Abstract
Daniel Shin’s Theology and the Public is an important contribution to how Hans Frei’s “theology” engages “the public.” Frei, before his untimely death in 1988, was professor of theology and religious studies at Yale University; he published two books and several articles during his lifetime. But these, along with various posthumous publications, have generated not a torrent but a remarkably steady stream of books and articles interpreting how his theology bears on sundry issues facing church and world today.
Shin, professor of theology and world Christianity at Drew University and clergy member in the United Methodist Church, develops a fascinating complexity to his simple title in order to align it with his subtitle. On the one hand, he wants to block any perception that Frei is subject to what James Gustafson called “the sectarian temptation.” On the other hand, he seeks to develop a constructive reading of Frei using David Tracy’s argument that “the nature of the publicness [of theology] is finally determined by some understanding of the reality of God” in relation to three “publics”—society and church and academy (xviii). He loosely aligns Tracy’s three audiences with Frei’s hermeneutics (especially Frei’s Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics, Yale University Press, 1980), his christology (especially Frei’s The Identity of Jesus Christ, Augsburg Fortress, 1975), and theological methods (especially Frei’s Types of Christian Theology, Yale University Press, 1992). This strategy creates room for interesting readings of Frei’s work (Shin’s subtitle) as a route to rethinking theology’s public (Shin’s title).
A key factor in Shin’s endeavor to block misunderstandings and advance correct understanding is the way he joins the secondary literature studying the continuity and changes in Frei’s position, particularly from the 1960s through the 1980s. This is perhaps clearest when he addresses the charges that Frei’s reading of biblical narratives “tyrannically absorbs” our world, or is a “pure narrativism” that restricts meaning to the narrative text itself, or promotes an anti-apologetical stance that is “a retreat from engagement with the existential concerns of readers embedded in the contemporary world” (1). Shin argues that some aspects of these charges (for instance, the charge of “tyrannical” absorption) are not based on a careful reading of what Frei has written. Other worries (for instance, the charge that Frei permits or requires the intra-textualism of the New Criticism) “may be true of Frei’s early work, but is not an accurate description of Frei’s work as a whole” (39). Still other misunderstandings can be blocked by attending to secondary literature that develops Frei’s own positions (for instance, Werpehowski, DeHart, and Schwartzentruber on “ad hoc” “rather than ‘systematic’ apologetics,” 2).
But most of Shin’s book is devoted to his own careful reading of Frei’s books and articles. There is no space here to give more than a taste of Shin’s careful arguments about Frei’s hermeneutics (part I), his christology (part II), and his theological method (part III). Shin argues persuasively that Frei’s scriptural hermeneutics came to center less on the literary genre of narrative (important as that remained) than on the church’s concrete practices of using Scripture centered on Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ’s unsubstitutable identity is public in a way that enables the church to receive enrichment from the world even as it engages the world in witness and service, including “a carefully circumscribed progressive politics” (94). Frei’s theological method is embedded in a concrete academy akin to Schleiermacher’s nineteenth-century University of Berlin, where professional education (including clerical training) and rigorous academic training coexisted in an “orderly eclecticism” (104), permitting and requiring theology to engage not only the academic publics of philosophy and history but also and even primarily literary studies and the social sciences. On all three scores (biblical hermeneutics, christology, and theological method) Shin’s book will provide novices to Frei’s theology a clear and careful commentary. Even long-time (or, if you prefer, older) readers like myself will find new insights throughout Shin’s readings of Frei.
Shin proposes that “Frei’s position is perched somewhere between Barth and Schleiermacher” (131). This will surprise those who identify Frei with (usually wooden readings of) Barth, but Shin makes a strong case for this reading, at least on the methodological issues he discusses in the last part of his book. But should this really surprise? After all, Schleiermacher, Barth, and Frei were all Reformed Christians. But this raises a question: In what sense is a church divided Greek and Latin, Catholic and Protestant, Lutheran and Reformed, and others a single “public”? Shin’s book puts us in an excellent position to extend Frei’s reflections into these issues, ecclesiological and eventually trinitarian.