Toward a Rhetoric of Postmodern Theology: Through Barth and Heidegger

American Academy of Religion

Toward a Rhetoric of Postmodern Theology: Through Barth and HeideggerAuthor(s): David E. KlemmSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Autumn, 1987), pp.443-469Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1464066 .

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion. LV/3

TOWARD A RHETORIC OF POSTMODERN THEOLOGY:

THROUGH BARTH AND HEIDEGGER DAVID E. KLEMM

THEOLOGY AND RHETORIC

Rhetoric is once again on the curriculum for the study of theology. Perhaps the latest in a series of renewed approaches to artful forms of thinking, the current project in rhetoric uncovers new lines of reading that tie up with the classical tradition. But in its most recent version, rhetoric no longer presents itself as merely reflection on the role of style in the art of persuasion. More global theories abound under the head of rhetoric of inquiry (Nelson; Megill; McCloskey). Through them we see rhetoric as theoretical inquiry into our communicative practices. Specifically, it reflects on the art of projecting and perform- ing the meaning of some domain of reality through speaking and writ- ing. Thus rhetoric is the counterpart of hermeneutics taken as inquiry into the art of understanding and appropriating meaning.

The rhetoric of inquiry has three central concerns. None of them is new. Consequently, its originality lies in its ability to open fresh per- spectives on our abiding interests. It focuses on (1) figurative and narrative means of projecting meaning to persuade audiences, (2) the relation of argumentative processes to notions of interest and ideology, and (3) the power of discursive practices in forming or disrupting com- munal solidarity. In all cases, however, rhetoric remains a discourse on the margins of thought and action (Hariman: 51). The marginality of rhetoric means that it always lives in deference to an independent subject matter, which it brings to speech and thought. Rhetoric aims at transparency for its subject matter through artistic density along with rigorous thinking. Thus, good rhetoric serves the quest for truth and is not its distortion. Yet rhetorical criticism is not merely a means of speaking about how a self-constituting subject puts objective matters

David E. Klemm is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, 52242.



444 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

into discourse. Its interest follows the ways discourse presents both the self and the subject matter of inquiry. And despite the importance of its concern with the life of discourse, rhetoric occupies the margin because it is always listening in on itself and never exercising direct control over the matter.

Theology is eminently rhetorical-and in need of new rhetoric. Following the death of the God of theism, theology seems not so much to lack a subject matter as to need new and persuasive ways of disclos- ing it. Theology reflects critically on the meaning of our talk about God and its relation to experience. Its subject matter is the radical otherness of the reality that grounds, judges, and graciously calls our linguistic being in the world. If God is God, God cannot appear either as an object or a subject within the subject-object structure of knowledge and perceptual experience, although anything could and has come to symbolize God. Hence theology must rely on figurative uses of language to speak about, to, or from God. This draws theology into the domain of rhetoric, for doubleness of meaning is at the heart of both. How can rhetoric serve theological thinking today? How are we persuasively to speak of God?

Clearly, we can no longer think the reality traditionally named God as a self-sufficient being or an absolute synthesis. The rational cri- tiques of Kant, Hume, and others block the passes to the highest being of metaphysics. Semler, Strauss, and other textual critics disclose a human face behind the living images of deity in the Bible. Even more striking, calamities of the twentieth century from the trenches of the First European War to the fires of Auschwitz and Hiroshima have shattered the claims of critical reason and calculative thinking to replace the God of premodern life and thought. No wonder the postmodern theologian, as interpreter of text and existence, feels an uneasiness in acknowledging the finitude of human understanding of the divine.

Despite our anxiety before a broken tradition, we continue to understand existence theologically. This is possible because the word "God," or some other word, can and does break into the linguisticality of human existence as Word of God. When understood, the word "God" names, clarifies, and sometimes provokes the experience of God-the advent of radical otherness. "God" thus signals infinite interpretation; it is a sign of the overturning of the ways we understand existence by what is finally other than ourselves and other than our world. And the experience of God calls forth the word "God," or other words, which open us to the source of meaning and enabling norms of action. But given the double critique of the premodern by the modern and of the modern by the postmodern, theology must con-



Klemm: Rhetoric of Postmodern Theology 445

tinue seriously to ask which words-"God" or others?- can so sound today in our world? And how should they be spoken?

This is a problem for hermeneutics-and rhetoric. We widely recognize theology as hermeneutical today, because it moves within the linguisticality and temporality of our being in the world and responds to the advent of radical otherness with interpretive thought. But these are reasons that we should also pay attention to theology as rhetorical, as persuasively giving voice to this depth. Postmodern theologians are postmodern rhetoricians; to understand them, we should interpret the rhetoric of their theologies. Postmodern theology is rhetorical; to practice it, we should think rhetorically.

A PROPOSAL

In this paper, I articulate a rhetorical vocabulary for speaking about postmodern theology by analyzing the use of tropes in postmodern theological inquiry. I begin by focusing on the two religious thinkers I deem most influential in the twentieth century: Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger. Both Barth and Heidegger responded to the postwar crisis of European culture. In the 1920s, Heidegger and Barth seemed to present religiously serious thinkers with forking paths into new worlds of meaning: Barth gave new voice to a Christian language of the Word of God; Heidegger spoke an ontological language of the meaning of being. Each gave new life to the theological subject matter under postmodern conditions. Yet, two distinct communities of discourse tended to appropriate the preaching of Barth and the teaching of Heidegger: the evangelical Christian community and the existentialist community. Then and now, these two camps shape the life and thought of many people, but they do not understand each other. Then and now, they disdain to listen or speak to each other. In addition, a third revisionist group projected a theological vision beyond and through the opposition of Barth and Heidegger, not as a synthesis but as an open standpoint capable of orchestrating the two. It is accessible only in the interplay between the two primary voices, or ones like them, is the position that offers the most genuine theolo- gizing in the late twentieth century.

My thesis is that the lines of reception pointing from the early Barth and Heidegger enter a changed rhetorical situation today. Recent theology is not prefigured by historical crisis but by the situation of openness to the other. Focusing on the use of tropes in recent discussions, I distinguish three types of postmodern theology stemming from the early reception of Barth and Heidegger: the confessional, deconstructive, and hermeneutical modes. Using the rhetoric of tropes as a diagnostic tool, I argue that all postmodern theologies are




not equal: serious problems that attend the confessional and deconstructive types do not afflict the hermeneutical approach. Yet even the hermeneutical version of theology faces a postmodern predicament that is in part a rhetorical problem.

