Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: historical-critical method

  • Confronting Critical Issues in Church

    I’m using “critical” here in two senses: 1) critical study of the Bible, as in using the methodologies of the historical-critical method and 2) critical in the sense of “of key importance.

    I believe that issues such as the inspiration of scripture, the nature of scripture, historicity (or not) of various passages, and creation and evolution should be addressed in church. They should be addressed in Sunday School, starting very young. In the modern world, we cannot expect children, not to mention older church members, never to be exposed to various alternate ideas.

    I think that would, in itself, make a good case for seriously addressing these issues in church. If you can’t restrict the flow of information, it’s counterproductive, in the long run, to try. I believe it would be a bad idea to restrict this information in any case. People, including young people, should be encouraged to make a fully informed choice. But the fact that the nature of the world means they will get all that information just makes the idea of narrowly indoctrinating them on a particular view, and/or hoping that certain questions won’t come up, impractical as well as just plain wrong.

    Ken Schenck brought this issue to my mind with his post How to Create a Fundamentalist. He notes: “All you have to do is bring history and context into the chemical process in a confrontative or combative way.” (You really need to read his whole post to get the context for this! He makes an important point.) Now trust me. If a young adult first encounters critical scholarship in a secular college, he or she will certainly encounter it in a confrontational or combative way.

    Now don’t misunderstand me. A certain number of readers will probably assume that I mean we should somehow inoculate church members against the attack on their faith by critical methologies. I think that is going to be a failure as well.

    Too often when we teach about other faiths in church, it becomes a matter of teaching them the most common stereotype of people of that faith and how to convert them. Just go to any Christian book store and look at short guides to other religions. Most of them will be of this type. It’s almost guaranteed that if a 100 page book covers several faiths and supposedly tells you how to “reach them for Christ” the description will be limited. Supposing someone learned about Christianity in 10 pages or less. Would you think they were ready to seriously address Christians?

    I bring this up by analogy, because another approach to teaching something about biblical criticism and the myriad of related topics in church is to have a class that would be best titled “Biblical Critics and How Bad They Are.” This is the same sort of approach. I don’t think one has an adequate idea of critical methodologies, even for a layperson, unless one has actually worked with the texts looking at the process and results. (I have a brief series on my other blog, Threads from Henry’s Web, touching on some of the basics of biblical criticism, along with another series on basic ideas about origins.) But frequently what we hear is a litany of “silly” results (from the viewpoint of the speaker) so that we can laugh at critical scholars and go back to believe limited things.

    But I think liberals and progressives are often weak in this area as well. They very often teach results of critical scholarship, supported largely by the authoritative credentials of particular teachers or speakers. I recall one Sunday School class that invited me to discuss the Jesus Seminar. They generally accepted the results of the seminar, and were pretty sure that conservative critics were wrong, but they actually had no idea how the seminar produced its results. So I took them to a pericope, looking at how one finds the boundaries, and then examining some of the criteria for authenticity. It was complex but enlightening.

    I could have said that I disagree with significant portions of the Jesus Seminar methodology (I do) and cited other scholarship that opposes it, but instead I chose (and will always choose) to break things down to nuts and bolts, if I can possibly find the time. There are, of course, many other methodologies to look at in studying the historical Jesus, and I think if one puts in the effort, one can teach a lay audience a great deal more than we do.

    Instead of this, I think we tend to teach biblical studies (lite) and theology (very lite), repeating the same sort of shallow things. There is plenty out there to teach, and if we’re afraid of discussing the major issues, we (in the mainline protestant churches especially) will continue to lose.

     

  • Is Canonical 2 Corinthians a Hypothetical Reconstruction?

    As I’ve noted before, I’m now reading Calvin J. Roetzel, 2 Corinthians, in the Abingdon New Testament Commantaries series.  I want to emphasize here that I accept the use of historical-critical methodology in Bible study.  That does not, however, force me to find all critical theories plausible.  I’m arguing against this specific set of theories, not against historical-critical methodologies generally.

