Tags
Brevard Childs, elephant in the room, George Aichele, John Barton, John Van Seters, Peter Miscall, postmodernism, Richard Walsh
It’s all on! The Summer 2009 issue of the Society of Biblical Literature’s flagship journal, The Journal of Biblical Literature, published an article which presented the unpresentable in Biblical Studies – the entrenched division between those biblical scholars who practice what may be called postmodern biblical criticism and those who practice historical criticism: George Aichele, Peter Miscall, and Richard Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room: Historical-Critical and Postmodern Interpretations of the Bible”JBL 128.2: 383-404. As the title of the article states, this fundamental division in biblical scholarship has long been unacknowledged. Everybody knows about it, everybody talks about “us” and “them”, but with a few notable exceptions (like Heikki Räisänen’s collection, Reading the Bible in the global village: Helsinki) it has lacked significant critical dialogue.
Now, John Van Seters has responded with an article in The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 9.26 (2009), “A Response to G. Aichele, P. Miscall and R. Walsh, ‘An Elephant in the Room: Historical-Critical and the Postmodern Interpretations of the Bible.” For Van Seters, the attempt in the JBL article to identify a mythic dimension to the various historical critical theories is “disingenuous”, because it has been precisely the subsequent history of historical criticism which has identified these myths. Van Seters also criticises the postmodernists for using Brevard Childs as an example of myth within historical criticism. Because Child’s own myth – that of a divine canon – is precisely that which historical critical method seeks to eradicate. This is what makes Child’s approach “antithetical to” historical criticism, claims Van Seters, and in fact makes Child’s approach closer to postmodern approaches. Van Seters also notes the more “ludicrous… caricatures” which the postmodernists made of historical criticism – particularly the reduction of all historical criticism to a nineteenth-century-style Romantic quest for mythic origins. Van Seters goes on, later in his rejoinder, to criticise “the endless generalizations about historical critics”, upon which much of the postmodernists’ article was based. (The same generalizations have previously been countered in John Barton’s Inaugural Lecture to the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1993), and similarly in his introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (1998).)
One of the most interesting points made by Van Seters is that postmodernism provides no alternative method to historical criticism, and indeed itself appears to rely on historical critical method (although, it does so, often, in denial of its reliance). Van Seters even states, “There is no post-scientific / wissenschaftlich or post-historic era, and we engage in such fantasies at our peril.”
Will there be dialogue? Or is this a repeat (with the decades-long delay which is typical of Biblical Studies) of the Derrida-Searle debate, in which each party continually restated their own positions and largely mispresented the other’s? At least there will be fireworks.
The Dunedin School 
Van Seters’s reply is a dialogue of sorts, but all he seeks to do – like a cranky old man – is cut down and dismiss anything that is not historical-criticism. Much flailing and mis-punching here, to gloss Terry Eagleton. http://stalinsmoustache.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/it-was-better-in-the-old-days-or-an-angry-old-man/
I think Van Seters was quite right to claim that much of Aichele’s identification of myth within historical critical scholarship was a failure of historical criticism to meet its own standards, rather than a postmodern discovery. If the problem with historical Jesus scholarship and Old Testament scholarship is its ongoing tie to theological presuppositions, as Aichele tells the story, then what is needed is that we are more critical, in a historical critical sense (not narrowly defined), not less critical. John Barton was right: in the instances that the historical critical method has most dramatically failed as a method, “it has continued to be hidebound to tradition and by the expectations of the wider religious community.”
Historical critical method is quite capable of being historical critical about itself, to very loosely paraphrase Adorno and Horkheimer. The ongoing lack of criticism is in part theological, but also in the will towards perfect meaning, in the will to naturalize readings, etc. The target at which “postmodern” approaches should aim is not historical criticism, but the modernist-humanist-totalizing assumptions under which it has sometimes operated in the past. That is the area of biblical studies which the so-called postmodern approaches should and have most contribute/d to, not traditional critical method itself.
For it is impossible to read the Bible without the historical critical method. It is the necessary, although not sufficient, condition for reading.
Lurking behind your comments, Deane, is an ideal method that does not always live up to its ideals. I would prefer to think of it as a method that can exist only because of those limits and perpetual failures. However, what arguments like van Seters and yours to a lesser extent neglect is – to engage in some historico-ideological analysis – the specific and limited nature of historical criticism. It has an origin in Europe in the late 18th and 19th centuries, within a Protestant context, arising out of a peculiar confluence of German economic and political backwardness (the time when Marx and Engels were also developing their theories), and it drew heavily from literary criticism outside itself to gain some grip. On this basis:
a) It is facetious to argue (as van Seters does) that it is archaic, not merely because that it an ingenious argument that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but because such an answer perpetuates a search for origins.
b) It is also a furphy to argue that if only it could rid of its tradition-bound, theological nature, it would be true to itself, for that theological tradition is ingrained within historical criticism. To remove that would be to cut out its own heart.
c) How on earth can it be the basis, the necessary condition for reading – the Bible I presume? It is one mode of reading, with its promises and limits and traps. Why not allegory, for example?
d) don’t get me wrong, I’m perfectly happy to engage in historical critical interpretation, but as a contingent and limited approach. Any claim to absoluteness is itself a theological claim.
