Hans Frei and the ‘Yale School’ of narrative theology he inaugurated are often understood to be Barthian in orientation. Although this appellation should be nuanced in the case of some of Frei's followers, one need not hesitate about using it to describe Frei, at least if the appellation refers to Frei's self-conscious and intentional alignment with Barth's project. When writers describe Frei as ‘Barthian’, typically what they seem to mean is that Frei shares Barth's dislike of apologetics. If Barth argued that the best apologetics is a good dogmatics, Frei argues that Christian theology should eschew apologetics and limit itself to Christian self-description.Footnote ¹ At various points in his career, Frei himself has tried to explicate this stance and to provide arguments in support of it. Many have found these explications dense or obtuse, and only rarely have the origins and contours of Frei's engagement with Barth been treated in the secondary literature.Footnote ² Although several very good biographical sketches have been published,Footnote ³ so far as I am aware, only two pieces have been published that address Frei's dissertation on Barth. The first did not undertake any substantive analysis of Barth's theological method. Instead, it provides a very fine treatment of the form and structure of the dissertation.Footnote ⁴ The second, by the same author, Mike Higton, contains a much more substantive analysis of Barth's dissertation, though its focus is quite different from mine. Higton highlights, as I do here, the importance to Frei of Barth's protest against ‘relationalism’. But Higton also brings out Frei's objection to Barth's ‘epistemological monophysitism’, which indicates the direction of Higton's analysis. Higton's excellent treatment of Frei's early work seeks to show Frei's early orientation as a theologian primarily concerned to develop a theology which can do justice to concrete historical life. As such, Higton argues, in Frei's hands (pace some of Frei's critics) theology is truly public.Footnote ⁵

Frei's dissertation itself remains unpublished, with the exception of an oddly edited abridgement that appeared ten years after Frei's untimely death.Footnote ⁶ In my view, however, Frei's dissertation on Barth, and especially his treatment of Barth's method, is of signal importance in that it sets the agenda and orientation for much, if not all, of Frei's later work. Consequently, rather than integrating a discussion of Frei's dissertation into a larger treatment of Frei's early work, as Higton's very fine book does, what I hope to do in this paper is to analyse Frei's dissertation on Barth. Further, I shall largely ignore Frei's criticism of Barth's ‘epistemological monophysitism’ and focus on his treatment of Barth's protest against relationalism, picking out three themes that in my view were most important to Frei's own theological project. These themes – the primacy of ontology over epistemology, the subordination of method to positive affirmations about God and the conformance of interpretative method both to Barth's methodological commitments and to his affirmations about God – are the subject of separate sections. After discussing Frei's dissertation on Barth, I shall conclude by making a few comments about the way these themes inform Frei's later work.

The influence of Frei's dissertation on Barth

Frei wrote his doctoral dissertation, ‘The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth, 1909–1922: The Nature of Barth's Break with Liberalism’, under H. Richard Niebuhr.Footnote ⁷ It was completed in 1956, and it concerned the changes that Barth's theological method underwent as a result of his break with liberalism. As he wrote his dissertation, Frei became convinced that Barth's break with liberalism was the most important event in Protestant theology in the modern period.Footnote ⁸ Fundamentally, on Frei's reading, Barth believed that theology must move away from an anthropological starting point if it is to avoid Feuerbach's critique. To escape from Feuerbach, Barth sought to subordinate not only theological anthropology, but also theological method, to positive ontological affirmations about God. Writing a half century later, Frei takes a similar ‘neo-Barthian’ move to be theology's best defence against deconstructionist critics. Frei's fear of deconstruction and his belief that the kind of hermeneutic method practised by David Tracy and Paul Ricoeur is vulnerable to it bear remarkable resemblances to Barth's fear of Feuerbach and Barth's belief that nineteenth-century liberal theology was vulnerable to Feuerbach's argument that theological claims about God were merely projections of anthropological beliefs about human beings. Frei believes that deconstructionist critique of hermeneutic theory (whose instantiation in theology Frei sees as the most prominent heir of modern liberal theology) is structurally very similar to that of Feuerbach. Consequently, he sees his own project as a continuation of Barth's.Footnote ⁹

