This essay forms part of an ongoing series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. The series explores questions of intelligibility, reality, theological language, and the philosophical conditions for Christian belief.
The preceding essay followed a line of transmission from Martin Heidegger’s presentations in Rudolf Bultmann’s Marburg seminar during the winter of 1923–24 to the existential interpretation of the New Testament that Bultmann subsequently developed. Heidegger had taken Luther’s claims about sin, hiddenness, judgment, and faith and translated them into descriptions of Christian factical existence. Bultmann then extended the operation across the New Testament. Divine action became the event of self-understanding awakened in the hearer. Resurrection, judgment, forgiveness, and new creation were no longer interpreted primarily as acts of God that transformed the real relations in which creatures stand. They became disclosures of existential possibility.
Yet Bultmann’s position left behind a difficulty that his most gifted successors could not ignore. If the content of Christian proclamation is relocated into the self-understanding of the hearer, what gives proclamation its power to bring that understanding about? How does a text written in another time become an address now? How does an inherited sentence cease to be information about the religious past and become a word that encounters, judges, and frees?
Gerhard Ebeling and Ernst Fuchs answered by moving the center of gravity from existence to language. Theological interpretation, they argued, does not merely recover the meaning once intended by an author or translate an ancient religious worldview into concepts available to modern persons. Interpretation succeeds when language happens again—when the text becomes address, when proclamation opens a new world, and when the hearer is brought into the reality of which the text speaks.
The decisive terms were Sprachereignis and Wortgeschehen: language-event and word-happening. Fuchs, the New Testament scholar, spoke especially of the language-event. Ebeling, the Luther scholar and systematic theologian, characteristically spoke of the happening of the Word. The difference should not be pressed too sharply. Both were attempting to recover what Bultmann’s existential interpretation seemed to presuppose but could not adequately explain: the eventfulness of language itself.
Their achievement was real. They recognized that theological language is not merely descriptive. The sermon does not simply report that forgiveness once occurred. The absolution forgives. The proclamation of judgment does not merely identify a general condition called sin. It places the hearer under judgment. The parables of Jesus do not package religious ideas in memorable images. They draw the hearer into a new situation in which familiar relations are overturned and another possibility of existence appears.
In recovering this eventful character of language, Ebeling and Fuchs came remarkably close to Luther’s understanding of the viva vox evangelii. The Gospel is not an inert deposit awaiting historical reconstruction. It is a living voice. It addresses. It accuses and consoles. It takes hold of the hearer and creates faith.
But the question that governed the preceding essays returns at precisely this point. What makes the language-event an event of God? Does proclamation become the Word of God because God actually speaks and acts through it, or does “God” name what occurs when language opens a new understanding of existence? Is the event of proclamation grounded in an antecedent divine act, or has the linguistic event itself become the final form in which divine actuality may be affirmed?
Bultmann had relocated divine action into existential self-understanding. The New Hermeneutic relocated it again, this time into the event of language.
The hearer no longer constituted the Word alone. But it remained uncertain whether the Word was grounded by anyone other than its happening.
From Existential Interpretation to the New Hermeneutic
The New Hermeneutic did not simply reject Bultmann. It arose from a problem internal to his project.
Bultmann had insisted that interpretation is never neutral observation. The interpreter does not approach the New Testament as a detached spectator reconstructing religious ideas from the past. Interpretation is governed by a prior understanding of human existence, and the text becomes theologically significant when it addresses the interpreter’s own possibility of existing before God. The goal is not antiquarian knowledge but existential understanding.
This was already more than the traditional historical-critical question of what a text once meant. Yet it remained possible to describe the process as a translation from one conceptual vocabulary into another. The mythological language of the New Testament was interpreted through existential categories. Apocalyptic judgment became the disclosure of human finitude. Resurrection became the possibility of new existence. Faith became the decision in which the hearer is freed from dependence upon the world’s available securities.
Ebeling and Fuchs recognized that this still gave too little attention to the medium through which the event occurred. If the proclamation calls the hearer into a new self-understanding, then language is not simply the container in which an existential meaning is transported. Language belongs to the event itself. The Word does not first possess a meaning that is subsequently transferred to a hearer. Meaning occurs in the act of address.
Here the later Heidegger became as important as the Heidegger of Being and Time. Bultmann had appropriated Heidegger’s analysis of existence, decision, anxiety, authenticity, and being-toward-death. Ebeling and Fuchs received increasingly the Heidegger for whom language is not merely an instrument used by an antecedently constituted subject. Language is the site in which a world opens and beings become available as what they are.
