The Place and Significance of Historical Criticism in Biblical Hermeneutics

CONTINENTAL THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

THE PLACE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM IN BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE THESIS COMMITTEE

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF THEOLOGY

BY MICHAEL BUBAN

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

MARCH 2017

DECLARATION

This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not being concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree.

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STATEMENT 1

This thesis is the result of my own investigations, except where otherwise stated. Where correction services have been used, the extent and nature of the correction is clearly marked in a footnote(s).

Other sources are acknowledged by footnotes giving explicit references. A bibliography is appended.

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STATEMENT 2

I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations.

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SUMMARY OF THESIS

This work is concerned with some basic problems which historical criticism poses to biblical interpretation. The first chapter deals with historical criticism in relation to problems of the text’s historical distance and contemporary significance. Certain key figures from the field of philosophical hermeneutics are briefly introduced (Schleiermacher, Gadamer, Hirsch, Ricoeur), but attention is also paid to the ways how historical criticism was actually practiced (Wellhausen, Mowinckel). It is maintained that historical criticism is a tool in interpretation and does not impede possible appropriation of the text by those who read it with deep affection. The second chapter faces historical criticism as a theological problem, which has become most apparent in the inerrantist milieu and which was more or less successfully answered by canonical approaches. A special attention is given to the canonical approach of Brevard Childs, which is understood against the backdrop of Barth’s doctrine of the Word of God and Frei’s view of biblical narratives. A special attention is given to distinction between approaches of Brevard Childs and James Sanders. It is maintained that Sanders’ canonical criticism provides better interpretive platform, because it wants to address the needs of contemporary interpretive communities through a selfaware historical critical enterprise. The third chapter takes up the problem of violence in the book of Joshua and the problem of theological meaning of the exodus story.

Biblical theological insights of James Sanders, James Barr, and Walter Brueggemann are applied. An eye is kept also on Pixley-Levenson debate and it is maintained that traditions of the exodus and conquest must be understood together as literary devices which invite communities of faith to freedom. As a result of the present research, historical criticism is presented as a hermeneutical tool which can help to rescue text’s significance for the contemporary communities of believers.

Key terms: historical criticism, hermeneutics, biblical interpretation, Spinoza, Wellhausen, Mowinckel, Gadamer, Ricoeur, emplotment, inerrantism, Barth, Frei, interpretive communities, canonical approach, canonical criticism, Childs, Sanders, Barr, Brueggemann, exodus, violence, conquest, Pixley, Levenson, liberation

STATEMENT OF WORD COUNT

The word count requirement for theses is 20,000 (+/- 5%) excluding appendices, genuine footnotes and bibliography.

20983

The word count for this thesis is __________________ words.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My warmest thanks belong to my wife Ana-Maria, who has supported me in spite of all the misfortune accompanying the formation of this work. Results of my research might be forgotten in the years to come, but her heroic struggle against all odds will not. My thanks and appreciation belong to my supervisor Dr. Charlie Hadjiev. Traces of coherence and intelligibility in my argument certainly lead to his clear and patient guidance while possible difficulties follow from my occasional lack of ability or opportunity to shape this work in closer cooperation with him. My thanks also belong to the CTS faculty for the extension, which they graciously gave me.

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INTRODUCTION

In Paris, I read L’Humanité, Russian version, yet for the Bible I’m still way too simple person.

— Jaromír

Nohavica1

Biblical scholars are reflecting on their field. It has become hallmark of biblical studies in the second half of twentieth century that new approaches emerge just in order to be restlessly reflected upon and replaced. After more than two centuries of classical historical critical scholarship, which used to pile up exquisite edifice like “lego bricks,”2 movements have risen in order to provide penetrating reflections on the very rationale of the discipline: Why do we read the Bible? What makes its texts significant? And how does it connect to what biblical scholarship actually do?3 According to Moore and Sherwood, this shattering, inflicted mainly by the arrival of literary and theological approaches, was for many like “a Damascus road encounter.”4 However, as Barton points out, these ground-breaking experiences often ended up with disappointment, because biblical scholars were asking too much of the new currents which they committed themselves to.5 Another problem is that increase in methodological awareness results in increase in dissonance. While some newer

1 Translated from a song by Jaromír Nohavica, Mám Jizvu Na Rtu [I have a scar on my lip], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK7Be_3bAxA

2 Philip R. Davies, “Biblical Studies: Fifty Years of a Multi-Discipline,” Currents in Biblical Research 13, no. 1 (October 2014): 35. Stephen D. Moore and Yvonne Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), 12, Ebook.

3 Davies, “Biblical Studies: Fifty Years of a Multi-Discipline,” 35-6. Moore & Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto, 28, Ebook.

4 Moore & Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar, 18, Ebook.

5 John Barton, Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study, Revised and enlarged. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 244. James Barr, History and Ideology in the Old Testament: Biblical Studies at the End of a Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 46.

approaches seek to embed the text into a hermeneutical framework in hope to endow it with desired significance, classical scholarship demands return to the treasures deposited in its strongholds over the centuries. These groups “cannot even agree what it is they disagree about.”6

In this work, I will try to identify the main issues in the debate. My main concern is with the place and significance of historical criticism. I propose to show that historical criticism is not only a legitimate stage in biblical interpretation, which helps to ascertain the text’s plain meaning, but also a hermeneutical tool, which can help to rescue text’s significance for the contemporary communities of believers. In the first part, I shall present historical criticism as a hermeneutical problem, because it stresses historical distance of the text. The second part will deal with approaches in biblical scholarship which have attempted to surmount this problem on theological grounds. The final part will present historical criticism as a tool in interpretation of the exodus and conquest narratives.

6 John Barton, The Old Testament: Canon, Literature and Theology: Collected Essays of John Barton, Society for Old Testament Study monographs (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 128.

1CHAPTER ONE:

HISTORICAL CRITICISM AS A HERMENEUTICAL PROBLEM

[T]he lover made a distinction between reading and reading, between reading with the dictionary and reading the letter from his lady-love. The blood rushes to his head for impatience while he sits and conjures out the meaning with the dictionary; he is furious with his friend for speaking of this erudite reading as a reading of the letter from his lady-love. He regarded all this (if I may so call it) erudite preparation as a necessary evil, that he might get to the point of […] reading the letter from his lady-love.

7

— Søren A. Kierkegaard

1.1In the Melting Pot of Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment

Historical criticism has many beginnings. Some say that it has been there for long, having its early precursors in skeptical Celsus,8 minimalist Origen9 or in Jerome, who considered Ezra to be a possible editor of the Pentateuch.10 Others think that foundations of biblical criticism were laid in the Renaissance with the renewed interest to go ad fontes, back to ancient sources in their original languages.11 Some

7 Søren A. Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourselves! And Three Discourses, trans. Walter Lowrie (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), 51-2. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 13.

8 Robert W. Yarbrough, “Should Evangelicals Embrace Historical Criticism? The Hays-Ansberry Proposal,” Themelios 39, no. 1 (2014): 38. Celsus held that “the prophets of the Jews and their great hero, Moses, wrote the history of their people in a way designed to favor their beliefs.” See Celsus, On the True Doctrine: A Discourse against the Christians, ed. R. Joseph Hoffmann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5.

9 Fred G. Bratton, “Precursors of Biblical Criticism,” Journal of Biblical Literature 50, no. 3 (1931): 17.

10 Roland K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament with a Comprehensive Review of Old Testament Studies and a Special Supplement on the Apocrypha (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973), 6.

11 John Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 124.

13 would question this view, because historical criticism as a largely academic phenomenon requires technological infrastructure which in pre-Guttenberg part of Renaissance was unattainable.12 Protestant scholars sometimes assert that it was the Reformation which gave impetus to historical critical study of the Bible, when its sola scriptura mindset emphasized redemptive importance of biblical historical narratives13 and when its sola gratia freed biblical scholars from dogmatic constraints.14 Again, this contention is contestable because, as Amos demonstrates, sola scriptura descends from earlier humanists, who were the first to criticize scholasticism in its unscrupulous departure from the Bible itself toward lifeless metaphysics.15 Before Luther it was Erasmus who insisted that the Scripture alone is the source of theology and that exegesis and theology are, and should be, two largely overlapping disciplines.16 So the link with Protestantism, although seemingly evident, is essentially accidental.17

The most popular explanation of historical criticism’s origin turns our attention to the Enlightenment,18 particularly to its radical strand represented most clearly by Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677 CE).19 To begin with Spinoza, as Barr has noted, is a “weary path already trodden by countless surveys.”20 This path will be taken also here, because Spinoza provides a convenient foil for understanding the hermeneutical

12 John Ahn, review of “The Nature of Biblical Criticism,” Horizons in Biblical Theology 31, no. 2 (November 1, 2009): 202.

13 Petr Sláma, Nové teologie Starého zákona a dějiny (Praha: Vyšehrad, 2013), 32.

14 James Barr, “Biblical Criticism as Theological Enlightenment,” in Bible and Interpretation: The Collected Essays of James Barr, ed. John Barton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I:159. Quoted also in John Barton, “James Barr and the Future of Biblical Theology,” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 70, no. 3 (July 1, 2016): 266.

15 N. Scott Amos, “New Learning, Old Theology: Renaissance Biblical Humanism, Scripture, and the Question of Theological Method,” Renaissance Studies 17, no. 1 (March 2003): 42.

16 Amos, “New Learning.” 53.

17 Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 135-6.

18 Cf. e.g. Hendel, “Mind the Gap: Modern and Postmodern in Biblical Studies,” Journal of Biblical Literature 133, no. 2 (2014): 438. Mark S. Gignilliat, A Brief History of Old Testament Criticism: From Benedict Spinoza to Brevard Childs (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012), 9, Ebook. Jeffrey L. Morrow, “The Early Modern Political Context to Spinoza’s Bible Criticism,” Revista de Filosofía 66 (2010): 8. Colin Greene and Martin Robinson, Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination (Milton Keynes, CO: Authentic, 2008), 98.