To summarise briefly, in his dissertation Frei elucidates three themes in Barth, all of which are designed to move Barth's theological thinking away from its anthropological starting point. First, as he makes his break from liberalism, Barth begins to emphasise the priority of ontology over epistemology.Footnote ¹⁰ In Barth's view, one of the things that made liberal theology subject to Feuerbach's critique was that it began with epistemological considerations and then refused to make claims that could not meet its epistemic criteria. After the break, Barth insists that theology must begin with ontological affirmations about God, and these affirmations are given in the incarnation and the testimony to it in the Bible. Frei makes a very similar move in insisting on the priority of the biblical narrative in theology. The second theme is closely related to the first and concerns theological method. After the break, Barth insists that theological method must be subordinate to, and be governed by, positive ontological statements about God, a position derived from Barth's prioritising of ontology over epistemology. It implies that theology cannot be truly systematic, because Barth believes that all true systematising will be anthropologically and epistemologically driven. Frei likewise insists that theological method must be governed by the revelation of God given in the biblical narratives. The third theme is interpretation of the biblical texts. Barth insists that interpretative method must be governed by his methodological commitments and his ontological affirmations about God. In the next three sections I shall address these themes in more detail from Frei's dissertation on Barth.

The primacy of ontology over epistemology

First, Barth's break with liberalism reversed the relation of ontology to epistemology. Before the break (i.e. prior to 1915), epistemology not only determined the agenda of theology, but was conceptually prior as well. During his liberal phase, Barth understood one of the theologian's most important tasks to be that of finding normative conceptions to express the experience of Christ. In his dissertation, Frei views this task as fundamentally epistemological: it is concerned with ‘the possibility of knowing God and saying something significant about that “knowledge”’. Footnote ¹¹ Barth is not as concerned, that is, with the fact or notion of revelation in itself as with the rational explication of revelatory experience.Footnote ¹² This epistemological concern marks Barth as a liberal during this period, as does his basic ‘relational’ approach to the problem (an approach or method of Ineinanderstellung). There must be some mode or capacity in human beings, on this approach, that permits them to receive God's revelation.Footnote ¹³

When Barth came to consider the question of God, however, Barth was haunted from the beginning by the ghost of Feuerbach. There is an obvious antinomy in the particular concrete encounter with God, which is an experience of positive or particular revelation, and the universal or transcendent nature of God. Even in his liberal period, or at least the latter part of it, Barth refuses to resolve this antinomy, because, among other things, he wants to resist Feuerbach's charge that God is nothing more than human wishes projected onto a transcendent plane. This refusal leaves Barth with a dialectic in thought form that provides a continuity with his post-liberal dialectical method.Footnote ¹⁴ In Frei's view, what is novel in Barth's break with liberalism is not, therefore, his dialectical method, but his ‘rejection of immediate experience as the source of faith’.Footnote ¹⁵ Barth was also concerned, during the liberal period, with the primacy of God, and he rejects any notion of cooperation in which divine and human work constitute cooperating means toward grace. Before the break, he sees the method of Ineinanderstellung as preventing such cooperation. After the break, however, he comes to regard this method as a conceptualisation of divine–human cooperation and therefore rejects it.Footnote ¹⁶

Even after the break with liberalism, epistemology continued to have a strong influence on the direction of Barth's theology, in Frei's view, but its relation to ontology changes. During the most strongly dialectical period, ontology and epistemology seem to be collapsed into one another.Footnote ¹⁷ After the second edition of Der Römerbrief, however, ontology begins to assume a conceptual primacy. By the time of Barth's book on Anselm, the conceptual primacy of ontology is largely accomplished. After the break, in other words, the basis of the knowledge of God does not lie in any immanent relation between human existence and God, nor in immediate experience or Ineinanderstellung. Instead, ‘The ground and possibility of knowledge of God lies within the nature of God as he reveals himself of his own free grace. Hence, the epistemological judgement of faith is in ordo essendi (which is also normative for the ordo cognoscendi) preceded by, and based on a judgement of objective, ontic reality – the reality of God.’Footnote ¹⁸

