Problems with the Historical Critical Method

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Problems with the Historical Critical Method

• OT-Hermeneutics -2006

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1. Historical-Critical Method

• 1.1 First, the method is used to elucidate the
  meaning of the text.
• 1.2 Second, the text is evaluated in terms of its
  historical accuracy.

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Krentz puts it this way . . . .

• "It is a method for collecting all possible
  witnesses to an era or event, evaluating what
  they say, relating the findings to one another in
  a coherent structure, and presenting the
  conclusion with the evidence." Krentz utilizes
  Lucey

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1.1 Definitions

• 1. Ulrich Wilckens "The only scientifically
  responsible interpretation that, with a
  methodologically consistent use of historical
  understanding in the present state of its art,
  seeks via reconstruction to recognize and
  describe the meaning these texts have had in the
  context of the tradition history Christianity."
  see Krentz, 33

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1.1 Definitions

• 2. "Historical-critical study of the Bible is a
  necessary component of responsible theology. To
  employ historical-critical method is to subject
  the putatively factual material and literary
  structure of the Bible to independent
  investigation in order to text their truthfulness
  and to discern their original historical meaning.
  This independent investigation assumes that the
  outcome of research will not be predetermined by
  a guarantee of the Bible's infallibility. The
  student of Scripture, using historical-critical
  method, is placed under the imperative of the
  historian who must seek the facts no matter where
  they lead."

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1.1 Definitions

• Limitations
• 1. "It is not secret that serious tension exists
  between historical criticism and the church. The
  problem goes much deeper than the issue of
  scholarly independence to pursue facts wherever
  they lead. The relationship of historical
  criticism and the church is characterized by
  deep-seated theological and doctrinal conflict
  over fundamental presuppositions of thought."
• 2. An atomistic treatment of the text that
  conflicts a theological unity approach.

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1.1 Definitions

• 3. ". . . another problem arises the Bible is
  seen primarily as an ancient document under the
  control of specialists and therefore remote from
  the concerns of contemporary life."

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1.1 Definitions

• "Those assumptions appear to be best summarized
  by George A. Kelly as the three governing
  principles of the historical-critical method
  "(I) autonomy - the research scholar will make
  up his own mind in light of the evidence (2)
  analogy - the credibility of a past event is
  tested in the light of its similarity to the
  modern experience and (3) causality - the
  conclusion or datum is part of a cause-effect
  series." Kaiser, Toward Rediscovering the Old
  Testament

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2. Gerhard Maier, The End of the Historical
Critical Method

• 1. It is impossible to discover any canon within
  the canon. There exist no criteria to map out
  certain texts as having authority and other texts
  as not.
• 2. One cannot separate divine Scripture from
  human Scripture. There exist no criteria to
  distinguish them.
• 3. Revelation consists in more than simply
  subject matter. It is personal in nature. The
  historical-critical method, on the other hand,
  depersonalizes the text in order to study it as
  an object. It cannot hear and obey.

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2. Gerhard Maier, The End of the Historical
Critical Method

• 4. The conclusions of historical-critical method
  are established prior to the actual
  interpretation of texts. Since the method knows
  in advance what texts are permitted to say and
  do, the text very often is not permitted to say
  what it really says.
• 5. The method is deficient in practicability. It
  yields exceedingly meager results, and there is
  hardly any consensus regarding most critical
  questions. As E. Earle Ellis points out,
  although it can show certain interpretations to
  be wrong, it can achieve an agreed interpretation
  for virtually no biblical passage. Further, the
  results are almost always useless for the life of
  the church. We would add that it also removes
  the Bible from the hands of the ordinary
  Christian.

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2. Gerhard Maier, The End of the Historical
Critical Method

• 6. Historical criticism is inappropriate for a
  text of the nature of revelation. If the Bible
  really is revelation, then not critique but
  obedience is called for.