14 problem of historical distance, which historical criticism generates. It should be, however, noted, that by tracing roots of historical criticism to the Enlightenment does not imply an intrinsic judgment. The Enlightenment denotes here, as also in Sheehan, not only “an essentially philosophical platform,” but “more generally the new constellation of practices and institutions […] that the eighteenth century used to address the host of religious, historical and philosophical questions inherited from the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.”21 Therefore when I say that historical criticism is a “product of the Enlightenment,” or that Spinoza was its “father,” I do not mean that historical criticism lives by Spinoza’s genius only. What I do mean is that the Enlightenment represents a point of culmination which adopted all preceding developments, namely ad fontes and sola scriptura, thus creating a new platform upon which historical criticism began its surprising career.22

1.2The Problem of Historical Distance

1.2.1Spinoza

Spinoza was an idealist, whose intelligence was only matched by his unwieldiness. In the book called Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza argued that

19 Cf. e.g. James S. Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture: Baruch Spinoza to Brevard Childs, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002). Mark G. Brett, Biblical Criticism in Crisis?: The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 82. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974), 17, 42. F. David Farnell, “Historical Criticism vs. Grammatico-Historical: Quo Vadis Evangelicals?,” in Vital Issues in the Inerrancy Debate, ed. F. David Farnell et al. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 487, Ebook.

20 James Barr, “A Review Article on M. Brett, Biblical Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies,” in Bible and Interpretation: The Collected Essays of James Barr, ed. John Barton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), II:139.

21 Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), xi-xii.

22 This opinion of mine is highly reminiscent of that of Barton, although Barton emhasized renaissance. Cf. Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 6.

philosophy and theology, or, reason and Scripture, are two separate domains. Concerning the Bible Spinoza writes,

[A]nyone who tries to accommodate the Bible to philosophy will undoubtedly ascribe to the prophets many things that they did not imagine even in their dreams and will construe their meaning wrongly. On the other hand, anyone who makes reason and philosophy the servant of theology will be obliged to accept as divinely inspired the prejudices of the common people of antiquity and let his mind be taken over and clouded by them.23

And indeed, in order to demonstrate that original meaning and contemporary reception are two entirely different things, Spinoza took lengthy detours taking issue with mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch,24 ascribing historical books to Ezra25 and pointing out to contingency of the biblical text and discrepancies in its present form.26 Now Spinoza wasn’t the first one to contemplate authorship of Old Testament writings. We have already seen Jerome and Origene as “precursors” of historical criticism in their views on authorship and the role of history. Then we could mention rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (a.k.a. “Rashi,” 1040-1105 CE), who has imagined more than one stage in composition of the biblical texts27 and his contemporary, rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra (1093-1169 CE), who has contemplated post-Mosaic additions to the Pentateuch.28 But none of this explains what Spinoza was up to. Morrow suggests that the most notable precursor to Spinoza’s program was Ibn Ḥazm (994-1064 CE), an Islamic thinker from Cordoba. Ibn Ḥazm has felt bitter about Jews because of political mishaps which he had to face.29 In order to let steam off, Ibn Ḥazm questioned mosaic

23 Jonathan Israel, Spinoza: Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Michael Silverthorne (Leiden: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 186, § 15:1.

24 Spinoza in Israel, Theological-Political Treatise, 123, § 8:5.

25 Harrison, Introduction, 10. Spinoza in Israel, Theological-Political Treatise, 127, § 8:12.

26 Spinoza in Israel, Theological-Political Treatise, 130, passim, § 9:1.

27 Eran Viezel, “The Formation of Some Biblical Books, According to Rashi,” The Journal of Theological Studies 61, no. 1 (April 1, 2010): 19, passim.

28 Harrison, Introduction, 7. Spinoza in Israel, Theological-Political Treatise, 105-6, § 8:9-11.

29 Jeffrey L. Morrow, “The Politics of Biblical Interpretation: A ‘Criticism of Criticism,’” New Blackfriars 91, no. 1035 (September 2010): 530.

authorship of the Pentateuch, by which he hoped to invalidate Jewish claims to divine revelation.30 Morrow observes that Spinoza, excited by a similar sentiment against the Jewish community which expelled him, borrowed many arguments from Ibn Ḥazm’s intellectual crusade.31 These considerations are related to political dimension of Spinoza’s program. We must not forget that “the father of higher criticism”32 and “the patriarch of the genealogy of the modern biblical scholar”33 was not biblical scholar in the first place, but rather a philosopher.34 His concern in the Treatise was not so much to interpret the Bible right, but to make a point that reason is a device that is independent of dogmatic concerns, even when interpreting the biblical text.35 Spinoza’s political aim, as Israel notes, was “to strengthen individual freedom and widen liberty of thought in Dutch society, in particular by weakening ecclesiastical authority.”

36 Elsewhere Israel remarks that Spinoza “sought to show that conventional - and officially approved - religious teaching and dogmas are based mostly on mistaken notions, indeed profound misconceptions about the character of Scripture itself.”37 According to Sandys-Wunsch, Spinoza’s main question was “how to find the truth of Scripture when one no longer believed it to be infallible.”38 His overall answer to this question was that the present reading of Scripture should resort squarely on matters that are intelligible for a rational humanistic mind. “Reason is the true light of

30 Morrow, “The Politics of Biblical Interpretation,” 531.

31 Morrow, “The Politics of Biblical Interpretation,” 537. Morrow, “Context to Spinoza’s Bible Criticism,” 17.

32 Louis W. Beck, Six Secular Philosophers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 31-2.

33 Hendel, “Mind the Gap,” 438.

34 Harrisville & Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture, 37. Morrow, “Context to Spinoza’s Bible Criticism,” 12.

35 John Sandys-Wunsch, “Spinoza - The First Biblical Theologian,” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 93, no. 3 (1981), 327.

36 Israel, Theological-Political Treatise, viii. See also Hendel, “Mind the Gap,” 438. Beck, Six Secular Philosophers, 31. Harrisville & Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture, 334.

37 Israel, Theological-Political Treatise, ix.

38 Sandys-Wunsch, “Spinoza,” 81, 327.

the mind,” says Spinoza, it “reigns over the domain of truth and wisdom,” but theology should reign over “piety and obedience.”39 Levenson notes that “history supplied Spinoza with the coffin into which he placed Torah.”40 While probably few historical critics since then shared Spinoza’s anti-religious bias, his legacy is present in the fundamental historical critical desire to read the Bible on its own terms, which are to be found not with the reader’s expectations, but in the original settings of the text.41

1.2.2Schleiermacher, Gadamer, Hirsch

The problem of historical distance, as introduced by Spinoza has been taken up in the work of Schleiermacher (1768-1834 CE). As “the father of modern hermeneutics as a general study,”42 Schleiermacher was concerned with method for understanding all texts, no matter what their religious authority might be.43 (This sort of free-mindedness can be traced to the influence of radical reformation, too.44) Schaper draws analogy between this tenet in Schleiermacher’s thought and Jowett’s (1817-

39 Spinoza in Israel, Theological-Political Treatise, 190, § 15:6.

40 Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 95. Similarly also John Barton, “Historical-Critical Approaches,” in The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, ed. John Barton, Cambridge companions to religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10.

41 Gignilliat, A Brief History, 9, Ebook. Cf. also the striking similarity between Spinoza’s and Barr’s outline of proper biblical interpretation. Spinoza in Israel, Theological-Political Treatise, 101-2, § 7:5. Barr, History and Ideology, 40-43.

42 Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 97. Anthony C. Thiselton, The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description with Special Reference to Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 5. Manfred Oeming, Úvod do biblické hermeneutiky: cesty k pochopení textu, trans. Filip Čapek (Praha: Vyšehrad, 2001), 28. Paul Ricoeur, “Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics,” Monist 60, no. 2 (1977): 181.

43 Joachim Schaper, “Historical Criticism, ‘Theological Exegesis,’ and Theology amongst the Humanities,” in Theology, University, Humanitites: Initium Sapientiae Timor Domini, ed. Christopher C. Brittain and Francesca A. Murphy (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), 106, Ebook.

44 Harrisville & Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture, 333.

1893 CE) often misquoted invitation to “read Scripture like any other book.”45 As with Spinoza, Schleiermacher’s starting point was that all understanding is difficult due to historical distance and that misunderstanding is a point of departure in any reading.46 Understanding of any text has to occur on two levels.47 (1) Firstly, grammatical level, which was concerned with original meaning and (2) secondly, psychological level, which involves, as Rutt suggests, “entering into the creative mind of the original author” and ascertaining the “authorial intent.”48 In other words, understanding takes place only when one not only understands what the words mean, but if he also realigns his own mind with the author’s and grasps its state. For Schleiermacher, these realities had two important implications. (1) Firstly, not everyone is fit for understanding. Even if one possessed all necessary historical and linguistic knowledge, he might not be able to perform the psychological aspect of interpretation because of his indisposition of some sort.49 (It would be interesting to trace this tenet in Schleiermacher’s thought to his nationalism50 and to his pietistic background.51) (2) Secondly, Schleiermacher did admit that a definitive understanding is not entirely possible and he rather spoke of “infinite approximation,”52 but he also believed that if one can realign his mind with the author, he can leap beyond the author’s intention and to understand the author better than he understood himself.53 Hermeneutics was

45 Schaper, “Historical Criticism,” 49, Ebook. Jowett’s quip in its proper context appears again in § 1.4.3.

46 Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 60.

47 Thiselton, The Two Horizons, 106.

48 Jessica Rutt, “On Hermeneutics,” E-Logos XIII (2006): 3.

49 Thiselton, The Two Horizons, 5.

50 Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible, 233.

51 Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, from Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism, ed. Carl E. Braaten (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 280-1. Pietists denied the possibility that unregenerate people could arrive at sound theological insights.

52 Schaper, “Historical Criticism,” 49-50. Richard L. Corliss, “Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutic and Its Critics,” Religious Studies 29, no. 3 (1993): 337.

53 Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 72.

