Christian Theologies of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction

13. Hans Frei

13 Hans Frei Mike Higton Hans Frei (1922–1988) was born to a secular Jewish family in Berlin. As Nazi anti-Semitism increased, he first was sent away to a Quaker school in England, and then emigrated with his family to New York. Somewhere along the way he became a Christian, and he eventually studied theology at Yale. After a period as a Baptist minister, and then as an Episcopal priest, he completed a doctoral thesis on Karl Barth at Yale under H. Richard Niebuhr. Soon afterward he returned to teach at Yale, where he remained until his death in 1988. He is best known for his work on biblical hermeneutics, especially questions having to do with the interpretation of narrative. His 1974 book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, a history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hermeneutics, has been very influential. In the 1980s, he became known as part of a “Yale school” or “postliberal” movement, comprising at least himself, George Lindbeck , and David Kelsey—a group taken to be responsible for focusing attention on the embedding of theological and hermeneutical claims in the lives and practices of Christian communities. Hans Frei did not pursue a comprehensive analysis of the doctrine of scripture. Instead, his work was devoted to identifying and undoing speci fic knots in which he believed modern theologians and exegetes had succeeded in tying themselves. With those knots undone, Frei believed that we could recognize in scripture a resilient heart. Given certain conditions, we could recognize a subject matter capable of standing over against us, captivating us and reordering our understanding. He believed that this resilient heart could be found in the Gospels’ narrative identification of Jesus of Nazareth. The scriptures depict Jesus for us in such a way that we cannot substitute for the unruly stuff of his particular story any more graspable set of ideas or sentiments, but must instead let ourselves be 220 taught to see this unsubstitutable identity as God’s action in history on our behalf, and the rest of scripture, our own lives, and our whole historical world as providentially ordered around this core.1 Two hermeneutical procedures are central to Frei’s vision: narrative interpretation and figural reading. By paying attention to the narrative forms in which crucial aspects of the Gospels are written, Frei tries to wean readers from misleading hermeneutical assumptions and toward a recognition of the resilience of the Gospel identification of Jesus of Nazareth; and by paying attention to the practice of figural interpretation, he tries to show how this identification of Jesus can be transformatively meaningful. This chapter will take up these two procedures in turn, and then examine Frei’s clarification, in the last years of his life, of the conditions under which the resilient heart of the Gospel becomes visible. Narrative Interpretation In The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, Frei claimed that precritical readers of certain “history-like” narratives in the Bible normally assumed that such narratives portrayed real historical events.2 By “history-like,” Frei meant any passage that depicts a world constituted by the interaction of characters and circumstances in a public setting. He acknowledged that precritical interpreters often passed quickly on to other kinds of interpretation, barely letting their eyes rest on this historical reading, and also that there could be various kinds of exceptions to this norm, where obscurity, moral repugnance, or theological nausea dictated. Frei nevertheless claimed that this assumption of the historicity of crucial history-like texts underlay all the other hermeneutical moves made by precritical readers. The fit between history-like text and historical truth was the unexamined norm, and such texts were seen as making literarily accessible a real historical world of characters and circumstances that, far from being a distraction through which the reader must pass before the real subject matter appeared, was in fact the real world of God’s historical activity. Such texts made history literarily accessible. In the stories of the cruci- fixion, for instance, long-ago events in Jerusalem were put into words. The stories enabled the history of God’s ways with the world to be read. They enabled the reader to explore the patterns and interconnections of the world that God had shaped by using something rather like a literary sensitivity : a sensitivity to the grammar, rhetoric, and plot, to the shapes and Hans Frei 221 connections of the narrative. For precritical...