I concentrate my analysis on the four master tropes of thought and discourse: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. The four tropes were shaped into a unity by Vico (129-31) and declared the "four master tropes" by Kenneth Burke (503-17). More recently, Hay- den White has written extensively on the four master tropes (see especially 1-26). Paul Ricoeur has incorporated the four master tropes into his discussion of time and narrative (219-27). Why focus on the tropes of rhetoric? Analysis of these traditional figures best serves my intention to understand postmodern theological thinking. I mean this in the technical sense in which we distinguish understanding from both conceptual thinking and prereflective experience: understanding is the temporal, linguistic practice of mediating between them. It pro- ceeds by forming images that connect abstract thought with concrete experience. Grasped rhetorically, the images of understanding are the tropes of discourse.

I begin by considering the central texts of emergent postmodern- ism in theology: Barth's The Epistle to the Romans (1921) and Heideg- ger's Being and Time (1927). I do not impose the tropes on either thinker. Neither can be understood purely propositionally or as a cata- logue of facts, although both formulate theories and appeal to experience. Hence the tropes of mediation loom important. In fact, they bear on fundamental theological decisions: tropes of thought convey the subject matter of theological thinking, disclose the ground and abyss of existence, and place a self in response to it.

THE RHETORIC OF EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS AND BEING AND TIME

Hayden White most clearly grasps the insight behind Vico's ordering of the four master tropes. He writes,

The archetypal plot of discursive formations appears to require that the narrative "I" of the discourse move from an original metaphorical characterization of a domain of experience, through metonymic deconstruction of its elements, to synecdochic repre- sentations of the relations between its superficial attributes and its presumed essence, to, finally, a representation of whatever contrasts or oppositions can legitimately be discerned in the total- ities identified in the third phase of discursive representation. (5)

The pattern moves from an initial (metaphorical) perspective on reality, through a reductive (metonymic) analysis of the situation, to a (synecdochic) reconstitution of the elements into a new figure, and finally




to a reflexive or dialectical (ironic) comprehension of it (Vico: 129-31; Burke: 503; White: 12; Ricoeur: 219-27). White claims for this pattern only the force of a convention in the discourse about consciousness and the discourse about discourse itself. Clearly it is a pattern lodged deep in the conventions of biblical narrative and the theologies constructed from it-but not without its tensions, especially at the moment of synecdochic summation. For in theological thinking, synecdoche marks the inbreaking of God from outside the linguistic structure. Let me turn now to the rhetoric of Barth and Heidegger, bracketing the question whether one's God is the other's being.

Metaphor

Metaphor figures our speaking about one thing in terms sugges- tive of another (Soskice: 15). Among the four master tropes, meta- phoric characterization of the situation opens the tropological domain and initiates the movement from the most naive apprehension to the most reflexive (irony) (Ricoeur: 222). Both Barth's and Heidegger's texts appealed to the profound sense of spiritual crisis after World War I. Each of them invites the reader to understand the crisis metaphori- cally. Barth figured the human situation as the crisis of human sinfulness before God. Heidegger understood the human situation as the crisis of inauthentic being in the world. In each text, the crisis metaphor lends power and urgency to the whole. Let me now consider the appearence and function of the crisis metaphor first in Barth and then in Heidegger.

As the dominant voice of dialectical theology, or "theology of crisis," Barth played a revolutionary role. His early theology not only expressed the widespread and profound unrest in Germany after the First World War but also disclosed and interpreted the crisis experience to his contemporaries (Rendtorff: 173-79; Fihler: 171-75). Before the war, Barth was filled with an evolutionary optimism stemming from a conviction in the essential connectedness of God and humans. But Barth was shattered by the war's outbreak and saw no future beyond it for the liberal theology of his own recent past (Barth, 1957: 14). Facing the collapse of the nineteenth century, Barth asked the most basic questions for one charged with preaching the gospel: What for us is divinity? How do we think it?

Through his reading of St. Paul and Franz Overbeck (1837-1905), Barth became convinced that theology as positive knowledge of God, even as the Whence of the feeling of absolute dependence, is impossible. After all, if all thinking objectifies, and God cannot be an object for humans to judge, then theological thinking is impossible. Barth's conclusion was radical: the only possible speaking of God is God's own




speaking. And fortunately for Barth, God does speak to us through biblical preaching. The task for theologians is to foster openness for revelation into which God may choose to speak. In Barth's view, historical criticism is not sufficient for this task. According to Barth, genuine criticism uncovers the Word in the words, presenting the referent of thought in and through the words. Barth's aim was not to retrieve the historical Paul but to let Paul's text speak again by collapsing the barriers between the first and the twentieth centuries (6-8).

Barth himself did this by rethinking St. Paul's theme that God is in heaven and humans are on earth, and no necessary connection joins them. Barth acknowledged that philosophy and theology share this theme. Philosophy names God the prime cause or one truth (10), which is presupposed by rational inquiry but elusive for knowledge; for it, God is absent. Theology beholds this one truth or prime cause in the figure of Jesus Christ, who makes God present to humans; for it, God is present. What knowledge does theology receive? The preaching of Jesus Christ reveals the unknowability of God. Theology thus receives a negative knowledge of God: theology knows God as wholly other than reason or unreason, language or silence, subjectivity or objectivity, and wholly other than the mediation of any of these. The wholly other is beyond all categories and their negation, but it appears in the event of appropriating the Gospel story. Once we reflect on the event of disclosure, however, we fragment its eventful character. Like a bird in flight, revelation cannot be caught by reflection. Once lost, we can only anticipate and remain open to its possible advent.

How, then, did Barth give a theological reading of the human situation figured as the crisis of sin? In Romans, he wrote, "We stand here before an irresistible and all-embracing dissolution of the world of time and things and men, before a penetrating and ultimate KRISIS, before the supremacy of a negation by which all existence is rolled up" (91). In the crisis of this encounter God brings us and everything temporal under divine judgment: mortal humans forget the absolute distance between God and themselves. Barth demanded repentence without excuse as the only appropriate response to the crisis.

This was no summons to a straying Europe to escape God's judgment by coming back into the religious fold. On the contrary, in Barth's words,

No undertaking subjects men to so severe a judgment as the undertaking of religion. The whole rich abundance of the wor- ship of God, from the grossest superstition to the most delicate spirituality, from naked rationalism to the most subtle mysticism of the metaphysician, is under suspicion both from above and from below. God treats it as arrogance, and men as illusion. (136)

Thus Barth suggests that theologians warn people against the illusion




that religion is closer to God than no religion. Barth uses the crisis metaphor to deflate human pretensions-both theological and religious. Let us turn now to the guiding metaphor of crisis in Heidegger.