According to Frei, the priority of ontology is the result of Barth's engagement with the biblical realists.Footnote ¹⁹ For them, the activity of the Holy Spirit and scripture are correlated in the Word of God.Footnote ²⁰ This is what enables Barth to assert the primacy of God's revealing activity even in the area of the knowledge of God.Footnote ²¹ This correlation of Spirit and scripture in the Word of God, a correlation that is carried out wholly by divine action, is the ground not only of our relationship with God, but also of our knowledge of God.Footnote ²² Barth's basic dogmatic plan, then, is as follows: ‘the content of revelation is the Word of God; the objective ground and possibility of revelation is the Incarnation of the Word of God; the subjective actuality and possibility of revelation lies in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.’Footnote ²³ This is what Frei calls Barth's radical realism, and it is characteristic of his break with liberalism. It is the avenue through which Barth attempts to avoid relationalism on the one hand and fundamentalism on the other. For his part, Frei will also attempt to navigate between two shoals: on the one hand, a liberal scheme of understanding into which biblical texts must fit, and a fundamentalist literalism on the other. In the later 1920s and 1930s, however, Barth argues that, in this correlating act of God, God becomes analogous to ‘that which it creates in the recipient: faith as obedience – including rational obedience’.Footnote ²⁴ Even this analogy, however, is grounded in the free activity of God, and it is this grounding in which Barth's assertion of the primacy of ontology over epistemology consists.Footnote ²⁵

The subordination of method to positive affirmations about God

The second theme that is important to Frei is that of theological method, and this theme has three thematic submoments. The first is closely related to the primacy of ontology over epistemology. Despite this primacy of ontology, on Frei's reading, Barth's basic concern remains epistemological: how are we to understand (or come to rational belief about) the relation of humanity to God? Throughout his career, both before and after the break with liberalism, the relation of humanity to God has primacy – indeed, a kind of transcendental primacy – over all other human relations.Footnote ²⁶ But the way Barth comes to understand this relation changes after the break. In the liberal period, the relation itself was primary; it could be extrapolated from anthropology. After the break, however, the relation can no longer be understood ‘from below’. Humanity can never make its way to God. Knowledge of God can no longer come by inferring a relation to our creator on the basis of an understanding of creation or of human experience. That is, our epistemic access to God must be construed in light of the primacy of Barth's ontological affirmations about God. Methodologically, this means that the doctrine of revelation must move into the foreground and become asymmetrical.Footnote ²⁷ As it does, the objective content of revelation becomes conceptually independent of and prior to understanding.Footnote ²⁸ Searching for God along the path from the finite to the infinite is impossible, for all one sees is the ‘constantly receding limits of finitude’. On the other hand, ‘if one sees the path from the infinite to the finite, one sees God in his relation to his creature. . . . But this path, this view of God in his relation to his creature is possible only for God himself.’Footnote ²⁹ Thus relationalism is impossible, because ‘there is no synthesis between the endeavor of man seeking to relate himself to God, and God's relating of himself to man’.Footnote ³⁰ In Frei's view, this constitutes Barth's break with liberalism: Barth no longer construes human experience as constituted by a relation between faith and its object such that an analysis of human experience as such can yield any knowledge of God.Footnote ³¹ So construed, this break means that the relation of humanity to God must be a derivative from the doctrine of God.Footnote ³²

