The basic meaning of kêrugma is "proclamation," literally the announcement of a herald. The term is derived primarily from kêrux, i.e., the authority and dignity of a herald, and, with the attachment of the suffix -ma, gave us the term kêrugma, a word of twofold meaning, denoting both the act and/or content of the heraldic message. In the New Testament, kêrugma referred to both the act of Christ’s preaching, and the salvific content of that preaching, these being indistinguishable historically. As J.A. McGuckin writes:

[T]he proclamation of the death and resurrection of Jesus is rendered as synonymous with the "good news" of salvation. There are also more mystical accounts of the kerygma in other parts of the New Testament ... which poetically depict the historical ministry of Jesus within the wider cosmic arc of divine condescension and exaltation.^[1]

The Kerygma is both a message and an event; it is an act of linguistic communication, as well as an occurrence or event meant to change the hearts and minds of those who experience it. As I will attempt to make clear in this article, the formation of dogma is not always the proper response to Kerygma ... for the Kerygma of Christ echoes through the ages, and requires - indeed demands - a response from all historical beings, i.e., all of humanity.

I.

In post-modern thought, the charge of essentialism is often leveled at thinkers who rely upon an originary source or primordial reference-point by which certain concepts are believed to become intelligible.^[2] Nietzsche’s famous proclamation of the ‘death of God’ has come to be recognized, in post-modern philosophy and theology, as the proclamation of the removal of the so-called transcendental signified - i.e., the essential source or primordial referent upon which all discourse is based - and its replacement by an open play of signifiers or textual traces, which serve only to open up ever new spaces of discourse.^[3] The result of this revolution of thought (or anti-thought) is that all claims to absolute truth have now become suspect; the center does not hold, and anyone claiming the privilege of access to transcendent truth is quickly excluded from the ongoing yet never realized "conversation" of Western civilization, as Rorty has described the post-modern philosophy that seeks no absolute truth, but merely wishes to continue talking from within itself, about itself.^[4]

Nietzsche’s statement, in Twilight of the Idols, that "we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar" (tr. Kaufmann 1982, p. 483), indicates an equation of God with the principles of linguistic discourse.^[5] When the originary source or principle of linguistic discourse is removed from our consciousness, all that is left is a play of traces of traces, of marks left behind by our predecessors - marks or traces which hold no essential meaning, but only the meaning that we are prepared to foist upon these traces in our present exegetical epoch. The notion of meaning then loses its significance - indeed, it becomes just that, a mere notion. This is a decisive move beyond pragmatism, or at least beyond the pragmatic approach to truth of C.S. Peirce, who believed in "truth for truth’s sake," and held that truth "is SO, whether you or I or anybody thinks it is so or not."^[6]

In contemporary Orthodox Christianity, truth is considered to be SO, yet it rarely, if ever, is examined on the dialogical basis that is part and parcel of our tradition. But what is tradition but consensus arising from a lengthy process of dialogue? Indeed, dialogue without some essential core, some originary source, is empty, mere words. As Nietzsche remarked, "[n]othing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect" (Twilight, tr. Kauffmann, p. 476) - meaning: words spoken without an authoritative referent are not worthy of semiotic perpetuation, and are therefore easily subsumed by contemporary discourse, for which no authentic referent is available.

Contemporary Christian discourse is largely dominated by polemic and rhetoric. True dia-logue or dia-lectic is virtually absent from Christian discourse, having been replaced by grand pronouncements that are eschatological and, at times, even ‘prophetic,’ in nature. The problem is that Christians all-too-often speak of themselves and for themselves, without any real reference to their non-Christian brethren, or even to other Christians professing a different proclamation of faith. This fosters an inability to think of life in any other manner than that identified by one’s Church as the authentic mode of existence proper to Christians. Theocratic bigotry is often the end result.^[7]

In this paper, however, my concern is not with the contemporary disjunctions affecting the various professions of Christian faith; rather, I am concerned with what may be called a primordial hermeneutic of faith and life - i.e., an attempt to resuscitate tradition on the basis of the approach of Gadamer, for example, as applied to the history of Christian thought, to the extent that we may offer a hermeneutics not of "suspicion," but of "retrieval or recovery."^[8] Such an approach involves reflection. Not the reflection of a being already content with the contents of his or her mind, or with the dogmatic pronouncements of tradition; but the reflection of one who has admitted questioning into the core of his/her existence. Such questioning brings one to the very heart of existential reality, of the divine-personal relationship that is the dynamic aspect of Christian Faith - the conscious reversion to an originary source (the "given"), a starting point that is irrevocable, and therefore fully human, due to its permanent encapsulation in, and effect upon, history. As Gadamer writes: "Reflection presupposes throughout that we have already submitted to the given in such a way that - and this is what reflection is - we then turn ourselves back to the given starting point."^[9] Reflection is essentially historical.