As the historian Allan Megill points out, the notion of total cultural crisis permeates all of Heidegger's writings. Moreover, Heidegger's enormous impact was in part due to his powerful expression of this notion (Megill: 111). But Heidegger did not express himself directly about a cultural crisis so much as to speak about it indirectly, through the metaphor of human situation as crisis of pervasive inauthenticity.

Reflecting on the crisis mentality that accompanied the postwar years, Hans-Georg Gadamer affirms, "The existential seriousness that characterized Heidegger in his lectures seemed to suggest that the rejection of inauthenticity and embracing of authenticity was the meaning of his doctrine" (1963a:141). But Heidegger's philosophical concern was different from the moral impact of his rhetoric. Gadamer adds, "Today it is clear that the inner and indissoluable connection of the authenticity and inauthenticity of Dasein, of unconcealedness and concealment, of truth and error, indicated the real dimension of the Heideggerian inquiry" (1963a:141). How, then, did the theme of inauthenticity, which was heard as invective, enter his philosophy?

Heidegger's philosophical inquiry followed a single question: What does it mean to be? He opened Being and Time with an argu- ment for the necessity of retrieving this question, which held Plato and Aristotle in awe while evoking their efforts. Once the systems of Greek metaphysics were in place, however, subsequent thinkers for- got the question from which the systems emerged. Presently, the question has been trivialized to the point where we do not know what it means, much less why it held the Greeks spellbound (20). Yet, Heidegger asked, if being is the most universal concept, from which nothing is excluded, what is the relationship between being as being and the categories of being? If being stands above all determinations of genus and species, and is thus not a being, what does it mean that we nonetheless understand its meaning well enough to use it? Does not that contradiction hide a great mystery? Heidegger was convinced of the importance of his question; his problem was how to formulate it properly, how to rethink fundamental ontology.

Heidegger's solution involves referring the question about the meaning of being to the formal structure of inquiry. Questioning presupposes (1) an activity of inquiring (Fragen), which is guided by what is sought, (2) that about which we inquire (ein Gefragtes), investigated through (3) some concrete reality (ein Befragtes), in order to yield (4) some theoretical result (ein Erfragtes). In posing the question "What does it mean to be?" some interesting connections appear. The




activity of inquiring is (1) a mode of being of the inquirer, which reflects (2) being as that which we inquire about, which intends (4) the meaning of being as theoretical result. By choosing the being of the questioner as (3) the concrete reality investigated, all four elements reflect being. Heidegger delighted in the result: a postmetaphysical ontology is possible as the existential analysis of the being that is there in its questioning. Philosophy properly pursues the meaning of being through deciphering the meaning of Dasein's being, a being which already understands what it means to be.

In Heidegger's analysis, Dasein's essence is Existenz: Dasein answers to "Who are you?" not "What is this?" This means the being of Dasein is in each case my own thrown project of a possibility to be (67). Dasein projects possibilities from within situations and thus opens the existential space and time for concrete concerns. From the structure of being in the world as always my own, Heidegger derived two primary modes of Dasein's being. Here we reach the crucial notion for his metaphor of crisis as inauthenticity: I can exist in forgetfulness of myself, by losing myself in the world and ceasing to be myself-such existence is inauthentic (uneigentlich); or by contrast, I can exist in awareness of my own timing or actualizing of possibilities to be-such existence is authentic (eigentlich) (68). This distinction can be applied to any of our human activities to show its meaning as either covering up one's being or revealing it. In each case, what is covered up or revealed is my own act of being in the world as the meaning of being.

Heidegger's descriptions of inauthenticity in everyday existence are ontological rather than moral; they describe possibilities for being oneself by not being oneself. They do not declare that we are all inauthentic and should not be. But the force of Heidegger's rhetoric drives the reader to moral self-scrutiny: Do I see myself in these descriptions? In the 1920s, Heidegger's "severe style of lecturing" and the "bitter acrimony" of his references to inauthentic existence, added the moral dimension of meaning to the crisis situation.

Metonymy

The second master trope, metonymy, prefigures the dispersion of the leading metaphor into its linked elements. As Kenneth Burke puts it, metonymy performs the "reduction of some higher or more complex realm of being to the terms of a lower or less complex realm of being" (506). It places some intangible state of being in tangible terms and therefore traces the abstract back into real life. Karl Barth employs metonymy when he represents human sinfulness as the fall from God. Likewise, Martin Heidegger employs this trope when he reduces inauthenticity to the self's falling from itself into the world.




The image of falling appears in two quite different senses in Barth and Heidegger. How does each of them metonymically spell out the fal- lenness in sin or inauthenticity?

Barth gave theological voice to the biblical image of the fall of man in Adam. Following Anselm, Barth figured sin as a robbery of God:

a robbery which becomes apparent in our arrogant endeavour to cross the line of death by which we are bounded; in our drunken blurring of the distance which separates us from God; in our forgetfulness of His invisibility; in our investing of men with the form of God, and of God with the form of man; and in our devo- tion to some romantic infinity, some 'No-God' of this world, which we have created for ourselves. (168)

Sin plunders God of God's divinity; it is a thievery from which no return is possible save by God's forgiveness. For it is marked by death, the trace of the broken relationship and the fall from God. The agent of this fall was Adam, who is no more a historical figure than the original event of sin was a historical event. Adam exists only as the old man dissolved by Christ; his sin is "the characteristic mark of human nature as such; it is not a lapse or a series of lapses in a man's life; it is the Fall which occurred with the emergence of human life" (173). The basic elements to which Barth reduces sin include the important image of robbing God, the casting of sin as a positive power in the world, and placing sin alongside its companion, death.

Heidegger's existential analysis also makes use of the image of falling, but not in the biblical sense of breaking trust with God. For Heidegger, falling (Verfallens) is the ontological-existential structure of everyday life making possible loss of self and forgetfulness of the meaning of being. Heidegger speaks of falling as "absorption in" (aufgehen bei) a group of people. Inauthentic existence is concretely manifest in the idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity by which people evade themselves and cover up the meaning of their existence (220). He also uses the image of "being lost" (223) in the publicness of the "they," which means letting the "I" fall out of Dasein's grasp into the anonymous "they" of average everydayness. In such inauthenticity, we forget ourselves as open centers of the timing of being and let das Man time our desires: "We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the 'great mass' as they shrink back; we find 'shocking' what they find shocking" (164).