A furphy! How marvellous. I’d heard of this beast, but never actually seen one in the wild.
Will, Roland,
A furphy?
Please enlighten those of us who think this is a typo (unless it is, then you can safely ignore us).
Eric
Answer’s over at http://stalinsmoustache.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/what-is-a-furphy/
While the late-18th and early 19th centuries are important for the particular genealogy of historical criticism, I don’t see any reason to define it with such limitations. At its broadest, not limiting it to any particular manifestation, historical criticism is literary criticism, which had been done for at least 2000 years before the Germans put their historical slant on it. Historical criticism is not only a Renaissance or Reformed or Enlightenment method, it is an Alexandrian method, too. John Barton distinguishes the particular method and conclusions of “the great German critics who established our discipline in the form we know it” from “the attitude of the great nineteenth-century German critics”.
I don’t even think it is particularly modern/humanistic/liberal. Its opposition to tradition has precedents in an ongoing opposition between authority and rational thought which erupts from time to time and is always creating new forms of irrationality. Celsus was a historical critic in the second century AD. Of course, he is only mediated by authority (Origen), whereas by 1800 the authority was not burning heresy so much (it had turned to pornography). Whatever other authority structures are constructed, the level of freedom of religious writing in the West is unprecedented in recorded history and in the present world. That’s the significant contribution of German scholarship to criticism, not their historical predilections. It’s not even particularly “modern”. Historical criticism might have begun with Celsus, if Christianity had lost. Irrationality and theology have always been in opposition with rationality and criticism – and while the lines have never been simple, and nobody has ever stood simply in one camp or the other, they remain opposites; theology is not a part of historical criticism (however much it has been, historically).
Yes, this is an ideal.
As such, historical criticism is necessary for any attempt to read the meaning of a text. If, for example, a text contains no allegory, in fact (irrespective of our ability to prove it), then an allegorical interpretation is not a “reading” – which must be an attempt to ascertain meaning. This is not to be so naive as to imagine that the attempt to read (meaning) will be successful. But in the absence of any such attempt to ascertain meaning (say, if one attempts an allegorical interpretation of a text containing no allegory), then there is no “reading”. If one gets the right meaning, it will only be by a fortuitous accident and coincidence. This is also not to deny that people may “legitimately” do other things with texts other than reading, such as use them to influence people, or use them to defend their ideologies (theology, postcolonialism, etc), or use them to create allegories, or use them literarily or writerly to invite the reader to do some meaning-making work. But if you want to “read” a text (and the “if” here reveals a contingent condition, not an absolute or theologizing one), historical criticism is a necessary condition.
This might come down to definitions. Nineteenth-century “historical criticism” can be more specific than the current broad usage of someone like John Barton. The term changes over time, sometimes being associated especially with source criticism, sometimes with historical criticism, sometimes with so-called postmodernist methods.
Maybe I’m less hung up on the method, because I wasn’t in a generation that had to react against the monolithic methodology into which it had devolved. I think got 5 minutes on J, E, D & P in a lecture, and then we moved back to a close reading of the final form.
Absolutely agree with you Deane.
I was the 5 minute era too, lecture on ‘methods’ – don’t forget the horridible other letters of the alphabet too!
How timely. I just finished John Collins’s Bible After Babel.
Pingback: A reply to Deane Galbraith’s defence of biblical historical-criticism « Stalin's Moustache
Pingback: What is a furphy? « Stalin's Moustache
Deane, we are talking about two different things.
Your position, inspired in part by Barton’s wayward argument, is that ‘historical;criticism’ is based on reason (logos) versus faith/theology/tradition (mythos) and reading a text in terms of looking what is objectively there.
You’ll have to stop calling it ‘historical-criticism’, since that would be to make Plato, the troubled champion of logos, a ‘historical-critic’. Far better to call it rational criticism, or simply interpretation.
In that light, historical-criticism – a specific, German-inspired method of biblical criticism – is one method among other methods of interpretation. I couldn’t agree more. The problem is that use ‘historical-criticism’ for what you are proposing effects a sleight of hand, since it sounds like a defence of historical criticism as it is commonly understood: a search for the history of the text and the history behind the text via the three great approaches and their derivatives (source, form and redaction). In other words, h-c doesn’t actually read the text.