Barth's problem, then, his ‘enduring concern’ after the liberal phase, is, as Frei puts it, to find ‘a proper understanding of the relation of God to man within a proper doctrine of God’.Footnote ³³ This will give him the clue to the proper theological method. The starting point for finding this understanding of God's relation to us is Jesus Christ. Thus Barth's Christocentricity carries forward from the liberal period throughout Barth's career. After the break, though, Christ is no longer conceptually a step along a path from humanity to God. Instead, the doctrine of the incarnation is also a derivative from the doctrine of God, and this, Frei argues, accounts for the growing importance of the doctrine of predestination in Barth's thought. Theology must be Christocentric simply because of God's act of predestination.Footnote ³⁴ According to Frei, ‘The question about Jesus Christ is no longer, why is he and not someone else the actualiser of our religious experience? The issue instead is to find the eternal ground for Jesus Christ's incarnation within the objective ground of the relation of God to man.’Footnote ³⁵

Frei's reading of Barth's writings on christology outlined the following problem: ‘is the relation in faith to Jesus Christ the clue to the understanding of faith, history and revelation? Or, is it conversely true that Jesus Christ is a fact understood from the prior perspective of a theological and/or philosophical system?’Footnote ³⁶ After the break, Barth insists that any resolution of this issue must sharply distinguish between the divine and human dimensions. Frei asserts that one can do this in three ways: ‘by sheer proclamation, i.e., by the refusal to allow methodology to predominate; by “dialectic” or by analogy’.Footnote ³⁷ Barth tried all these ways. The writing of the second edition of Der Römerbrief was a strongly dialectical effort, and by the time of the book on Anselm he was using a doctrine of analogy. But throughout all his post-break changes, he sought to have his positive affirmations about God govern not only the content of his thought, but his method as well.

This refusal of primacy to method is the second thematic submoment of Frei's concern with theological method in Barth. Even during his liberal period Barth had stressed the primacy of God. He followed Schleiermacher during this period in refusing to see faith as independent of revelation. Thus, when Barth attempts to stress the ‘absolute priority, independence, and sovereignty’ of God's grace, for Frei this means pre-eminently to work out both a theological method and an understanding of our knowledge of God in terms of God's priority, independence and sovereignty.Footnote ³⁸ After the break, this emphasis on the methodological priority of God eventually developed into a consistent doctrine of predestination.Footnote ³⁹ There were other continuities as well, including Barth's Christocentricity. During the liberal period, Barth saw christology as the only content of theology, which must be expressed in a relational form. After the break, christology remains the only content of theology, but it now becomes an eschatological notion giving content to the proper object of theology, the Word of God.Footnote ⁴⁰

On Frei's view, Barth walks a fine line between two opposing dangers.Footnote ⁴¹ On the one hand, he could capitulate to the liberals by translating (or transliterating) the Word of God into his own conceptual forms. On the other, he could remain purely critical, making only dialectical statements, thus consigning theology to prolegomena that could never get beyond method to substantive content.Footnote ⁴² If he wanted to move past criticism to a constructive phase – i.e. positive knowledge of God – Frei poses his problem thus: how can we have any knowledge of God at all without, on the one hand, positing some immediate divine–human complementarity within human nature that survives the fall, or, on the other, relying on a supernatural revelation that sunders faith and reason?Footnote ⁴³ To achieve positive knowledge of God while avoiding these twin sirens, Barth needs to subordinate theological method to the substantive content of his doctrine of God. But the problem is how to effect this subordination without falling back on a pre-rational (or supra-rational) supernatural revelation. It was his study of Anselm that provided Barth with the breakthrough that helped him address this question. For Barth, Anselm regards faith as a call to cognitive understanding, through which we participate (in a limited way) in God's mode of being. Faith is not faith, therefore, unless it involves right belief. ‘Faith, he insists after Anselm, is relative to the “Word of Christ’, and is reception, knowledge, affirmation of this Word.’Footnote ⁴⁴