As a structure of human being, falling represents the tempting possibility of submitting to an apparent certainty, tranquillity, and security which is in fact alienating. Offered illusory release from the anxiety of being oneself, Dasein "drifts along toward an alienation in




which its ownmost potentiality-for-Being is hidden from it," until tak- ing a "downward plunge" (Absturz) into the groundlessness and nul- lity of inauthentic everydayness (223). But the lure of tranquillity is really a masquerade of turbulence (Wirbel), the restlessness of the heart that has lost itself.

Like Barth's treatment of the original sinfulness of humans as "timeless and transcendental" (171), Heidegger asserts that his existential-ontological analysis is of a condition prior to any actualized corrup- tion. Falling figures the possibility of inauthenticity as a kind of motion downward, an eternal forgetting of what it means to be the one "I am."

Synecdoche

Classically, synecdoche involves either using a genus term to stand for a species which participates in it or a species term to stand for the genus, a part for the whole. In Hayden White's dynamic understanding of the sequence of tropes, synecdoche reassembles the elements of the metonymic deconstruction of a domain of reality, showing the relation between them and the "presumed essence" of that domain (5). The movement from metonymy to synecdoche, in other words, is a return from the many to the one or a shift from dispersal to integration within the domain of reality. In the discourse of Barth and Heidegger, the synecdochic move is crucial, for it figures the opening of the human sphere to the reality transcending it. And in each case, the language of genus and species, or even part and whole, fails. The "presumed essence" of the domain of human reality in its sinfulness or inauthenticity lies beyond that domain and must break into it in a transformative event. For Barth's Epistle to the Romans, the synecdochic figure is the inbreaking of the wholly other God; for Heideg- ger's Being and Time, it is the irruption of being into everyday existence. In each case the event transforms: it opens the possibility of eschatological existence (Barth) or authentic existence (Heidegger). Consider the synecdochic transformations, first in Barth and then in Heidegger.

In Barth's view, crisis, as the undergoing of God's judgment, is never a sheer negation but is always determinate negation. The negation posits something new; the No conceals a Yes. The judgment is heard as inbreaking grace. We hear this in the preaching that the cross leads to eternal life. According to Barth, the inbreaking word of God can overturn our attachments to life and death. A new person may appear, radically oriented in faith to the continual approach of God.

Barth said the name Jesus Christ marks the place where God's




absolute otherness breaks into the world without touching it. Although we cannot observe directly the act of God, we see the crater and effulgence of the event (Romans, 29). The grace of God's word actualizes the "impossible possibility" of faith (137). For Barth, faith is the ability to relate the whole content of life to its invisible origin. Faith does not claim to possess itself; indeed, it claims not to possess anything special (164). Faith recognizes the necessity and wrongness of all human strivings for the eternal-including religion-and dwells within that tension. Faith accepts the godlessness of historical existence, knowing that it is not revelation and that revelation breaks into history only in the powerlessness of death and the cross (197).

Faith keeps its eye riveted on the crucified Jesus, for he provides the standpoint for understanding self, world, and God, which Barth insisted I cannot achieve on my own. For Barth it was self-evident that I see myself in his death: "With my eyes fixed upon Christ, in this judgment and surrender and dissolution and contradiction, I recognize myself" (198). Participation in the death of Jesus opens encounter with the death of death, not anticipated as everlasting life but as radical openness to the future through God's advent. To hear God's word means so to identify with Christ that I die with Christ. In the crucifix- ion of the "I" with Christ, I find, "the wholly Other has entered within my horizon once for all," (206) opening my freedom for the future (201-2). Hope in Christ is the salvation of the person resurrected with Jesus (314).

Heidegger also employs the synecdoche of the inbreaking of the otherness to convey a redemptive dimension of reality. For Heideg- ger, inauthenticity is the disruption of the temporal activity of care. But Dasein can take hold of itself in its wholeness, because it can project its own end in death. In anticipating its own death, Dasein opens itself to the intruding otherness and thus may gain the standpoint from which to gather itself in its wholeness and conclusive meaning.

According to Heidegger, the mood of anxiety signals the right time for Dasein's reversal: "Anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but being of itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death-a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the 'they,' and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious" (311). Anticipating death brings Dasein face to face with its ownmost potentiality for being (294). That potentiality may be actualized by hearing the "voice of conscience" (Stimme de Gewissens) (313). Conscience discloses authentic being; it is rooted in the openness of Dasein.

Here we reach Heidegger's synecdoche in full force: otherness




breaks into inauthentic existence through the call of being as nothing. Heidegger wrote, "Indeed the call is precisely something which we ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily per- formed, nor have we ever done so. 'It' calls, against our expectations and even against our will" (320). But who or what breaks in? "In its 'who,' the caller is definable in a 'worldly' way by nothing at all. The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, through being in the world as the 'not at home'-the bare 'that it is' in the 'nothing' of the world" (321). The nothing here signifies something positive, namely, the structure and content of guilt as a mode of Dasein's self-understanding. Grasping what I am not but could and should be, Dasein responds with resoluteness. In resoluteness, Dasein takes hold of its authentic being in the world. Resoluteness projects the genuine possibilities for which the situation calls.

Irony

Irony, the final master trope, displays the oppositions and rever- sals in the third phase of synecdochic integration (White: 5). Burke connects it with recognition of dialectic at the heart of the matter, a dialectic manifest in the dramatic pattern of the sequence of tropes. His ironic formula is "what goes forth as A returns as non-A" (517). In Barth, the meaning of "God" is ironic: it goes out as "the one and only" and it comes back as "no one and nothing." In Heidegger, "being" is ironic: it goes out as the unity of beings and comes back as nothing. Because the words God and being are the central words of the texts, irony colors the whole of each text.

Barth's theology circumambulates the word God. But any utter- ance of this name is ironic. On one hand, God names the divine source and goal of everything, the first and final cause, the one truth of all being. Yet whatever we so name God necessarily is not God. On the other hand, the unknowable God reveals God's being: the death of Jesus manifests the unknowability of God. We see God only in the negation of God (278). Thus, ironically it is God who is not-God in our naming of God-the God named in the Bible as the one and only.

