Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: an Incarnational-Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation.

RECOVERING THEOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS: AN INCARNATIONAL-TRINITARIAN THEORY OF INTERPRETATION. By Jens Zimmerman. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004. Pp. 345. Cloth, $32.99.

Zimmerman, who teaches at Trinity Western University, argues for an incarnational-trinitarian hermeneutic by showing (rightly) that all interpretation theory is at least implicitly theological and that all theological reflection is also hermeneutical. He prosecutes this hypothesis in three acts.

Part I retrieves the Reformation traditions of Luther, Calvin, the Puritans (especially John Owen), and the Pietists (especially Spener and Francke) in order to show that pre-modern theologians were no less philosophically sophisticated than post/modern thinkers. Central to the argument are oft-neglected aspects of Reformation thought: that for Luther, justification understood in terms of faith as trust was intimately linked to ethics understood in terms of faith as love and to union with God understood in terms of faith as hope (recall that Finnish-Lutheran scholarship has recently shown the centrality of the idea of deification to Luther's early theology of justification); that for Calvin, we enter the hermeneutical circle wherein the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self are inextricably intertwined; and that for the Puritans and Pietists, there is not only the role of the Holy Spirit in regenerating the heart and illuminating scripture, but also the understanding of theology as performative: for ordering a just society (Puritans) or furthering personal relationships with God and others (Pietists). Yet the recurring thesis throughout is Luther's insistence on the cross as the criterion of all theological reflection.

Part II argues that modernity silenced the Word of God precisely through the processes of secularization (Kant and Schleiermacher) that severed hermeneutics from its explicitly theological underpinnings. Zimmerman suggests that the reconstruction of an adequate philosophical hermeneutics must go through Gadamer and Levinas, the former for his brilliant articulation of the hermeneutical process and the latter for "regrounding" hermeneutics ontologically and transcendentally on ethics. Left on their own, however, the trajectory of Gadamer and Levinas results in the radical hermeneutics of Derrida and Caputo which either deconstructs finitude endlessly (bereft of transcendental norms) or leaves us ignorant of both self and other (as the self can never really know the transcendent other). What is needed is an understanding of the self-other relationship which preserves the distinction between self and other, but articulates the differences in relational and ethical terms.

The "answer" in Part III is Zimmerman's incarnational-trinitarian theory, which proposes a personalist and intersubjectivist ontology, ethics, and hermeneutics in dialogue with Bonhoeffer. Such an incarnational-trinitarian model is explicitly theological, epistemologically communal, and directively ethical. Yet the result is also a theological aesthetics (here, in dialogue with von Bahhasar) that recovers the beautiful in both ethical and incarnational terms (against the iconoclastic tradition of Reformation thought), even as the beautiful both reveals and conceals the gloriousness of God.

In response I offer both a comment and a question. First, an initial reading of Part I seems to provide a Reformational "foundation" for the incarnational-trinitarian thesis. Yet there are two related problems here: that the details of this new story can be challenged at various points (e.g., one-sided readings of Kant or Schleiermacher), and that the main contours of Gadamer's hermeneutical theory (which Zimmerman endorses) militate against any "foundationalist" notion of hermeneutics. Yet to contest Zimmerman's story is to assume that hermeneutics is grounded in historical genealogy (in this case, one leading back through the Puritans and Pietists to Luther and Calvin), precisely what contemporary philosophical hermeneutics rejects. Hence, I suggest that Part I (and the whole book) is better understood as a "performance" through which Zimmerman not only articulates a hypothesis but also contributes to the hermeneutical and theological conversation of our time through the retrieval of certain voices in the tradition.

Second, the question: as a Reformational theologian, is not Zimmerman ultimately concerned with the interpretation of the biblical text? Even within the Reformation traditions, however, he uncovers essential features of the hermeneutical circle that includes the regenerating and illuminating work of the Holy Spirit, the affective and participatory dimension of Puritan and Pietist engagement with the world, and the lived, performative, or ethical dimension of theological understanding, all of which conspire to undermine any simplistic appeal to the reading and interpretation of the Bible as being at the heart of the theological task. So while there is a robust incarnational hermeneutic in Part III, the trinitarian dimension is lacking because of an undeveloped pneumatology: precisely because the messiah not only has come (297ff.), but is also still to come, now is the age of the Spirit. Thus RECOVERING THEOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS contributes substantially to at least one side of the kind of robust incarnational-pentecostal-trinitarian hermeneutic so important for our time.

Amos Yong

Bethel University

St. Paul, Minnesota