An important ingredient in Barth's methodological breakthrough, and one that exercises a pervasive influence on Frei, is that there can be no separation of form from content.Footnote ⁴⁵ Thus, not only the content of theology, but the form as well must be brought under the lordship of Christ. Theological method cannot be prolegomena, but must be consistent with its substantive claims, especially its claims about God. In order to fulfil this intention, in Frei's view, Barth gave a leading role to the content of revelation and sought to have this content determine his method.Footnote ⁴⁶ The content of revelation is concrete, undialectical and prior to dialectic. Thus, dialectic cannot synthesise its formal and material elements.Footnote ⁴⁷ Barth's breakthrough consists in the fact that ‘content, or rather the object, constantly dominates the thought-form in Barth's understanding. Hence, thought-form and the meaning of its content are never properly and systematically balanced in his thought.’Footnote ⁴⁸

Finally (the third thematic submoment of Barth's method), Frei is particularly interested in Barth's opposition to systematising. Indeed, the place of his principal critique is in this area. After the break with liberalism, Barth continued to maintain some form of the continuing immediate presence of God to creation. Yet without some kind of relational complementarity – i.e. in denying that anything about God can be read off creation – it is difficult to conceive God's immediate presence. So relationalism continued to influence Barth in that it kept epistemological concerns within Barth's field of concern. In addition, it kept Barth concerned with theological method. Barth insists that the objective content of revelation cannot be limited by predetermined epistemological limits. Thus Frei argues that the task that preoccupies Barth after the break is how to articulate ‘the manner in which the complete primacy, uniqueness, and subjecthood of God conditions from the very outset the manner in which we may know him’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Barth tries to accomplish this task by insisting that the Word of God is both the content of theology and the basis of theological method. But this insistence presents Barth with a problem: how can this insistence be made to cohere with the freedom, spontaneity and subjectivity of human beings? Ultimately, Barth finds the answer to this question in the doctrine of double predestination. Through this doctrine, the free grace of God can be the basis of the freedom, spontaneity and subjecthood of human beings.Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, our freedom is not grounded in any ‘given’ relational complementarity through which God's freedom can be understood. Instead, it is the free act of God in speaking God's Word to us that funds both human subjectivity and our knowledge of the freedom and sovereignty of God. Revelation is therefore based on the doctrine of God alone (through the doctrine of the Word of God), and natural theology is ruled out. In this way, Barth was able to assert the sovereignty of God not only over our destiny, but over our epistemic access to God as well. At the same time, if God is known only through God's freely spoken Word, theological method must be founded on this same doctrine of the Word of God, and in doing so Barth is able to assert the absolute primacy and sovereignty of God over theological method as well.Footnote ⁵¹

Frei takes this move to have radical implications for theological method. It means, first, that there can be no independent or objective standpoint from which to view the relation of Creator and creature. Second, any method that takes the free and sovereign grace of God as its sole focus cannot produce any theological system.Footnote ⁵² Theology must therefore remain critical, and cannot take a constructive turn.Footnote ⁵³ ‘For dialectic is incapable of providing positive theological content’.Footnote ⁵⁴ This is why, in Frei's view, Barth finally made the turn to the analogia fidei, and it is this analogy that enables him to defend his positive, constructive claims, as well as to provide more coherence to his thought. But it is precisely here that Frei believes he runs the greatest risk of betraying his insight that systematising must be resisted. And it is here that Frei's appraisal of Barth takes its most critical turn:

The conformance of interpretative method to Barth's methodological commitments and affirmations about God