Heidegger's philosophy raises the question of the meaning of being. His inquiry is likewise thoroughly ironic. For Heidegger, being signifies at once the one connecting process through which things are and the connectedness of everything that is. But we have no direct apprehension of being, because being is not something which is (23). Hence anything we name "being" and not "a being" is not being. Being cannot be defined because there is nothing with which to com- pare and contrast it. And the existential interpretation of the meaning of being as we always already understand it tails off into the unthink-




able region of Dasein's temporalizing of time. Heidegger showed the systematic elusiveness of a single explicit meaning of being as time

(P6ggeler: 63-66). Being disappears into the constantly hiding source of temporality that is the openness of Dasein. We encounter this absence or nothingness in the experience of anxiety, but we cannot think it. The word being names nothingness; nothing manifests being. The search for being ends with nothing; nothingness reveals being.

In sum, although they employ different languages, Barth and Heidegger each present us with a rhetoric of redemption through the use of the four master tropes. In each case we find a metaphor of crisis, a metonymic dispersal of the metaphor, a synecdochic figure breaking into the disruption and gathering the crisis into a higher unity, and finally an ironic view of the whole. In each case, the figure of irony opens the discourse to its opposite and divests it of importance with respect to the divine reality it bespeaks. The languages of God and being both affirm and negate themselves through irony. But what about more recent theology? Granted that Barth and Heidegger function as patron saints for so much contemporary thought, what has become of their rhetorical strategies?

FROM CRISIS TO OTHERNESS: A REFLEXIVE TURN

In recent theology, the rhetorical situation has changed. The urgent sense of historical crisis no longer determines the metaphorical perspective of theological reflection. Instead, acknowledgement of human otherness prefigures the domain of theology. Good reasons, and not simply a shift of style, support this transformation of the meta- phoric starting point for the rhetoric of postmodern theology. Let me indicate why the crisis metaphor fails today and why the metaphor of otherness is more appropriate. I proceed in two steps. First, historical consciousness, which initially gave rise to the crisis metaphor, has deepened its reflexive posture, and this in turn has unravelled that metaphor. Second, the same reflexive posture that dismantled the crisis metaphor brings otherness out of concealment. I take these two steps in turn.

The notion of historical crisis presupposes historical self-consciousness, by which I mean initially the awareness of temporal distance sep- arating the subject of inquiry from the voice of the past. Such historical consciousness, which dates back at least to Herder and Ger- man romanticism, entails a reflexive view on all that is handed down by tradition (Gadamer, 1963b:111). Following Hans Wagner, I call this consciousness "noematic reflexivity," for it is aware that the content of reflection is thoroughly conditioned by history (Wagner: 43). This historical sense demands that the inquirer place any document within its




proper context in order to understand its own meaning and signifi- cance and that the inquirer assign some directionality to history insofar as it leads from that past context to the present one. We find this historical consciousness in modern hermeneutics from Schleiermacher through Dilthey, which assumes the privilege and burden of what Gadamer calls the "most important revolution among those we have undergone since the beginning of the modern epoch" (1963b:109). It addresses this task by the program of reconstructing historical contexts and imaginatively re-experiencing meanings within them.

But historical consciousness, by virtue of its noematic reflexivity, has the interesting telos of dismantling teleology in history. The reflexive awareness of the self encountering the historically other leads in the nature of the case to awareness of the temporality and historical situatedness of its own here and now act of reflecting. In other words, noematic reflexivity entails "noetic reflexivity" (Wagner: 35). In postmodern hermeneutics, of which Barth and Heidegger are the harbingers, we already find such a deepening of historical consciousness coupled with the crisis metaphor which it will cancel. With noetic reflexivity, the dream of simply reconstructing a past (as if the "I" were a neutral onlooker) ends. The new image is that of the event of understanding-a "fusion of horizons" in which past and present are temporally mediated. The reflexive play of understanding aban- dons the historicist assumption of a unifying grand narrative (Lyotard: xxiv). But with its loss, the notion of a crisis in history-a rupture in the grand narrative-also drops away. The crisis metaphor deconstructs itself.

Moreover, the deepened reflexive recognition of the temporality of both the subject and the object of history exposes us to a more fundamental problem than the notion of crisis-the situation of con- fronting otherness. I do not now refer to the "wholly other" of the early Barth or the "ontological difference" of Heidegger but to the sphere of human otherness-the presence of the free subject who thinks and acts other than "I" do. Otherness, of course, surfaces within the self when, in encountering the other, "my own" prejudices become "other" and new convictions become "my own." And under pluralistic social conditions, increasingly we encounter otherness external to the self. Today we are much more overwhelmed by the otherness inscribed on everyday experiences than we are by images of crisis. The challenge for understanding is no longer to reconstruct historical meanings or to address the crisis of history but to uncover what is questionable and what is genuine in self and other, while opening self to other and allowing the other to remain other.

Interestingly, neither Barth nor Heidegger satisfactorily accounts




for the presence of the human other. Barth invokes the theme of otherness when he confronts the division of the Church into the Church of Esau (where no miracle occurs and men are exposed as liars) and the Church of Jacob (where the miracle happens that Truth appears above the deceit of men) (1921: 341). But Barth overrides this theme with the Word of God before which all are the same: "Let God be found true, but every man a liar" (341). Heidegger engages the theme of otherness when he speaks of being-with-others in solicitude. But Heidegger mediates all relationships to the other through the self's use of tools in the mode of being at hand. The other is never encountered as other (Buber, 938:168-77; Theunissen: 179). Otherness is a missing theme in early Barth and Heidegger, but it presses on us today.

The eclipse of historical crisis and the uncovering of otherness are related: the culmination of historical consciousness relativizes all grand narratives; the final crisis of historical consciousness is the sense of being lost in stories, none of which are ultimately mine or God's but are those of the other. The leading metaphor for theology in recent years is the human situation as otherness. It is a turn provoked by the unescapable reflexivity of human thought and being in the world. The metonymic elements of this root metaphor include the self, the other, the encompassing world, and time.

Naturally, the new rhetorical situation evokes anxiety among religious communities and theologians. The reflexive consciousness engendering this situation exposes the weakness and fragility of theological discourse. How have the current types of postmodern theology adapted to the new rhetorical situation?

In what follows, I sketch out three typical theological responses, each of which represents an appropriation of the crucial rhetorical formations of the early Barth and Heidegger. I leave the later work of Barth and Heidegger out of the picture for this present essay; I do not here address the question how their later writings contribute to these typical responses, because we can just as well construct these types with reference to the early writings. I begin with the confessional type, move to the deconstructive type, and end with the hermeneutical type. My focus is on the synecdochic ordering of the reflexive metaphor and its metonymic elements (self, other, world, and time) and the play of irony.

