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Stefan Felber. Wilhelm Vischer als Ausleger der Heiligen Schrift. Eine Untersuchung zum Christuszeugnis des Alten Testaments. Forschungen zur systematischen and okumenischen Theologie 89. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999. 414 pp. DM 92.
This is a slightly revised version of a dissertation accepted at the University of Erlangen in 1997. It is the only published monograph to date on the Swiss scholar Wilhelm Vischer (1895-1988), a figure of considerable importance in Continental theological discussions in the 1920s and 1930s. Vischer is best known for his two-volume work Das Christuszeugnis des Alten Testaments [The Witness of the Old Testament to Christ], the first volume of which appeared in 1934. As a result of his unwillingness to downplay the close ties between early Christian theology and ancient Judaism, Vischer was driven from his teaching post in Germany by the Nazis in 1933.
This incident had a prior history. During Vischer's student days and early career, world-renowned theologian Adolf von Harnack had championed the view that the OT should be removed from the Protestant Bible. The basis for his position was critical and scientific, as those terms were understood in the German university. Vischer joined others like Barth in the 1920s in opposing the notion that the historical-critical method as plied in the university was the gate through which all biblical exegesis must pass (though at the same time Vischer's work at points reflects an undue commitment to historical criticism, about which Felber rightly raises questions; see e.g., pp. 151, 223). God's voice from the whole of Scripture should still be heard, not brusquely smothered by a pretentious academic rationalism. To clarify Vischer's stance and its reverberations through the rest of the twentieth century, Felber's study focuses on "the central issues surrounding the relation of the Christian faith to the Old Testament" (p. 13) as these come to the fore in Vischer's writings and related discussion.
Felber traces Vischer's life from birth in Davos, Switzerland to student days in Marburg, Germany, "the most liberal faculty of his time" (p. 23). His NT lecturers included Wilhelm Heitmuller, Wilhelm Bousset, and Rudolf Bultmann. He heard OT scholars like Karl Budde and Hermann Gunkel. The neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, who deeply influenced Bultmann about 1905, also left their mark on...