The first two themes, then, that Frei takes from Barth are that epistemology must be subordinate to ontology, and that this priority of ontology has implications for theological method. That is, method must be subordinate to a doctrine of God (i.e. our epistemic access to God can only be ascertained on the basis of our positive ontological affirmations about God), and any systematising must be ruled out. The third theme I wish to highlight from Frei's initial work on Barth is that of interpretation. On Frei's reading, Barth works hard to make interpretative method consistent with his substantive claims. That is, interpretative method must be governed by the methodological commitments discussed above: the primacy and priority of God's free, initiating gracious act, the impossibility of any knowledge of God in the absence of such a divine act, and the resistance to systematising. These commitments imply that the reader of scripture is dependent on the guidance of the Spirit as the author of scripture in order to understand the revelation that occurs through scripture. This implies, importantly, that the meaning of the scriptural texts cannot consist in their referential function. If it did, in Frei's view, the reader would have to have some knowledge of the referent to which the text refers, as well as the referential intent of the author. But this kind of knowledge is precisely what the methodological commitment to the priority of the free, initiating divine act rules out.Footnote ⁵⁶ And this just means that any correlation between the ‘word’ – the scriptural text – and the Word of God that the scriptural text reveals cannot be systematic, but must remain ad hoc.Footnote ⁵⁷

Barth's method has its price, though, in Frei's view, and the price is paid in the areas of theological anthropology and human understanding. As the doctrine of revelation gradually evolves, after the second edition of Der Römerbrief, any understanding of human nature in Barth becomes derivative from Barth's christology.Footnote ⁵⁸ Frei expresses the problem thus: ‘The inability to grant, unsystematically but concretely, positive content to human nature derives in large part from the fact that revelation and the doctrine of God form the ground of all doctrine, and that Jesus Christ is the sole content of that doctrine, so that everything beside him, especially in separation and “over against” him, appears to be abstract.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Frei himself attempts to avoid this problem through his articulation of narrative identity. This understanding of identity allows him to retain the methodological primacy of ontological affirmations about God while giving concrete, unsystematic content to human nature. Divine revelation, theology's starting point, is given primarily through a narrative depiction of Jesus’ identity, and any understanding of human nature must also derive from the concrete narrative identity of particular human beings.

How these themes appear in Frei's own work

I have tried to identify three themes in Barth's work that remained important guiding insights for Frei throughout his career: the subordination of epistemology to ontology, theological method and interpretation. Let me now simply mention a couple of examples of the appearance of these themes in Frei's own work, beginning with his magnum opus, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. If Barth's own project in theology, and in particular his turn away from liberalism, is a project worth continuing, then there must be some way of describing just what was theologically wrong with the modern or liberal turn in Protestant theology. In Frei's view, behind the liberal turn lay two mistaken assumptions. First, modern liberal theologians were in large part motivated by an apologetic impulse to justify or defend the claims of Christian theology to western intellectuals who were increasingly sceptical of these claims. One of the reasons this apologetic effort or impulse was mistaken was that it does not do justice to the nature of the biblical stories on which such claims are based. The apologetic impulse, that is, ignores the ‘tyrannical’ nature of the biblical stories. Second, modern liberal theologians assumed a referential theory of meaning by which not only words, but sentences and indeed the stories themselves have meaning only insofar as they are able to ‘refer’ or point to entities outside the text itself. Frei takes this understanding of meaning to be contrary to the nature of the biblical stories themselves, as well as being indefensible in its own terms.

Frei tells this story in the justly famous book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.Footnote ⁶⁰ Frei's historical sketch of eighteenth- and nineteenth- (really, early nineteenth-) century hermeneutics proceeds under the following thesis:

Prior to the modern period, Christian preachers and theologians had envisioned the world as ‘formed by the sequence told by the biblical stories’.Footnote ⁶² On Frei's analysis, three features of this kind of reading were most important. First, if a biblical story were to be read literally, then it must have ‘referred to and described actual historical occurrences’.Footnote ⁶³ Second, if the world described by the biblical stories is one single world (i.e. one single temporal flow), then the stories must themselves tell one cumulative story. And the way the stories were joined together into a single cumulative story was by making the earlier stories figures or types of the later stories. In Frei's view, this kind of figural reading does not conflict with the literal sense, but is a natural extension of it. Third, since the biblical stories tell one cumulative story of the only real world, then these stories must also tell the story of each present age and the individuals in it. A Christian was to understand and to conduct his own life so that it made sense as a part of the single cumulative biblical story.Footnote ⁶⁴