    In arguing against the unity of the book, Roetzel says:

    … Most [scholars who argue for the integrity of the book] side with Kümmel that the canonical version of 2 Corinthians was Paul’s original epistle, and they tend to ignore the hypothetical nature of their own construction even while repudiating the hypotheses of others (Kümmel 1965 [Introduction to the New Testament. Nashville: Abingdon, 1965], 292).  — p. 25

    This seems to me to be an odd statement.  Though it is not explicit, it appears to aim to place all views on a level playing field, from unity to the five letter hypothesis.  But that doesn’t seem the correct approach.

    If I have a letter with an essentially unified textual history, in this case meaning that the partitioning of the letter is nowhere evident in the textual history as we have it, then we might give at least slight preference to the notion that it is, in fact a letter.  When it fulfills all the forms, that suggestion is strengthened.

    I suppose that the idea that the letter is a unity is, indeed, an hypothesis, but it seems a rather obvious one.  Suggestions of Paul’s changes of mood and/or rhetorical intention are based on observing the text based on this first and most obvious hypothesis.

    On the other hand multiple letter hypotheses are immediately much more complicated.  First one has to assume that someone combined multiple letters into one, cutting out the salutation of at least one and the conclusion of another.  If we assume five letters, then the situation becomes more complicated.

    There are clearly shifts or seams in 2 Corinthians.  The question is why?  The problem for multiple letter hypotheses, I think, is to answer the question not just of why such seams are there (which they answer by proposing multiple letters), but also just why someone should put the document together in this way.

    I don’t see this addressed anywhere.  What is the purpose of the redactor?  If he wishes to preserve all the letters why not just copy them in succession?  If he has some theological purpose, then the question goes right back to the start–what is the meaning of the text as it stands?  (I would welcome comment from someone who has spent more time studying New Testament than I have.)

    I’m suggesting two things.  First, that the hypothesis that the letter as we have it is a unity should be privileged in discussion to some extent, because it is supported by the best possible evidence–that’s what the letter looks like now.  Second, that a theory that involves redaction must also explain the actions of the redactor.  Simply producing plausible pieces and providing a chronology for them does little without some reason why they would have been combined as they were.

    Let me illustrate from some texts where I feel I’m on more solid ground.  Many people try to solve the chronological differences between Genesis 1 and 2 by attributing them to two sources.  Now I believe they are from two sources.  I think the evidence is fairly solid for that.  But having said that, I have solved nothing regarding the difference in chronology between the two chapters, because I still must think about a redactor who somehow thought that putting them together made sense.  So now I must ask about his motivations and what message he intended to convey bringing them together.

    In the case of Isaiah, we again have a composite book, but here were have a hypothesis for why redactors would want to add to the book.  Very likely there was a school of prophets or scribes who preserved Isaiah’s work and added to it from time to time.  Their motivation is to preserve the prophet’s (or prophets’) words. They are not cutting pieces out and combining them, but rather putting the pieces together, generally as they were.

    I don’t see any similarly plausible hypothesis for 2 Corinthians, which makes me find the arguments for unity much more plausible in view of the lack of solid reasons for someone to sew the book together from two to five pieces as various theories suggest.

  • Is Anything Biblical?

    Over on Complegalitarian Wayne Leman asks whether either side of the complementarian/egalitarian debate should claim to be Biblical. Since I am openly egalitarian, perhaps I should try to answer the question “is egalitarianism Biblical?” instead.

    But the fact is that I’d rather question the term “Biblical,” as indeed some of the commenters to Wayne’s post have done. The fact is that most people in the Christian community claim to believe things that are Biblical in one way or another. And depending on one’s approach, almost anything can be called Biblical.