The implications for theology were considerable. Scripture was no longer to be treated as a collection of propositions whose meanings could be extracted and reformulated. Nor was proclamation merely the practical application of conclusions reached by exegesis. Theological understanding happened when the language of the text became language again—when what had been handed down ceased to be a mute object of investigation and began to speak.
Hermeneutics consequently changed its task. The old hermeneutic asked how an interpreter might cross the distance separating the present from the past. The New Hermeneutic asked how the text might create the understanding required for it to be heard. The interpreter did not stand over the text as the subject who supplied its meaning. Properly interpreted, the text interpreted the interpreter.
This was an important correction to the lingering subjectivism of the Kantian inheritance. The hearer was not simply constituting an object of religious meaning. The hearer was being addressed, judged, and reoriented by a word not under the hearer’s control.
But the correction remained incomplete. The word acquired priority over the subject. It was less clear whether the speaker acquired priority over the word.
Fuchs and the Language-Event
Ernst Fuchs developed the linguistic turn most clearly through his interpretation of Jesus’ parables. A parable, on his account, does not convey a detachable theological lesson by means of an illustrative story. Its function is not exhausted when the interpreter identifies the abstract proposition hidden beneath the narrative form. The parable is itself an event of language. It creates a situation in which the hearer may see differently, judge differently, and inhabit a world newly opened by the speech of Jesus.
The Good Samaritan does not merely communicate the proposition that one ought to help persons in need. It unsettles the hearer’s received divisions between neighbor and stranger, righteous and unrighteous, insider and outsider. The parable does not first define neighbor-love and then provide an example. It brings the hearer into a linguistic situation in which the question “Who is my neighbor?” can no longer be answered as it was before.
Likewise, the parable of the laborers in the vineyard does not present a general theory of distributive justice. It creates a world in which the hearer confronts a generosity that violates the familiar symmetry between labor and reward. The hearer may resist that world, but the resistance belongs to the event. The parable exposes the hearer’s attachment to an order of merit precisely by giving language to another order.
This was what Fuchs meant by a Sprachereignis. Language does not merely describe a situation. It creates the situation in which understanding becomes possible. Something comes to language, and in coming to language it becomes present as a possibility for the hearer.
Fuchs therefore attempted to move beyond the opposition between the historical Jesus and the Christ of proclamation that Bultmann’s theology seemed to intensify. The words and deeds of Jesus mattered because in them faith first came to language. Jesus did not merely become the object of a kerygma developed after Easter. His own speech was history-creating. His parables and actions opened the linguistic world within which the later proclamation became possible.
This represented a genuine gain. The New Hermeneutic could no longer be satisfied with the bare fact that Jesus had existed and had been crucified. It returned to the form and substance of his proclamation. Jesus’ language mattered because his language did something. The historical Jesus reentered theology, not primarily as the object of neutral reconstruction but as the one in whose speech the possibility of faith first became articulate.
Yet the nature of this return must be stated carefully. Jesus returned chiefly as the origin of a linguistic possibility. His significance lay in the world his language opened, the relations it reordered, and the existence it made possible. What God did through Jesus was identified increasingly with what came to language through Jesus.
The distinction between act and articulation consequently became difficult to maintain. Did Jesus’ speech disclose and mediate an act of God that grounded it, or was the divine act identical with the coming-to-language itself? Did the parable open a new world because the reign of God had actually drawn near, or did “the reign of God” name the new world opened by the parable?
Fuchs intended the stronger claim. He did not think Jesus was merely an ingenious poet producing transformations of consciousness. God comes to language in Jesus. The language-event is revelatory because God is present within it.
But the semantic question persists. What would distinguish a genuine coming-to-language of God from a powerful linguistic event interpreted as divine? The transformation of the hearer cannot by itself answer the question. Language may disclose new possibilities, produce joy, awaken love, and reorder a community without being the speech of God.
A word may create a world without creating the world.
Ebeling and the Happening of the Word
Gerhard Ebeling approached the same problem with a deeper and more sustained engagement with Luther. He understood that theology could not treat the Word as a bearer of information whose content remained unchanged whether or not it was proclaimed and heard. The Word of God is not a theological datum placed before the subject for inspection. It is an address. It happens.
Ebeling’s preferred term, Wortgeschehen, preserves this eventful character. The Word is a happening in which reality comes to expression and the hearer is brought into a new relation to reality. Theology is therefore inseparable from hermeneutics, because theology exists to serve the event in which the inherited Word becomes an intelligible and effective address in the present.