19 seen as a creative process, where through “a placing of oneself within the mind of the author” the reader recreates the very act of text’s creation.54

It is not possible, given the present space constraints, to survey reception and development of Schleiermacher’s thought in 19th and 20th centuries. Nonetheless, it will be helpful to see at least their reception by Gadamer (1900-2002 CE). Gadamer commended Schleiermacher for recognizing the creative aspect in hermeneutics, but he took an issue with Schleiermacher’s psychological interpretation.55 Gadamer did recognize the need of entering a dialogue with otherness of the text (and its tradition), but he didn’t deem it possible, or even desirable, to fully enter the historical horizon, as Schleiermacher did envisage.56 Instead of Schleiermacher’s authorial intent, Gadamer was seeking for the intent of the reader.57 It is often pointed out that Gadamer has emphasized subjectivity and contingency of the reader. Such an assertion is correct, but this was not Gadamer’s ultimate purpose. Rather, to put him in contrast with Schleiermacher, if Schleiermacher wanted the interpreter to grasp the state of author’s mind, Gadamer wanted the text to grasp the state of reader’s mind. Gadamer took the psychological task away from the reader and ascribed it to the autonomous text, which is here not only to be engaged, but to bring about transformation on part of those who have engaged it.

Classical theoretical hermeneutics has been following Schleiermacher in distinguishing three stages of interpretation, namely (1) understanding, (2) explication and (3) application.58 A common understanding of the term “hermeneutics” today is

54 Thiselton, The Two Horizons, 300-1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, Rev. ed. (London: Continuum, 2004), 164.

55 Gadamer in Thiselton, The Two Horizons, 301. Rutt, “On Hermeneutics,” 4.

56 Eric D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 123, 246. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 303, 354.

57 Rutt, “On Hermeneutics,” 4.

58 Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 176. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, 112.

20 that it covers all three stages,59 but for Schleiermacher, hermeneutics was mainly concerned with the first stage and did not include application.60 Here Gadamer parted with Schleiermacher, considering application to be “an integral element of all understanding.”61 Concerning the problem of historical distance Gadamer therefore writes:

Our thesis is that historical hermeneutics too has a task of application to perform, because it too serves applicable meaning, in that it explicitly and consciously bridges the temporal distance that separates the interpreter from the text and overcomes the alienation of meaning that the text has undergone.62

Gadamer believed that purely historical investigation is mistaking the means for the end.63 The end of interpretation was, according to Gadamer, to reach ourselves through the text, to fuse our horizon with the text’s and to let it say something “valid and intelligible for ourselves.”64 This means that historical criticism as a quest for plain meaning of the text would not contribute to its understanding, but to its alienation!65 Gadamer instead suggests that “projecting a historical horizon” should be “overtaken by our own present horizon of understanding.”66 His emphasis on subjective horizons of present readers now comes on scene. But this emphasis doesn’t imply an outburst of unrestrained results of interpretation.67 It simply means that the

59 Gordon D. Fee and Douglas K. Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth: A Guide to Understanding the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), 10-14.

60 Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 176.

61 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 307-8. Cf. Adonis Vidu, “Interpretation and Law: Some Thoughts on Understanding and Application,” Perichoresis 2, no. 2 (2004): 41.

62 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 309.

63 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 302.

64 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 303. Cf. Marius Nel, “Attempting to Define a Pentecostal Hermeneutics,” Scriptura 114 (May 2015), 5.

65 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 303-4.

66 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 305-6.

67 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 332. Gadamer states, “Neither jurist nor theologian regards the work of application as making free with the text.”

21 reins were given to the text, so that it is no longer the reader who needs to grasp author’s mind but the autonomous text that grasps mind of the reader.

Hirsch (*1928 CE) has criticized Gadamer for mingling the basic hermeneutical process between the original meaning then and there and its significance here and now into one undifferentiated zone of understanding, which Gadamer called “fusion of horizons.”68 Against Gadamer, Hirsch explains that significance of the text can’t depend on the neglect of its original meaning, because “significance always implies a relationship, and one constant, unchanging pole of that relationship is what the text means.”69 So if Gadamer finds significance of the text in the fusion of horizons, Hirsch finds it in their distinction! Barr (1924-2006 CE) has complained that Gadamer used to enjoyed too much popularity among 20th century biblical scholars and that he is constantly referred to with no critical engagement.70 Indeed, many of Gadamer’s statements and the overall shape of his program can provide ammunition for various theological approaches.71 Gadamer’s approach presents us with a question, which is by its very nature vital for the whole project of historical criticism: Is the quest for a “plain sense” of the text or its “original meaning” desirable, given that all interpreters are encapsulated within their respective horizons? And if it is, should the process of interpretation start from here and now with respect to the reader’s needs, or then and there, with respect to the original settings? We shall hopefully see that historical criticism is essential as the first step in interpretation. But before we get there, we

68 Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, 112, 255. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 305.

69 Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, 8. Eric D. Hirsch, “Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted,” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 2 (1984): 203-4.

70 Barr, “A Review Article on M. Brett,” 140. Barr laments uncritical appropriation of Gadamer. Cf. Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 55.

71 Michael Kirwan, “Theological Hermeneutics,” Communio viatorum 43, no. 2 (2001): 109. For general assessment of Gadamer in relation to theological hermeneutics see Daniel J. Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 127-56.

must take up Gadamer’s concern with pre-understanding and ask how does it apply to the actual practitioners of historical criticism.

1.3Is Historical Criticism a Value-Free Method?

Barton believes that the term “historical-critical method” is not particularly well-chosen, because it doesn’t communicate its task well. “Criticism is neither historical nor a method,” says Barton and opts to name it just “biblical criticism” instead.72 I agree that historical criticism is but a first stage in interpretation, not a method on its own. But for this very reason, I also suggest that biblical criticism is always historical, because even though some of its sub-disciplines aren’t immediately related to historical issues (e.g. form criticism), they always bear some implications to it and are always employed to untangle difficulties on the historical horizon. One reason why Barton dismisses “historical” as an appropriate adjective is that much of the current interest in biblical history hasn’t been driven by a critical mindset.73 Schaper expands on this, noting that “fact that today […] many of the PhD students at the best universities of the United States who work on the history of ancient Israel are in fact fundamentalists speaks volumes.”74 This applies to Spinoza, too, whose bias against religious communities makes him the worst father historical criticism could ever have, at least should it be value neutral, as Barton would like to have it.75 In spite of this, I want to maintain that biblical criticism is always historical. Not because it is exclusively concerned with history and its problems, but because it remains focused

72 Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 53, 67. Barr, History and Ideology, 40.

73 Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 68.

74 Schaper, “Historical Criticism,” 46-7, Ebook.

75 Barton, “Historical-Critical Approaches,” 11-2.

23 on the historical horizon of the texts, on “the context of their origin,”76 as Barton himself admits.

Historical criticism is not a “method” of interpretation. It’s a tool, which may ascertain “ways in which texts are capable of having meaning,”77 or to tell that “the text ‘could mean A’ or ‘could not mean B,’”78 particularly with reference to philological issues and background studies. Barr observes that what has been said “as a complaint against historical criticism and admitted by some of its practitioners, [was that historical criticism] did not even try to determine meaning. It stopped short of doing that.”

79 In other words, historical criticism is not a method which always yields the correct results of biblical interpretation. It is a tool which helps us to understand texts in the milieu of their origin. This relates to another important feature. If Dunn defines historical criticism simply as “the attempt to gain as accurate a picture as possible of the past,”80 it is strongly implied that prior to this “attempt,” the “picture of the past” is not obvious at all! Historical criticism then comes and seeks to find historical Jesus or the “actual ancient Israel.”

81 Questions of the text’s origins, its date, authorship and its historical context82 are given priority over the text’s face value and its traditional reception. Routledge has noted in this vein that for historical criticism, “the meaning of a text thus becomes bound up with the ability to discover what lies behind it.”83 It is, in a sense, quintessential for historical critical mentality to inten-

76 Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 68.

77 Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 244.

78 Barton, “Historical-Critical Approaches,” 17-8.

79 Barr, History and Ideology, 37.

80 John Ziesler, “Historical Criticism and a Rational Faith,” The Expository Times 105, no. 9 (January 1, 1994): 270.

81 George Aichele, Peter Miscall, and Richard Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room: Historical-Critical and Postmodern Interpretations of the Bible,” Journal of Biblical Literature 128, no. 2 (2009): 385.

82 Robin Routledge, “Guest or Gatecrasher: Questioning Assumptions in a Narrative Approach to the Old Testament,” Journal of European Baptist Studies 3, no. 3 (2003): 163.

83 Routledge, “Guest or Gatecrasher,” 18.

24 tionally regard, in Gadamer’s words, “an end of what is only a means”84 by making its “ability to discover what lies behind it,” an end. Simply put, historical criticism reads the Bible not only on its own terms, but on its own terms only. It has been often asserted that historical criticism is not value free, because its practitioners often betrayed their religious confession. Wellhausen and von Rad were Lutherans,85 historical Jesus scholars are often Christians86 and everyone else is utterly biased in her own enigmatic way.87 Harrisville and Sundberg are certainly right in saying that “no method of interpretation can transcend its cultural milieu.”88 But does it mean that the very project of historical criticism shares biases of its practitioners? Obviously not. The real “bias” of historical criticism is in its concern with history at the expense of the present significance.

Gabler (1753-1826 CE) has made a distinction between biblical and dogmatic theology. Dogmatic theology was of a “didactic kind” whereas biblical theology of a “historical kind.” Biblical theology was supposed to be arrived at by proper exegesis, by collecting the biblical ideas and by discerning their historical contingency. Only then could it be utilized by dogmatics.89 This two-stage process was certainly not unknown to the majority of biblical critics in modern times. But instead of informing their exegesis with their religious convictions, Barton believes that historical critics have “tried to discover what the Bible meant, and only then went on to ask how it fitted (or did not fit) with the religious convictions they already had.”90 What Gabler

84 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 302.

85 Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, 10, 24. Cf. Barr, History and Ideology, 48-9.

86 Aichele & Miscall & Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room,” 392.

87 Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament Theology: Essays on Structure, Theme, and Text, ed. Patrick D. Miller (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 64-5. Quoted in Barr, History and Ideology, 137. Cf. also Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 45. Davies, “Biblical Studies,” 52.

