Textual indeterminacy and determinacy: Klaus Berger's history-of-effect hermeneutic

Abstract

This article analyzes the Lucan discipleship text (Luke 9:57-62) using Klaus Berger's history-of-effect (wirkungsgeschtliche) hermeneutic. After reviewing the text's reception history and Berger's rhetorical approach, it is argued that Berger's history-of-effect hermeneutic explains both why and how Luke 9:57-62 has had a consistent impact within Christian reading communities. The consistent reception is attributed to the teleological orientation of the text's rhetorical strategy as well as to the location of the meaning-center between text and reader. The resulting effect is both indeterminate and determinate. This dual character explains why the text can be experienced in flexible uniformity with its formative situation.

**********

The objective of this article is to analyze the Lucan discipleship text (Luke 9:57-62) using Klaus Berger's history-of-effect hermeneutic.

At a 1992 conference, Klaus Berger briefly outlined the main thrust of his Second Testament hermeneutic which links form, content, and effect (Berger 1993). The six-page article was a sample of the history-of-effect hermeneutic that the Heidelberg scholar has described more fully in his previous German publications (e.g., Berger 1984).

The reason for considering Berger's approach is two-fold. First, the discipleship text has a reception tradition within Christian communities of functioning uniformly yet with distinction. In other words, the text functions to control its general meaning, but then within this determinacy, there is a certain indeterminacy. This will be illustrated below. I will argue that Berger's hermeneutic, which combines both a text's rhetorical strategy and a reader's reception strategy, helps to explain this effect.

The second observation is that the discussion of the rhetorical aspects of this text (Robbins 1989; Henderson: 301-05) raises the question of the link between rhetoric and hermeneutic. Although in opposing ways, both of these studies work to explain the text's rhetorical strategy. I will argue that Berger's approach helps to clarify the debate and the hermeneutical issues involved.

The text of Luke 9:57-62 reads as follows:

   As they were going along the road, someone said to him, "I will follow you
   wherever you go." And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds of
   the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." To
   another he said, "Follow me." But he said, "Lord, first let me go and bury
   my father." But Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead; but
   as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." Another said, "I will
   follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home." Jesus
   said to him, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for
   the kingdom of God" [NRSV].

Review of the Text's Reception

The reception of Luke 9:57-62 can be characterized as essentially uniform. The basic meaning of the text is seldom questioned. There is no evidence that Christians did away with burial rights on the basis of the command to "let the dead bury their own dead." Nor have most Christians understood that they were no longer to have a home or to say farewell to friends and relatives.

The text has always been read by commentators as a discipleship text. For example, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) used the text to warn Christian disciples of pride: "One man offered himself to follow him, and was disallowed; another did not dare this, and was aroused; a third put off, and was blamed" (397).

Martin Luther (1483-1546) also referred to this text when speaking of how the patriarch Isaac demonstrated faith by living every day "in the world without the world and outside the world" (5:8). For Luther, the command "Let the dead bury their own dead; you go and proclaim the kingdom of God" was illustrative of the distinction between the two kingdoms--"the temporal and the spiritual" (46: 266).

Jean Calvin (1509-1564) explained the denied request to bury the father as follows:

   Whatever duties we owe to [others] must give way, when God enjoins upon us
   what is immediately due to himself. All ought to consider what God requires
   from them as individuals, and what is demanded by their particular calling
   [389].

For Calvin, discipleship was framed in the context of measured individual reflection in light of the sovereign claims of God.

Martin Hengel (1924--) focused on the absoluteness of the discipleship commitment which exceeds the Elijah. Elisha relation in the biblical tradition or the teacher-pupil relation in the rabbinical tradition. For Hengel, the unconditional nature of following Jesus "can no longer primarily be understood from the standpoint of the effectiveness of Jesus as a `teacher,' but it is to be explained only on the basis of his unique authority as the proclaimer of the imminent Kingdom of God" (15). Thus, from its earliest reception through to the present, the text has challenged would-be disciples with the demands of discipleship.