This is why Ebeling could describe theology as a doctrine of the language of faith. Theology is not first a metaphysical theory from which preaching later draws practical conclusions. Its task is to clarify the language in which faith hears and answers the Word. The theologian serves proclamation by tracing the movement through which the biblical witness, the history of doctrine, the present situation, and the conscience of the hearer are brought into relation.
Ebeling’s work cannot fairly be reduced to Bultmannian existentialism under a linguistic description. Several of his most important moves push against such a reduction.
First, Ebeling refused to treat the historical Jesus as theologically irrelevant. The Christian kerygma could not be allowed to float free of the one whom it proclaimed. The ministry, words, conflict, suffering, and death of Jesus belonged to the origin of the Word that confronts the hearer. Faith did not create Jesus as its object.
Second, Ebeling’s reading of Luther kept the relation between Word and faith asymmetrical. Faith is not a spontaneous human possibility. It is awakened by hearing. The Word comes from outside the hearer and brings the hearer into the relation faith names.
Third, Ebeling understood that the Word exposes reality. Theological language is not a private religious vocabulary superimposed upon an otherwise self-sufficient world. It calls reality what it is before God. The proclamation of law uncovers the falsehood in which human beings live; the proclamation of Gospel opens the freedom that arises when the sinner no longer has to establish the self before God.
Ebeling thus recovered much that had been endangered in Bultmann. The Word was not merely an occasion for a self-understanding whose formal structures philosophy had already supplied. The Word itself performed the interpretation. It disclosed the hearer to the hearer.
Nevertheless, the underlying ambiguity remained. Ebeling could say with Luther that the Word does what it says. But what makes this the case? Is the Word efficacious because God acts through it, or is “God’s action” the theological interpretation of the efficacy experienced in the word-event?
The difference is decisive.
The sentence “Your sins are forgiven” may release a person from crippling guilt. It may open a future the hearer could not previously imagine. It may dissolve the self’s compulsive attempt at justification. All of this belongs to the event of absolution.
But none of it is yet identical with forgiveness by God.
The hearer may experience liberation without God having authorized the word. Conversely, God’s promise may be true even when the hearer resists it, misunderstands it, or feels no liberation at all. The psychological, existential, and linguistic effects of proclamation are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for the truth of what is proclaimed.
The Word may happen without being believed. It may be believed without being understood adequately. And language may happen powerfully while speaking falsely.
The happening of the Word therefore requires a ground deeper than its happening.
The Genuine Recovery of Performative Speech
The New Hermeneutic saw something that theological realism must not lose. Theological sentences are not exhausted by the states of affairs they describe. Some theological utterances are performative. They do not merely say something; they do something.
The absolution “I forgive you” is not a report that forgiveness exists somewhere. The utterance enacts a relation. The baptismal declaration does not merely describe a person as belonging to Christ. The words belong to the act in which the person is baptized. The sermon does not only offer information about judgment and grace. It accuses, consoles, promises, and calls.
A purely descriptive semantics would miss this. It might specify what must be the case for “God forgives sinners” to be true while saying nothing about what happens when that truth is addressed to a particular sinner as “Your sins are forgiven.” It might explain reference without explaining address, correspondence without efficacy, and truth without proclamation.
Ebeling and Fuchs rightly resisted such reduction. Christian truth is not a timeless inventory of divine facts. God’s truth comes to creatures in language that addresses them. The Word is not less than propositional, but neither is it merely propositional.
The distinction needed here is not between truth and event but between the event’s ground and its effect.
A performative utterance does not become efficacious merely by possessing a particular grammatical form. Its success depends upon authority, circumstance, speaker, intention, and reality. A stranger cannot end a marriage by declaring two persons divorced. A passerby cannot absolve a debt owned by someone else. Words accomplish what they say only when the speaker possesses the authority and power to accomplish it.
This is still more obvious in theology. “Let there be light” is not creative because the imperative mood possesses ontological force. It is creative because God speaks. “Your sins are forgiven” does not forgive because religious language has opened an existential possibility. It forgives because Christ has borne and forgiven sin and authorizes the promise spoken in his name.
The eventfulness of the Word therefore presupposes the agency of the speaker. The linguistic event does not replace divine action. It is the creaturely form in which divine action reaches its hearer.
What Ebeling and Fuchs recovered was the performative character of proclamation. What their hermeneutical framework did not finally secure was the ontological authority by which the performance succeeds.
Two Satisfaction-Conditions
The issue can be stated with the logical distinction that has governed this series.
Consider the proclamation:
“God forgives the sinner.”
On a realist interpretation, the sentence is true if and only if there is a God, there is a sinner, and God stands in the relevant relation of forgiveness toward that sinner. When the sentence is addressed as absolution, further conditions obtain: the speaker is authorized to announce the promise, the utterance refers to the divine act, and the act of proclamation mediates what God has done and promises to do.
