Renewing Biblical Interpretation

Zondervan, Craig Bartholomew, Colin Greene, Karl Möller

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780310144731
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Renewing Biblical Interpretation is the first of eight volumes from the Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar. This annual gathering of Christian scholars from various disciplines was established in 1998 and aims to re-assess the discipline of biblical studies from the foundation up and forge creative new ways for re-opening the Bible in our cultures. Including a retrospective on the consultation by Walter Brueggemann, the contributors to Renewing Biblical Interpretation consider three elements in approaching the Bible—the historical, the literary and the theological—and the underlying philosophical issues that shape the way we think about literature and history.

1

Uncharted Waters: Philosophy, Theology and the Crisis in Biblical Interpretation

Craig G. Bartholomew

One can say with some justification that the beginnings of biblical criticism are initially far more a philosophical than a theological problem . . . in dealing with these questions . . . The church historian finds himself or herself transported into the largely uncharted area which lies between philosophy and theology’.¹

Those who devote themselves to the study of Sacred Scripture should always remember that the various hermeneutical approaches have their own philosophical underpinnings, which need to be carefully evaluated before they are applied to the sacred texts.²

Introduction

If we are to discern the cancer and the many opportunities of the current state of biblical interpretation we must work at a depth diagnosis so that the solutions we propose contribute towards a genuine renewal of biblical interpretation. In this chapter I argue that unless we have the question of philosophy firmly in sight we will always be in danger of missing the depth of the problems, and the opportunities confronting us.

My argument develops as follows: First, I will argue that the crises of both modernity and biblical interpretation are at least philosophical, if not more than philosophical, and that these crises are connected. Secondly, I will look at some key examples in biblical studies to indicate how philosophy inevitably shapes biblical interpretation, whether acknowledged or not. Thirdly, I will look at the response to the crisis in biblical interpretation of ‘theological interpretation’, and show that this still leaves open the question of how philosophy relates to theology. Fourthly, I will explore several models of the theology-philosophy relationship and argue that an integrative model is required for biblical interpretation.

The Crises of Modernity and Biblical Interpretation as Philosophical

Postmodernity has become the catchphrase for our time. In an era of fragmentation and pluralism, and incredulity towards metanarratives, it is astonishing – and instructive! – that such broad-brush analysis is so pervasive. I am reluctant to concede that we have moved from modernity to postmodernity – if one must use modernity as the centre from which one analyses western culture then I would prefer to speak of late modernity or high modernity.³ Apart from the problem of trying to do cultural analysis with a club rather than a scalpel when one works with these wide-ranging categories, from a Christian perspective I think it is a mistake to think that so-called postmodernism has moved radically⁴ beyond modernity. The human autonomy that is fundamental to modernity, for example, remains as entrenched in postmodernism as in modernity. We may no longer be sure that human autonomy is the basis from which we can find truth, but then we will manifest our courage by bravely learning to live without that hope.

What the ‘post’ in postmodern does get at is the fundamental philosophical challenge that aspects of the modern worldview have recently been subjected to. In terms of epistemology the very possibility of representing the world truthfully has been radically challenged – witness the variety of positions taken in this regard by Habermas, Norris, Lyotard, Foucault, Rorty and Derrida. With this has come an awareness of the extent to which the post-Enlightenment, modern worldview is itself a tradition among traditions. Not all would agree with this of course, but it is precisely here that the battle rages. Gadamer, for example, argues that the Enlightenment perspective has its own prejudices and that these are specifically directed against the Bible as Scripture.⁵ All this raises in an acute fashion the challenge of (genuine) pluralism and questions at root the post-Enlightenment belief in progress.

Lest you think I am imagining the extent to which postmodernism involves a philosophical crisis, let me refer to a few recent authors in this respect. David Lyon says that ‘The postmodern, then, refers above all else to the exhaustion of modernity.’⁶ In his book on humanism, Carroll concludes:

Our story is told. Its purpose has been simple, to shout that humanism is dead, has been so since the late nineteenth century, and it is about time to quit. Let us bury it with appropriate rites, which means honouring the little that was good, and understanding what went wrong and why.⁷

Similarly in his Cosmopolis, Stephen Toulmin says of modernity that

What looked in the nineteenth century like an irresistible river has disappeared in the sand, and we seem to have run aground . . . we are now stranded and uncertain of our location. The very project of Modernity thus seems to have lost momentum, and we need to fashion a successor programme.⁸

