Value of the Historical-Critical Method

I’ve written a number of posts on the historical-critical method previously on this blog (category, listing 28 posts). It is one of the areas on which I can properly be described as unabashedly liberal. I fully embraced the critical approach to Bible study as the starting point, and as the best approach to ascertaining the historical meaning of the text. This doesn’t prevent me, of course, from looking at other means when dealing with application or other community or personal meanings. In fact, the historical-critical method is solely aimed at getting at historical meanings, and quite properly so.

There are a number of imbalances that are possible. Specialists in particular methodologies will often overemphasize one approach over another, such as when form critics find oral elements all over the place, even in places where an oral stage most likely never existed. Another imbalance occurs when one assumes that having studied the history of a text, one understands the meaning of the text itself. Some critical commentaries leave this impression; having sorted out the background, the foreground gets little attention. Enter canonical criticism, which places its focus squarely on the canonical form of the text, and even further on the way in which that text fits into the current canon of scripture. It is important to realize that this is also a historical stage of the text, complete with a sitz im leben (I abuse the term slightly) of its own and a reason for its existence.

Brevard Childs was a great advocate of canonical criticism. I’m currently using his commentary on Isaiah in my own devotional reading of Isaiah, and I have found him quite enlightening. I’ve written considerable on Isaiah here and also on my Participatory Bible Study Blog.

In his introduction to chapters 28-35 he makes a couple of comments on the historical study that are worth underlining:

As I have indicated before, I find this method of simply juxtaposing three reconstructed layers from different ages inadequate as an interpretive solution because it does not address the effect of this shaping on the text as a whole. One is left only with fragments arranged in historical sequence. [emphasis mine] p. 199-200

And again:

While I do not question the legitimacy of attempting to recover the history of the growth of the Isaianic corpus as a whole, much of the recent research remains futile, in my judgment, when it assigns the key to the interpretation to various theoretical reconstructions. The crucial exegetical question remains, regardless of how deeply one probes behind the present text, whether one can in the end discern any element of coherence in the rendering of the chapters in their final form. [emphasis mine] p. 200

I think these paragraphs make a key point: One has to be skeptical of one’s own reconstructions, and one needs to discover what it may have been that resulted in the text we have. It made sense to someone somewhere. For example, by identifying two sources in Genesis 1 & 2, have we resolved anything? It may explain some apparently contradictory elements, but then we have to ask just why it was that anyone thought the two went together.

I must emphasize that I reject the approach as well of those who believe that skepticism of the critical work results necessarily in a return to the traditional default. If I am skeptical of some of the divisions of sources in the pentateuch, that doesn’t mean that I automatically accept unity of authorship. There are good reasons to be skeptical of that as well.

In fact, I can summarize this by saying that there are good reasons to be skeptical, especially of one’s own work!