    I’m sure I’ve told the story before of the young man from an Independent Baptist church who came to my door wanting to share the gospel with me. It didn’t matter to him that I was already a Christian, or that I pulled out my Greek testament to follow along with his texts. He was arguing in favor of “once saved, always saved” but more particularly that the “once saved” had to be a complete and total dependence on grace without any inkling of any form of works. He had a quite legalistic definition of grace, in fact! We both presented texts, and as those of you acquainted with the topic may guess, books like Matthew, Hebrews, Acts, 1 John, and James featured in my part of the discussion. When it was over and he was about to leave he said, “I’m worried about your salvation. I’ve presented you with nothing but scripture, but you haven’t responded with any scripture.” Then he paused. “Well, except for Matthew, Acts, Hebrews, and James, and they don’t count!”

    His reason they didn’t count was that according to him those books were written either for the Jews or for a “transition period” between the Jewish dispensation and the dispensation of the church. Those with theological training will recognize a fairly detailed and intense form of dispensationalism.

    Now my point isn’t whether his form of dispensationalism is right or wrong–I happen to think it’s silly, but that is unimportant here. Rather, I’d like you to notice that both of us though we were being Biblical, but neither of us would be likely to recognize what the other one was doing as Biblical. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a sermon illustration about visiting this guy who read Greek and who kept using texts that just didn’t apply in that particular context.

    Depending on how you approach interpretation, a great variety of things can be made Biblical or not Biblical. That’s because the Bible is a collection of different books from different times, places, and written for different purposes. They are brought together as a “Bible” by the recognition of the Christian community. I happen to think that collection is Holy Spirit driven, but that’s not the key issue here.

    There is enough diversity in all those books that depending on how I tie them together, I can come up with very different results. Yet over and over I encounter people who won’t even discuss their approach to interpretation or their understanding of the Bible as a “canon.” What many want to say is that they are just teaching what the Bible says, and then they quote a line, a verse, or a passage and apply it to their particular time and circumstances. But that line, verse, or passage wasn’t written at that moment, and its author didn’t point it at that particular time, place, and circumstance. The interpreter is taking something that was written at one time and place and applying it to another.

    And we have to do that. But we should acknowledge that our understanding is involved in our interpretation and application of the passage. We each interpret, we each have to take responsibility. Some think it appears selfless and humble to take ourselves out of the equations. “I’m just proclaiming the word of God.” But it isn’t humble to do the work and then claim that it was really God all along instead of you.

    Let me just list some key approaches to understanding the Bible as a complete canon.

    1. Community – the community receives, collects, and interprets, then in various ways mediates the application. The Catholic church’s “magisterium” is one aspect of this type of approach though there are many others. In some charismatic churches the pastor has become a local “magisterium” and nobody can question the pastor’s understanding of scripture. It may get labeled in different ways, but few of us are immune to the attempt to create some kind of authority.
    2. Dispensationalism – since the Bible appears to say very different things in different places, one way to make it work is to divide it up. Then if you have one text that says “faith without works is dead” and another that “you are saved by faith apart from works” (pardon my loose paraphrasing here), you just assign them to different dispensations.
    3. Proof texting – rarely claimed as a method, but very commonly used, this involves taking your favorite key texts and applying them while ignoring everything else. The more accomplished proof-texters have ways of explaining away all other texts, and seem oblivious to how ridiculous such explanations may seem to others.
    4. Historical-critical – I enjoy the tools of this method, but it too has its weaknesses, usually in that it takes texts apart without ever putting them back together. One can come up at the end knowing about everything there is to know about a text, but still having no idea what it actually means.
    5. Covenant theology – fit the texts within the various covenants God made. I like large portions of this idea, though a bit of overdoing it can result in something that looks remarkably like dispensationalism, though the two are not really that closely related.

    Of course there are more, and I’m not here trying to advocate one or the other. I’m just trying to point out that we all have some approach or combination of them, and often when we think someone else is hopeless non-Biblical, it is more the result of a difference in approach than to any ignorance on their part.

    In the end, however, I think the term “Biblical” is not a very meaningful one. I’d prefer “true” and “false.” Once we’ve made our claims we can then discuss the issues based on whatever evidence and process of logic we used to arrive at them. At a minimum, however, we have to look at the approach, otherwise the debate will be intractable.