Scripture & Theology

Where I have some evaluative comments of my own to intersperse, these shall be in bold italics.

‘Behind’ The Text: History and Biblical Interpretation (2003)

Here Alvin Plantinga takes on Robert Gordon; van Inwagen lines up against Colin Greene and Joel Green, and there is an essay by William Alston that seems appended to that phase of the book. There are two ‘Catholic’ contributions from Mary Healy and Peter Williamson. Re-thinking history is what goes on in the next six essays, while the last four-Möller, Seitz, Neil MacDonald and Stephen Wright seem a little more miscellaneous.

In the introduction Bartholomew claims that the bible tells us a story form creation to new creation. There is also a story of historical criticism from early modernity to today. M. Sternberg as the doyen of literary approaches to the bible nevertheless wanted to hold on to the historiographical intentionality of the bible writers. The postmodern turn is invoked: can history really represent the past? Again a Jewish scholar, this time Jon Levenson is invoked. However there is no mention of New historicism.

Plantinga in a version of Ch12 of his Warranted Christian Belief argues that at a level of historical probability that the apostles wrote volumes of divine discourse is only ‘fairly likely’. (22) ‘HBC is fundamentally an enlightenment project; it is an effort to determine from the standpoint of reason alone what the Scriptural teachings are and whether they are true.’ (27) This works both on the composition and on the historical background to the text. HBC is guided by the Troeltschian notions of methodological doubt, analogy and correlation, and maybe also, autonomy. These all combine to throw suspicion on any idea that God might intervene in the world. [There is a curious excursus on Victorian doubt and the Ethics of Belief (cf. W.K. Clifford).] On the one hand sceptical scholars conspire to form a consensus around the Troeltschian principles but disagree with each other and until they manage to agree there is no need to worry. These are good reasons, thinks Plantinga, for a believer to disregard HBC.

Plantinga rightly chides those who would exclude Christian scholarship on the grounds of pluralism. He is right to criticise many of the ‘experts’ for standing as priests and experts in the law. But Troeltsch is not accepted by the majority of Christian exegetes. Plantinga tells us we can perhaps build on what is acceptable to everybody, yet thinks that we can know things that nobody else knows because we were ‘in the right place’. Unfortunately I cannot share Plantinga’s view that uneducated people are less deistic in their thinking than theological and biblical ‘experts’ and his account of biblical criticism is an unfortunate caricature.

Bartholomew himself takes on Philip Davies, even if that is a bit like Richard Dawkins choosing Christian fundamentalists as dialogue partners. For Davies academic study of the bible must be etic and inclusive, not emic and confessional. Bartholomew agrees with Plantinga that ‘a real live Scripture scholar is unlikely to have spent a great deal of thought on the epistemological foundations of the discipline.’ (63) This seems unfair to the likes of N.T. Wright. With Plantinga belief can indeed be ‘properly basic’. Bartholomew notes an alliance with Barthian anti-natural theological foundationalism. He seems quite taken with Plantinga and his philosophical big guns.

He senses a need for a theology of history (a note echoed elsewhere in this series.) Why needn’t a theist believe that God have spoken the commandments audibly? We can’t found our belief in resurrection on hard evidence.

Robert Gordon wants to offer some defence of HBC: it helps explain why Genesis 1 has animals created before humans and Gen 2 has the reverse. HBC cannot prove the resurrection, but it might be able to show that the belief is present on all layers of the NT. (85) HBC rightly warns us off ‘Christomnism’ in the treatment of the OT and, after all, ‘some of the impetus for HBC comes from the bible itself.’ These questions come from ‘what Scripture does to Scripture’ It is a non-Troeltschian historical investigation that Gordon proposes, something Calvin would have used. For Plantinga it is either TBC or HBC; there is no middle ground and to do HBC means to leave ‘what you think you know by way of faith.’ (94) Gordon adds that God’s being the author of a prophecy fulfilled in the NT does not mean he is author of the bible. (99)

If a believer can see that critical studies do not undermine the reliability of the NT then one can ignore them. Yet, for Plantinga here is ‘no reason for me to think that critical studies have established any important thesis about the New Testament.’ (128) The same goes for philosophers – one does not need them to practice a religion. But that is hardly the point. This series is about Scripture and Hermeneutics, not how to be a faithful Christian.

