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Problems with the Historical Critical Method

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Title: Problems with the Historical Critical Method


1
Problems with the Historical Critical Method
  • OT-Hermeneutics -2006

2
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.

3
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

4
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

5
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."

6
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.

7
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."

8
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

9
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.

10
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.

11
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.

12
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.

13
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.

14
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.

15
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.

16
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.

17
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.

18
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.

19
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.

20
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.

21
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.

22
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."

23
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."

24
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."

25
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."

26
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."

27
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."

28
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."

29
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."

30
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."

31
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

32
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."

33
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."

34
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."

35
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."

36
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."

37
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. . . ."

38
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."

39
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."
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