For more than two centuries, the tradition of historical-critical study of the Bible has sought authoritative readings of the Bible that distill key normative theological concepts out of many studies of particular strata of the biblical text and it's history. Because of the mathematics of conditional probability, these efforts cannot succeed. Historical judgments about discrete portions of texts and slices of ancient Israelite history can discipline and enrich our larger-scale, traditional interpretations of the Bible. But the techniques of modern historical analysis that provide critical insight lack the creative, synthetic power to generate canonical readings. (7)
I am not an expert in hermeneutics or in the interpretive tradition, but I have had a little schooling. I know enough to know that Neoplatonism and the four-senses tradition were put aside, when Enlightenment science picked humanity from the navel of the cosmos. History replaced metaphysics. And method overcame genius, pragmatic wisdom, or contemplative and mystical insights. German criticisms sometimes hilariously gave us the historical-critical method and conservative scholarship wiped out the critical part and replaced it with the word "grammatical"--as much a political as academic move. It has held an easy peace in the burned over landscape of dead trees and souls that remain after the total war between fundamentalists and modernists, a war presided over by the janus god Modernity. This peace has held for nearly half a century, but, today, that peace is slipping. There is R. R. Reno's observation, above, but the sensibility behind it can be observed in growing calls for theological exegesis. I should observe that R. R. Reno is general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible.*
Where I am concerned, I have long wondered how to make the "well, if you understand the historical situation" results of exegesis and the well-worn "Bible says" truisms stand together. Paper after paper and commentary after commentary discover new readings based on historical and grammatical science--findings that are shared in the classroom and discussed at conferences but rarely--at this point--make it into pulpits and sunday school curricula. These finding are not hostile to the text, as were the assaults of the Tuebingen school, but they are different, nevertheless. And, slowly but surely, they will collectively reshape confession.
I am mostly glad. Perhaps we are seeing the fruit of the Reformation--the gospel message restored to the church after so much cultural accretion. But if these results are based in history alone, if these results are arrived at by a method born of science, then how can they be completely trusted as dependable by the church of Jesus? This method removes the Bible from the churches. It is the Bible of the schoolmen--no matter how devout. Can this Bible be trusted? Does God call ministers without first making them historians? To ask such questions sounds like American anti-intellectualism. It is not. Mine is a question about the role of the Spirit and a growing certainty that Jesus's reign should extend even to method.
* In the interest of full disclosure, I now own every volume of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible and mourned the day the series was canceled. The entire perspective of this post baffles me today (writing September 2022). R. R. Reno went on to be the editor of First Things magazine, which sucked an irenic journal into dismal conservatism so that not a word was spoken against the Trump disaster for his entire four years. Therefore, I canceled my subscription ages ago and, until Reno is gone, I will not be resubscribing.
Very good thoughts Thom. Especially critical for me, I think, are your last two paragraphs. "Does God call ministers without first making them historians?" As a person who was a historian, not before being called, but before being officially theologically trained and then ordained, this strikes close to home. I don't think everyone needs to be a historian, but there is a certain degree of context that has to be handed down with the text itself in order for it to make sense. This is the responsibility of the community as a whole, but particularly of the ordained. But this need not be the dry and ever-changing history of the "schoolmen" but can be the closely held tradition of the Christian community. In the end, historical study, as with any other interpretive tool must be seen as just that: the tool of the body of Christ, and it is up to the body--through the spirit--to discern what God is saying through scripture.
ReplyDeleteDifficult work, and it calls us to ask "what is the community that makes this decision" and "who has the authority." How broadly, in other words, to we draw the lines. Around denominations? Around Protestants only? Catholics? Orthodox? All of the above? What community makes this decision with legitimacy?
@Thom: These are the types of questions that I have found myself asking lately. I don't want to create a false dichotomy, but I wonder if there is a way in which we can read canonically for doctrine and dogma and historically for the academy. In other words maybe we can learn from the old hermeneutic of multiple meanings by adopting a new hermeneutic of multiple approaches to reading?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments. Brian, I really enjoyed your post on Childs, and want to go back and read it again. Nevertheless, this problem repeats itself in the question about Jesus: the Jesus of Faith / Jesus of History. I don't think you can separate them, and so how can you separate how you read? And, Jody, your point about what needs to be carried by the community is a good one. Whatever the answer to this problem, it is community that will provide a context for the answer. There was a post recently in the blogosphere about the canon being the hermeneutical decision of the community. There is something to that, though I would not want to say that the church chooses its scriptures but, with the Reformers, that it recognizes them. And now I'm running in your tracks: "What community makes this decision with legitimacy?" . . . Personally, I find myself asking questions about the origin, definition, and development of the analogia fidei, because it seems to me that rather than outlining orthodoxy, orthodoxy would be better kept by measuring from a common center.
ReplyDeleteThom, apologies I didn't see this comment earlier. I wonder if when you talk of measuring from a common center,you're expressing something similar to C.S. Lewis who compared Christianity to a pie, with each tradition being a slice of the pie, and the core of the faith at the center of the pie. The deepest and most faithful practitioners of their traditions of the faith were closest to the center, what was for him "mere Christianity." I do think it's possible to ask the question of whether there can really be such a thing... is mere Christianity just a somewhat more conservative/orthodox version of the liberal quest for the "essence of Christianity" apart from all that doctrinal stuff that makes us uncomfortable as post-enlightenment folk. The other question that might be asked, to consider things in the model you've suggested, is who determines the length of the string/rule from the center. In other words, what community, and by what authority, is something declared beyond the bounds of Christianity? This question is one that every group must deal with, but it is particularly difficult when the group you're talking about is brought together as a body... whom do we risk amputating, or alternatively, how deformed to we allow the body to become.
ReplyDeleteA note in a book references the 1927 epistolary argument between Adolf von Harnack and Karl Barth over the nature of biblical interpretation. Scholar John Thompson calls it a debate, "not between historical criticism and its opposite but between a largely critical, historical reading of Scripture and one which, while accepting this, sought to penetrate more deeply into the meaning and message of Scripture--"The Strange New World within The Bible," as Barth called it. (See H. Martin Rumscheidt, Revelation and Theology: An Analysis of the Barth-Harnack Correspondence (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972).)
ReplyDeleteFr. Jody, Thank you for your helpful comments. Reading over them again, I’m so thankful that you brought up the role of the community as the locus of a proper Christian hermeneutics. (Perhaps there is a connection here between the hermeneutic of a community and its doctrine of God, so that a communal hermeneutic reflects our Trinitarian theology?) Given my pietistic background, I habitually turn to the individual, even if I’ve been led beyond that error through confession. It is not the first time you’ve set me straight on that account, and I hope you will continue to direct me properly until I at least catch at the fault. Now then, referring to mere Christianity and the slices of pie, there are so many awful things hidden in that mix that I think we’d best leave it be. The analogia fidei is the best idea I have yet to begin to say what is a better reading and practice and what is less. That allows church discipline its proper role in its corporate spiritual discipline and it gives us an authority. It is not a clear authority, certainly, but it is something akin to a constitutional authority which, though hotly contested upon all sides, bobs and weaves, rises and falls, and suggests a common center and direction. Now a quick caveat here. My understanding of the analogia fidei is that it is shorthand for finding Jesus in the text, or finding how the text is illuminated in its proper place by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. I could be grossly misunderstanding the origin and use of the analogia fidei, but I think that is what it refers to, and if so, the analogia fidei is, then, not only a model for hermeneutics but for prophetic homiletics as well, thereby undoing what Barth noted about early twentieth century hymnody, that it celebrates our story rather than the story of God.
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