The Bible in Modern Culture

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Introduction

I. The Subject of This Book

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 test 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.

The achievements of historical-critical study of the Bible are astounding. We know more now than the church has ever known about the historical backgrounds of both Testaments. Form criticism and tradition criticism have disclosed the process of text formation, and linguistic research has probed the meaning of the biblical vocabulary. We are more aware of the discrete theologies that make up the Bible and the ways they interrelate and differ. The volume of scholarly literature on the Bible, grounded in historical-critical method, is immense and, for the most part, unrestricted by confessional or national boundaries. Bibliographical research in this material operates efficiently at an international level. All major biblical scholars practice some form of historical-critical method. It is assumed widely among theologians. While hermeneutical proposals for doing theology continue to abound and conflict, historical-critical method appears to offer a common basis for discussion among even the most disparate parties. It is hard to imagine how the Christian intellectual community could live without historical-critical study of the Bible.

But can the church live with historical criticism? It is no 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. A generation ago, Gerhard Ebeling made the following assertion: "[Historical criticism] is indeed all out to justify its existence as an independent theological discipline by discovering more and more new and increasingly radical theories of an anti-traditional kind.... [T]he impulses which lead to real advance in the development of this discipline are without question those which sharpen the tension with traditional dogmatics." The same observation could be made today. Indeed, the problem appears more pronounced.

Conflict between historical criticism and church traditions has been apparent from the beginning. Historical criticism of the Bible originated in the opposition between church dogma and the new liberal political philosophy of emergent modern Europe in the seventeenth century. This in turn led to a concerted effort in the eighteenth century to uncover the original message of Jesus apart from church tradition. Historical criticism sought to measure the meaning of Jesus' message according to the standards of Enlightenment morality and rationality. Biblical critics eventually retreated from the claim that an historically pristine portrait of Jesus could be disclosed by scholarly investigation. But they never withdrew from the confident assumption that the historical discipline determines the standards of meaning and value that are used to interpret Scripture. This has resulted in the creation of complicated hermeneutical procedures in which the content of the Bible is separated from what stands behind it. What the Bible reports and what it means are conceived to be two different matters, the latter especially to be determined by scholarship operating under presuppositions of modern culture. The result has been to assess the Bible according to measures that scholars deem fit and to treat church tradition and its reading of biblical texts with a hermeneutic of suspicion. This situation propels historical criticism, and the academic culture out of which it comes, into a constant struggle to dominate the church and dogmatics.

Historical awareness, however, forces one to observe that the contemporary biblical scholar does not live in an ideal world of universal morality and scientific objectivity. The scholar brings the ideas of a specific intellectual milieu to bear on historical research and hermeneutical proposals. This milieu heavily influences the intellectual standards by which judgments about the Bible are made. The practitioners of historical criticism often ignore this fact. Each generation of biblical scholars has too easily assumed that it has achieved the consummate approach to biblical analysis when, in fact, what it has done is to equate cultural norms with eternal truth. Problems associated with these approaches have been revealed by succeeding generations of scholars. Few, however, have looked at the curious phenomena of advance, revision, and even rejection of analyses that are so much parts of the story of the development of historical-critical method. Nor has the spiritual impact of historical criticism on the church been a topic of sustained reflection.

We believe that what is needed is a confessionally critical history of modern biblical criticism. And by "confessionally critical" we mean an analysis that is historically aware of the influence of cultural contexts on the formulation of ideas while, at the same time, seeking to be responsible to the church and its dogmatic tradition.

We will attempt to trace historical criticism as an historical phenomenon that has undergone change and development over time to create the system of ideas with which so many operate today. This contextual approach allows the exploration of the philosophical presuppositions of the practitioners of the historical-critical method. We think this is important because we believe that the debate over historical criticism of the Bible is nothing less than a debate about primary theological principles in the life of the church. As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger has stated: "At its core, the debate about modern exegesis is ... a philosophical debate. Only in this way can it be carried on correctly. Otherwise it is a battle in a mist. The exegetical problem is identical in the main with the struggle for the foundations of our time."

II. The Plan of This Book

We will proceed by means of an analysis of principal figures whose ideas represent major movements in the history of historical criticism. These figures, examined in terms of both their contextual cultural setting and their enduring significance, will provide us with the opportunity to explore the meaning of historical criticism of the Bible for our time.

We note the restrictions entailed by our method. The first is that persons whose works do not reflect a particular, discrete movement, whether in support of or in opposition to it, will not be given the attention they would have deserved had we proceeded by a method of encyclopedic description. For example, the great Tübingen scholar Johann Tobias Beck (1804-78) will receive some little attention, whereas his pupil, Adolf Schlatter (1852-1938), will be the subject of an entire chapter. The reason is that while Schlatter was greatly indebted to his teacher's freedom from orthodoxy and pietism as well as to his developed meditation on nature, a perspective at least part of which sets Beck among the precursors of the later "crisis," "neoorthdox," or "dialectical theology," the teacher did not share his pupil's historical sense. On the other hand, the advantage to the pursuit of movements is one that perennially attaches to classifications, that is, they enable the reader to identify motifs or currents of thought, thus "universals," by which to arrange the otherwise disparate, disconnected data of persons, influences, and perspectives. Further, since this volume is preeminently a survey of modern historical-critical study of the Bible, its primary task, as that of any survey, is to furnish definition, to outline horizons, and to fix contexts (in this instance, to fix the contexts of the use of historical-critical method), leaving it to further study to determine precisely where in those contexts a given datum, person, or perspective may belong - if, indeed, at all.

Second, our method very often involves the selection of a representative text or texts through which the figures chosen are evaluated. For example, although Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was enormously productive, we have chosen his brief, dramatic dialogue Christmas Eve (1805) as our primary focus because it directly addresses the topic of historical-critical method, enunciates the rules for its application, and draws the theological consequences of its use. This procedure has the advantage of viewing the chief figure reflecting a given movement from the perspective of a strategic or signal work.

