Hermann Gunkel

Life

Gunkel was born in 1862 in Springe, near Hanover, Germany. He studied theology at Göttingen and Giessen and initially taught the New Testament before turning to the study of the Old Testament. After serving as a lecturer at Göttingen and Halle, he became professor of Old Testament at the University of Berlin, the University of Giessen, and the University of Halle. He retired in 1927 and died in Halle in 1932.

Work and Contributions

Gunkel was a leading figure in the History of Religions School, which sought to understand the Bible through comparison with the religions of the ancient Near East. His first book, The Influence of the Holy Spirit (1888), examined the experience of the Holy Spirit among believers of the apostolic age. In Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton (1895), he interpreted passages such as Genesis 1 and Revelation 12 in comparison with Babylonian creation myths.

His greatest contribution was form criticism (a method of study that analyzes the literary form of a text and the situation in which that form arose). In his Commentary on Genesis (1901), he argued that the narratives of Genesis had originally been short units transmitted orally before being written down, and he sought to identify the form of each unit and the "setting in life" (Sitz im Leben) in which it was used. He also applied this method to the Psalms, classifying them as hymns, communal laments, individual laments, royal psalms, individual thanksgiving psalms, and other types. This classification was set out in his Commentary on the Psalms (1926) and in Introduction to the Psalms (1933), which was completed by his student Joachim Begrich. His method spread into New Testament scholarship as Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Dibelius, and others applied it to the study of the Gospels.

Influence on the Korean Church

In the Korean church, Gunkel is known chiefly through seminary courses in Old Testament introduction and biblical hermeneutics. Progressive seminaries have presented form criticism as a basic method of biblical study. Conservative denominations and seminaries are generally reported to have regarded it as a branch of historical criticism and to have treated it critically. Nevertheless, the practice of reading the psalms according to categories such as hymns, laments, and thanksgiving psalms is widely employed in Korean-language commentaries and sermons across denominational lines.

Assessment

Gunkel is regarded as a scholar who brought to light the relationship between the literary character of biblical texts and the worship life of the community of faith. He is credited with laying the foundation for the study of the Psalms and Genesis, and later Old Testament scholars such as Sigmund Mowinckel, Gerhard von Rad, and Claus Westermann adopted or modified his method.

His work has also drawn criticism. Evangelical and Reformed scholars who uphold biblical inerrancy criticize him for reading biblical narratives within the framework of legend and myth, thereby undermining their historicity and their authority as revelation. Within the academy as well, some have argued that he divided texts into excessively small units and reconstructed their original settings in life on the basis of conjecture. For this reason, canonical criticism and literary criticism, which seek to read the final form of the text as a whole, have since come to be used alongside form criticism.