88 Harrisville & Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture, 330-1.

89 Frederick C. Prussner and John H. Hayes, Old Testament Theology: Its History and Development (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 3.

90 Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 165.

25 knew as “biblical theology” is similar to what Barton calls “biblical criticism.”91 It is the first stage in the process of interpretation. The central dogma, the most cherished value of historical criticism, is that it values the past, the otherness and the plain meaning of the text above what the interpreter intends to say, no matter how noble, benevolent, or theologically correct his intentions are.92 By injecting their perspectives in historical critical enterprise, confessional biblical scholars have not disproved, but confirmed this, because they have demonstrated that historical criticism is not a mode of interpretation per se, but an interpretive tool. This in itself rests on the core conviction that “the text’s truth, value, or meaning derives finally from its originating source.”93 In order to see perils and promises of this conviction more clearly, I will now have a look at Wellhausen and Mowinckel. These two were chosen because they not only exemplify historical criticism at its best, but also stand out as those who were able to integrate different concerns in a way which is, as Saebø puts is, “more than the sum of its given presuppositions.”94

1.3.1Wellhausen’s Source Criticism

One of the first full blown applications of source criticism on the Pentateuch was performed by Eichhorn (1752-1827 CE) in his Einleitung in das Alte Testament 95 Eichhorn’s Einleitung is sometimes described as “the first truly modern historical

91 John Sandys-Wunsch and Laurence Eldredge, “J. P. Gabler and the Distinction Between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology: Translation, Commentary, and Discussion of His Originality,” Scottish Journal of Theology 33, no. 02 (April 1980): 147. Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 3.

92 Barton, Canon, Literature and Theology, 208.

93 Aichele & Miscall & Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room,” 395.

94 Magne Saebø, “Sigmund Mowinckel in His Relation to the Literary Critical School,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 2, no. 2 (January 1988): 27.

95 Johann G. Eichhorn, Einleitung in Das Alte Testament (Leipzig, 1781-3).

critical Introduction to the Old Testament,”96 mainly because it approached the Old Testament “as an independent record of antiquity, a source from the distant past from which one could reconstruct the early stages in the education of the human race.”97 Eichhorn has hereby heralded a hundred years of vigorous source criticism within German academia, which has climaxed with Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Israel.98 Wellhausen (1844-1918 CE) took advantage of the century of source criticism introduced by Eichhorn and others. The documentary hypothesis, which counted mainly with J, E, D and P, just in various chronological arrangements, was already established.99 In his Prolegomena Wellhausen combined source criticism with redaction criticism, which allowed him to sort the Pentateuchal sources with reference to its historical implications and to find rationale for the prophets to predate the final form of the Torah.100 With the sources appearing historically under various redactions and with the prophets predating Torah, Wellhausen proposed a model of the formation of Israel’s religion as developing from primitive animism, through enlightened prophetic movement, towards sophisticated (and highly legalistic) Second Temple Judaism.101 Wellhausen obviously didn’t appreciate biblical narratives for their historical value, but for the religious ideas and theological conflicts which they

96 Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 35.

97 Childs, IOTS, 36.

98 Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003). First appeared in German in 1883. First English translation in 1885.

99 The documentary hypothesis was preceded by the fragmentary and the supplementary hypotheses. See Edward J. Young, An Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964), 124, 160. Gleason Archer, A Survey of Old Testament Introduction (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1964), 74-78. Raymond B. Dillard and Tremper Longman, Úvod do Starého zákona, trans. Vilém Schneeberger, Pavel Jartym, and Pavel Štička (Praha: Návrat domů, 2003) 34-37. John Van Seters, The Edited Bible: The Curious History of The “Editor” in Biblical Criticism (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 185-244. Harrison, Introduction, 14-21.

100 Van Seters, Edited Bible, 223-231. Redaction criticism tries to trace a redactor or an editor of the text. It was, in a specific sense, introduced as a necessary by-product of source criticism (p. 238), where editor was a “conflator of documents” (p. 221). See also John Van Seters, “An Ironic Circle: Wellhausen and the Rise of Redaction Criticism,” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 115, no. 4 (January 5, 2003). Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 11.

101 Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 5. Harrison, Introduction, 21. Archer, Survey, 79.

27 contain.102 The final form of the Old Testament was understood as the starting-point of Judaism, not of the ancient Israelite faith, which was understood instead as a development from lively piety of David and Isaiah to the unpleasant organized religion of the Law, which for Wellhausen has marred enjoyment of the former.103 Levenson observes here that Wellhausen has “reenacted Paul’s experience, which Lutheran tradition had long taken to be autobiographical and normative.”104 If this is the case, how does it contribute to our understanding of historical criticism?

It was said that by Wellhausen’s time, the documentary hypothesis was already fully available. Wellhausen just, as Friedman puts it, “brought all the pieces together […] into a clear, organized synthesis.”105 Now Wellhausen may have been too Lutheran, but the historical critical aparatus which he was working with was not. Even if all Pentateuchal scholars since 17th century were Lutherans through and through, which was obviously not the case, it would be difficult to demonstrate how their developing source-critical theories supported their unabashed Lutheranism. Moreover, if Wellhausen sought to make a Lutheran case, he could have made it on theological, not historical grounds. It rather seems to me that the central “bias” of his work was in his attempt to rescue the original Israelite piety from the deposits of later developments.106 In this quest, Wellhausen exercised an unprecedented freedom towards the text.107 It is sometimes noted that historical criticism, following the path set by

102 Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 346, passim. V. Philips Long, “Historiography of the Old Testament,” in The Face of Old Testament Studies: A Survey of Contemporary Approaches, ed. David W. Baker and Bill T. Arnold (Grand Rapids, MI: Apollos, 1999), 161. Long states that Wellhausen’s “historical conclusions rested squarely on [his] literary judgments.”

103 Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 3.

104 Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, 14.

105 Richard E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (San Francisco: Harper, 1997), 163, Ebook.

106 Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 76-82.

107 John Barton, “Canon and Old Testament Interpretation,” in In Search of True Wisdom: Essays in Old Testament Interpretation in Honour of Ronald E. Clements, ed. Edward Ball (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 42. Barton, “Historical-Critical Approaches,” 16.

Wellhausen, is atomistic, anti-theological and deprives the text of its significance.108 While this might be true of some works, it is completely untrue of Wellhausen himself, whose results were, in the end, quite holistic and theologically significant. Perlit notes that “[f]or Wellhausen, the witness that history bears to God lies—hidden, yet at the same time clearly revealed—in its givenness and in its natural course, in such a way that the ‘earthly nexus’ of events resists any attempt to spiritualize or theologize it.”109 In other words, Wellhausen believed that theology lies behind the text, not in front of it, and he took the advantage and freedom to go and find it there.

Perhaps this is why Wellhausen wrote to the Prussian Minister of Culture that his conscience blames him for not fulfilling “the practical task of preparing students for service in the Evangelical Church.”110 Perhaps he felt that because of seeking theology “behind the text,” his scholarship will end up being not Lutheran enough. Perhaps his scholarship wasn’t theologically arid, but on the contrary — theologically too resolute!

1.3.2Mowinckel’s Form Criticism

A consensus of many 19th century historical critics was to read Psalms as religious expressions of particular poets, not of a community which later appropriated them. This consensus began to break up with Gunkel (1862-1932 CE), who has pointed out that development of many Psalms can be explained only if these were written directly for the needs of public worship. This would mean that our primary concern in reading Psalms would not be psychology of their author, but rather their

108 Angela R. Erisman, “New Historicism, Historical Criticism, and Reading the Pentateuch,” Religion Compass 8, no. 3 (March 2014): 71. Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 50-1.

109 Lothar Perlitt (1965) translated and quoted in Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 53.

110 John J. Collins, The Bible after Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 6. Gignilliat, A Brief History, 52, Ebook. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible, 163, Ebook.

Sitz im Leben, which in turn signifies that Psalms were of extraordinary importance for the cultic activity in ancient Israel.111 Gunkel’s quest for Sitz im Leben in Psalms was taken up and transformed by Mowinckel (1884-1965 CE).112 Gunkel was, according to Mowinckel, too uncritical of the earlier consensus, which maintained that Psalms were post-exilic, “‘spiritualized’ imitations of the old, now mostly lost, cultic psalm poetry.”113 The necessary implication of Gunkel’s own discovery was that Psalms in their present form represent the cultic poetry itself, not its latter reflection.

For if the Sitz im Leben of the biblical Psalms is found with ancient Israelite cult, what prevents them from being the actual cultic texts?114 Although this move required much earlier dating, Mowinckel didn’t imagine David himself to be the major psalmist. He argued that the Psalms were shaped by anonymous tradents.115 Mowinckel’s main interest was not in historical (date) or literary (form) situation of Psalms but rather in their sociological function.116 In addition to Gunkel’s occupation with literary forms, Mowinckel sought to trace every Psalm to its respective place within the cult.117 Their function was envisaged in accompanying ancient Israelite festivals, where the community reenacted and re-appropriated its corporate cultic identity in an act of lively worship.118

Mowinckel believed that the central festival where many Psalms find their Sitz im Leben was the Enthronement Festival held in autumn as a part of the Feast of

111 Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 34-7.

112 Saebø, “Mowinckel,” 25. Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 37.

113 Sigmund Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 29. Cf. Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 37-8. Gignilliat, A Brief History, 78, Ebook.

114 Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 38. Mowinckel, The Psalms, 30.

115 Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 73. Mowinckel, The Psalms, 77-8.

116 Saebø, “Mowinckel,” 25-6.

117 Martin R. Hauge, “Sigmund Mowinckel and the Psalms ‐ a Query into His Concern,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 2, no. 2 (January 1988): 65.