On the other hand, we have not limited ourselves to such selection. In our study of Adolf Schlatter, for example, it seemed most helpful to range over the whole of his work in order to make clear his position as the transition between a critical past and the new, fermenting scholarship. Similarly, we have attempted to position the two contemporary scholars Paul Ricoeur (1913-) and Brevard Childs (1926-) each within the total context of his work in order to point up its similarity or dissimilarity with a generation of scholarship grown exponentially.

Chapter 1 sets the scene for what follows by looking in more detail at what we have identified in this introduction as the theological and doctrinal conflict between historical criticism and the dogmatic tradition of the church. We consider this tension to be nothing less than a war between two worldviews of faith: the worldview of modern critical awareness originating in the Enlightenment and the inherited Augustinian worldview of the Western church. The reason we have chosen these two worldviews is that they and not others - such as Thomism or Orthodox sacramentalism - have had the greatest impact in shaping modern Protestantism. It is within the history of modern Protestantism that the discipline of historical criticism arose. We believe that philosophical and theological conflict between Augustinianism and modernity is the underlying reason for the ironic but unavoidable fact that while the church has been enriched by the knowledge that historical criticism provides, it nevertheless finds this preeminent scholarly discipline a hostile companion in the journey of faith.

Chapter 2 turns more specifically to the history of historical criticism. Our focus will be the rise of rationalist biblical criticism in the seventeenth century in the work of Baruch Spinoza (1632-77). Spinoza was suspicious of all claims of historical religion. The child of a Jewish family forced to emigrate from Portugal to Holland, Spinoza knew the burden of religious persecution firsthand. If that were not enough, he lived his life under the menacing shadow of the Wars of Religion (1550-1648) and their aftermath. In his Theological-Political Treatise (1670), Spinoza attacks the political power of religion by calling into question the legitimacy of religious authorities in matters of civil government. Since the Bible is central to religious authority, Spinoza undertakes a critical investigation of the claims of Scripture in order to subvert its role in European political life. This investigation is grounded in modern historical principles. The first such essay of its kind, the Tractatus is clear evidence that historical-critical method originated in politically engendered hostility to the claims of faith.

In Chapter 3 we turn to the eighteenth century. The one figure towering above all the rest in this period is Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Although he took intriguing excursions into a "rational" interpretation of Scripture - as in "The Conflict of the Faculties" of 1798, occasioned by his distaste for the traditional custom of having theologians march in honored place at the head of the faculty in academic processions - Kant did not undertake any extended criticism. Such an effort was pursued by his older contemporary, the Wolfenbüttel orientologist Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768). The texts by which to view Enlightenment criticism through Reimarus's eyes are two "fragments" of his Apology published by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) in 1777 and 1778 respectively. The first is "On the Resurrection Narratives"; the second, "On the Intentions of Jesus and His Disciples." It was these portions of Reimarus's four-thousand-page Apology that drew the heaviest fire from his critics and resulted in severe restrictions upon Lessing's publishing activity.

The subject of Chapter 4 is the movement according to which the divine revelation could not be grasped by thought but had to be apprehended through intuition, feeling, presentiment - the movement known as "romanticism." Yet, romanticism did not on that account abandon historical-critical study. On the contrary, since it viewed the individual not merely as the recipient of the revelation but also as the revealer, it was through the historical description of persons that the revelation was mediated. Without doubt, the most gifted and celebrated representative of this movement was Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher. The text chosen to afford a glimpse at the romantic movement in theology and its use of critical method is from Schleiermacher's early years: his Christmas Eve of 1805. We have already-mentioned the reasons for this choice. The piece is an oddity this side of the nineteenth century since it combines the scientific development of ideas with poetic description. It articulates standpoints inductively and imaginatively, and makes perspectives live as persons. It echoes the style of the Platonic dialogue and does so quite successfully. Christmas Eve, at least in the opinion of Schleiermacher's great interpreter Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), furnishes the best introduction to the work of this theological giant's maturity. For all its brevity, Christmas Eve allows the connection between Schleiermacher's metaphysical worldview and his conception of the Bible to come to the clearest light, especially with regard to the complicated question of the relation of the "Jesus of history" to the "Christ of faith."

Idealism is the topic of Chapters 5 and 6. This movement is characterized by belief in a system, and on the basis of the assumption that the many have their home in the One, in an "Absolute" that is raptured beyond all division or differentiation between subject and object, the real and the unreal. In the area of historical-critical research, the two names most linked to this movement are those of David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) and his teacher, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860). For Strauss the choice is obvious, his landmark work The Life of Jesus (1835). Because Strauss's approach to New Testament texts is repetitive and his conclusions so brief, we believe that insight into his method and presuppositions can be gleaned at any section of the Life. We will examine his discussion of the narrative of Jesus' baptism. For Baur we will range over more territory, although his The Church History of the First Three Centuries (2nd ed., 1863) is especially important. This mature work offers sufficient introduction to his method and interpretative principles.

In Chapter 7 we turn to Schleiermacher's one-time pupil, Johann Christian Konrad von Hofmann (1810-77), who, like his teacher, assigned to historical study the role of corroborating Christian experience, and thus came to represent a route out of Schleiermacher taken until this day, and by scholars to the right and left - the route known as "salvation history," or Heilsgeschichte. Von Hofmann thus has his proper place in any history of biblical criticism. We will explore several works, including his classic text, the posthumously published lectures entitled Biblische Hermeneutik (1880).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Bible in Modern Culture by Roy A. Harrisville Walter Sundberg Copyright © 2002 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Excerpted by permission.
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