CONFESSIONAL RESPONSE

The confessional type appropriates the Barthian synecdoche of Jesus Christ as the place where the wholly other God breaks into the world. No longer responding to a historical crisis, but rather answer-




ing now to the situation of encountering the other, it fails in this new context to play out the irony in Barth's use of the name of God: whatever we name as God is, strictly speaking, not-God. Indeed, consciousness of irony is reduced, not extended to apply even to the synecdoche of Jesus Christ. Consequently the confessional position possesses a figure of God while suppressing the awareness that the symbol of God is just that-a symbol of God that manifests God but strictly speaking is not God. This loss of irony and reflexivity closes the openness of the symbol of God to the other. In fact, this type tends to see the presence of otherness as threatening to the health and con- tinuity of the particular Christian community it represents. The central interest of this type is to preserve Christian identity in the church over against the other by stablizing theology and ethics around the synecdochic symbol of God as Jesus Christ.

For the confessional type, the Bible presents the transcendent God, preeminently through the synecdoche of Jesus Christ. Sacred scripture provides a clear map for formation of character, beliefs, and action: theology becomes biblical theology; ethics becomes divine command ethics. The church community seals off its self-understanding from that of the world. Viewing the world as chaos, the church provides distinct criteria for formation of identity, meaning, and value through the synecdochic symbol. The presence of the other is begrudgingly tolerated by the community but endowed with no voice; the self walls itself off from the genuine other. Time is understood as the time of solidification by return to the past.

Within confessional communities, theology can reach extraordi- nary levels of sophistication and learning. Philosophical backing may be sought in theory of narrative (legitimating the Bible as our story), Wittgenstein's thought (legitimating biblical theology and ethics as our language game), cultural anthropology (legitimating our religious tradition as a given and unquestionable scheme), and sociology of knowledge (legitimating theological knowledge-claims as appropriate to our social context). But nonetheless theology becomes a ghetto-language, not answerable to the general rules of discourse of the world and not addressed to the other as other. Heidegger, as the other of Barth, is ignored (if not despised).

Certain of these tendencies come out in the later writings of Barth himself. But Barth preserved the irony of his theology throughout. Recalling that the God we name is not God preserves a healthy sense of humility; the Church is one with the other in its tendency to lie about God. Barth considered reflexivity as a sinful posture before God, but God's own Word in Christ is reflexive in the extreme: Jesus is aware of manifesting God as unknowable and of choosing himself for




reprobation while choosing individual humans for salvation (Barth, 1942: 163). But confessional appropriations of Barth's theology tend to lose the reflexivity in Barth's own account by eliminating the ironic dimension of theology.

The confessional alternative is wrongheaded on a number of counts. It assumes the possibility and desirability of isolating a Chris- tian community within the encompassing world, whereas in fact we are all exposed to and participate in a vast array of ways of interpreting the world, its final ground and goal, and the genuine ends of human practices. Individuals and communities cannot segregate themselves from the effective-history of the larger social world by treating the others as outsiders. As James M. Gustafson says, "To suppose that in our time the Christian community could become a tribal culture iso- lated from others is certainly false" (91). By the same token, philosophical and theological isolationism surely fails. The synecdochic symbol of Jesus as God should be discussed as a symbol of God within an open inquiry concerning discourse and interpretation. Claims that the synecdoche of Jesus Christ truly manifest God should be demonstrated with reference to general theories of truth in language. In the absence of these, confessional approaches cannot enter into dialogue with the other.

Although the task of placing individual theologies within this type is a separate problem from the construction of types, I take the work of George Lindbeck, Paul Holmer, John Howard Yoder, and Stanley Hauerwas, among others, to fall under this heading.'

DECONSTRUCTIVE RESPONSE

The deconstructive type of postmodern theology appropriates in a radical way the Heideggerian synecdoche of the inbreaking of being as nothing through the uncanniness of Dasein. But it tends to lose Heidegger's irony in thinking about being: just as being escapes conceptual grasp and shows itself as nothing, so nothing makes present being. Opposing the claims of language to signify being and its pre- tense to make present, the deconstructive position denies the divine self-manifestion in symbol. Frequently it does this by carrying the motif of kenosis to its extreme: the divine self-emptying in the symbol of Christ completes itself with the negation of the symbol. But with this move, deconstruction forfeits as well Heidegger's sense of the primordial presence of being through nothing. Consequently, it is left with the activity of negating presences while forgetting the sense in which that very activity of negating also makes being present. The

1 My placement of these texts in the confessional type ought not to substitute for a careful consideration of their claims and purposes that I do not give here.




radical undercutting of symbolic presences closes itself to the other. In fact, this type sees the openness of the secularized and dehistoricized world not so much as presenting the positive possibility of encountering the other as that of breaking away from constricting religious-theological traditions. The motivating interest of this type is to sever ties between theological thinking and church communities once and for all and to render theological language free from a transcendental signified. Theology negates itself as theology; ethics become impossible.

For the deconstructive type, the biblical texts present an endless maze or Penelopean fabric that is constantly unwoven and rewoven in the play of deconstruction. Each text fits into an infinite web of shift- ing contexts, referring in the round to other interrelated threads, criss- crossing in a perpetual process of interweaving that is centerless-a play of signifiers over the abyss. The mazing Scripture cannot be mapped: "In the absence of complete presence, secure foundation, authoritative orgin, and ultimate end, there is nothing other than erring" (Taylor: 179). World no longer encompasses selves or communities nor is that to which texts refer; world is knit into the play of signifers. There is nothing outside the text, because world (like text) is an unstable and transitory process of the display and removal of meaning. There is nothing other than appearances (Taylor: 172); nothing appears in and through appearances. The other is privileged as the voice of decentering and dislocation, but denied the potentiality of recentering and relocating. Time is understood as the time of futural transition is which the old is undone and the new is unnameable nothingness.

Deconstructive theology unifies the metonymic elements of self, other, world, and time not by a positive synecdoche but by the sny- ecdochic deferral of any unifying symbol: nothing unifies or centers the play of intertextuality. Support for deconstructive theology is sought above all in the texts of Jacques Derrida, which lives off what Maurice Blanchot calls "the amazing power of the negative" (Bruns: 14) that exists between sign and signified as well as texts and contexts. The power of the negative is the power of temporality, undoing any fixity or presence of meaning and subverting the unity of truth-and thus God-into errant wandering as the living death of God. Theology is always the hidden target of deconstruction, which indiscriminately calls into question and casts into doubt's shadow whatever comes in its way. For any standing meaning, which deconstruction forces into exile, purports to offer a true account of something and Truth is the philosophical figure of God. Deconstruction is committed to showing the nothingness behind, before, and within all standing meanings that claim to participate in Truth-in God-and in so doing perpetrate a lie. Thus for deconstruction, traditional discourse is always theological




discourse in the West-its logocentrism and claim to truth reveal that. And all deconstructive moves against pretenses of abiding logos may be called theological in the postmodern, deconstructive sense; its truth is the untruth of language and life in appealing beyond itself.