118 Donald K. McKim, ed., Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2007), 888, Ebook.

Tabernacles (Lv 23:33-36), celebrating “Yahweh’s cosmic conflict, victory and enthronement.”119 The central figure of this festival was the king, who was supposed to be “power-filled instrument for carrying out Yahweh’s will on earth.”120 This was, according to Mowinckel, the enigmatic biblical “day of Yahweh,” which was “His enthronement, his royal day, the festival of Yahweh, the day when as king He came and ‘wrought salvation for his people.’”121 An apparent problem with this theory is that Psalms themselves don’t yield much evidence in its support.122 Mowinckel therefore had to pay heightened attention to ancient Israelite parallels.123 If the Israelite temple was built in the usual Phoenician style, then also songs and ways of worship could have been borrowed.124 Mowinckel believed that the Enthronement Festival follows structure of the Babylonian New Year’s festival, where the king appeared as the representative of men before god, but also as the representative of the arriving Yahweh before his people, who is responsible for maintaining harmony of the powers of life.

125

Hauge observes that Mowinckel has utilized the concept of cult as a vehicle for analysis of religious experience, which otherwise would be too elusive for scholarly concerns.126 Mowinckel was looking for precedent appropriation, dramatization, and re-experience of the magnificent cosmic events of God reaching out for the world.127 Cultic imagination in ancient Israel was in the center of his interest. The cult was not

119 Robin Routledge, Old Testament Theology: A Thematic Approach (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2012), 128. Sigmund Mowinckel, He That Cometh: The Messiah Concept in the Old Testament and Later Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 140.

120 Mowinckel, He That Cometh, 172. McKim, Dictionary, 890, Ebook.

121 Mowinckel, He That Cometh, 145.

122 Hauge, “Mowinckel and the Psalms,” 68.

123 Mckim, Dictionary, 887, Ebook.

124 Mowinckel, The Psalms, 189.

125 Hauge, “Mowinckel and the Psalms,” 67. Mowinckel, He That Cometh, 39, 76, 233.

126 Hauge, “Mowinckel and the Psalms,” 70-1.

127 Hauge, “Mowinckel and the Psalms,” 68.

31 regarded as a dead structure of deteriorated ancestral faith, as we could see with Wellhausen.128 On the contrary, formal public worship was seen as a factor shaping private piety and prayer.129 It was “a relation in which a religion becomes a vitalizing function as a communion of God and congregation, and of the members of the congregation amongst themselves.”130 Thus Mowinckel started a quest for the lively ancient Israelite piety with the aim to capture the worshiper when he “feels and knows […] that the divine is with him […] causing his soul to vibrate, sometimes so strongly that all his body is taken over by the vibrations in holy intoxication, in shivering ecstasy.”131

Mowinckel has applied his cultic Sitz im Leben also on large chunks of narratives in Genesis and Exodus.132 For example, Mowinckel argued that Exodus 1-15 was originally a cultic legend, a recital, which was subsequently historicized and transformed into a narrative.133 This approach has marked Mowinckel’s partial divorce with consensus scholarship, but it has scarcely made him less of a historical critic.134 On the contrary, he was a historical critic par excellence, seeking for a “historical understanding of the Old Testament.”135 This has obviously in no way prevented him from realizing the need of appropriation of the biblical text by a community of believers. To conclude this section, it must be noted that both Mowinckel and Wellhausen were concerned with the overall shape of the ancient Israelite religion and that they both gave an impression that this shape is relevant for the contemporary

128 In fact, this was Mowinckel’s major objection against Wellhausen. See Saebø, “Mowinckel,” 25.

129 McKim, Dictionary, 889, Ebook.

130 Mowinckel, The Psalms, 15.

131 Mowinckel in Hauge, “Mowinckel and the Psalms,” 70.

132 Hauge, “Mowinckel and the Psalms,” 65.

133 Childs, IOTS, 167. Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 347.

134 Saebø, “Mowinckel,” 34.

135 Saebø, “Mowinckel,” 35.

religious practice. This implies that historical criticism is not value free, but not primarily because of the covert agendas of its practitioners, but because of, as Aichele et al. put it, “a deep desire to get back to some original, an archē or First Signified.”

136 Or maybe in other words, it is the conviction that the authentic revelation or the personal relationship with God takes place at the source, with the original nomadic religion (Wellhausen) and in the original cultic settings (Mowinckel).

1.4The Problem of Significance

1.4.1Historical Criticism, Ricoeur and Significance

This problem has a practical aspect to it. Historical criticism usually seeks, as Barton had put it, “to untangle the complex interrelationships within and between complex [biblical] texts.”

137 It is focused on historical horizon of the text with all of its otherness and historical contingency. The “complex relationships” are, however, not something that the church or a devout reader is curious about. Most sermons on Exodus 24 are probably not concerned with the problem of Moses going up the mountain four times without going down (Ex 24:9, 13, 15, 18).

138 Sermons are usually not aimed to underline complexity of the text, but rather its simplicity and immediate application. Smothers, after considering all kinds of historical critical sub-disciplines which might help 1 Samuel 13 to preach better, states that “the worth of a critical method for Bible study should not be determined simply by its immediate usefulness for preaching.”139 This statement is defeatist, but it’s got the point: Historical critical

136 Aichele & Miscall & Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room,” 395.

137 Barton, “Historical-Critical Approaches,” 14.

138 This example can be also found in John Barton, “Reading Texts Holistically: The Foundation of Biblical Criticism,” in Congress Volume Ljubljana 2007, ed. André Lemaire (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 374.

139 Thomas G. Smothers, “Historical Criticism as a Tool for Proclamation: 1 Samuel 13,” Review & Expositor 84, no. 1 (February 1, 1987): 30-1.

33 mentality is not particularly helpful in arriving at a relevant, applicable religious meaning. Legaspi observes this while he points out that critical approach to the Bible seeks “to uncover the Bible’s true meaning in history, that is, the meaning its separate texts would have had before they became a Bible at all.”140 Indeed, Legaspi believes that we have two bibles at hand, the scriptural one and the academic one, which was forged during the Enlightenment. These two “are fundamentally different creations,” which are “loyal to separate authorities” and should “function independently.”141 Historical critical study of the Bible has, as Legaspi observes, produced “an astonishing amount of useful information” without offering “a coherent, intellectually compelling account of what this information is actually for.”142 A manifestation of this problem is at hand when we see an expert biblical exegete giving a sermon which, from the congregation’s point of view, is rather unattractive. Biblical preaching must involve, as Culpepper writes, “a retelling of the biblical story so that hearers are drawn into the narrative world of the biblical stories” and “see life from the perspective of faith.”143 But historical criticism simply does not offer this kind of reward, at least not at the first look.

A theoretical solution to this problem can be found with Ricoeur (19132005 CE). Taking up Gadamer’s approach,144 Ricoeur has identified three distinct domains of meaning: The world behind the text, the world within the text and the world in front of the text.145 To focus on the world behind the text leads to its

140 Michael C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 25. Cf. also Gignilliat, A Brief History, 145, Ebook.

141 Legaspi, The Death of Scripture, 169.

142 Legaspi, The Death of Scripture, 169.

143 R. Alan Culpepper, “Narrative Criticism as a Tool for Proclamation: 1 Samuel 13,” Review & Expositor 84, no. 1 (February 1, 1987): 34.

144 Kirwan, “Theological Hermeneutics,” 111.

145 Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 87-94.

“enstrangement” and “distanciation.”146 That is, however, a mistake, because texts have their “semantic autonomy.” They have escaped their historical contingency, their author and addressee,147 and are ready for appropriation in a new context.148 But appropriation is not a unilateral contract imposed on the text by the reader. On the contrary, it means that it’s the text who owns the reader, not vice versa. To encounter the text means to encounter new modes of being. And “interpretation,” for Ricoeur, “is the process by which disclosure of new modes of being […] gives to the subject a new capacity for knowing himself.”149 Interpretation is therefore not about the reader knowing his text, but about the text knowing his reader!150 This is why Ricoeur doesn’t seek to penetrate into the world behind the text, because if the reader has “to coincide with anything, it is not the inner life of another ego, but the disclosure of a possible way of looking at things, which is the genuine referential power of the text.”151 Ricoeur elsewhere describes this coincidence between the text and his reader as “emplotment,” which is an act of judgment and productive imagination over a narrative.152 To emplot a narrative means to reconfigure its elements, so that it might endow the reader with a new identity, as the reader inhabits the place between narrating and explaining narrative elements.153 Ricoeur was largely concerned with biblical hermeneutics. On Pauline letters he for example states,

146 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 44, 89. Cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 303-4.

147 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 91-3.

148 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 43, 87, 89. Paul Ricœur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” New Literary History 5, no. 1 (1973): 113.

149 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 94.

150 Greene, Metavista, 60.

151 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 92.

152 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), I:76.

153 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, I:168.

The letters of Paul are no less addressed to me than to the Romans, the Galatians, the Corinthians, and the Ephesians. Only the dialogue has a “thou” whose identification precedes discourse. The meaning of a text is open to anyone who can read.154

This statement is most appealing, because it resembles the Christian experience of encountering the text in the innermost being, just as with Augustine, when he was commanded to “take up and read” the letter to the Romans.155 At the same time, this appeal is what causes the problem. No historical critic would object to Augustine’s honesty, but an increasing number of them would question whether he got Paul right when he “took him up and read”!156 It would seem that for Gadamer and Ricoeur, the more the reader liberates himself from the “romantic desire” to know what the plain meaning of the text is, the more does he benefit from it and the more has he understood what it is all about. The issue I want to take with this radical circumvention of historical critical research is that Ricoeur’s “‘logicist’ rejoinder” to historicism, as he calls it,157 collapses the two poles of reader and text into a “fusion” or “appropriation,” which in turn gives monopoly for meaning to the reader (or to the autonomous, but ahistorical and subjectively perceived text, as Ricoeur would have it). This solution is, in my opinion, as bothersome as the alienation which historical criticism purportedly inflicts. It would be much better to change the rules, just as the young captain Kirk did in the Kobayashi Maru scenario,158 so that one wouldn’t have to choose between arid criticism and vain subjectivism.

154 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 93.

155 Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Edward B. Pusey (Waiheke Island: The Floating Press, 2009), 217-8.

