toward a Theological Understanding of Understanding,
a Comparative Analysis of Schleiermacher and Barth on Hermeneutics
“Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace.” Karl Barth
“No God without a world, and no world without God” Friedrich Schleiermacher
“God can only known through God”[1], not by human reason or experience, Barth proclaims. In revolting against Liberalism of his era, Barth refuses to surrender his theology to anthropology. Placing revelation beyond human understanding, his hermeneutics are consistently shaped and molded by subject matter in his, so called, theological exegesis.[2] For Barth, Scripture theological content takes precedence over any theory of interpretation.
On the contrary Frederich Schleiermacher argues that whatever the type of inspiration of Scripture, it does not affect the approach to hermeneutics. The scripture must be read as any other book, at a purely human level, of what the author intended to communicate through the text. In the lecture notes of his student, Schleiermacher makes the following remarks:
“Given the great variety of ideas of inspiration, it is best, first of all, to test what sort of consequences the strictest idea leads to, i.e., the idea the power of the spirit extends from the inception of the thought to the act of writing itself. Due to the variants, this no longer helps us. These were, however, already present before the Scripture were collected. Here, too, then, criticism is necessary. – But even the first reader of the apostles’ epistles would have had to abstract from their ideas to the author and from application of their knowledge of that, and would have completely confused…. Therefore, this interpretation must be correct. The same point holds with respect to the grammatical side. But then every element must be treated as purely human, and the action of the Spirit was only to produce the inner impulse”[3]
Schleiermacher firmly believes that the crucial matter in hermeneutics is isolated in the human author’s thoughts and experiences, as these are understood through the text. The emphatic and logic attempts to reach understanding have no correspondence to divine inspiration of the scripture, in the sense that this divine origin, even if it would be assumed, have fully ‘incarnated’ to the grammatical and psychological aspects of the writing. Thus hermeneutics is necessarily limited within these authorial processes of thinking and writing.
Barth, on the other hand, argues that scripture is witness to and a form of the Word of God, and should be read as such that whatever theory of interpretation is employed, it will always be surrendered to its theological content. Hermeneutics is a servant in the house of the Logos. In a lecture delivered at
“How remarkable that he does not seem to have considered the possibility that the thought which I understand in what is said by someone else, whether with or without his system or any other hermeneutics, might contingently, without any qualitative or quantitative possibilities of misunderstandings, the truth or Word of God, and I should then have good reason to treat this address more specifically and more seriously than any other as the bearer of this content, a reference to this subject. What if special NT hermeneutics, whether gratefully employing Schleiermacher’s method or any other general method, were to consist quite simply of taking these texts more seriously in this specific sense? Why should not God have spoken to man in a way that is necessarily and compellingly understandable? And why should not human speech be necessarily and compellingly understandable as God makes it so? If God is God?”[4]
It is clear from this remark that Barth takes the content of the Scripture as the priority over hermeneutics, in which the subject matter stand as master while hermeneutical device serve as tool to approach Scripture as such. In other word, discourse matter takes precedence over reading method; ontology over epistemology. But if, as Barth contends, the givenness of Scripture could ensure that there is no qualitative and quantitative misunderstanding[5], then Thiselton is right that hermeneutics is not needed, a logical dilemma indeed![6] We want to affirm both the divine origin of scripture and the gift of human understanding and its insights.[7] Here, at this point, I believe, Schleiermacher’s insights on hermeneutics may actually work hand in hand with Barth’s emphasis on God’s centered theological exegesis.
This paper is an attempt to move beyond the divergence of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics and Barth’s theological exegesis. The thesis of this paper is that theory of interpretation constructed under a more balanced theological understanding of “understanding” may reconcile the emphasis on divine origin of the scripture with theory of human understanding. I will attempt to show that theory of human understanding in Schleiermacher in fact may be best understood in theological terms, and Barth’s theological exegesis is basically in need of hermeneutical reflections. This will be carried by firstly shows that insights of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical theory does not necessarily have to ignore theological content of scripture and that he, in the end, could not avoid inherently theological dimension of human understanding. Secondly, I will also attempt to show that Barth’s hermeneutics while provides many insight for theological exegesis will not be able to avoid reflections on hermeneutics since the theological content assumed is necessarily caught in hermeneutical circle. It needs to be confirmed by reading of the text and reflection of those readings. In the last two parts of the paper, three aspects of Christian theology: divine agency of Holy Spirit, community shaped reading and theological understanding of human fallibility and potentiality will be brought into discussions, in an attempt to clarify and resolve the problem. These theological categories will be brought in dialogue with insights from Gadamer, Ricoeur and proponents of theological hermeneutics. These theories of hermeneutics, we propose, are potentially correspondent to elements of theological understanding. Through this exercise we hope that we may highlight some line of thoughts, a way beyond impasse that general hermeneutics pursued by Schleiermacher actually may work hand in hand with theological exegesis of scripture, employed by Barth. In the following discussion, we will firstly consider Schleiermacher’s reflections and contributions to hermeneutics.
[1] Quoted from Anthony C. Thiselton, Hermeneutics : An Introduction (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2009), 190.
[2] Some scholars would not agree that Barth have consistent hermeneutical approach, for examples see Mary Kathleen Cunningham, What Is Theological Exegesis? : Interpretation and Use of Scripture in Barth's Doctrine of Election (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1995).; for views that Barth’s hermeneutics is a more consistent one, see for example Werner G. Jeanrond, "Karl Barth's Hermeneutics," in Reckoning with Barth(Oxford, England: Mowbray, 1988). and Richard E. Burnett, Karl Barth's Theological Exegesis: The Hermeneutical Principles of the Römerbrief Period (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).
[3] Schleiermacher, ”General Hermeneutics” in Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, The Hermeneutics Reader : Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present (New York: Continuum, 1997), 79. The emphasis is mine.
[4] Karl Barth and Dietrich Ritschl, The Theology of Schleiermacher : Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publ), 183. Emphasis is original.
[5] qualitative and quantitative misunderstandings refer to Schleiermacher’s category of misunderstandings, consecutively, misunderstanding of what is the point and misunderstanding of how important is the point
[6] Anthony C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Pub. House, 1992), 230-231.
[7] Ibid, 231.