Again, certain of these tendencies unfold in Heidegger's own later corpus. But Heidegger throughout retained the ironic relation between being and nothing. Being is unthinkable for Heidegger; con- ceptually it is equivalent to nothing. Nonetheless we encounter nothingness in anxiety and overcome it in courage. The nothingness of being as time is manifest for Heidegger preeminently in the figure of authentic timing-the "I" of authenticity. Heidegger's intention always was to glimpse being through becoming oneself authentically by claiming one's own mortal freedom. Authenticity is not a representation of a transcendental signified but the self's recovery of its own mortality. Moreover, truth for Heidegger is no longer merely the correspondence between what is said and what is so; it is the prior enabling structure of unveiling (aletheia) that makes possible anything like correspondence. Thus Heidegger preserves ironic presencing of the primordial in the withdrawal of being from thought: Nothing is a symbol of the self's encounter with its own truth for Heidegger, not merely a power from which to derive a technique of undercutting as in Derrida. Heidegger, in other words, has a synecdoche of reflexivity through which being is ironically present. Derrida self-consciously defers synecdoche, because the free play of reflexivity for him must deny all claims of primordial presence.

The deconstructive type errs in its extreme appropriation of Heidegger. By giving free reign to reflexivity while deferring its figur- ation in synecdoche, deconstruction turns the Heideggerian "primordiality of absence" into the "absence of primordiality" (Caputo: 191-200). As a negative theology, it fails to disclose the divine or the authentically human. Moreover, deconstruction gives the impression of championing the other-the marginal, the outsider, the feminine, and any others. But in fact it abuses the other by denying the possibility of dialogue. Deconstruction does not enter into conver- sation with the other; it does not inquire with the other about what concerns the other. Deconstruction ends dialogue by refusing to listen to the other so that the other can answer back. The negative swirl of "erring" dissolves both subject matter and dialogue partner in nar- cissistic monologue in which the cleverness of one's own mind and the wit of one's own tongue compensate for the absence of a discussion partner. In its inaccessibility to dialogue, it is unresponsive and irre- sponsible (Bruns: 15). Finally, deconstruction is morally and ethically impoverished. Deferral of synecdoche and refusal to listen means no call of conscience, no voice of silence urges the "I" back to authentic-




ity. The decision to become oneself authentically is deferred along with the disclaimer of presence.

Once again, my problem is not to place actual texts within types of postmodern theology, but merely to construct the types on rhetorical grounds. But I consider the listed texts by Mark C. Taylor and Carl Raschke to fall under this heading.2

HERMENEUTICAL RESPONSE

The confessional type of theology accepts its traditional synecdochic representation of God as God's own (exclusive?) self-presenta- tion; it intolerably narrows the gap between symbol of God and God. The deconstructive type rejects any and all synecdochic representa- tions of God on the grounds that making present is always deferral; just as intolerably, it follows the death of God into abyssful namelessness. Hermeneutics plays the mercurial role of mediating between presence and absence in the synecdoche of God. It allies itself neither with merely handing on the faith of the community nor with subverting it; hermeneutics wishes to understand what the tradition has to say within a new situation, and this always means to enter into dialogue with it. What would it mean, hermeneutics asks both the Barthian and Heideggerian wings of tradition, for a synecdochic figure to show us the hidden wholeness of our situation of encountering otherness?

Hermeneutics begins by appropriating the ironic dimension of discourse: it does not need deconstruction to inform it that whatever is said or shown can never completely succeed or fail at achieving presence. Hermeneutics understands that whatever is said or shown as it is also manifests what it is not. Recall Burke's "ironic formula": what goes forth as A returns as non-A (517). The hermeneutical consciousness neither retreats from the nonbeing irony presents, nor rushes forth to lose itself in its mazes, but rather seeks to understand the tradition in the temporal movement irony manifests. Irony discloses the temporality of our linguistic being in the world and with it, our openness to the other. The confessional response to human mortality as evident in temporality is to retreat to our time and thus to give it a familiar face. The deconstructive response to time's power of negation is to dance in aberrant carnival, thereby to shake the dust of the past from its feet. The hermeneutical response to temporal existence is to mediate the tradition into the future, to project the future by interpreting tradition. After all, "It is that to which we belong and which we are, and it is that which we seek to understand" (Bruns: 22).

Accordingly, the hermeneutical type receives and hands on the

2 Again, my placement of these texts within the deconstructive response calls for close reading and discussion of these texts. It ought not to be taken as a dismissal.




Barthian synecdoche of Jesus Christ as symbol of God. But it mediates the meaning of this symbol into the new situation in which encounter with the other figures so importantly. From the standpoint of hermeneutics, the symbol itself calls for response by displaying a thoroughgo- ing openness to the other, an openness that reflects authentic acceptance of temporality and finitude. Since Heidegger functions paradigmatically as Barth's other, hermeneutics can mediate Barth through Heidegger and the reverse. In either direction, the synecdoche displays the divine in a symbol of the self's ability to become itself through what is not itself but is other than itself. Moreover, the hermeneutical type accepts the reflexive trope of irony.

For hermeneutics, to be attentive to irony means that to understand anything at all we must engage in dialogue with it, listening and responding to the multiple versions of what is coming to language. And reflexivity means that in listening and responding hermeneutics strives for two things: on one hand, to resist reducing the other to the same by drawing the other into my world of meaning; on the other, to listen to what is questionable in my own voice while realizing that no party to dialogue occupies the atemporal seat of neutral spectatorship. As mortals we are finitely situated within the give and take of dialogue, where we find matters of common concern refracting in an open- ended play of language. The central interest of this type of theology is to open itself both to the otherness of tradition in its temporality and to the encounter with the human other through the tradition. Let me now indicate how the hermeneutical type of theology might interpret the synecdochic and ironic moments of tropology.