156 See esp. Stendahl’s article and its aftermath. Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” The Harvard Theological Review 56, no. 3 (1963): 203-205, passim. See also Christopher M. Hays and Stephen L. Herring, “Adam and the Fall,” in Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism, ed. Christopher M. Hays and Christopher B. Ansberry (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 39-40.

157 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 90.

158 “Kobayashi Maru Scenario,” Memory Alpha, accessed March 28, 2017, http://memoryalpha.wikia.com/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru_scenario.

1.4.2Emplotment as the Desired Goal In Interpretation

The positive contribution of Ricoeur’s work is located in his clear determination of appropriation and emplotment as the desirable goal of interpretation. The negative contribution is the false dichotomy which his approach implies. Both of these aspects are apparent for example in the book Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination. The authors are attempting to make sense of the Bible as the book which engages, illuminates and endows with meaning the world in its contemporary intellectual situation. Historical criticism is regrettably brushed away as completely unfit for such an operation. Greene explains that thanks to historical criticism, the Bible became “not only depoliticized, it also became the arcane territory of a scholarly elite whose esoteric disciplines opened up a rift between the academy and the life and witness of the church.”159 Undoing this “catastrophe” includes Ricoeur’s emplotment, which invites us “to become involved in task of meaning-making.”160 God provided us with raw material of biblical narrative just as he provided Adam and Eve with the nature to govern it and work it into something else. We are emploted into the narrative and emploted by the narrative, but not in the sense of replacing the narrative’s own dynamics, as is the case with radical reader response approaches, but through the very fact of having engaged with it. In other words, we create narrative’s significance simply by being intelligent readers. Emplotment into Biblical narrative is hence, in Greene’s thought, not only desirable, but also unavoidable, especially in the context of Church and its mission, which for that matter is primary concern of the book. 161 Historical criticism, on the other hand, is declared bankrupt.

159 Greene, Metavista, 99. Similar rhetorics is employed in George Aichele, The Postmodern Bible, ed. Eizabeth A. Castelli et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 12.

160 Greene, Metavista, 114.

161 Greene, Metavista, 116-7.

I find this line of reasoning completely unjustified, because emplotment is a practice which historical criticism neither prevents nor inspires. Yet this prejudice is not uncommon. Aichele, Miscall and Walsh, authors of an explicitly postmodern leaning, claim that historical criticism is not disinterested, but fundamentally religious,162 because it wants “to get back to some original, an archē or First Signified, which is always theological or ideological, such as the real Jesus or the actual ancient Israel.”163 This claim as such is absolutely agreeable. But then they go further and try to remedy this “trouble,” because unlike historical criticism, which “desire[s] a single Truth to define the texts”164 (a “plain meaning,”165), postmodernism “concentrates on the signifier [what we now think it should mean] as opposed to the signified [what was on the writer’s mind].”166 In other words, if we can’t secure an objective meaning, we should celebrate a subjective one. This radical shift in focus not only allows for wholesale dismissal of the historical horizon, as we have seen with Gadamer and Ricoeur. It also authorizes a robust recovery of significance by introducing new political and social agendas. They are “open[ing] up spaces for […] the dispossessed and marginalized.”167 In this sense, Sherwood and Moore note that “[critical] theory, in the form of a banalized and sloganized postmodernism, was translated into biblical studies as an exhortation to overhaul and refuel the aged methodological engine of the discipline.”168 Even more clearly than with Ricoeur and Gadamer do we see here that the goal in interpretation justifies the means. One only has to have his “theory” about what the text means, for example a Christianized theory of power and 20th century

162 Aichele & Miscall & Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room,” 393.

163 Aichele & Miscall & Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room,” 393-5.

164 Aichele & Miscall & Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room,” 399.

165 Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 3.

166 Aichele & Miscall & Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room,” 399.

167 Aichele & Miscall & Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room,” 387.

168 Moore & Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar, 63, Ebook.

international relations. One does not have to know what the text actually wants to say.169 No wonder than that historical criticism as the main agent of “the Enlightenment Bible” is constantly under fire.170

One possible rejoinder to these radical approaches would aim at their dismissal of objectivity. If one realizes his lack of objectivity, the appropriate answer is, as Barton suggests, to want for more of it, not less.171 Another rejoinder, which I want to present with all vigor, is that if we perceive historical criticism as an interpretive tool, not as a mere ideological snare of western supremacists or as a debilitating caprice of some surreal academic nerds, we shall see that historical criticism is not at all opposed to the idea of emplotment, which these radical revisionists long for.

1.4.3Emplotment, Pentecostals and Kierkegaard’s Lover

It is, in my opinion, no overstatement to say that the need of emplotment is exceptionally clear in the Pentecostal movement. Yong interestingly states that “whereas modern historical criticism emphasizes the objectivity of the text over and against the interpreter, Pentecostals observe instead the ‘this is that’—our or my experience (this) is equivalent to the reality accomplished in the lives of the biblical characters or anticipated by them (that)—character of the Bible in relationship to its readers.”172 Pentecostals were often associated with conservative evangelicals because of their high view of the Bible,173 but Byrd notes that no matter how conservative Pentecostals were, historicity as such simply didn’t fulfill their need to re-experience

169 Barr, History and Ideology, 23.

170 Moore & Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar, 63, Ebook.

171 Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 49.

172 Amos Yong, “Reading Scripture and Nature: Pentecostal Hermeneutics and Their Implications for the Contemporary Evangelical Theology and Science Conversation,” Perspectives on Science & Christian Faith 2011/63, no. 1 (March 2011): 5.

173 William K. Kay, “Pentecostals and the Bible,” Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association 24, no. 1 (June 2004): 81.

the text’s symbols.174 Pentecostal sermons are always expected to “facilitate the listener’s ability to identify and feel the experiences in the text.”175 This is apparent on the characteristic Pentecostal strife for re-experiencing the charisms and other features of the biblical communities of faith.176 This leads Byrd to contend that Ricoeur’s approach is a very convenient partner for Pentecostal hermeneutics.177 This link is not entirely self-evident, because classical Pentecostals probably wouldn’t agree with Ricoeur’s blatant dismissal of the “world behind the text.” But even this is changing, as we sometimes hear a testimony of a Pentecostal who has “journeyed through the wilderness of the first naïveté (both precritical and then modernistic scientific Biblicism) and entered into the ‘second naïveté’.”178 An implicit opposition to postcritical and theological approaches in Pentecostalism is found with Fee, who insists that bridging the distance between then and there and here and now begins by recognizing it, not by neglecting it.179 This makes Fee, as Oliverio observes, compatible with Hirsch’s historicist approach rather than with Gadamer and Ricoeur.180

174 Joseph Byrd, “Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Theory and Pentecostal Proclamation,” Pneuma 15, no. 1 (January 1, 1993): 210. Aldwin Ragoonath, “Pentecostal Preaching in North America” (Th.D. diss., University of South Africa, 2000), 94.

175 Byrd, “Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Theory,” 211-2. Ragoonath, “Pentecostal Preaching,” 96. Kenneth J. Archer, “Pentecostal Hermeneutics: Retrospect and Prospect,” in Pentecostal Hermeneutics: A Reader, ed. Lee Roy Martin (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 134.

176 Byrd, “Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Theory,” 204. Aldwin Ragoonath, Preach the Word: A Pentecostal Approach (Winnipeg: Agape Teaching Ministry of Canada, 2004), 49-56, Ebook.

177 Byrd, “Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Theory,” 211.

178 Kenneth J. Archer, A Pentecostal Hermeneutic for the Twenty-First Century: Spirit, Scripture, and Community (London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 7.

179 Fee & Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth , 12, 21-22, passim. Bradley T. Noel, “Pentecostal and Postmodern Hermeneutics: Comparisons and Contemporary Impact” (Th.D. diss., University of South Africa, 2007), 126-130.

180 L. William Oliverio, Theological Hermeneutics in the Classical Pentecostal Tradition: A Typological Account (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 171.

Ragoonath, who enjoys some influence on practical training of Pentecostal ministers,181 states,

Ricoeur’s theory can help Pentecostals to return to their roots by helping them to re-experience the text and to gain an understanding of the Biblical text. He moves the reader to a position of understanding the text that will normally be lost. If his position is rightly applied it can help Pentecostals and give them a theory to interpret the Biblical text both literally and symbolically.182

Let us now respond by returning to the Kierkegaard’s parable. Pentecostals, after all, profess to be the greatest lovers of the Holy Spirit, who is the only living person to whom the Bible could be at least indirectly ascribed. So how should the lover read the letter from his lady-love, which she happened to have written in a foreign language? The first step is not to abandon arid dictionaries and read the letter as though it had some meaning in front of it. That could be amusing, but utterly wrongheaded. Some Dutch words could make some sense in Czech, but that sense is usually so different from their original meaning that it would be nothing else than a monkey business.183 Nor is it viable for the lover to translate the letter and read it only synchronically, because although the lover does want to appreciate “the minute choice of words and reported details, the pace of narration, the small movements of dialogue, and a whole network of ramified interconnections in the text,”184 these features are of a secondary importance, for he is not in love with the letter itself and much less with the foreign language. Reading the letter as a mere literature can be only achieved by a tour de force!185 Yes, the lover does strive to appropriate the letter for himself and to emplot himself in it, but not because of the letter itself, but because of the loved one

181 Ragoonath’s textbook Preach the Word is required as collateral reading for an undergraduate homiletics course offered by Global University on its vast missions field.

182 Ragoonath, “Pentecostal Preaching,” 100.

183 See similar point in Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 235.

184 Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 3.

185 C. S. Lewis in John Barton, “Reflections on Literary Criticism,” in Method Matters: Essays on the Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Honor of David L. Petersen, ed. Joel M. LeMon and Kent H. Richards (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), 528.

41 behind it. It is exactly the otherness of the letter which allows for a desired dialogue.186 He wants to be emploted into the “world behind the text” so that he might not only re-experience the text, but also better understand who his lady-love is and what does she actually want to say. This different kind of emplotment is what the lover really wants and needs.

