Jim West has posted an op-ed piece on the glories of biblical minimalism on “The Bible and Interpretation” website. Joseph Kelly has asked me to chime in, so I suppose I’ll do so.
Jim defines minimalism as follows. And, I want to make clear, I’m interacting with Jim’s article and definition,
not the broader world of biblical minimalists. So, here’s what he says:
“Minimalism” is the supposition that the biblical text cannot rightly or honestly be mined for historical reconstructions of ancient Israel or earliest Christianity. The underlying assumption here is that the biblical text is not historically oriented. That is to say, the purpose of the Bible is not to offer 21st century historians fodder for their reconstructive mills; it is to speak theologically to ancient (and I would also say, modern) communities of faith.
In general, it seems that Jim and I think in roughly the same way about what the Bible is and what we’re supposed to do with it.
When Richard Hays was talking about N. T. Wright’s Jesus work at the Wheaton Theology Conference, he described Wright’s approach to the Gospels as treating them like windows to look through in order to see the history on the other side. Conversely, Hays was advocating for reading the biblical narratives as we have them, stories written as theological narratives to tell us about Jesus.
I agree with Hays. The point of the Gospels is to be read as stories, not for a supposed history behind. And Jim is on this same trajectory.
Where I find historical studies valuable is where they help us to become better readers of the text we have. In fact, this is what I enjoy so much about Wright’s, Jesus and the Victory of God. Any book that purports to be a historical Jesus book but does not ever declare anything in the Gospels as “unhistorical” seems to me to be a category mistake. The book is, as I read it, a very helpful, historically rooted theology of the Synoptic Gospels.
Moreover, Jim is surely correct to bring intrabiblical intertextuality into this discussion. Were “original, historical referent” the concern of the biblical writers, we would not see them actively rewriting the scriptures as they bring them into new contexts. The 
theological, actualizing concern supersedes what we would call the “historical” concern. If the Chronicler just wanted to communicate the “historical” event, he would have just copied Kings, if Matthew and Luke had been concerned with history as we see it, they would have just copied Mark and Matthew wouldn’t have added squirrely second donkeys, second demoniacs, and the like.
But before signing up for the guild of biblical minimalists, I’d want to ask if the bifurcation and choosing of sides between historical maximalism and theological minimalism isn’t, itself, a function of the same modern tendency that brought us the concern with the a-theological historical in the first place? Before we loop Luke into the cause, it seems important to ask if, as an ancient historian, he had a more mixed category of history and theology that makes his work, to his mind, thoroughly both–even while it undermines the modern concerns with historiography as a discipline?
And if so, then that brings up the question of how different Luke is from ancient historians. If it is a matter of quantity of God- (or other propaganda-) overlay rather than quality of historiography, it seems that what we “know” from the Gospels might be not so different from anything else we might “know” about the ancient world. It’s an honest question (not merely rhetorical): how much more against the grain to we have to read the Gospels to get at “what really happened” than we’d have to read against the grain of Herodotus, Plutarch, or Julius Caesar?
In general, though, I’d say that the way Jim describes what we should be doing with the Bible is correct: we read it to understand the theological narrative being communicated. History can help us understand that narrative better, but witnessing to an uninterpreted, “objective,” or de-divinized history behind the text, is not the purpose for which these texts were written.
Then, of course, there is the question of what further problems this might raise in terms of these being the defining narratives of a people, but maybe that’s another post for another day.
It seems to me that there are three prominent ways of reading the scripture. The first is practiced by a lot of modern Christians and entails viewing the text as if it were dropped out of heaven as a specific word of God to them. This usually has negative consequence due to the ignorance od the history and context of the text.
The second is Wright’s “window” theory which attempts to reconstruct the world behind the text. While academically valid, and perhaps worthwhile, ancient texts are very stubborn and do not readily yield the type of information that modern historians require. Hence the fact that over 300 years of historical Jesus research has yielded so many vastly different reconstructions (cf. Schweitzer’s critique).
The third is approximately West’s “minimalism.” I, like you, think this is the most fruitful way to read biblical texts: in their original context and as theological narratives. I must say, however, that this does not let the scholar off the hook from a historical standpoint. Historical research must play a vital role in determining “original context.”
jd i’m grateful for the incisive observations. much appreciated.
Right-o. Now if I can just figure out how to get you to call me “Daniel”…
Jim’s article seems to me to be flawed by poor examples, and is quite unconvincing because of it. I would think that the editors of 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles are (probably quite deliberately) engaging in a theological dialogue over the nature of God’s sovereignty. It’s the stuff of Job. But to do that they both rely on the events they describe being known as history. To say they cannot be harmonised historically is a non sequitur as the point of different is non-historical: which spiritual being moved David.