Interpreting the Christian symbolism of Karl Barth, hermeneutical theology can understand the figure of Jesus in the gospels as the synecdochic inbreaking of the divine that gathers together self, other, world, and time. In actual existence, the self is estranged from itself, the other, the world, and God. Under conditions of estrangement, by the power of God's grace in Christ, the self may encounter itself and its God in what is other than itself and God. In the drama of redemption, I-the sinner-may exhaust myself in the effort to be righteous in God's eyes and hear only God's judgment. But the No of judgment may become the Yes of grace, if through the preached gospel I find my true self in what is not me but the other I that I am not. This comes with the recognition of Jesus Christ as my own genuine "I." Barth wrote: "He is the man who has passed from death to life. He is-what I am not-my existential I-I-the I which in God, in the freedom of God-I am! (269)." These crucial words record the recognition of the I in the other and return of the I to itself in a new God-centered subjectivity.




How does this image speak to the situation of encounter with otherness? For the Barthian, Jesus presents a synecdoche of existence in faith enabling a transformation of the self in its relatedness to self, other, and world. The redeemed self is shaped by the images of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Hegel can help us understand Barth: through hearing the gospel story, the self reenacts the stages of transformation through blind estrangement (Jesus is first outside as not-I, the other), recognition of estrangement (I find my own authentic self in Jesus as other; I see his being as my own otherness), and finally the overturning of estrangement (the I found in the otherness of Jesus returns through his death and resurrection as my own, an I reoriented to self, world, and God through Christ).

Understood hermeneutically, this synecdochic inbreaking of otherness means three things. First, the figure of Jesus presents not only the meaning of authentic human being in faith but also the being of God. How so? The symbol not only presents me with the "I" of faith as my own otherness but also discloses what it means for God to be God-namely, not to be aloof, impersonal deity but to be approaching each I with its own otherness (Scharlemann: 134-41). Jesus, symbol of authentic faith, is symbol of God only through the cross of Christ- through Jesus' own denial that Jesus is God (Tillich: 123-25). The symbol of God denies that it literally is God and thus affirms itself as symbol of God. Second, the synecdoche permits the unbeliever to remain other than the believer. Jesus denies that he is God and yet performs the being of God. But in denying his own divinity, he grants truth to those others who also deny him special status and do not see him as symbol of God. The cross of Christ allows the person who sees nothing special in the figure of Jesus to remain other (Scharlemann: 177-82). Third, the synecdoche allows for multiple appearances of the same meaning in other figures. Barth, of course, would violently disagree, but we are looking only at the synecdoche of Jesus as appearance of authentic faith and symbol of God. How might this occur?

Consider Heidegger's account of the overturning of estrangement. For Heidegger also, the self encounters the genuine "I" external to itself, as other, where "I" should not be. This encounter is possible because "For the most part I myself am not the 'who' of Dasein; the they-self is the 'who' "(312). In the mood of anxiety, anticipating my own death, Dasein first recognizes its lostness in the "they" and hears the voice of conscience as nothing at all-the nothingness of authentic subjectivity. The otherness of the nothing reveals itself as my own otherness-my own authentic selfhood encountered outside me in anxiety. The "I" returns, transforming relations to self, other, world, and time, through Dasein's wanting to have a conscience and resolutely setting the will.




For Barth, the "I" shows itself only in the person of Jesus Christ, whose being is grace. For Heidegger, the "I" appears as the presence of nothingness, to which the will responds with resoluteness. The two primary experiences seem to be irreconcilably different. But the hermeneutical consciousness can understand these two experiences as separate manifestations of the same event. I can understand myself encountering my own otherness-the otherness of authentic life-at one time under the particular description of hearing the story of Jesus and at another time under the different description of anticipating my own death. In each case the "I" appears in what is not-I and then triggers the overturning of otherness. Moreover, the reflexivity of the hermeneutical consciousness can reconcile the passivity of Barth's account of receiving grace with the activity of Heidegger's account of willing to have a conscience by seeing these as two phases of a single struggle in which my most genuine effort is met by an enabling power (Buber, 1923: 62). The crucial feature of the hermeneutical dialogue of self and other is the ability to understand the same meaning of being-the authentic "I"-in different appearances. This permits us to retain religious symbols as the presence/absence of the signified reality. And it permits us to understand how other symbols than our own might manifest the "I" of authentic being in the world. How does this bear on the formulation of God by hermeneutical theology? I refer again to the irony in the rhetorics of Barth and Heidegger.

For Barth, God signifies both the one final agent and no one or nothing; for Heidegger, being signifies both the one connecting process and nothing. For Barth, God is not being; for Heidegger, being is not God. But the hermeneutical consciousness understands the doubleness in one language to connect with the doubleness in the other. Barth's language of God as one and only, the numinous presence of God, finds its counterpart in Heidegger's language of the withdrawal of being in anxiety. Heidegger's language of the presence of nothing finds its counterpart in Barth's language of God as not-God and no one. The names God and being each point to the other for fullness of meaning, and that mutual pointing reminds us that the full content of religious experience is caught only in the back and forth movement of reflexivity as it responds to God (who is not God) on one side and opens itself to being (which is nothing) on the other side. The ironic formula for the being of God suggested for hermeneutics is "God is God in the play of identity and difference between God and being." This formula appropriates both the language of the wholly other God and the language of the meaning of being, while respecting differences.

The strength of hermeneutics to avoid the difficulties of confessional and deconstructive theologies should be clear. By entering into




dialogue with symbols, it avoids either reifying or dispelling them. By understanding the relation between self and symbol, it preserves the openness of the symbol to the other and the other's symbols. But by adopting the reflexive posture of hermeneutical consciousness, hermeneutics exposes its own fragility. Hermeneutics focuses on the primary religious relations established between selves and symbols in texts and existence. It demands a feeling for and a memory of what it means to enter into those primary relations. But to reflect on the relation is different than to enter into it.

This poses the postmodern predicament for hermeneutical theology: Can the second naivete of hermeneutics, which can orchestrate various primary languages without eliding differences, recover the vitality and power of the primary relations these languages express? Or does the reflexive posture, so rich in interpreted meaning, find itself poor in religious experience? Its own relation to the religious reality is always indirect, mediated through its understanding of the meaning of primary symbols. Its gain of a reflexive stance and a reflexive dimension of the religious reality seems offset by loss of primary immediacy. This, it seems to me, is the price of hermeneutical consciousness: to be and not to be in the presence of religious reality. The joy and anxiety of hermeneutics live in that tension, which defines the postmodern predicament.

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Toward a Rhetoric of Postmodern Theology: Through Barth and Heidegger