A word about the historical-critical method

R. R. Reno made this comment in the June/July issue of First Things. Printing it here is a public admission of personal doubt--perhaps just a small one, a question, a confusion, or perhaps not--concerning the interpretive method of my schooling, namely this historical-critical (grammatical) one. Reno says,

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.

Church Dogmatics 1.1.2

You say what you are. That’s what Barth is getting at in this section. Perhaps “are” is the wrong term, as it presupposes a metaphysic of being (and the personal jury is still out as to whether Barth’s is a metaphysics of ontology). Nevertheless, Barth’s doctrine of revelation--what you say--is dictated by what you are. Say, then, that you are God, then Truth is what you are. So what you say of yourself, what you reveal of yourself, is Truth. Say, then, that you are a human being. Limited. A created thing. A creature. Your “saying” is also limited and created, encompassing at best only a world of created things.

But when the Church becomes--when it is elected in God’s providence for faith in the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, then it confesses what it knows to be there, but with created lips. And so Truth erupts eschatologically into the world through its confession--a confession it is given, not one it has appropriated, a confession born of seeking not of obtaining. “It does not have to begin by finding or inventing the standard by which it measures [what is true]. It sees and recognizes that this is given within the Church. It is given in its own peculiar way, as Jesus Christ is given, as God in His revelation gives Himself to faith. But it is given” (12).

There are two levels of knowledge, even as they are two levels of what can be expressed. Because it is Jesus who speaks, and because Jesus is the incarnate Son, and because the Son enjoys the pure agape of trinitarian fellowship with the Father, then his word can be trusted. His word, he himself, is an analogia fidei (τὴν ἀναλογίαν τῆς πίστεως) which is a true canon. “He is the truth, not merely in Himself, but also for us as we know Him solely by faith in Jesus Christ” (12).

The one level is a level of perfect comprehension and speech--a “charismatic theology from within” whose characteristic theologian in Paul. The other is steps out after, asking and fumbling according to the ontology of those who ask. “As the Church accepts from Scripture, and with divine authority from Scripture alone, the attestation of its own being as the measure of its utterance . . . (16 emphasis mine). This is a “theology from without” whose characteristic theologians are the second-century apologists. “It alone creates fellowship and can be ecclesiastical and scientific” (22). Nevertheless, it is “always undertaken as an act of penitent obedience” and its chief method is prayer born of faith that the Spirit “will guide you into all truth” (Jn. 16.13 ESV). It believes that “in, with and under the human question [note the inference to Luther’s doctrine of the Eucharistic presence] dogmatics speaks of the divine answer” (12).

I should note, as well, that this two-layered matrix of speech, the Truth and the questions that point to the truth, is very reminiscent of the scholastic argument that the efficacy of the sacrament was not bound to the piety of the officiant, or lack of it.

I like that Barth is not content to set out on beaten paths. He goes to foundations and comes back with a doctrine of revelation that I’ve heard lampooned and spoken against my whole life. Barth’s theology can make a dead dog into divine revelation. He denigrates the scriptures, they say, and dissolves revelation into subjectivity.

Most of these criticisms and the critics that wield them have not read Barth, or, if they have read him, have not attempted to understand him--at least that is my governing hypothesis. I do not think he denigrates church history, the creeds, or the scriptures. They are, in fact, the matrix upon which his Dogmatics is built. So the truth of the matter is more subtle.

I have the feeling Barth is not out to change the accident but the substance of theological activity in the world. And I have a feeling he is wresting the podium from the hands of confident rhetoricians and reminding everyone, “Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great” (Prv. 25.6 ESV). The self-revealing of the Triune God is a power beyond the epistemological dictates of scientific reductionism, and He is coming into the world.

And I wonder if Barth is reading Calvin better than Calvin has been read in a very long time. I wonder if Barth is breathing the spirit/Spirit of the Reformers and grasping the true sense of ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, the church reformed and always reforming, and therefore calling subsequent comfortable Protestant-scholasticism what it is.

Karl Barth; revelation; analogy of faith; election