Faithfully Seeking Understanding: Selected Writings of Johannes Kuhn (review)

Among scholars of nineteenth-century German Catholic theology, Johannes Evangelist von Kuhn (1806-87) is regarded as the greatest speculative mind of the so-called Catholic Tübingen School. Although selected works by Kuhn's colleagues J. S. Drey and J. A. Möhler have previously been translated into English, this volume is the first English translation of Kuhn's writings—a welcome addition to the literature on the Tübingen School.

In his introduction, Kaplan reviews the debate about the Catholic Tübingen School, pointing out how the contrasting positions of Josef Rupert Geiselmann and Rudolf Reinhardt have been refined by more recent scholars. Like Bradford Hinze, Kaplan believes that the theologians generally included under the Tübingen banner attempted to chart a middle course between rationalism and historical relativism on the one hand, and ecclesial triumphalism and a static understanding of doctrine on the other. Like Peter Hünermann, Kaplan identifies methodology as the centripetal force that can justify placing the diverse Catholic theologians who studied and/or taught at Tübingen under the heading of a school of thought.

Kaplan follows the same structure and includes, for the most part, the same excerpts from Kuhn's writings that Heinrich Fries used in Johannes von Kuhn (Graz, 1973). Like Fries's collection, Kaplan's book includes selections that span Kuhn's publishing career from the 1830s through the 1860s. These selections, which compose just a tiny portion of Kuhn's voluminous corpus, explore vital themes such as the relationship of revelation and history, the nature of faith and its relationship to reason, the Catholic understanding of Scripture and tradition as sources of truth, and the doctrines of God and grace. Before each selection, Kaplan provides a brief, helpful introduction that explicates its specific historical context and also describes Kuhn's influence on later theologians or suggests a trajectory from Kuhn's way of approaching a theological topic to the way such topics are handled in contemporary theology.

Drawing heavily on Hubert Wolf's 1992 Ketzer oder Kirchenlehrer? (Mainz, 1992), Kaplan helps the reader understand the complexity of Kuhn's theological and church-political positions, which were alternatively deemed orthodox and heretical. Because Kuhn advanced progressive theological positions on such matters as the development of doctrine and the "didactic" or theological character of the gospels, and because he disagreed with some neo-Scholastic interpretations of grace while approving elements in the theology of the liberal Protestant Friedrich Schleiermacher, some of Kuhn's writings were referred to Rome for condemnation. The texts included by Kaplan in this volume generally illuminate the nature of those tensions.

Unfortunately, accurate translation cannot always make Kuhn's ideas clear to readers, especially those less familiar with nineteenth-century German philosophy and theology (see, for example, the turgid text on pp. 53-54). This volume, moreover, would have been improved if the full German title of the included articles had been consistently supplied. The inclusion of a few other texts in this volume also would have improved our appreciation of Kuhn. For example, to illuminate Kuhn's critique of D. F. Strauss's Life of Jesus Critically Examined (Tübingen, 1835), Kaplan chose to translate "Von dem schriftstellerischen Charakter der Evangelien im Verhältniss zu der apostolischen Predigt. . ." under the heading "Is History Mythic?". An understanding of Kuhn's approach to biblical interpretation, in general, and his criticism of Strauss, in particular, would, however, have been significantly enhanced if Kaplan had included an excerpt from "Hermeneutik und Kritik in ihrer Anwendung auf die evangelische Geschichte" (1836). In that article, Kuhn argued that a truly "scientific" exegesis protests equally against exclusively supernaturalistic and rationalistic interpretations as it does against an exclusively mythical interpretation of the Gospels, while conceding that the story of Jesus' birth and childhood could be regarded as mythical.

These suggested minor improvements notwithstanding, Kaplan's book provides a very good portrait...