On the linguistic-event interpretation, the sentence succeeds when it occurs as an address that frees the hearer from self-justification and opens a new existence. Its satisfaction-condition is the occurrence of a transformative word-event.
These conditions are not equivalent.
God may forgive even when the sinner does not experience liberation. A false proclamation may produce liberation without being authorized by God. A sentence may transform its hearer while misidentifying the source and character of that transformation. Conversely, a true Word may be resisted and therefore fail to produce the existential effect by which the New Hermeneutic recognizes its happening.
The two interpretations can overlap. The realist does not deny that divine forgiveness may become present in a word-event. Indeed, the realist can affirm more strongly than the linguistic theologian that God acts through proclamation. But the overlap does not establish identity.
The language-event is the mode of mediation. It is not the ultimate truthmaker.
This distinction reveals the precise continuity from Marburg through Bultmann to the New Hermeneutic. Marburg located objectivity in the processes through which thought constitutes its object. Bultmann relocated theological meaning into the existential self-understanding awakened by proclamation. Ebeling and Fuchs relocated it once more into the linguistic event through which such understanding occurs.
At each stage, the site of constitution changes. First thought, then existence, then language.
What does not change is the reluctance to allow an independently acting God to determine the satisfaction-conditions of theological speech.
The object is no longer constituted by a transcendental subject. It is no longer constituted simply in the decision of the hearer. It is constituted in the event of address.
The father has been slain again. The household remains.
The Historical Jesus and the History-Creating Word
The return to the historical Jesus in Fuchs and Ebeling deserves particular attention, because it appears to reverse the direction of dependence criticized here.
Bultmann had separated sharply the Jesus who proclaimed from the Christ who was proclaimed. The historical existence and crucifixion of Jesus supplied the necessary that of Christian proclamation, but the theological content of the kerygma did not depend upon a recoverable account of Jesus’ own consciousness, deeds, or teaching. Faith encountered Christ in proclamation rather than securing itself through historical reconstruction.
Fuchs and Ebeling recognized that this left the kerygma dangerously without historical substance. If proclamation is not grounded in the words and history of Jesus, it risks becoming the church’s proclamation of its own possibility of faith. They therefore participated in the renewed attention to Jesus characteristic of the post-Bultmannian period.
Yet they did not return to the historical Jesus as an object available to positivist reconstruction. They returned to Jesus as the origin of the history of language in which faith lives. Jesus’ speech is significant because it generated the linguistic world of faith. His parables, table fellowship, pronouncements, and journey toward death brought into language a new understanding of God and human existence.
Again, the gain is considerable. Jesus is not merely the accidental occasion for a kerygma whose existential meaning could in principle have arisen elsewhere. His life and speech possess a determinate form. The language of faith has a history because it arises from this person and no other.
But the same question appears at the level of history. Does Jesus’ language create faith because it truthfully discloses who God is and what God is doing, or is God’s reality identified with the history-creating power of Jesus’ language?
The historical Jesus can return and divine agency remain displaced. It is enough that Jesus inaugurates a linguistic possibility whose effects continue in proclamation. What need not return is the God whose reign Jesus announced as drawing near independently of the hearer’s response.
A language may be historically generative without being referentially successful.
Jesus’ parables may have created a community, reordered moral imagination, and generated centuries of interpretation. None of these effects by themselves makes it true that God’s reign came near in Jesus. Their theological significance depends upon the actuality of the God whose reign the parables proclaim.
The language is history-creating because it is reality-disclosing. It is not reality-disclosing merely because it became history-creating.
Luther’s New Language
The resources for correcting this displacement lie within the Lutheran tradition Ebeling knew so well.
Luther’s theology of the Word is radically performative. God’s Word does not merely indicate a reality external to itself. The Word creates, judges, kills, forgives, and makes alive. The distinction between sign and action cannot be drawn in the manner presupposed by a merely representational account of language.
But Luther never imagines that words possess this power apart from the God who speaks them. The divine Word is effective because it is God’s Word. Its linguistic force is grounded in divine agency.
This becomes particularly clear in Luther’s account of the nova lingua. The new language of theology does not consist in the invention of an autonomous religious vocabulary. Old words are baptized and made to signify in a new way because the reality to which they answer has been transformed and disclosed in Christ. “God,” “humanity,” “righteousness,” “death,” “life,” “freedom,” and “bondage” acquire new relations because the Word became flesh and because God acts under forms that reason could not have anticipated.