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3. Nation, Historical Criticism and the Current
Methodological Crisis

• 1. Instead of bringing the reader of the Bible
  into intimate connection with its message,
  historical criticism rather has a pronounced
  distancing effect. It renders Scripture into a
  strange object to be dissected and examined
  instead of acknowledging it to be a Word that
  must be heard and obeyed in the present moment.
• 2. The method arose at a time when it was
  believed that it was possible to engage in
  historical research without presuppositions,
  while in actuality it functioned from the
  beginning with the assumptions of positivism,
  which have since shown to be untenable.

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3. Nation, Historical Criticism and the Current
Methodological Crisis

• 3. Historical criticism can easily oversimplify
  the complexities of the ancient period due to the
  limitations of sources, the difference between
  ancient and modern consciousness, and the
  inherent ambiguity of historical data. Exact
  understanding is therefore difficult, and
  historical criticism has not always admitted
  this.
• 4. The method produces conflicting result on a
  variety of problems so that the notion of a
  critical consensus is a figment of the
  imagination. A vast uncertainty of judgment and
  open skepticism prevail.

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3. Nation, Historical Criticism and the Current
Methodological Crisis

• 5. Contrary to the aim of historical criticism
  to recover the original meaning and intentions of
  the biblical text, doubts are sometimes expressed
  that this is possible or even desirable. On the
  basis of medieval exegesis the argument has been
  advanced that Scripture may have an implicit
  meaning going far beyond the authors original
  intention that can only be understood by a later
  audience.
• 6. Historical criticism is atomistic and
  disintegrative it does not produce adequate
  understanding of documents as literary wholes,
  since it concentrates on the pre-literary history
  of the text and tends to ignore its
  post-history. Thus the tradition is ground up
  into small pieces which have no meaning within a
  broader context.

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3. Nation, Historical Criticism and the Current
Methodological Crisis

• 7. The results of historical criticism cannot be
  effectively communicated to non-specialist and
  consequently can hardly serve the needs of the
  Christian community for teaching and
  edification.
• 8. The criteria by which historical method
  functions (e.g. the principle of analogy) are
  inadequate in dealing with historical novelty in
  biblical narratives there are numerous events
  which are without analogy.
• 9. Historical criticism is largely responsible
  for the sterility of the academic study of the
  Bible it neglects the devotional use of
  Scripture, strips it of theological meaning and
  renders it difficult if not impossible to gain
  exegetical results which are relevant and
  meaningful for contemporary worship and
  practice.

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3. Nation, Historical Criticism and the Current
Methodological Crisis

• 10. The view of myth often advocated by historic
  criticism is not only reductionistic and
  anti-historical but also ignores the power and
  meaning of myth even for modern humanity.
• 11. Historical criticism embraces the often
  unexamined assumption that in the biblical
  narratives only that which can be proved to have
  actually happened has any meaning.
• 12. The study of the direct, genetic or causal
  relationships of units with each other,
  involving the prehistory and the post-history of
  the texts is inadequate for a full
  understanding. In addition there must also be
  what could be called their para-history, an
  investigation of significant parallels, wherever
  found and from wherever time and on whatever
  level, an investigation carefully disciplined by
  structural methodology.

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4. Hagner, The New Testament, History, and the
Historical-critical Method

• 1. The historical-critical method must reject the
  limitations of the positivistic scientific model.
• 2. The historical-critical method must be open to
  the transcendent, i.e., to the possibility of
  divine causation.
• 3. The historical-critical method must pursue
  without restriction the explanation that best
  explains the phenomena under investigation.

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4. Hagner, The New Testament, History, and the
Historical-critical Method

• 4. The historical-critical method must test the
  reliability of historical witness using the same
  criteria and having the same resultant confidence
  whether what is in view involves the natural or
  the supernatural. Perhaps more attention must be
  given to the quality, circumstances, character,
  etc. of the witnesses to a supernatural even than
  to an ordinary event.
• 5. The historical-critical method must consider
  the role of the community in the transmission of
  the tradition not simply as potentially negative
  but as potentially positive.

