Theological Interpretation of Scripture Matters—15

History and Historical Criticism, Again

Artistic Rendering of the Library of Alexander, by O. Von Corven (1890; source: Wikimedia Commons)

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[In a previous post, I noted that the contemporary renaissance of theological interpretation of the Bible has raised perplexing questions about the relationship between this theological enterprise and historical criticism and historiography in biblical studies. See that earlier post for orientation and recommended resources.]

The Problem of History

The fissure separating Scripture and theology is not a new phenomenon, but is the consequence of seismic shifts and their aftershocks over the last three centuries.¹ Theologian Alister McGrath conveniently refers to the epicenter of this movement as the sense of “being condemned to history”: “The confident and restless culture of the Enlightenment experienced the past as a burden, an intellectual manacle which inhibited freedom and stifled creativity.”² Thus, as the historian Carl E. Schorske wrote,

In most fields of intellectual and artistic culture, twentieth-century Europe and America learned to think without history. The very word ‘modernism’ has come to distinguish our lives and times from what had gone before, from history as a whole, as such. Modern architecture, modern music, modern science—all these have defined themselves not so much out of the past, indeed scarcely against the past, but detached from it in a new, autonomous cultural space.³

In the theological arena, interest in a theology without tradition resulted in perennial questions about the place of the study of Scripture in the curriculum, just as the increasingly historical definition of the Bible’s meaning has led to the segregation of “serious” biblical studies from exploration of the ongoing significance of the Bible.

This massive shift has to do with the problematizing of history: If all knowledge is historically grounded, then we moderns should not be governed in our knowing by someone else’s history, including the history of the Bible itself and of the Christian tradition. How does this orientation impinge on biblical studies? It leads to the assumption that the only viable history within which to construe the meaning of biblical texts is the history within which those texts were generated, or the history to which those texts allegedly point. The results for a theology that can in some substantive sense claim to be “biblical” are disastrous, since it is difficult to construe the significance for contemporary times of a biblical text whose meaning properly belongs to another, ancient time.

Painting with the broadest of strokes, the relation of Scripture to theology can thus be portrayed with regard to the relationship between biblical text and historical context.

• Premodern perspectives on text and history tended to work with the assumption that text and history were coterminous, or at least that the history behind the text was not the sole or determinative factor in meaning-making. Theology, after all, is not separated from exegesis.

• Modern perspectives posit a purposeful segregation of history and text. Here we learn that the history to which the biblical text purports to bear witness and the biblical text that provides such a witness are not coterminous. Since interpretive privilege is accorded to history in this perspective, the biblical text should be regarded with critical suspicion, and historical inquiry is the order of the day. As one of my Berkeley colleagues told me years ago, historical criticism is essentially anti-textual in its quest for events and meaning not in but behind the text. Accordingly, biblical interpretation is construed as a discipline of validation (when the biblical text is judged to represent historical events with accuracy) or of reconstruction (when it is not).

• In late-modern times, a few have migrated to forms of study for which there are no facts, only perspectives. Accordingly, texts might be sundered from their sociohistorical contexts within which they were generated, from those texts alongside which they reside within the canon of Scripture, from the traditions of interpretation that have grown up around them over these millennia, and from whatever interpretive constraints might have been suggested by the texts themselves. (Because these impulses continue the modern agenda of sundering the present from the past, these forms of study seem to be only late-modern, not postmodern.)

In any case, under the old historicism, textual meaning could be tied with certainty to historical reconstruction, even if that reconstruction was regarded as anything but certain. For some, this confidence is rejected in favor of endless meanings. The one sees a commitment to forms of biblical interpretation that keep at arm’s length the communicative aims of scriptural texts, working with the presumption that those aims are of antiquarian interest, but not existentially compelling. The other is debilitating to systematic theology, too, since the interpretive enterprise offers no canons against which to measure a “right” reading from a “wrong” one, or a “good” reading from a “bad” one.

Historical Criticism: We Cannot Live with or without It

Against this backdrop, our only attitude toward historical criticism today can be one of ambivalence.

Historical Criticism: We Cannot Live without It

It might appear far easier to reject historical criticism out of hand, to cast its demons out of the household of faith-oriented biblical studies. To do so, however, is to fail to realize the importance of historical inquiry and so to fail to anticipate the nature of the seven additional demons that would return to find the house well-swept and in order. The last state would be worse than the first!

Let me briefly sketch four reasons for my assertion that we cannot do without historical-critical inquiry.

1. We (many of us) are children of the modern and/or late-modern era. We continue to hear and to frame questions like: What actually happened in the exodus? Did Jesus really do that? Modernity, like its elusive relative postmodernity, is not a product in a retail superstore that one chooses (or not) to purchase. It is rather a cultural phenomenon that pervades experienced life. We act out of cultural paradigms even when we are not looking, precisely because culture includes those values and practices that form the (often unexamined) presuppositions of embodied social existence. To assume that we can escape the interests and concerns of modernity and late-modernity, not least in relation to historicism, would be naive on our part.

2. We recognize today that all language is embedded in culture, and this includes the languages of the Bible. This is a fundamental assumption of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek lexica, with the result that it should go without saying that historical inquiry is inescapable. If this is true at the philological level, it is also true of still-higher levels in the study of the communicative aims of biblical texts, semantics and pragmatics included. That is, whatever else they are, biblical texts are cultural products whose communicative aims are at the same time constrained and mobilized by the contexts within which they were generated.