The newness is neither arbitrary nor self-enclosed. Theological language does not create its own referent through linguistic intensity. It is made new by the reality that gives itself to be spoken.
This is why Luther can unite semantic transformation with ontological realism. The same word may function differently in philosophy and theology because the realities and relations in which it stands are different. Christ is not merely called divine and human within an innovative grammar. The language is required because Christ actually is divine and human. The communicatio idiomatum is not a linguistic experiment that makes contradictory predicates religiously fruitful. It is answerable to the hypostatic union.
Similarly, the promise does not create forgiveness from the linguistic resources of the believing community. It delivers the forgiveness Christ has won. The Word creates faith because the Spirit acts through it. The efficacy of proclamation is real participation in divine causality.
Luther therefore permits theology to affirm everything the New Hermeneutic rightly wanted to affirm. The Word is event. The text interprets the hearer. Proclamation creates what it calls for. The parable does not merely illustrate. The absolution does not merely describe. The Gospel is viva vox.
But the direction of dependence remains clear.
God does not become gracious because grace comes to language. Grace comes to language because God is gracious.
Christ is not risen because resurrection is proclaimed as a possibility of new existence. Resurrection can be proclaimed because God raised Jesus from the dead.
The Word does not acquire divine authority by happening effectively. It happens effectively because the divine speaker authorizes and inhabits it.
From Word-Event to Constitutive Satisfaction
The necessary correction is therefore not a retreat from event into static correspondence. It is a more adequate account of the event.
Classical semantics asks whether a sentence is satisfied by a model. The New Hermeneutic asks whether the sentence becomes an event that opens understanding. Theological realism must ask a more fundamental question: what act grounds both the reality proclaimed and the proclamation by which it becomes present?
The answer is the Logos.
The world is not a mute structure to which theological language is subsequently attached. Its intelligibility is already grounded in the Word through whom it was made. Divine speech is constitutive before human speech is responsive. God does not discover linguistic forms capable of expressing a reality that exists independently of divine meaning. God speaks creatures into determinate being and sustains the relations by which they can be known and named.
Human proclamation participates in this constitutive speech. It does not repeat the divine act univocally or acquire creative power of its own. It is taken up into the divine act by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit joins finite words to the Word they proclaim, so that creaturely speech becomes the instrument of divine address.
The order is therefore:
divine act,
authorized proclamation,
hearing and faith.
The New Hermeneutic is tempted to reverse the order:
language-event,
transformed understanding,
divine reality within the event.
The difference is not that one position values proclamation while the other values metaphysics. The difference concerns what makes proclamation theologically efficacious. On the realist account, the word-event succeeds because it participates in an act of God that precedes and grounds it. On the hermeneutical account, the occurrence of the event tends to become the form in which divine actuality is constituted.
Constitutive satisfaction preserves the insight that truth is not non-agentive. God is not an inert object standing within a model. The Logos is the agent through whom both world and Word possess intelligibility. Yet because the agency is God’s, not language’s, constitutive satisfaction also prevents the linguistic event from closing upon itself.
The Word truly happens because the Word truly is.
The Word before the Event
Ebeling and Fuchs performed an indispensable service for modern theology. They saw that the problem of proclamation could not be solved by extracting timeless content from ancient language. They understood that meaning is not complete apart from address, that interpretation is an event, and that theological language seeks not merely to inform but to place the hearer before God.
They also brought theology closer to Luther’s insistence that faith comes by hearing and that the Gospel is a living voice. Against every reduction of doctrine to religious information, their work remains a necessary protest.
But protest is not yet foundation.
A language-event cannot supply its own divine authority. A word-happening cannot distinguish by its happening alone between revelation and projection, absolution and reassurance, Gospel and religious rhetoric. The transformation of the hearer does not establish the identity of the speaker. The world opened by a text does not make that world real.
Theological proclamation requires more than effective language. It requires a God who has acted, a Christ who has been raised, and a Spirit who authorizes finite words to participate in the divine address.
The New Hermeneutic was therefore correct to say that proclamation is an event. It was not yet able to say with sufficient clarity whose event it is.
The event does not ground the Word.
The Word grounds the event.
The next essay will consider what happens when the linguistic event is no longer treated merely as the medium of divine disclosure but is drawn into the doctrine of God itself. In Eberhard Jüngel, the hermeneutical inheritance of Bultmann, Fuchs, and Ebeling becomes an ontology of divine being. God is understood as the mystery of the world and as the event in which God comes to language. The question will be whether this move restores the reality displaced by the New Hermeneutic—or gives the linguistic displacement its most sophisticated theological form.
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