It follows that his task will be of a profoundly diachronic character; he will become a historical critic of his lady love’s writing. Questions of date and circumstances of writing will be of utmost importance and if he finds slightest irregularity in the natural flow of the text, he will immediately contemplate five or six explanatory theories. Did she compose the letter before, or after their previous correspondence? Did she promise to come in May? Why did she change her mind to August? Or did two of her scribes project their villainous ideologies onto the text? No matter! The lover must know, for he is after his lady love’s heart, not after an ephemeral feeling. It is sometimes alleged that by academic, historical critical reading of the Bible, students could be robbed of their faith and the function of scripture could be “stultified.”187

This parable demonstrates that it is exactly the other way around. The love letter is stultified not when criticism prevails, but when it does not. Only then does the letter bear no witness to the lady love’s actual feelings. I have previously mentioned that Jowett’s invitation “to read Scripture like any other book” is often misquoted.188 It is perhaps right about time to quote it right, for it aptly expresses my present argument. When interpreted like any other book, by the same rules of evidence and the same canons of criticism, the Bible will still remain unlike any other book; its beauty will be freshly seen, as of a picture which is restored after many ages to its original state; it will create a new interest and make for itself a new kind of authority by the life which is in it. It will be a spirit and not a letter; as it was in

186 Alex Sinclair, “A Dialogical Approach to Critical Bible Study: The Use of Schwabian Deliberation to Integrate the Work of Bible Scholars with Educational Philosophy,” Religious Education 99, no. 2 (March 2004): 118.

187 Christopher Rowland in Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 138.

188 Schaper, “Historical Criticism,” 49, Ebook. See § 1.2.2.

the beginning, having an influence like that of the spoken word, or the book newly found. The purer the light in the human heart, the more it will have an expression of itself in the mind of Christ; the greater the knowledge of the development of man, the truer will be the insight gained into the ‘increasing purpose’ of revelation.189

189 Benjamin Jowett, The Interpretation of Scripture and Other Essays (London: Routledge, 1907), 34.

2CHAPTER TWO:

HISTORICAL CRITICISM AS A THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM

If you can establish faith, do not worry about dogma. For thousands of expositors will be born and they will take care of it.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry190

2.1Conservative Approach

2.1.1Theological Impasses in Conservative Scholarship

Historical criticism is well known for its dismissal of traditional ascriptions of authorship of many biblical books and for denial of literal historical accuracy of their accounts. Critical theories of authorship and of historical background of individual texts seldom conform to a wide consensus,191 but it is widely perceived, that the version of history as we now have it in the Bible is not literally accurate. Adam and Eve were not the only ancestors of the human race, if they existed in the first place.192 Author of the Pentateuch was rather a compiler of several pre-existing strands and it was not Moses, as was traditionally believed, and not even Ezra, as was believed by Spinoza, but a Second Temple group of scribes.193 The very existence of Israel as a nation prior to 10th century BC is often contested194 and even very moderate estimates of literacy level in Palestine wouldn’t imagine educational infrastructure with ability

190 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Citadela [The Wisdom of the Sands], 47, Ebook, § LV.

191 John N. Oswalt, “Canonical Criticism: A Review from a Conservative Viewpoint,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 30, no. 3 (1987): 323.

192 Nicholas E. Lombardo, “Evolutionary Genetics and Theological Narratives of Human Origins,” The Heythrop Journal (November 2016). Denis Alexander, Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? (London: Monarch Books, 2014), 176-179, Ebook.

44 to produce any complex writing prior to this time.195 This critical outlook not only rules out chronological records (e.g. 1 Kgs 6:1) and incidental notes on authorship (e.g. Ex 34:28), but also literal reading of large chunks of biblical narratives, including pivotal events such as the creation and flood, Abraham’s life of faith, exodus from Egypt, conquest of Canaan, or Saul’s and David’s unification of Israel and so on.

Conservative voices are usually alarmed by these assertions, because they see historical accuracy as the indispensable quality, without which the Bible loses its reliability as Scripture.196 Even the New Testament use of the Old Testament must be against all odds described as “interpretation” and taking “fuller meanings” by faith must be maintained.197 When it comes to authorship, Webb for example validates Genesis as covenant literature “by its association with the Sinai covenant and Moses as Yahweh’s prophet,”198 perhaps because he assumes that J, E, D and P weren’t Yahweh’s prophets and didn’t make Sinai covenant on behalf of Israel. The point is that by denying authorship of a biblical book, one is denying an inspired author Moses and hence the book’s inspiration itself.199 With historicity it is quite similar. In the festschrift for Eugene Miller, Howard explains that since “the Bible’s message is

193 For a clearly minimalist position see e.g. Russell E. Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 187, passim. The date is provided on p. 245. Post-exilic date is increasingly acceptable also within evangelical circles. See John H. Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch: Revelation, Composition, and Interpretation (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009), 139-143, Ebook. For rationale and convenience of latter dating see David J. A. Clines, The Theme of the Pentateuch, 2nd ed. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 104.

194 Dermot Nestor, “Merneptah’s ‘Israel’ and the Absence of Origins in Biblical Scholarship,” Currents in Biblical Research 13, no. 3 (June 2015): 301, 303, 314, passim.

195 Matthieu Richelle, “Elusive Scrolls: Could Any Hebrew Literature Have Been Written Prior to the Eighth Century BCE?,” Vetus Testamentum 66, no. 4 (October 12, 2016): 556-594.

196 Archer, Survey, 10.

197 Douglas J. Moo, “The Problem of Sensus Plenior,” in Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon, ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Academie Books, 1986) 210-11.

198 Barry G. Webb, “Biblical Authority and Diverse Literary Genres,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. Donald A. Carson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016) 590.

199 Donald A. Carson, “The Many Facets of the Current Discussion,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. Donald A. Carson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 19.

45 given to a large extent through historical writings,” through which we “learn about God.”200 And since history in general, as he defines it, purports to be a factual account of the past, it follows that compromising historical accuracy of the text results in destruction of its meaning, with which we can “identify,” as Kaiser, whom Howard quotes, puts it.201 Bullock argues in the same volume that history and theology in the Old Testament are inseparable, but not in the way that Old Testament history writing was conformed to its theology, as one might expect from such a statement, but rather that theology is drawn from and utterly dependent on historical accuracy of the narrated events.202 Young, an exemplary evangelical Old Testament scholar, applied this principle in his critique of Wright’s and von Rad’s Old Testament theologies. Wright claimed that biblical theology was, indeed, a “confessional recital of the redemptive acts of God in a particular history,” and he did acknowledge that history was “the chief medium of revelation.”203 Wright did not, however, understand biblical history of Israel as divinely inspired revelation, but as Israel’s subjective witness to God’s redemptive works. This approach, according to Young, threatened to compromise any project of theological reading. If Israel confessed that they were able to leave Egypt thanks to Yahweh’s intervention (cf. Dt 26:8), was their confession based on facts? Young asks, “Was Israel drawing a true inference from what she experienced, or was she simply deceived?”204 To Young’s mind, not even von Rad was involved in writing genuine Old Testament theology, but rather in a diachronic study of Israel’s

200 David M. Howard, “History as History: The Search for Meaning,” in Giving the Sense: Understanding and Using Old Testament Historical Texts, ed. David M. Howard and Michael A. Grisanti (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic & Professional, 2003), 43.

201 Walter C. Kaiser (1973) in Howard, “History as History,” 44.

202 C. Hassell Bullock, “History and Theology: The Tale of Two Histories,” in Giving the Sense: Understanding and Using Old Testament Historical Texts, ed. David M. Howard and Michael A. Grisanti (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic & Professional, 2003), 106.

203 G. Ernest Wright (1952) in John J. Yeo, Plundering the Egyptians: The Old Testament and Historical Criticism at Westminster Theological Seminary (1929-1998) (Lanham: University Press of America, 2010), 108.

204 Edward J. Young (1959) in Yeo, Plundering the Egyptians, 108.

traditions, because theology requires not traditions of men, but Word of God as the proper subject of its inquiry.205 Biblical theology does not merely rest in confessing what “suprahistory” witnesses to, but in the deep conviction of the historicity of biblical events. This betrays the core issue which conservative scholars take with historical criticism. It is not so much their passionate interest in late bronze and early iron age literacy level in Canaan. It is their concern with religious relevance of the Bible that they put at stake. The classical doctrine of inspiration, as defined for example by Warfield (1851-1921 CE) or by the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, were only the means for maintaining this concern.206 History is, in the conservative mind, a space where God reveals Himself. By depriving biblical narratives of their historicity, they are deprived of their focus on God in history and therefore rendered useless as the object of faith or theological reflection.207

2.1.2Inerrantism as a Distinct Hermeneutics

Conservative scholarship has sometimes been accused of “bibliolatry,” which entails putting too much emphasis on the literal sense of the Bible and not reading it on its own terms.208 Such an accusation might have something to it, as Wallace, an inerrantist scholar, admits.209 But in the essence, it is exactly vice versa. Conservatives

205 Yeo, Plundering the Egyptians, 109.

206 Benjamin B. Warfield, “The Inspiration of the Bible,” Bibliotheca Sacra 51 (1894): 618, passim. “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy,” 1978, accessed March 28, 2017, http://www.bibleresearcher.com/chicago1.html

207 Graham A. Cole, “The Peril of a ‘Historyless’ Systematic Theology,” in Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? A Critical Appraisal of Modern and Postmodern Approaches to Scripture, ed. James K. Hoffmeier and Dennis R. Magary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 48, Ebook.

208 Roger E. Olson, “Some Different Meanings of ‘Biblical Inerrancy’ and a Challenge to Evangelical ‘Inerrantists,’” Roger E. Olson, February 22, 2016, accessed March 28, 2017, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2016/02/some-different-meanings-of-biblical-inerrancyand-a-challenge-to-evangelical-inerrantists/. F. David Farnell, “Early Twenty-First-Century Challenges to Inerrancy,” in Vital Issues in the Inerrancy Debate, ed. F. David Farnell et al. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 182-3, Ebook.

