The year 2006 marks the fiftieth
anniversary of the opening of Disneyland, the amusement park that vividly
brought to life the magic of the wonderful world of Walt Disney’s
imagination. Many adults who visit Disneyland experience it as a return to
familiar horizons from their youth. But the world of Disney’s imagination
was so rich and vibrant that it can never be viewed as a period piece,
erected at one particular time and place in the past. Rather it has the
potential for infinite expansion. So no matter how often one returns, one
is apt to find some attraction that rekindles that primordial sense of
wonder that was experienced on one’s first visit.
The preceding
is a parable for anyone who reads the Bible. What few are apt to be aware
of, however, is that the year 2006 has another, more important
significance. It celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the publication of
Robert W. Funk’s seminal book, Language, Hermeneutic, and Word of God,1
in which the author invited a generation of biblical scholars to discover
anew the wonders of the topsy-turvy imaginations of both Jesus and Paul.
For more than a century prior to 1966 biblical scholars and theologians
had been preoccupied with the problem of the gap between the biblical
worldview and the understanding of the world generated by modern philosophy
and science. Christian theology has traditionally claimed that scripture is
the prime vehicle for hearing the word of God. But if the language of the
Bible was bound to an archaic vision of the world that struck modern readers
as fantastic and unreal then traditional theology was faced with a crisis.
For how can words that convey an inaccurate description of the real world be
received as the word of one who is really God — at least of that God who
could be believed to have created the real world? Any God who creates an
unreal world is bound to be conceived as unreal. Visitors to Disney World
may be awed by the creations of the Disney "imagineers." But no one but the
youngest would ever confuse Fantasyland with the world of everyday life. So
the inescapable problem that the development of the modern world has posed
for Christian theology is how to recover the relevance of the language of
biblical theology as the vehicle for the true word of God for today’s world.
Liberal theologians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tried
to distill the essence of eternal rational truth from scripture and to
discard the parts that everyday modern human experience would consider
fantastic. Karl Barth and other neo-Orthodox theologians of the
mid-twentieth century took the opposite tact. Noting that the Bible itself
equated the word of God with a prophetic challenge to secular men of the
ancient world, they argued that it is precisely in challenging modern
humanity’s self-sufficient godless worldview that the Bible was still the
prime vehicle for the word of God.
Rudolf
Bultmann charted a path between both camps by distinguishing two aspects of
language: event and concept. Events are active; they happen to someone.
Concepts are passive; they are descriptions of a world subject to
contemplation. The Bible portrays God as an active Force, whose word has
power to create and judge. Therefore, Bultmann concluded, the word of God
can never be reduced to a particular worldview, not even that of the New
Testament. Since ancient Israelites heard God speak through Hebrew
prophets addressing their own situation ("Thus says the LORD: 'I am the LORD
your God...'), modern humans can encounter that same God only in words
directly addressed to their own existence. For the biblical God is not just
one of many concepts in a human view of the world. Rather, people actually
hear God speak only in words that transform their own prior
self-understanding.
This de-objectification of the understanding of the word of God lay at
the heart of Bultmann’s controversial and often misinterpreted call for de-mythologization
of the New Testament. In the first third of Language, Hermeneutic, and
Word of God Funk adeptly guides readers through the maze of Bultmannian
and post-Bultmannnian views of language and scripture. It would be folly to
try to summarize all the twists and turns of that tour here, especially
since that would require a crash course for those unfamiliar with the
philosophy of Martin Heidegger. But I would encourage any reader who wants
to understand the path taken by some of the most influential biblical
scholars and theologians of the past and present generation to follow Funk’s
own summary of the impact of their views of language on the task of biblical
interpretation.
For Funk himself, one Heideggerian insight is crucial for recovering the original
revelatory power of New Testament texts. Heidegger held that language did
not just describe an existing world but rather created a world by evoking
it. Words are not properly understood when they are viewed as merely
labels, that is, as signs pointing to something else. On the contrary,
language is where humans encounter their world. It is the house in which
Being itself resides. Thus, in Heidegger’s view, it is poets who create the
world by articulating a vision which others are invited to visit and
explore.
In the last two thirds of Language, Hermeneutic, and Word of God
Funk leads readers through an exercise to discover Jesus and Paul as poets,
men whose use of language shaped visions of the world in which others are
invited to dwell. In detailed exegetical studies of select parables of
Jesus and letters of Paul, Funk explores how the words of both men
articulate visions that challenge hearers to rethink their old worldviews
and to see themselves in a new light. Jesus’ "poetry" is in his use of
metaphor, while Paul’s comes in his flair for paradox. In either case the
worldview presupposed by the intended audience is stood on its head.
