But suppose we did. Then the question would still remain: did this mega-documentation really help us? Could we, for example, even remotely grasp Jesus’ claim without knowing the Old Testament? Can Jesus be understood without the Torah and the prophets, without Israel’s experiences and hopes? Can Israel’s hopes be understood outside the history of the faith of that people? And can Jesus be understood if we look at his life without having as our perspective the fact that here the history that has taken place between God and Israel has reached its last and decisive phase? But how can this dimension of the event be made visible by merely piling up facts, by a simple summary of external events? Here every medium that only shows us a series of external facts will fail us.
Documentary Films
Let us remain for a moment with the case of film, because we can learn a great deal from it. Every documentary filmmaker who understands her or his art would make a radical and decisive selection from the enormous quantity of filmed material we would have produced in our scenario and bring that selection into a carefully constructed composition—and so interpret it already. Perhaps she would interrupt the chronological sequence with flashbacks. Perhaps he would even build in visual allusions to the Old Testament to clarify events. In any case we can be sure that she would constantly introduce pieces of film that create connections by means of “quotations.” In addition, he would hint at things in the background and give symbolic dimensions to individual events.
In other words: every good filmmaker would choose only a little from the overflowing mass of material available, bring that little into a coherent context, and create a great many semantic relationships between the individual parts of the film, and would do exactly the same with the available sound material. And in this way the filmmaker would interpret the whole event, perhaps without inserting a single word of commentary from anyone off screen or providing a single interpretive title. In any case, if no interpretation is given to an external event it cannot tell us anything.
And now comes the crucial question: did the authors of the gospels do anything different? Did they not cut, recombine, quote, allude, comment, interpret? Of course they did! And they did so using all the tools of a true narrative craft, because they knew that without interpretation there can be no understanding. Even the most accurate and strictly factual depiction of history cannot do without constant interpretation.
On 25 February 2004 a highly honored film on Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and his attempt to assassinate Hitler was shown on German television.5 A commentator in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote of this film:
This is the most accurate film about Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt that has yet been produced, and it is the least complete. Those who view it this evening on television can rely on the correctness of the scenery, the uniforms, and the chronology. The director, Jo Baier, not only reproduced exactly the events of 20 July already researched by the Gestapo and found in their detailed files. He has precisely reconstructed Hitler’s barrack and the whole of the Führer’s headquarters in the East Prussian swamps, down to the mosquitoes. We cannot say in the strict sense that Baier has forgotten anything.… Anyone who wants to know what a German officer named Stauffenberg did throughout the day of 20 July 1944 will be well served here.
But anyone who wants to know what the last day in the life of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg meant will feel lost. This has to do with the fact that this film is remarkably lacking in any kind of larger meaning. We could even say that it is a narrative without a context, a historical film with no history in it—and one that de-dramatizes history in the same remarkable way that dramas nowadays are de-historicized. We learn nothing of who Stauffenberg was or even who he might have been.
6
This is the problem in a nutshell. To use another image: bare “facts” swirl chaotically through the universe in their billions. If no one organizes or interprets them they remain garbage, pure informational garbage. This informational trash has nothing to do with “history,” not in the least. The so-called fact is a prior level, a partial element, but it is not yet history. Thousands of facts, in and of themselves, are not history. History is interpreted event. Historical knowledge organizes and interprets the infinite chaos of facts.
The Interpretive Community
But who does this work of interpretation—interpreting the chaotic factual material that pours out at us every day and every year? Of course it seems obvious to say that this is the work of individual historians, specialists in history, who search the archives, seek out contemporary witnesses, gather material, and then one day produce a book in which they have placed the gathered facts in a larger context, shed light on them from various sides, and so narrated a piece of history.
Oh, if only it were so simple! In reality, individual historians do not work alone. Alone, they are nearly helpless. They presuppose the work of many others; they examine a great number of prior works that have already been produced by others. They have to depend on the statements and interpretations of earlier historians. All by themselves they could never get an overview of the incalculable quantity of factual material, let alone organize it or interpret it. Besides, the documents the historian finds in the archives are for the most part already interpretations from the view and to the purpose of the witnesses of the time.
Thus, as with all serious research, there is something like a research community of historians. We need only think of the many dictionaries and reference works every historian has in her or his library. To put it more bluntly: there is something like an interpretive community of historians. Obviously, in this interpretive community as in all the scholarly professions, outsiders, contrary thinkers, oddballs, and blockheads try to make themselves heard. They too are necessary.
And of course there are struggles between groups, extreme positions, battles over positions, and quotation cartels, that is, groups of scholars who quote each other but persistently keep silence about the results of other groups’ research. But above all, there is endless combat. That is inevitable in every serious field of research.
But despite the never-ending battle among historians, they form something like an interpretive community that, up to a point, even creates consensus. Otherwise the mainstream of historical research and the great scholarly standard works that are used throughout the world would be completely unthinkable.
So what is being called “interpretation” in this chapter does not fall from heaven and cannot be accomplished by lone individuals. “Interpretation” presupposes a community of interpretation. “Interpretation” presumes communication between people. “Interpretation,” finally, in sociological terms, assumes a group that wants to secure its historical identity. And above all, “interpretation” presumes a “cultural memory” within that larger group.7
The People of God as Interpretive Community
Everything said so far about historical scholarship is, of course, true also of theology. Here the larger group that makes historical interpretation possible is the people of God. They were a narrative community from the very beginning. They told how God acted among them in ever new ways. And as a narrative community the people of God became a community of interpretation, a community that again and again renewed and purified its memory.
All that, incidentally, is true not only of the past. The church is still an interpretive community today. It is vital for it to look back at its own past, to examine it critically, and to try to understand the present on the basis of this critical retrospect. Only in that way can it take the next step into the future. At present the church, after causing infinite suffering to the Jews over centuries with its theology of Israel, has finally come to the point of revising its relationship with Judaism. This revision will profoundly change the church’s life.