But the challenge of the starting point is to ensure that the heralding call (kêrugma) of the origin is never overwhelmed by the enshrined response (dogma) of the historical beings subsisting in light of the call. Theologians, with their carefully attuned dogmatic song always playing in the backgrounds of their minds, are less prone than the philosopher to adopt the siren-call of anti-traditionalist revisionism. The error of the religious philosopher, however, is carefully de(s)cri(b)ed by Nietzsche as follows:

The ... idiosyncrasy of the philosophers ... consists in confusing the last and the first. They place that which comes at the end - unfortunately! for it ought not to come at all - namely, the ‘highest concepts,’ which means the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last smoke of evaporating reality, in the beginning, as the beginning.^[10]

It is my view that the cause of so much dissension and division among the mainstream Christian denominations of our present epoch is due to a lack of attention to eschatology. The majority of Christians (it seems to me) are overly concerned about truth in the here-and-now, and therefore pay little or no attention to the eschatological fulfillment of truth preached by St. John: "it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is" (1 John 3:2 NKJV). This is, of course, a classic New Testament passage in support of Orthodox theôsis doctrine; yet it speaks to a larger point concerning Kerygma and Dogma - i.e., the fact that truth is inherently personal, for it involves a transformation of the person (who already bears the image of God) into a being bearing also the likeness of God. This is the eschatological quest of humanity, and it is not a quest to develop ever-more sophisticated dogmas by which to govern the earthly Church. No! It is a quest to realize the herald-call (kêrugma) of our Incarnate Lord, Jesus Christ. This is accomplished not by an enshrinement of an historically determined tradition in a fixed, monumental manner (dogma); rather, it is the historical - and therefore ever-changing, ever-developing - response of historical beings (persons) to the likewise historical Kerygma of Jesus Christ, as contained in the Gospels.

I quoted above Nietzsche’s disparaging remark about those philosophers (and I will also add theologians) who confuse the last with the first. One of the philosophers Nietzsche had in mind in that passage was Hegel, who developed a philosophy of history based on the concept of a universal spirit realizing itself within the unfolding process of history - and not merely human history, but a history shared equally by human Will and universal Spirit ... and, of course, Nature - the common ground upon which Humanity and the Spirit meet, in order to bring about the "End of History." Yet the error of Hegel’s philosophy resides in the removal of human freedom, of endeavor. For Hegel believed that human endeavor is always - whether the human wills it or not - in accord with the intentions of Universal Spirit. Meaning, which is something that humanity should create as it advances in history - is utterly absent from Hegel’s philosophy ... precisely because it is placed at the forefront, as the origin, of his schema. Humanity is fated to complete its history in the very manner willed by Universal Spirit, and so loses all ontological value. Hegel’s so-called "world-historical beings" are mere puppets of the Universal Spirit. Their accomplishments are not their own, they do not change history - they merely fulfill it.^[11]

Now it must be admitted that Hegel has not been influential in modern Orthodox theology; in fact, it was his rival, Schelling, who had a rather substantial impact on the development of Russian Orthodox thought (particularly Soloviev, Bulgakov, and Berdyaev). Yet I believe we can find - if we look carefully enough - an insidious Hegelianism in contemporary Christianity (especially Orthodoxy); for we can see a tendency toward a fixity and traditionalism that ignores the dynamic aspect of the kerygmatic call - i.e., the demand for a response. The ‘comfort’ of entrenched dogma is that it demands no response. Hegel admitted that the simple man, the timid man, takes comfort in the knowledge that certain "world-historical beings" exist, for these beings relieve him of the exigency of historical action. So too, I think, many Christians take inordinate comfort in the dogmas that seem to offer an alternative to thinking, to reflection - an alternative to the challenge of Kerygma.

II.