Funk’s exploration of the language of Jesus and Paul advanced key insights that
were to make a lasting impact on future interpretations of parables and
letters alike. Earlier in the century Adolf Jülicher had challenged the
traditional understanding of the parables as allegories—picturesque fictions
that required interpretation—by arguing persuasively that Jesus’ parables
were, rather, extended similes or metaphors that illustrated a single point
(for instance, the kingdom of God). Each parable was taken to mean one thing
and one thing only. Subsequent scholars (most notably C. H. Dodd and Joachim
Jeremias) also saw each parable as illustrating a single point. But unlike
Jülicher, who tended to interpret parables in terms of timeless abstract
truths, other scholars tended to locate the parables' "original"
point within the framework of eschatological Jesus sayings: sayings, that
is, that imply God's final judgment of the world and creation of a new world
order. In either case, the parable was taken to mean something other than
itself. If that were so, then the parable would be understood merely as a
pedagogical tool: a sign that points to a reality other than itself and that
was dispensable once one recognized its point.
In exploring
the linguistic horizons of metaphor, however, Funk argued that the plots of
Jesus’ parables could not be reduced to a simple point that was better and
more clearly expressed in general abstractions. Rather, Jesus’ parables
create a view of a world as Jesus himself wanted it to be seen, a world that
was at once the everyday world in which he lived and yet a world so
constructed as to call his hearers’ preconceptions into question. The world
of Jesus’ parables, Funk argued, is both familiar and strange. On the one
hand, it is a picture of the world of common secular existence—flaws and
all—rather than some imaginary heavenly or futuristic utopian realm. On the
other hand, the conjunction of elements in the world depicted by Jesus is
surrealistic to the point that it “cracks the shell of mundane temporality”
(p. 156), inviting the hearer to participate in a reordered perception of
everyday reality.
Funk repeatedly invokes parallels between the parables of Jesus and the
world that Lewis Carroll’s Alice saw in Through the Looking Glass
: “all is familiar, and all is strange, and the one illuminates the
other” (p. 160). On the one hand, the familiarity of elements in the world
portrayed by Jesus invites the hearer to enter his vision; yet once one
recognizes the strangeness of the construction one is forced to decide
whether to stay within that world or leave it. Thus, Funk argues, Jesus’
parables are misunderstood when viewed either as commonly acceptable mundane
truths or descriptions of an ideal ultimate world order. Rather, Jesus’
parables “present a world the listener recognizes, acknowledges. Then he is
caught up in the dilemma of the metaphor: it is not his world after all” (p.
162).
Funk’s analysis of how Jesus’ parables function as metaphor caught
twentieth-century biblical scholars up in a dilemma. If Funk’s view of the
world as depicted by Jesus is correct, the commonplace interpretation of
Jesus as an eschatological prophet has to be abandoned. For the vision of
the world that Jesus proposed as illustrating God’s kingdom is not an
idyllic utopian realm after all. Rather it is very much a vision of the
present sphere of mundane human existence, with all its incongruities and
imperfections spotlighted. Thus, Language, Hermeneutic, and Word of God
takes a tentative, but very necessary, first step towards an understanding
of the non-eschatological Jesus that was later to emerge full-blown in the
research of the Jesus Seminar.
Funk’s exploration of the language of the letters of Paul is more
preliminary than his study of the parables but no less earthshaking
theologically. For most of church history the Pauline epistles have been
treated as primary source books for Christian doctrine. But Funk stressed
that, as real letters addressed to specific readers, Paul’s letters are
correctly understood only as one side of a conversation in which Paul
“deforms” his audience’s preconceived notions, not with ready-made doctrines
of salvation but with paradoxical reminders of Jesus’ crucifixion. Paul
borrows the jargon used by his opponents for the sake of argument only. He
shows no interest in championing his personal christology against all
others. Rather, he calls attention to the crucified Jesus explicitly to
deflate grandiose theological theories. If that insight is correct, then
Paul’s statements serve as a caution against all self-promoting normative
theological doctrine.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland opens with Alice musing about
the book her older sister is reading: “What is the use of a book without
pictures or conversations?” The author of Language, Hermeneutic, and
Word of God was inclined to agree. Although his book was published
devoid of illustrations, he opened the eyes of a generation to recognize
that the speech of both Jesus and Paul invoked paradoxical images to crack
conventional worldviews and challenge others to imagine reality in a
wonderfully fresh way.
/1/ Funk, Robert W. Language, Hermeneutic and Word
of God: The Problem of Language in the New Testament and Contemporary Theology.
New York: Harper & Row, 1966.