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5. Precritical Movement

• David C. Steinmetz Theology Exegesis Ten
  Theses
• 1. The meaning of a biblical text is not
  exhausted by the original intension of the
  author.
• 2. The most primitive layer of biblical tradition
  is not necessarily the most authoritative.
• 3. The importance of the Old Testament for the
  church is predicated upon the continuity of the
  people of God in history, a continuity which
  persists in spite of discontinuity between Israel
  the the church.

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5. Precritical Movement

• David C. Steinmetz Theology Exegesis Ten
  Theses
• 4. The Old Testament is the hermeneutical key
  which unlocks the meaning of the New Testament
  and apart from which it will be misunderstood.
• 5. The church and not human experience as such is
  the middle term between the Christian interpreter
  and the biblical text.
• 6. The gospel and not the law is the central
  message of the biblical text.
• 7. One cannot lose the tension between the the
  gospel and the law without losing both law and
  gospel.

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5. Precritical Movement

• David C. Steinmetz Theology Exegesis Ten
  Theses
• 8. The church which is restricted in its
  preaching to the original intention of the author
  is a church which must reject the Old Testament
  as an exclusively Jewish book.
• 9. The church which is restricted in its
  preaching to the most primitive layer of biblical
  tradition as the most authoritative is a church
  which can no longer preach from the New
  Testament.
• 10. Knowledge of the exegetical tradition of the
  church is an indispensable aid for the
  interpretation of Scripture.

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5. Precritical Movement

• David C. Steinmetz "The Superiority of
  Pre-Critical Exegesis"
• "Medieval theologians defended the proposition,
  so alien to modern biblical studies, that the
  meaning of Scripture in the mind of the prophet
  who first uttered it is only one of its possible
  meanings and may not, in certain circumstances,
  even be its primary or most important meaning. I
  want to show that this theory (in at least that
  respect) was superior to the theories which
  replaced it."

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5. Precritical Movement

• Three Reason to distinguish between "letter
  law"
• 1. "Simply because a story purports to be a
  straightforward historical narrative does not
  mean that it is in fact what it claims to be.
  What appears to be history may be metaphor or
  figure instead and the interpreter who confuses
  metaphor with literal fact is an interpreter who
  is simply incompetent."
• 2. "The second reason . . . was the thorny
  question of the relationship between Israel and
  the church . . . .The church regarded itself as
  both continuous and discontinuous with ancient
  Israel. Because it claimed to be continuous, it
  felt an unavoidable obligation to interpret the
  Torah, the prophets, and the writings. But it was
  precisely this claim of continuity, absolutely
  essential to Christian identity, which created
  fresh hermeneutical problems for the church."

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5. Precritical Movement

• 3. "A third reason . . . that while all Scripture
  was given for edification of the church and the
  nurture of the three theological virtues of
  faith, hope, and love, not all stories in the
  Bible are edifying as they stand."

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5. Precritical Movement

• "From the time of John Cassian, the church
  subscribed to a theory of the fourfold sense of
  Scripture. The literal sense of Scripture could
  and usually did nurture the three theological
  virtues, but when it did not, the exegete could
  appeal to three additional spiritual senses, each
  sense corresponding to one of the virtues. The
  allegorical sense taught about the church and
  what it should believe, and so it corresponded to
  the virtue of faith. The tropological sense
  taught about the individuals and what they should
  do, and so it corresponded to the virtue of love.
  The anagogical sense pointed to the future and
  wakened expectation, and so it corresponded to
  the virtue of hope."

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5. Precritical Movement

• 1. "Medeval exegetes admit that the words of
  Scripture had a meaning in the historical
  situation in which they were first uttered or
  written, but they deny that the meaning of those
  words is restricted to what the human author
  thought he said or what his first audience
  thought they heard."
• 2. "Only by confessing the multiple sense of
  Scripture is it possible for the church to make
  use of the Hebrew Bible at all or to recapture
  the various levels of significance in the
  unfolding story of creation and redemption."

