Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 84:2 (Fall 2022)
Article: Eclipsing "Mimesis": A Theological Case For Hans Frei’s “Special Hermeneutics”
Author: Jacob D. Myers

WTJ 84:2 (Fall 2022) p. 245

Eclipsing Mimesis:
A Theological Case For Hans Frei’s “Special Hermeneutics”

Jacob D. Myers

Jacob D. Myers is the Wade P. Huie Jr. Associate Professor of Homiletics at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA.

Centuries after figural readings of Scripture had fallen out of fashion, Hans W. Frei resurrected this hermeneutic in an effort to restore a unitary understanding of the Bible. Such a hermeneutic was made doubly difficult by the History of Religions school on the left and the biblical theology movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the right. Frei’s Barthian inspired theological intervention found support in the literary critical work of Erich Auerbach, who argued that the Bible was best characterized as a history-like or realistic narrative. As such, Scripture’s ultimate meaning emerges neither from its ostensive reference nor its mythological form. As a realistic narrative, biblical meaning—especially of those stories with a supernatural orientation—can be unlocked neither by external positioning (ostensive reference) nor by recategorization (myth). Rather, in Frei’s mind, textual meaning and biblical unity can only emerge from a “special hermeneutics” that treats biblical texts as unique-in-kind insofar as they render a real world for the reader. Focusing on Frei’s solicitation of Auerbach’s argument in the former’s seminal text The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, this article presents an overview of Frei’s hermeneutical argument in critical conversation with Auerbach’s equally ground-breaking monograph Mimesis. The study concludes with an appraisal of Frei’s strategic use of Auerbach as a key component of postliberal theology, arguing ultimately that Auerbach’s literary workaround, while helpful, cannot supplant that which Barth deemed fundamental to a proper interpretation of Scripture, namely, faith.

The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor,
they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us—
they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels.

—Erich Auerbach1

WTJ 84:2 (Fall 2022) p. 246

Hans Frei followed Karl Barth’s break with nineteenth-century theological liberalism. He regarded Barth’s action as nothing less than a radical reorienting of the theological enterprise. The theological radicality Frei perceived in Barth’s early writings necessitated an equally radical hermeneutic, namely, one that is attuned to the freedom and agency of God as revealed in Scripture.2 Frei came to regard Erich Auerbach as an ally in his ...