This method of biblical interpretation was thus primarily a matter of the interpreter interpreting her own life and the world around her as a part of the world made accessible by the biblical narratives. During the eighteenth century, however, Frei argues that this mode of interpretation increasingly broke down, among both radical thinkers like Spinoza and conservatives like Johannes Cocceius and Johann Albrecht Bengel. For these thinkers, the ‘actual’ historical world became detached from the world depicted in the Bible. Instead of making the world accessible, the biblical stories simply ‘verify’ or provide evidence for these independently accessible events.Footnote ⁶⁵

As Frei puts it, the direction of interpretation now reversed itself. The principal interpretative question was no longer how to make my own life and experience of the world intelligible in terms of the biblical narratives. Instead, the primary question was whether the biblical texts (and whatever concepts may be derived from them) depict the ‘real’ world as I otherwise apprehend it.Footnote ⁶⁶ A crucial implication of this new direction was that ‘whether or not the story is true history, its meaning is detachable from the specific story that sets it forth’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This detachability of meaning resulted in the literal reading of the stories being divided from and opposed to the figural reading, with the latter becoming increasingly ‘discredited both as a literary device and as a historical argument’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In its isolation from figural reading, the literal reading of a story now came to mean two things: first, grammatical and lexical precision in estimating what a text meant to its original audience, which in turn implied a single meaning of statements; and, second, the coincidence of the description with the historical facts.Footnote ⁶⁹

The Eclipse, then, is ‘an investigation of the breakdown of realistic and figural interpretation of the biblical stories, and the reversal in the direction of interpretation’.Footnote ⁷⁰ In Frei's telling, interpreters even after the reversal continued to attend to the literal sense of the stories. But the literal sense came to mean the single meaning of a text, which was given by the event or reality to which the text referred. Nonetheless, all agreed that something more was necessary for interpretation, and that was ‘ideational meaning or religious significance’.Footnote ⁷¹

When modern interpreters turned away from figural interpretation, the crucial point was not that they denied any nonliteral meaning to the texts, but that their understanding of the literal meaning changed. Instead of being the literal depictions themselves, the meaning of the narrative was ‘located’ in some extra-textual event or idea to which the text referred. In Frei's view, this occurred because biblical scholars had available to them a method of investigating any historical reference contained in a text, but no literary method by which realistic narratives could be understood. Thus, the separation of story from its meaning occurred because scholars confused history-likeness (literal meaning) with historical likelihood (ostensive reference). As the story was separated from its meaning, the narrative itself went into ‘eclipse’.Footnote ⁷²

When one considers the three themes in Barth's work that most impressed Frei in his formative dissertation, one can see why it was so important for Frei's own project to chart this understanding of the meaning of the biblical texts. On my reading, Frei takes all the three Barthian themes that come through in his work on Barth to be undermined by the referential understanding of meaning that he analyses in the Eclipse. When meaning is located outside the texts themselves, Frei argues that the conditions and criteria of the meaning of such texts must be given by independently established epistemological principles. This is precisely what happens in the work of Anthony Collins, for whom the criteria and possibilities of the meaning of biblical texts are given by Lockean epistemological principles. The work of Collins figures so prominently in the narrative Frei tells in the Eclipse because it established that epistemology must be prior to ontology in theological method – the establishment of a mistake as far as Barth and Frei are concerned.

Second, this priority of epistemology transformed all debate about the meaning of biblical texts into debates about their reference. This transformation was motivated by an apologetic impulse, beginning with referents that all should consider plausible, then arguing that such reasonable referents (whether historical, ideal or located in Jesus’ consciousness) are the real referents of the biblical stories. The meanings of such stories were articulated so as to make them amenable to apologetic argument, creating an ordered pair of meaning and understanding that were complementary and universally accessible. On Frei's telling, whether in an earlier Lockean form (such as that of Collins), or in a more sophisticated hermeneutic form (such as that of Schleiermacher), the fundamental duality of this ordered pair persisted. Such a systematic ordering gives priority to method over any positive affirmations about God. That is, whatever the biblical texts may say about God, in Frei's view the meaning of such statements must be construed in conformity with this independently established ordered pair.

