Fuchs' achievement lay in bringing the insights of Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and Martin Heidegger into fruitful conjunction.
He sought to bridge Barth's Calvinist emphasis on the revealed Word of God with Rudolf Bultmann's Lutheran emphasis on the nature of human existence before God by employing a phenomenology of language derived in part from Heidegger's later position, arguing that both human existence and the being of God are ultimately linguistic - made available in language - and that theology is thus properly "faith's doctrine of language" (German: Sprachlehre des Glaubens).
Conversely, the reality of God's love is verbalized in Jesus' word and deeds recorded in the Gospels and is thus preserved as language gain (German: Sprachgewinn).
His ideas were part of a broader movement in theology that sought to engage more deeply with the existential and cultural challenges of the time..[5][6] But Cornelius Van Til, based on the Reformed tradition, took a critical stance towards the New Hermeneutics.
Van Til believed that the New Hermeneutics, by introducing human-centered perspectives and existentialist philosophy into biblical interpretation, undermined the absolute authority of Scripture and subordinated God's revelation to human experience.