However, to return to your own proposal for interpretation, based on reasoned objectivity, we face the problem first traced so well by Horkheimer and Adorno, namely that the faith/theology/tradition that is supposed to hobble such an approach is part of its very definition.
and although you aren’t talking to me, and here too because you are too ;-) that’s why I said there isn’t a single definable way to do historical criticism. It has developed alot since whenever it started, and developed in different ways. Perhaps rational criticism might be more appropriate for what some of us do now. Does it really matter what you call it as long as you define what you do?
Does it really matter what you call it as long as you define what you do?
I think so. Although, we have to work with what’s widely accepted in language. If we’re speaking about the substance, Plato did do historical criticism, and there is nothing absurd about this statement except the name. But the name is not the thing.
At this point in history, the term “historical criticism” has a use which doesn’t necessary coincide with its original usage (but why worship etymological origins?). The term “historical criticism” is now widely used to identify the reading of ancient biblical texts via the critical methodologies of philology and historical-contextual analysis. Source, form, and redaction criticisms were later included in the meaning of “historical criticism”, but are not really essential to it. So, this makes it all necessarily ambiguous. Sure, it would be better to forget the last 200 years of nomenclature and just call it “literary criticism”. But, due to the twists of history, that term is usually understood in opposition to historical criticism (although, it should not be). So, while there might be more appropriate terms, “historical criticism” might be the best of a problematic lot.
Sure, faith/theology/tradition is a part of the historical-critical tradition. But it need not be. It’s possible to climb up on the ladder, and then kick it away.
I was sort of arguing with Roland really because he seemed to be saying that we shouldn’t call it historical criticism anymore because of the baggage. Literary criticism is what they use to reconstruct “Q”. I think I could get quite fond of rational criticism or perhaps rational historical criticism. But any term is always ambiguous and isn’t going to be self explanatory. So although it does matter, it doesn’t matter because you’re not going to please everybody you’ve picked the right term even after you’ve explained what it is. Or explained what it isn’t. Or are you? (ir have I misunderstood you?!)
What they used to call “literary criticism” in older usage was a virtual synonym for historical criticism (or literary-historical criticism). That’s because literary critics, a century or so ago, used to be mainly into philological and source criticism (in Homeric studies, etc). But literary criticism has branched out since then. This results in the strange result in biblical studies that the modern approaches have now taken the term “literary criticism”, in distinction from anything to do with sources, by adopting the modern meaning in opposition to the older meaning. This is yet another complication. It’s messy, and there isn’t any simple answer. I agree that defining your precise approach is the way to go. But a label like “rational criticism” sounds like some Kantian Enlightenment project.
virtual synonym – yes exactly. But actually I’ve very quickly become attached to ‘rational criticism’ despite it’s own ambiguities so I’ll just have to explain that it isn’t some Kantian enlightenment project and define what it is everytime I apply it. I think I will drop historical criticism despite my original resistence to that idea… :-)
Yeah – Maybe “critical reading”, where “reading” attempts to establish meaning within (as well as prompted by) texts rather than uses of texts, and “critical” refers to social scientific methods (close reading, source crit, narratology, structuralism, philology, reader reception, etc).
Pingback: ‘Historical-Criticism’ and Historical-Criticism: Reply to Deane Galbraith « Stalin's Moustache
Actually, Deane, your last post has hit the nail pretty much on the head, without a thumb too close by. They did call it ‘literary criticism’, since they borrowed the assumptions from other literary critics outside biblical criticism. The problem from there is twofold: first, the approach became ossified within biblical studies, so much so that when I speak with historians or literary critics today, they find it a strange beast, locked into outmoded assumptions concerning both history and literature. For all their great work, varied scholars like Niels Peter Lemche, John van Seters and John Barr are all beholden to this warped tradition. Second, somewhere along the road it was forgotten that the approach arose through a process of borrowing. So when other biblical critics continued – or perhaps began anew – to find out what literary and historical critics were doing in other disciplines, they were and are accused of applying anachronistic methods, of abandoning proper biblical criticism and so on.
Yeah – that’s how I see it.
Pingback: And the debate continues « Stalin's Moustache
Pingback: More Dialogue Between Historical Critics and Postmods « The Dunedin School
Pingback: Imagining the Postmodern « The Dunedin School
Pingback: Reflections on the so-called postmodern-historical debate « Stalin's Moustache
Pingback: James Crossley, always historicizing, Deconstructs the Hist-Crit/Postmod Binary « The Dunedin School
Pingback: New Years Resolution and Review of Late December Posts « The Golden Rule