It is possible to take excessive comfort in the Christ-event, i.e., in the salvific Birth, death, and Resurrection of Our Lord. Indeed, many Christians place an immense emphasis on the saving act of Christ, without paying sufficient attention to the challenge of His message, which His relatively brief life on earth served to herald. When one focuses exclusively on the event of Christ’s Incarnation, to the detriment of His message, one ends up reducing human existence to a function of God - that is to say, one all-too-easily forgets that Christ died for us, not for the greater glory of the Godhead. This latter notion is found in one of the most venerated saints of the Orthodox Church, Maximus the Confessor, who declared that the Incarnation would have occurred whether or not humanity lapsed into sin - for the purpose of Creation, according to Maximus, was that God may have an opportunity to objectify Himself. This is virtually identical to Hegel’s concept of the realization of Absolute Spirit in history, and is the result of the burying of the herald-call (kêrugma) under mountains of dogma and canons. When this occurs, the present is enshrined as a permanent state of being; the eschatological vision becomes reduced to a museum piece, an artifact, and the past (as well as the future) becomes ensconced in an interpretative milieu that is reduced to a constant struggle against any manner of intellectual development. The term "innovation" becomes a dirty word, and is quickly connected with the equally weighty term "heresy."^[12]

In the writings of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas one finds a very curious reference to "a past more ancient than any future." What Levinas means by this is a past in which I - as historical person - have always already been implicated, even in the absence of my knowledge of, or existential connection with, that past, calls my existence into question .... So my task then becomes a recovery of that past; yet this is a task never completed, for the past, which connects with the future through the historical perpetuation of all human endeavor, of creativity, prevents my finite nature from extending itself infinitely to all of eternity in a pure act of will. This does not mean that I am sundered from universal history, but rather that I am a part of it - in spite of my lack of knowledge of the past and the future that it heralds - and, further, that by being a part of the past (and its future) in an ineffable way, I unite in myself, existentially, the full scope of history ... i.e., unrealized history. My present then becomes, as it were, indescribably ancient, spoken before the foundation of Time, present to God in all His glory before He created us in His image and (eventual) likeness.

Kerygma is the heralding call, the announcement to humanity by God of its noble quest to fulfill His vision for His Creation. This is not determinism, for God has given us the freedom of will to respond to the herald-call however we see fit. One of the modes of response to this call is the formation of Dogma. Yet Christians must remain ever attentive to the herald-call, of which the formation of dogma is but a response. We must avoid the error of cutting short the historical echo of the Kerygma by prematurely enshrining it in a finite dogmatism that does not fully appreciate the supreme antiquity of that past more ancient than our pre-kerygmatic present.

Notes:

[1] J.A. McGuckin, The Westminster Handbook to Patristic Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press 2004), p. 201.

[2] See, for a relatively recent example of such debates, N.C. McAfee, “Resisting Essence: Kristeva’s Process Philosophy,” in Philosophy Today, vol. 44 (Supplement 2000), pp. 77-83.

[3] A seminal text analyzing this linguistic phenomenon is J. Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” tr. A. Bass, in Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1988), pp. 1-23.

[4]R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press 1979), p. 377-378.

[5] On this topic, see C.A. Raschke, “The Deconstruction of God,” in Deconstruction and Theology (New York: Crossroad 1982), pp. 1-33.

[6] C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, A. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1931-1958), 1.44, 2.82, 2.135.

[7] This is to be especially noted in the case of Christians who oppose abortion, for example, and vote for anti-abortion candidates as a matter of course, regardless of the said candidate’s position on other, more important issues, such as those involving foreign policy, in which a faulty decision can adversely affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of already existing human beings.

[8] See R.M. Grant, D. Tracy, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible, second edition (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1984), p. 160-162 ff. A hermenuetics of suspicion is a type of exegetical approach to a text and its tradition that presupposes a history of distorted interpretation that not only produces error, but illusion – i.e., unquestioned assumptions about the text. Assumptions about a text that go unquestioned due to a blind faith in tradition are often the most difficult to undo. A classic text such as the Bible is a perfect example of a writing that has been severely distorted by centuries of varying assumptions about its meaning.

[9] H-G. Gadamer, The Beginning of Philosophy, tr. R. Coltman (New York: Continuum 1998), p. 69.

[10] W. Kaufmann (tr.), The Portable Nietzsche (Penguin 1982), p. 481 – my emphasis.

[11] These world-historical beings may fulfill historical becoming on what appears to be their own terms, and they many even feel a powerful sense of freedom in doing so; yet there is no creative, personalistic, eschatological content in their actions – merely determinism.

[12] See A. Schmemann, The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy, tr. L.W. Kesich (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press 1992), pp. 220-230ff.