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Bultmann on "die Sachkritik"

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Perhaps another way of clarifying the same difference is to say that talk about "die Sache" of the text, or, in English, what the text is about, is ambiguous, insofar as it can refer either to a reality beyond the text or to the meaning of the text, as distinct from the text itself. By "die Sachkritik," then, * one can mean either critical validation of the claim of the text to be appropriate to the reality beyond it that it is about – and this is what I mean by a "transcendent criticism" -- or critical interpretation of the text, of what the text says, by reference to what it means, i.e., by reference to the question it asks and its answer to this question -- which is what I mean by an "immanent criticism."

I now see more clearly than I once did that such an immanent criticism can and should take both a historical or hermeneutical and a philosophical form. In the case of the historical or hermeneutical form, immanent criticism consists in criticizing individual expressions of meaning by reference to the meaning they more or less adequately express. In the case of the philosophical form, by contrast, immanent criticism consists in critcizing individual expressions of meaning by reference to the kind(s) of meaning of which they are more or less adequate expressions.

Wiki MarkupBut, if I understand him correctly, what Bultmann means by "_die Sachkritik_," which is to say, "_eine Kritik ..., die zwischen Gesagtem und Gemeintem unterscheidet und das Gesagte am Gemeinten misst_" ("_Das Problem einer theologischen Exegese des Neuen Testaments_": 340 \ [53)), goes beyond both of these forms of immanent criticism to include, or even to be, a transcendent criticism. It is, in fact, his way of conceptualizing the kind of criticism Luther understood and practiced by measuring even the teaching of the apostles by whether or not they "push Christ." Or, again, it is the properly "critical" procedure that Marxsen distinguishes as "_die Sachkontrolle_" from the strictly "historical" procedure of "_die Exegese_." As such, however, it is, in my view, as in Marxsen's if not in Luther's, the proper business of systematic theology, as distinct from historical theology or New Testament theology.

13 April 1994