Finally, any interpretative method that has a referential understanding of meaning as a constituent part cannot be governed by the primacy and priority of God's free and initiating grace, because in Frei's view such a method assumes, rather than denies, epistemic access to God in the absence of such an initiating act. When the meaning of the biblical texts are held to consist in their reference to some extra-textual reality, and when the conditions and criteria of that meaning are given in advance by a prior theory of understanding, it follows, on Frei's view, that the reader must already have some independent understanding of the reference of the texts if she is to understand their meaning. Interpretative method is therefore governed not by the priority of God's free and initiating grace, but rather by an independent theory of understanding. All of this overturns the primacy of ontological affirmations about God given in the biblical narratives and makes them subordinate to the epistemological needs of apologetic argument.

Frei's creative and interesting book, The Identity of Jesus Christ,Footnote ⁷³ published almost contemporaneously with the Eclipse, also evidences Frei's construal of Barth's project. This book, which Frei considers to be his own articulation of the essence of Christianity, begins not with any kind of epistemological prolegomena, but instead with an articulation of the category of identity and an extended reading of Jesus’ identity as it is depicted in the gospels. Instead of presenting an argument for belief in Christ's resurrection and presence that would be available to an unbeliever, he leaves intact the gap between faith and unfaith. Again following Barth, he prioritises ontology over epistemology, arguing for a biblical literary kind of quasi-ontological argument for Jesus’ continuing presence rather than beginning with epistemological conditions and arguing that they are fulfilled. This argument itself borrows Auerbach's understanding that the biblical texts are ‘tyrannical’ in that they seek to overcome our reality with their own. This is precisely what happens in Frei's quasi-ontological argument. The overall movement of Frei's thought in the Identity is (1) to begin with the narrative structure of the gospels, (2) to provide a narratively structured description of the identity of Jesus, (3) to provide an argument from that very narrative structure for the truth of the central gospel claims about God's own presence in Christ, and (4) to spin out nutshell accounts of the Word of God, the sacraments, the Holy Spirit, and the church and its mission and ethical obligation. The book is a remarkably creative attempt to accomplish these objectives in a way that is faithful to the Barthian project described above.

To recapitulate, Barth's insistence on the primacy of ontology over epistemology can be seen clearly in Frei's work, in both the Eclipse and the Identity, as well as in his later essays.Footnote ⁷⁴ One can also see Frei's commitment to the primacy of ontology in his extended criticisms of apologetics precisely because he takes apologetics to be grounded in epistemology.Footnote ⁷⁵ Further, Frei advances Barth's agenda regarding the second theme, theological method. He argues for the subordination of theological method to a doctrine of God by giving primacy to the narrative form of the gospels (in his earlier work) or their literal sense (later). Theological method, he insists, must derive from a reading of the gospels, and its subordinate nature prevents both the determination of method by epistemology and any true systematising.Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus he will argue that the adequacy of any theological method must be judged by how well it is able to take account of either the narrative structure of the gospels (earlier in his career) or the literal sense of the narratives (in his later years). The third theme, the subordination of interpretation to these methodological commitments (and thereby to positive affirmations about God), can also be seen in Frei's work. Because the incarnation is the source of our affirmations about God, and because any knowledge of the incarnation must come through the narrative depiction of Jesus’ identity in the gospels, any interpretation of their meaning as consisting in their referential function is ruled out. Frei's use of Auerbach's notion of the ‘tyrannical’ nature of the biblical texts is part of his attempt to make his own theological method derivative from the narrative structure (earlier) or the literal sense (later) of the biblical texts. In my judgement, these three Barthian themes animate all of Frei's work.Footnote ⁷⁷