Colin Greene writes that if it was good enough for the church through the ages that the gospels were reliable, then why not for us too. There then follows a fairly wild interpretation of Heidegger as some eschatological prophet and the dubious assertion: ‘In reality the New Testament is a public proclamation of the kyrios, which was raised from the dead. Its authority is not located in the historicity of the events it describes but in the eschaton that has already been thrust upon me.’ (13)

Thank goodness for Robert Gordon and especially Joel Green. Breytenbach’s research establishes the verisimilitude but not the verity of Acts 13-14. Historical enquiry is needed to see and show how God has intervened. But narratives are those things which shape a people’s identity, they are about ‘assigning meaning to the events that have been fulfilled among us’. (149) Writing with some debt to Albert Cook’s History/Writing, Green argues that Luke’s screening of materials is not purely agenda-driven, if we can accept that he sought to be fair and honest. Perhaps it is not adequate to focus on the integrity rather than the accuracy or intention of the writers. William Alston’s attack on the use of the ‘criterion of dissimilarity’ is not without merit, but seems totally unaware of how this criterion has been developed and challenged beyond recognition, as discussed in Gerd Theissen’s work. Mary Healy’s essay is informative without being all that stimulating. Peter Williamson does a similar thing in more detail while telling the story about the Pontifical Biblical Commission, which seemed to be alive to methods such as that of Paul Ricoeur’s relecture. Williamson thinks that historical criticism is to be valued if it is shorn of its concomitant presuppositions; the ‘Jesus of history’ and the ‘Christ of faith’ should not be separated as they were in Bultmann (Cardinal Ratzinger’s chief bogeyman.) He then registers the important point that has become a rallying flag for orthodox of all persuasions in recent years: ‘While Christian faith is open to considering and learning from new historical data, faith is governed by the presentation of Jesus and his message expressed in the canonical texts. Catholic exegesis grounds its knowledge of God’s action in human history in Jesus Christ on the testimony of Scripture and tradition, which it has accepted, rather than on historical research. This is because, in the last analysis, Christian exegesis is a theological rather than a historical discipline, whose ultimate foundation is revelation and faith rather than historical research.’ (208)

Williamson shows how the literal sense is ‘that which has been expressed directly by the inspired human authors’ (no mention of authorial intention) and that this ‘literal sense of some texts possesses a dynamic aspect.’ (215) There is a sense that PBC did not go far enough in condemning wrong presuppositions and wrong use of the method and the likes of John Collins go on believing that HC is neutral while a confessional approach is not. The passage from Rankean empiricism which still left room for divine causality, to a Comtean positivism, which did not, to the Droysen-Dilthey-Gadamer idea of history-writing as a conversation with the past in the light of a life-tradition – all this is well sketched by Iain Provan. ‘Whatever the value of archaeology, then, in filling out our picture of the past, we repeat: history is fundamentally openness to acceptance of accounts of the past that enshrine other people’s memories.’ (249) He rejects Collingwood’s model of the historian as a lone-ranger not wanting to rely on the testimony of others. There is a long and useful section on the OT histories of Thompson and Grabbe as privileging the ANE accounts over the bible, as though the former were more ‘balanced’ in their reporting, and concludes by echoing Halpern’s claim that history can only be based on testimony and not predictability: ‘history is the telling and retelling of unverifiable stories’. (263)

Murray Rae observes the delight, common in both modern and postmodern historians, in disengagement. Spinoza despised the use of biblical narratives or any narratives in order to understand the eternal which is learned from reflection on self-evident axioms. Jewish and Christian faiths were thus historicised and seen as myths. With Vico history did not have a purpose, only an inner necessity. Lessing wrongly equated our distance from the past in terms of experience with that in terms of knowledge (274) and the latter might do especially if we follow Gadamer; Lessing was demanding too much certainty to take the step of commitment. Troeltsch did make history a means to an end, that of a ‘dogma other than that of orthodox Christian faith’. (279) In the bible a fictionalizing tendency is subordinate to historical reference, as Francis Watson has said. Creation out of nothing means that creation is temporal. The purpose of history may also exceed our expectations, and a belief in history implies one in human accountability (so, Derrida). The history of Israel starts with Abraham who does not descend from heaven, like a mythical figure (presumably it is also important that Jesus had a history in his early life, etc.) But his was a particular life that had universal significance; and so too might ours. This is a masterly essay. What I cannot quite understand is why Walter Sundberg is allowed to have another go at the same subject: Kierkegaard for him can be used as an antidote to Lessing. This is not a bad attempt but one feels it covers the same ground as Rae, only less well.