3. The capacity of the Bible to function as Scripture depends in part on its capacity to expose and thwart our own limited, historical horizons. Historical inquiry protects the text from us—that is, from our tendencies (A) to assume that our conception of the world is the way the world is, has always been, and will always be, and therefore (B) to read our histories into the lives of others, always and everywhere. Among the consequences of this ethnocentrism is the domestication of Scripture, so that its strenuous demands can be folded happily into our common life. The effects of this tendency in Bible reading have often been disastrous—whether one thinks of apartheid in South Africa, classism in Great Britain, racism in the US, the almost global disparaging of women, or some other manifestation of a biblical interpretation insufficiently critical in its historical criticism. Such readings subvert the witness of God’s people and disguise Yahweh in a dishonorable cloak.

4. We can’t escape the historical character of our (biblical) faith. That is, there are profoundly theological reasons for engaging in historical inquiry, including the affirmation of God’s creation of the cosmos; the grounding of Israel’s identity as God’s people and, indeed, their understanding of Yahweh in the exodus; for Christ-followers, the declaration that God entered the world in the coming of Jesus of Nazareth; and our recognition that Paul, James, Peter, and others worked out the ramifications of Jesus’s coming in earthy exchanges with Christ-followers throughout the Roman Empire.

Historical Criticism: We Cannot Live with It

What may appear to be a resounding affirmation of the need for historical criticism must quickly be tempered by a recognition of its serious limitations and faulty premises. Let me mention three.

1. Historical criticism assumes what Christ-followers can never assume, namely, that there is more than one church. As Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson observed, “The initiating error of standard modern exegesis [i.e., historical-critical exegesis] is that it presumes a sectarian ecclesiology”—one that fails to acknowledge that “the text we call the Bible was put together in the first place by the same community that now needs to interpret it.”⁴ Baptist theologian James McClendon similarly insisted on Scripture’s authority as an invitation, to which he referred as “a hermeneutical motto”: “The present Christian community is the primitive community and the eschatological community.”⁵ With these words, both are drawing out the hermeneutical significance of the Nicene affirmation of the church as one. Both encourage our recognition that the fundamental division between the biblical world and our own is not first historical but theological. It has to do with a theological vision, the effect of which is our willingness to regard these biblical texts as our Scripture and to inhabit Scripture’s story as our own.

2. Historical criticism assumes what no one can assume, namely, that scholarly inquiry has discovered a ledge of neutrality on which to stand to engage in biblical interpretation. Said differently, historical criticism has long been anchored to a scientific approach to biblical texts that assumes the impossible by requiring contemporary readers of Scripture to shed their contemporary clothing, to come, as it were, empty-handed to the ancient text. One noted biblical scholar likened his work to “listening in on an ancient conversation”—neglecting the reality that his very listening was itself an interpretive act. (He can only hear what his own conceptual patterns allow him to hear!) In its modern attempt to free the Bible from the stranglehold of the dogmatic theology that determined in advance interpretive outcomes, historical criticism failed to appreciate how it had located the legitimate interpretation of Scripture in its own ideology. That is, even if Scripture must be allowed to speak within its own socio-cultural environment, the predispositions of modernity determined the allowable substance of that ancient environment.

3. Historical criticism as generally practiced remains ensconced in a discredited philosophy of history. A commitment to the scientific method, to scientific detachment, is basic to modernist historical inquiry in biblical studies. The late-nineteenth century bequeathed to the twentieth the imperative that historians (and this is what biblical scholars generally wanted to be and largely became) emulate natural scientists in their pursuit of fixed laws. This enterprise has come under serious scrutiny, as I noted in an earlier post. Even though recognition of these issues is growing, many continue to follow the well-worn paths of the old historicism.

The American historian David Lowenthal made plain something of the nature of the criticisms brought against modern historicism with four telling observations:

1. “No historical account can recover the totality of any past events, because their content is virtually infinite.”

2. “No account can cover the past as it was, because the past was not an account; it was a set of events and situations.… Historical narrative is not a portrait of what happened but a story about what happened.”

3. “Historical knowledge, however communal and verifiable, is also invariably subjective, biased both by its narrator and by its audience.”

4. “Knowing the future of the past forces the historian to shape his [sic] account to come out as things have done.”⁶

These observations pertain both to the historical work of biblical writers, which requires a significant overhaul in the way their work is understood and evaluated, and to the work of biblical scholars-cum-historians. It remains for historical criticism to remake itself in light of observations such as these.

Theological Interpretation

This both-and (We can’t live with it and we can’t live without it!) has been one of the motivating factors behind current interest in the enterprise of theological interpretation of Scripture. It is one of those factors, but hardly the only one. Even so, this has been and remains one of the central challenges facing theological hermeneutics of the Bible: How to remake historical inquiry in ways that take seriously both (A) decades of methodological innovation in our understanding of history and the historical task and (B) the status and theological role of the Bible as Scripture. Undoubtedly, this will entail returning historical inquiry to the position of servant in the task of interpreting texts, rather than the master.

1. Parts of this essay are adapted from my article, “Modernity, History, and the Theological Interpretation of the Bible,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54 (2001): 308–29.

2. Alister E. McGrath, The Genesis of Doctrine: A Study in the Foundation of Doctrinal Criticism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 81.

3. Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 3–4.

4. Robert W. Jenson, “The Religious Power of Scripture,” Scottish Journal of Theology 52 (1999): 89–105 (98).

5. James Wm. McClendon Jr., Ethics, vol. 1 of Systematic Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 1986), 31.

6. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 214–18.