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Precritical Movement

• Four Fundamental Assumptions Governing the
  Difference Between the Precritical versus the
  Historical-critical Exegesis
• 1. "First, unlike the historical-critical
  exegesis of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and
  twentieth centuries, the older exegesis (whether
  of the patristic, medieval, or Reformation eras)
  understood the historia that is, the story that
  the text is properly understood to recount to
  be resident in the text and not under or behind
  it. In other words, the "story" is identified
  with the literal or grammatical sense."

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Precritical Movement

• 2. "Second, quite in contrast to modern
  historical-critical exegesis, the older exegesis
  assumed that the meaning of a particular text is
  governed not by a hypothetically isolable unit of
  text having a Sitz im Leben distinguishable from
  the surrounding texts or from the biblical book
  in which it is lodged. Instead, the meaning of a
  text is governed by the scope and goal of the
  biblical book in the context of the scope and
  goal of the canonical revelation of God. In other
  words, Christian exegetes traditionally have
  assumed that a divine purpose and divine
  authorship unite the text of the entire canon."

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Precritical Movement

• 3. "Third, the older exegetes understood the
  primary reference of the literal or grammatical
  sense of the text not as the historical community
  that gave rise to the text, but as the believing
  community that once received and continued to
  receive the text. The text is of interest above
  all because it bears a divinely inspired message
  to an ongoing community of faith and not because
  it happens also to be a repository of the
  religious relics of a past age. . . . The
  precritical exegete . . . did not understand
  these historical or contextual issues as
  providing the final point of reference for the
  significance of the text. . . . the precritical
  exegete understood the text, but its very nature
  as sacred text, as pointing beyond its original
  context into the life of the church. 'Literal,'
  therefore, had a rather different (and fuller)
  connotation for the older exegetical traditions
  than it does for many today."

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Precritical Movement

• 4. "A fourth point amplifies the third. The
  Reformation-era exegete, like his medieval and
  patristic forebears, never conceived of his task
  as the work of an isolated scholar on the
  shoulders of whose opinion the entire exegetical
  result could be established and carried. Instead,
  the exegete of the Reformation era indeed, even
  the Protestant exegete of the later
  sixteenth-century, who held as a matter of
  doctrine that Scripture was ultimately
  self-authenticating as the highest norm of
  theology understood the interpretive task as an
  interpretive conversation in the context of the
  historical community of belief."

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6. Postcritical Movement

• Ochs, Peter. "An Introduction to Postcritical
  Scriptural Interpretation." in The Return to
  Scripture in Judaism and Christianity Essays in
  Postcritical Scriptural Interpretation.
• 1. Representative of this "movement" Moshe
  Greenberg Hans Frei George Lindbeck Halivni

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6. Postcritical Movement

• 1. ". . . an emergent tendency among Jewish and
  Christian text scholars and theologians to give
  rabbinic and ecclesial traditions of
  interpretation both the benefit of the doubt and
  the benefit of doubt the former, by assuming
  that there are dimensions of scriptural meaning
  which are disclosed only by way of the
  hermeneutical practices of believing communities
  and believing traditions of Jews or Christians
  the latter by assuming, in the spirit of
  post-Spinozistic criticism, that these dimensions
  may be clarified through the disciplined practice
  of philological, historical and
  textual/rhetorical criticism."

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6. Postcritical Movement

• 2. ". . . semiotic philosopher Charles Peirce
  would call a three-part hermeneutic claiming
  that the text (the first part) has its meaning
  (the second) for a normative community (the
  third), rather than identifying the meaning of
  the text with some historical or cognitive
  "sense" that is available to any educated
  reader."
• 3. "Summarized in a sentence, the argument of
  both Jewish and Christian postcritical
  interpreters is that modern scholars have reduced
  biblical interpretation to the terms of a dyadic
  semiotic that lacks warrant in the biblical
  texts. The postcritical scholars claim that, as
  read in the primordial communities of rabbinic or
  of Christian interpreters, these texts, recommend
  a triadic semiotic, according to which the texts
  displays its performative meanings with respect
  to its community of biblical interpreters."

