Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §6.4
Moses and Elijah are, information not provided by the text, the reader will miss a
fundamental dimension of the significance of the account of Jesus' transfiguration
(Mark 9.2-8 pars.). The surprising evocation of the Newtonian world view
('closed universe') in a hermeneutic trying to distance itself from the historicalcritical
method prompts a wry smile.
A second form of the hermeneutical circle sends the interpreter back and
forth between the matter of the text and the speech used to convey it, between
Word and words, Sache und Sprache," H between langue and parole, signified and
signifier. 75 This form of the hermeneutical procedure has been played out
throughout the period reviewed in the preceding chapters, particularly in the way
in which again and again a definitive subject matter perceived through the text
has been used to critique the wording of the text itself. One thinks, for example,
of the gospel (was treibet Christus) serving as the critical scalpel for Luther, 76 or
the universal ideals of Jesus indicating an 'essence' from which the merely particular
could be stripped, 77 or Bultmann's 'kerygma' providing the key for his
demythologizing programme, 78 or 'justification by faith' acting as the 'canon
within the canon' for Käsemann. 79 Or in recent Jesus research an instructive example
is Wright's repeated appeal to a metanarrative of Israel in exile and hopedfor
return from exile as providing a hermeneutical echo chamber in which the
various sayings of Jesus and stories about Jesus resonate with a meaning hardly
evident on the face of the text. 80
The third form of the hermeneutical circle is that between reader and text.
The interaction between reader and text was already implicit in the recognition
of a 'psychological' dimension to hermeneutics, 81 and in the historical principle
of 'analogy' (above §6.3c). Bultmann elaborated the point in his insistence
74. Meyer, Aims 96. Sachkritik (the English 'content criticism' is not really adequate)
builds on the older theological distinction between the Word of God and the words of Scripture
through which it is heard (but is not to be simply identified with them) by distinguishing between
the real intention (die Sache, the matter or subject) of a text and the language in which it
is expressed (die Sprache). Sachkritik is linked particularly with the name of Bultmann (see,
e.g., Thiselton, Two Horizons 274).
75. Referring to Ferdinand de Saussure's influential distinction between the language
system (langue) and concrete acts of speech (parole) and his idea of the text as an encoded
sign-system — hence 'semiotics', the theory of signs (see Thiselton, New Horizons 80-86).
76. Luther's famous criticism of the epistle of James: 'What does not teach Christ is not
apostolic, even though St. Peter or Paul taught it' (Kümmel, New Testament 25).
77. See above, §4.3.
78. See above, §5.3.
79. E.g., E. Käsemann, ed., Das Neue Testament als Kanon (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck,
1970) 405.
80. Wright, Jesus passim.
81. Schleiermacher and Droysen, in Mueller-Vollmer, Hermeneutics Reader 8-11, 128.
120