The Scandal of Having Something to Say: Ricoeur and the Possibility of Postliberal Preaching

2. Hans Frei on How to Read during an Eclipse

17 chapter Two hans frei on how to Read during an eclipse Behind every christian sermon worthy of the name is a preacher reading the Bible.1 or, in the language of the previous chapter, the prospect of the christian preacher “having something to say” to the human situation from beyond the human situation turns on the promise of the Bible as a resource for mediating such a Word. But the simple picture of the preacher in her study, diligently pouring over the language of the week’s lection, is deceptive. The Bible on the desk appears open and inviting, but the serious options available for making sense of the scriptural text are constrained by manifold factors of great complexity. The task of understanding the dynamics implicit in the preacher’s weekly act of theological interpretation on behalf of a community of faith in our post-enlightenment context is daunting. a lens is needed to clarify the issues and frame the discussion. The hermeneutical thought of hans frei is such a lens. frei’s specific proposal for how christians should read is important in its own right, but 1 for an articulation of the claim that “[r]ight preaching is the interpretation of scripture,” see david lyon Bartlett, Between the Bible and the Church: New Methods for Biblical Preaching (nashville: abingdon, 1999), 11. for an interesting, but finally unconvincing, attempt to problematize this claim, see david Buttrick, A Captive Voice: The Liberation of Preaching (louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 29–32. 18 The Scandal of having SomeThing To Say it will also serve to structure the broader hermeneutical issues. frei’s project is helpful in this role for a number of reasons. in the first place, frei self-consciously understood his work in relation to the reading practices of Karl Barth, which makes frei’s approach particularly suitable to the project of exploring a homiletical approach that is compatible with Barth’s theology of the Word.2 furthermore, frei was an exceptionally careful historian of ideas, and his diagnosis of the “wrong turn” in biblical hermeneutics since the enlightenment has enjoyed broad influence, even among some who have not found his specific counterproposal persuasive. another aspect of frei’s project that makes it instructive is the way his hermeneutics have been worked out over time in critical dialogue with first modern and then, in his more “cultural-linguistic” second phase, poststructuralist approaches to language and textuality. Perhaps the most crucial feature of frei’s project for the purposes of the argument of this book is the way his thinking about biblical narrative provides a particularly compelling conversation partner for the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. frei and Ricoeur share much in common, but the inner workings of their respective approaches to narrative are quite distinct, if not divergent . comparing and contrasting their positions will prove heuristically rich and lead to a well-rounded and nuanced engagement with the hermeneutical issues at the heart of this book. finally, frei’s hermeneutics are of special interest for this project because the homiletical implications of his thought have been worked out with great care by charles campbell.3 The analysis that follows shows that campbell’s thorough appropriation of frei’s project in the domain of homiletical practice renders the strengths and weaknesses of frei’s approach all the more transparent and lays the groundwork for a Ricoeurian revision that builds on what is best and corrects what is least helpful in frei’s “postliberal” approach. 2 “it seems to me that Barth’s biblical exegesis is a model of the kind of narrative reading that can be done in the wake of the changes i describe in this book.” hans W. frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (new haven: yale University Press, 1974), vii. he then goes on to list several examples from the excursuses in the Dogmatics. 3 See charles l. campbell, Preaching Jesus: New Directions for Homiletics in Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology (grand Rapids: eerdmans, 1997). hanS fRei on hoW To Read dURing an ecliPSe 19 Hans Frei and The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative hans frei was born in 1922 in germany.4 his family was of Jewish background and fled germany after the nazis came to power.5 frei was studying textiles on scholarship at north carolina State University when a chance meeting with h. Richard niebuhr led...