question raised by the hermen-eutics of suspicion is the ground of its trust. For Christians

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that trust, which we call faith in the God of Jesus Christ,commits us to a form of suspicion more radical than thesecular kinds because it is the hermeneutical expression ofGod’s judgment. And since God’s judgment is always theshadow of his grace, Christians are able to live their livesand do their thinking in the hopeful insecurity of the faith-ful imagination.

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Documents

Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imaginationassets.cambridge.org/052165/0488/sample/0521650488wsc00.pdf · Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination around since creation, they have surely