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7. A Response to the Postcritical

• Roberts, J. J. M. "Historical-Critical Method,
  Theology, and Contemporary Exegesis." The Bible
  and the Ancient Near East Collected Essays,
  393-405. Winona Lake, IN Eisenbrauns, 2002.
• Introduction
• 1. "Historical-critical methodology was always
  the bogeyman of fundamentalistic biblical
  scholarship, but now it has become the bogeyman
  for much wider circles of theological scholarship
  in this so-called postcritical age. It is not
  uncommon today, even in scholarly circles, to
  blame historical-critical scholarship for making
  the Bible inaccessible to the average person."

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7. A Response to the Postcritical

• 2. ". . . nontheological and theological critics
  alike attack the method for being overly
  concerned with historical questions, with the
  search for external referential meaning, for not
  being satisfied with the internal, narrative
  meaning of the text."
• 3. ". . . Lindbeck . . . argues that it was a
  particular way of reading the Bible "as a
  canonically and narrationally unified and
  internally glossed (that is, self-referential and
  self-interpreting) whole centered on Jesus
  Christ, and telling the story of the dealings of
  the Triune god with his people and his world in
  ways which are typologically . . . applicable to
  the present." This hermeneutic began to break
  down at the time of the Enlightenment, according
  to Lindbeck, and its loss is largely responsible
  for the present biblical illiteracy and the lack
  of a central core of commonly acknowledged
  beliefs in Christendom today."

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7. A Response to the Postcritical

• Canonical Unity
• 1. "First of all,what precisely is meant by
  "canonically unified whole"? . . . . Lindbeck
  speaks of the Hebrew scriptures and the Hebrew
  Bible in a way that suggests that he follows
  Childs in basically identifying the OT canon with
  the canon of the Masoretic Text. That, however,
  was definitely not the OT canon of most Christian
  churches until the time of the Reformation. . .
  ."
• 2. "Second, how can one protect a canonical
  reading of the text . . . from the charge that
  one is simply reading all sort of later Christian
  meaning into the text? . . . . Openness to the
  canonical context of the fuller story need not
  result in collapsing the distinctive message of
  Isaiah into a carbon copy of later New Testament
  text, but it does require a willingness to take
  historical development seriously in order to
  avoid this danger."

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7. A Response to the Postcritical

• 3. "Third, to read a biblical book as scripture
  in the light of the larger canon need not imply
  any contrast to a reading motivated by
  philological or historical purposes. . . . The
  historical-critical method is not responsible for
  the difficulty of interpreting the biblical text.
  Any ancient text from a different culture
  composed in a foreign language would present
  similar difficulties. . . ."

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7. A Response to the Postcritical

• Narrational Unity
• 1. "Lindbeck's characterization of the Bible as a
  "narrationally unified whole" also needs further
  specification. If he means by that phrase that
  all parts of the bible contribute generally to
  the one story of God's dealing with his people,
  it is a useful concept. However, one must be
  careful to avoid overstressing narrative as the
  fundamental theological category for revelation.
  If the older scholarship overstressed history as
  the mode for revelation, recent scholarship seems
  tempted to simply substitute narrative or story
  for history, forgetful of the fact that narrative
  is subject to many of the same objections that
  were raised against history."

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7. A Response to the Postcritical

• Self-Referential and Self-Interpreting
• 1. "Lindbeck's principle of scripture's
  self-referential and self-interpreting character
  is also problematic. It was formulated as a
  corrective to the tendency in historical-critical
  scholarship to be so concerned about the
  historical background of the text that the actual
  narrative meaning of the text was lost. . . . The
  introduction of historical information actually
  extraneous to the story is no contribution to the
  interpretation of the story as such, and far too
  much of that has been done."
• 2. "If a book refers to external events, a more
  profound knowledge of those events than what is
  actually narrated in the book itself may be
  necessary for a proper understanding of the work.
  . . . An interpretation of the Bible that limits
  itself to a referential system totally restricted
  to the biblical narrative itself does not take
  seriously the actual character of the biblical
  literature."