One smiles when one reads the disarming comment of C. Stephen Evans (321): his full defence (The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) of the church’s classic way of reading the NT as history ‘has not called for the critical notice of any kind: it has simply been ignored.’ (321) His point is to argue that a common starting point for reading Scripture can be discerned, even where the ensuing interpreters differ in their results. He speaks of the Rule of faith as the content of the main creeds as defined by the ‘early’ ecumenical councils or (cutely) CS Lewis’s ‘mere Christianity’ which is ‘more like a hallway or common room that various churches share.’ (324) Quoting from his earlier monograph mentioned just above: ‘The history of New Testament interpretation strongly suggests that the New Testament under-determines its own interpretation.’(325) With a nod to Stephen Davis, the creedal lenses are provided by the Scriptures themselves; they are not alien to the Christian faith. And we certainly don’t have to approach the evidence to establish faith without faith, as Swinburne would do. The Scriptures for the non-evidentialist account do not provide evidence for faith to rest on but ‘are part of the means whereby God creates faith in those who come to know “the great things of the gospel”.’ (333) In Plantingan terms, if there is a ‘ground’ then it is the circumstances in which God creates faith, and that includes the Church.

For Greg Laughery, in a fine, well-researched article, Ricoeur in a postmodern climate can be feted as a hero for his insistence on the historical in the bible – it is a public truth touching the real world. Trace, testimony and représentance matter to him. There is a useful deployment of Ricoeur’s late work La Memoire, L’Histoire, L’Oubli, especially in his tussle with the ‘postmodernist’ Hayden White.

David Lyle Jeffrey shows how the Aeneid’s metanarrative was linear in a way that the Odyssey was circular; it was more about destiny than selfdiscovery. He likes Tom Wright’s notion that the Christians metanarrative is public truth and not about a God rescuing people out of the world, and heartily agrees with most of the project, but wants to issue a caveat.

‘I am less sure than he is that the pilgrim journey to which Galatians and Hebrews invited its Christian readers is not, after all, toward a celestial, rather than a restored earthly Jerusalem…There is a strong hermeneutical sense in which Hebrews is a recapitulation of Galatians.’ (378) The two letters get slight treatment by Wright. One should not allow to think that our destination is not beyond history.

(One wonders just why Tom Wright was not invited to receive the treatment O’Donovan got in Volume III., although the essay by Bartholomew and Goheen in Volume 5 goes a long way) Lyle Jeffrey is rarely anything but stimulating and here he does not disappoint as he tells us: Don’t be bewitched by history!

Möller’s article is deep and technical but there is just a sense that it is just too much an introduction into recent scholarship on the 12 prophets without really that much hermeneutical considerationsthese are more anecdotal-e.g. Lohfink’s attack on ‘pan-deuteronomism’. How different is the concept ‘Fortschreibung’ from the Childsian ‘aggiornamento’?

Seitz comments on Von Rad’s inability to go beyond P and J to the final form. Rosenzweig’s Rabbenu-Redactor could have been fitted in with the collation of the witnesses by Christ. The canonical approach can now be taken beyond Childs’ final form of each book-approach to consider the history and the theology of how sections of the Tanakh came together. ‘Jonah’ is viewed by Seitz as taking a special place in the Twelve, but a place that is on the way to Nahum. Exegetical insights jump out at many corners and the sense one has is of something fresh and alive. Neil MacDonald stresses, what he part-learned from Childs, the ‘ontic priority’ of the early chapters of Genesis. God created and acted in the world ‘by respectively determining himself to be the creator of and actor in it’. (489)