This crisis is certainly more than just philosophical, but it is certainly not less than a philosophical crisis. There are historical, social, cultural, technological and economic dimensions to the present ferment in western culture. But, if as Derrida insists, every academic discipline has a philosophical subtext, then the philosophical aspect of the crisis is perhaps most significant for academic work, not least biblical interpretation. In an interview with Kearney, Derrida, rightly in my opinion, argues that

In all the other disciplines you mention, there is philosophy. To say to oneself that one is going to study something that is not philosophy is to deceive oneself. It is not difficult to show that in political economy, for example, there is a philosophical discourse in operation. And the same applies to mathematics and the other sciences. Philosophy, as logocentrism, is present in every scientific discipline and the only justification for transforming philosophy into a specialized discipline is the necessity to render explicit and thematic the philosophical subtext in every discourse. The principal function which the teaching of philosophy serves is to enable people to become ‘conscious’, to become aware of what exactly they are saying, what kind of discourse they are engaged in when they do mathematics, physics, political economy, and so on. There is no system of teaching or transmitting knowledge which can retain its coherence without, at one moment or another, interrogating itself philosophically, that is, without acknowledging its subtextual premises; and this may even include an interrogation of unspoken political interests or traditional values.⁹

Derrida is, I think, right about philosophy being foundational to all scientific disciplines¹⁰. And it is as one interrogates the philosophical subtext of modern biblical interpretation that the extent to which it is indebted to modernity becomes apparent. However, philosophically modernity is now in crisis, and through its rootage in modernity, biblical interpretation is unavoidably affected by this crisis. Indeed, we will not understand the crisis in biblical interpretation unless we discern its connection with the broader philosophical crisis of modernity that, inter alia, postmodernism signifies. The logic of my argument is as follows:

(1) It is legitimate to describe the dominant method of interpreting the Bible in the last 150 years or so as historical criticism. There is a variety of historical criticisms and all sorts of developments within this period,¹¹ but there is a commonality within that variety under the umbrella of what might be called the modern worldview, and it is important for post-Enlightenment biblical scholars to represent the situation this way! Part of the mythology of modernity is what Toulmin pejoratively calls the standard account of modernity.¹² This is the view that modernity began in the seventeenth century and represents the progressive triumph of reason. In this context historical criticism is thought of as the standard way of studying the Bible objectively.

(2) The philosophical subtext of the historical-critical method is post-Enlightenment philosophies of history, and nineteenth-century historicism in particular, as Ernest Nicholson acknowledges in his 1986 inaugural. Nicholson points out that the name historical criticism indicates its source. It emerged from the historical thinking that emerged out of the Enlightenment, received further impulses from Romanticism, and burgeoned in the German historical school of the nineteenth century.

To a remarkable extent, indeed to a greater extent than has often been realized or acknowledged, it was this historical thinking that provided the basis of biblical hermeneutics in the nineteenth century, and more than the theologians and biblical scholars themselves it was the leading figures of the German historical school – Barthold Gustav Niebuhr, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Leopold von Ranke, Johan Gustav Droysen, Theodor Mommsen, and others – who created the interpretive framework and provided the method.¹³

The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is followed by a historiographic revolution in the nineteenth century, and historical criticism embodies the application...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Foreword By Brevard S. Childs
• Academic With an Open Book
• Introduction
• 1. Uncharted Waters: Philosophy, Theology and the Crisis In Biblical Interpretation
• 2. Scripture Becomes Religion(s): The Theological Crisis of Serious Biblical Interpretation In the Twentieth Century
• 3. The Social Effect of Biblical Criticism
• 4. A Response to Walter Sundberg
• 5. Confessional Criticism and the Night Visions of Zechariah
• 6. A Response to Al Wolters
• 7. The Philosophy of Language and the Renewal of Biblical Hermeneutics
• 8. A Response to Neil B. MacDonald
• 9. Renewing Historical Criticism
• 10. Critical But Real: Reflecting On N.T. Wright’s Tools for the Task
• 11. ‘In the Arms of the Angels’: Biblical Interpretation, Christology and the Philosophy of History
• 12. An Experiment In Biblical Criticism: Aesthetic Encounter In Reading and Preaching Scripture
• 13. A Missional Approach to Renewed Interpretation
• 14. Deconstructing the Tower of Babel: Ontotheology and the Postmodern Bible
• 15. Imagination and Responsible Reading
• 16. A Response to Trevor Hart
• 17. A First Retrospect On the Consultation
• Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Addendum