As I’ve been meandering through my thoughts on being an academic who is preparing students for ministry in places that read the Bible very differently from the academy, the issue of biblical precedent for reading the Bible has come up.
In particular: doesn’t adherence to a historical-critical methodology already put us over-against the Bible, since the NT writers (for example) did not practice this sort of historical reading strategy?
The point is well made. If there’s one thing that historical readings of the Bible show us it’s that the biblical writers weren’t reading the Bible to find out what it meant to an imagined first audience. They were reading it as a word to them. Like normal people still do today.
I have two responses to this. The first is that I don’t think historical critical readings get the last word. More on this in a second.
The second is that most people today think they’re giving historical readings, even when they read it as word to themselves. The person who gets all excited about how the passage spoke to them or grabbed them during their quiet time is typically not saying, in my experience, simply that God told them something through these words. Readers, teachers, and preachers speak of these words spoken to them as though they are the words spoken as intended by Jesus himself, by Paul himself, by God who inspired them.
That is, people assume that there is a continuity between their experience with the text and its historically rooted significance. This is why historical criticism is so devastating to so many freshman in NT Intro–because we assume that we’re reading the Bible in accordance with what it actually is and says. If we didn’t care about the historical issue, then the realization that we have the history wrong would not disturb so many people’s faith–or call forth such vociferous defense from those who continue to adhere to the traditional idea.
But back to my first point: I don’t think historical criticism is the end of the interpretation story. I see it as more of a first step in a process of giving multiple readings to the same text.
One of the implications of the conviction that the Bible has a fundamentally narratival character, and that the life of the church continues this narrative and we as particular people play its various roles, is that later scenes in the story have the potential to transform the meaning of earlier scenes.
As characters in the story, we might expect that a certain chain of events will transpire. We arrive at a place where we are convinced that the end of our journey has come, but not in the manner we predicted. Looking back, we see that what we hoped for did come to pass, but differently from how we had anticipated, and even the hope itself is transformed.
This is the situation of the church reading the prophecies of Israel’s salvation–which have much less to do with a coming Messiah in particular than with full restoration from exile and geo-political freedom and/or hegemony more generally.
Historical critical exegesis tells us that 2d Isaiah was looking for restoration from exile. Historical-critical exegesis shows us that Mark picked up the theme of Isaiah’s second exodus / restoration from exile and interpreted it in a non-historical manner. And, as people who look to Christ for salvation we are right to take up that hermeneutic and reinterpret the OT in light of what God actually has done to save and restore God’s people.
And we continue to use these narratives of restoration as we look to the future: a time of both individual and corporate salvation and the restoration of the cosmos as a whole. Moreover, I anticipate that when that final salvation comes we will be as surprised at its particulars as the Bible-adherent Jews were at the particulars of what God was doing in Jesus.
We read in light of a later point in the story: the post-Jesus side of the narrative.
For many of us, this narrative has continued through a church tradition that includes various creeds and confessions–various battles fought that have defined in the identity of the people of God in various ways. Those earlier moments in the story continue to define how we read the Bible as a word spoken to us, whether as assumptions, as points we consciously read into the text, or points that we fight against in the text, convinced that other things are going on than the church tradition has affirmed. In each case, the way we read is determined by our point in the story which comes now with 2,000 years of interpretive tradition.
The trick for the church, as I see it here in the second decade of the 21st century, is to figure out how historical critical reading strategies–a perspective on what the Bible is that in part defines us as in our contemporary context–can also become a part of the theological storehouse of people of faith.
Can this historical approach to scripture feed the church’s faith? Can it provide theological riches for the people of God?
I do think so–but the process of moving from history to theology has been a slow one, with too few practitioners helping make the translations and transitions. The fault here lies largely with those of us employed in the academy, who have as a whole taken far too long to start doing the work of developing our historical findings theologically.
The academic world is changing. It is developing space for theologically interested readings of scripture of all types. The question is whether this will be a boon to the church or further stifle its ability to hear scripture afresh. The stifling can occur not only as the academy talks about the Bible in ways that the church won’t accept or can’t hear, it can also happen as the academy attempts to put its academic content into ecclessial containers that simply cannot contain it.