209 Daniel B. Wallace (2005) in Farnell, “Challenges to Inerrancy,” 182, Ebook.

who demonstrate such a vigor in defending historical accuracy of the Bible do so because they want to vindicate God as its inerrant Giver. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy reads, “We affirm that what Scripture says, God says. May He be glorified.”210 Issues with the authorship of the Pentateuch, Isaiah, or Daniel could have some implication for omniscience of the incarnate Christ (cf. Mt 8:4; 15:7; 24:15), but they are, as I contend, of a secondary importance.211 A similar minor problem would be that if “all scripture is inspired [θεόπνευστος] by God” (2 Tm 3:16) and if this implies historical accuracy of this Scripture, then the Holy Spirit should have explained through Paul whether he means Hebrew Bible or the Septuagint.212 These kinds of problems are often easily resolvable, at least as long as one doesn’t push the inerrantist case too far.213 The major problem is that inerrantism is a set of beliefs about the role of the Bible. When historical criticism comes and challenges inerrantism in but a single case, it is like a crack in glass which threatens to penetrate through the entire system if not sealed right at the beginning.214 Beale states that “to assess reports of the miraculous in biblical historical narratives to be non-historical because of a modern bias against the supernatural distorts a correct understanding of these ancient narratives.”215 What I suspect is that Beale would keep saying that even

210 “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy,” § Inerrancy and Authority. See also Gregory K Beale, Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority (Wheaton, IL: Good News Publishers, 2008), 199, Ebook.

211 Kenton L. Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 126, Ebook. James Barr, Escaping from Fundamentalism (London: SCM Press, 1984), 11.

212 For example, there is a difference between lifespan of people indicated in genealogies of Genesis 1-11. For an interesting resolution of this problem see Dwight W. Young, “The Sexagesimal Basis for the Total Years of the Antediluvian and Postdiluvian Epochs,” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 116, no. 4 (January 1, 2004). For further considerations on 2Tim 3:16 in relation to this problem see Barr, Escaping from Fundamentalism, 1, passim.

213 See e.g. Craig L. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible?: An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2014), 108-9, Ebook. Blomberg is decent and rational. He is willing to take a mediating position whenever necessary.

214 James Barr, The Bible in Modern World (London: SCM Press, 1973), 3, 15.

215 Gregory K. Beale, “Myth, History, And Inspiration: A Review Article of Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 49, no. 2 (2006): 305.

if one would prove that “a modern bias” has nothing to do with his assessment, because his “correct understanding” is given by the inerrantist hermeneutics, which he has subscribed to.

Inerrantism is a hermeneutic, it is a mode of understanding. In this vein, Geisler complains about separation of inerrantism from hermeneutics and affirms that it “entails a certain kind of understanding of what the Bible means, namely, a historicalgrammatical understanding of the text.”216 Vanhoozer makes a very similar point, although he observes that inerrancy is but an “undetermined” hermeneutic, because it “does not necessarily generate interpretative agreement even among those who hold to it.”217 That is definitely correct, but such is the case with any kind of hermeneutic. Dispensationalists may disagree on the certain number of dispensations, but they are still dispensationalists.218 Pentecostals may manifest diverse opinions on what exactly does the Luke-Acts narrative teach about social activism, but as long as they all believe that Luke-Acts teach that speaking in tongues is the initial evidence of the baptism in the Holy Spirit, they all remain within the strict boundaries of classical Pentecostal hermeneutics.219 Inerrantism similarly binds its adherents to affirm historical accuracy of the Old Testament220 and to interpret the text in such a way that would bring reconciliation to contradictions and discrepancies.221

216 Norman L. Geisler, “The Historic Documents of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy,” in Vital Issues in the Inerrancy Debate, ed. F. David Farnell et al. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 18, Ebook.

217 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Lost in Interpretation? Truth, Scripture, and Hermeneutics,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48, no. 1 (2005): 97.

218 Charles C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism, Revised and expanded. (Chicago: Moody Press, 1995), 32.

219 Martin W. Mittelstadt, Reading Luke-Acts in the Pentecostal Tradition (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2010), 78-80, Ebook.

220 Barr, Escaping Fundamentalism, 82. Barr observes that for fundamentalists, Old Testament problems are more essential than for example similar problems in the Gospels.

221 See e.g. Gleason L. Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1982).

I’m even tempted to push this case a little further. Barr thought that fundamentalism could join forces with postmodern approaches against historical criticism as their common enemy.222 I propose that there is no need for such an alliance, because inerrantism already is a kind of postmodern critical theory. Its present form has grown in 1970’s and 80’s from dissatisfaction with modernistic mentality of historical criticism. It accuses historical critics of philosophical prejudices (humanism, rationalism, antisupernaturalism).223 As a remedy, fundamentalism imposes an arbitrary category of inerrancy onto the ancient texts in order to absorb their religious power for the sake of its own peculiar religious and often also social and political interests. Moreover, it advocates for a marginalized group, namely, fundamentalists, and it identifies this group with the people of the Bible. This representation of inerrantism is obviously mischievous and unconvincing, but I insist that there’s a germ of truth to it. Why does, for example, Henry complain that “in concentrating on authorial intention, some commentators seem to imply that the biblical writers need not always have intended to teach the truth”?224 Does it mean that authorial intention must be bend to fit inerrancy? What if God wanted to communicate a truth by letting the writer to tell untruth? Barr thought that the alliance between fundamentalism and postmodernism will be unhappy precisely because “fundamentalists are not so sure that they want to abandon history as an important ground.”225 Now Henry’s complaint indicates that for inerrantists, only some versions of history are acceptable more than others.

222 Barr, History and Ideology, 150-3.

223 Archer, Survey, 97. Beale, “Myth, History, And Inspiration,” 305.

224 Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), IV:126, 130, Ebook.

225 Barr, History and Ideology, 151.

2.1.3Inerrantism, Post-Conservativism and Faithful Criticism

Vanhoozer, a post-conservative author, admits that his main interest is in text’s theological truth226 and he warns inerrantists that “[w]e do less than justice to Scripture if we preach and teach only its propositional content” because “[i]nformation alone is insufficient for spiritual formation.”227 He then adds, “We need to get beyond ‘cheap inerrancy,’ beyond ascribing accolades to the Bible to understanding what the Bible is actually saying, beyond professing biblical truth to practicing it.”

228 Vanhoozer suspects that inerrantism as a hermeneutic, in spite of its corpulent philosophical grounds and ubiquitous doctrinal affirmations, does not do what hermeneutics should be doing. He wants to emphasize a narrative side, which “is not just packaging [of a set of propositions]; it is a form of understanding, what Ricoeur calls ‘explanation by emplotment.’”

229 Vanhoozer makes a good point in showing that propositional approach is less than adequate for biblical hermeneutics, as long as it wants to enable appropriation and re-experiencing of the text. Nonetheless, it is my impression that he only adds to the existing inerrantist hermeneutics another layer. A “narrative inerrantist” would have to say: (A) The Bible is only right in its historically accurate accounts. (B) The Bible must always be right and therefore all of its historical accounts are accurate. (C) The true meaning of the text is not behind it, in the inerrant propositions, but in front of it. (D) So forget about A and B and emplot the narrative in your present situation. It would seem to me, on the other hand, that Vanhoozer somehow cautiously indicates that evangelical theology doesn’t need to be afraid of

226 Vanhoozer, “Lost in Interpretation,” 93.

227 Vanhoozer, “Lost in Interpretation,” 100.

228 Vanhoozer, “Lost in Interpretation,” 100.

229 Vanhoozer, “Lost in Interpretation,” 105.

historical criticism. Should the penny drop this way, he might arrive at something more viable.

A more balanced approach in the evangelical milieu is found with Hays and Ansberry in their co-edited book Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism. The authors have not invested themselves in direct polemics with conservative scholarship. What they have done instead is an experiment with the aim to find out how historical criticism of the Bible challenges evangelical faith. In other words, the authors are proofreading historical critical scholarship to find theological impasses. Interestingly enough, they do find some. Ansberry argues for the theological importance of the historical exodus, although he admits absence of direct evidence.230 Daling and Hays similarly defend historicity of resurrection as an indispensable article of faith.231 Remaining problems, such as authorship and date of the Pentateuch or the historicity of Adam and Eve are presented as matters of no insurmountable theological ramifications. Alliance of historical criticism and evangelical faith is envisaged as the “faithful criticism.” It is a relationship of mutual respect and partnership, which “combines rigorous historical-critical inquiry with a resolute commitment to the essential doctrinal convictions of Christianity in order to understand the historical and theological dimensions of Scripture.”232 Historical criticism does not pursue doctrinal affirmations, but rather provides them with necessary correctives, as is the case with historical Adam.233 Areas of the exodus and resurrection, which reside beyond reach of

230 Christopher B. Ansberry, “The Exodus: Fact, Fiction or Both?,” in Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism, ed. Christopher M. Hays and Christopher B. Ansberry (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 71-73.

231 Michael J. Daling and Christopher M. Hays, “The Historical Jesus,” in Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism, ed. Christopher M. Hays and Christopher B. Ansberry (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 180.

232 Christopher M. Hays and Christopher B. Ansberry, “Faithful Criticism and a Critical Faith,” in Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism, ed. Christopher M. Hays and Christopher B. Ansberry (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 208.

233 Hays & Herring, “Adam and the Fall,” 37-53.

verifiable history, are released to become matters of faith. Hays and Ansberry demonstrate that historical criticism is not “a manifestation of unfaith”234 and that God may be moving on its backstage in order to purge meanings of His Word.235

Faithful criticism is a promising concept. It invites those who were educated in radical inerrantist environment to reconsider the unbearable burden of proof which inerrantism puts on biblical texts. On the other hand, faithful criticism is open to the same kind of critique as its conservative counterparts, because it operates under the same paradigm: If certain article of our theology doesn’t require historicity of certain biblical texts, then we don’t have to insist on its historicity. But if it does require historicity, then we can’t dodge it. But what if, to our horror, a confirmed theological impasse will really be found? What if they excavate Joshua’s generation slaughtered on the shore of the Sea of Reeds? Or Jesus’ body enjoying its rest in piece in a not-soconquered grave? I do not aspire to provide answers to these questions. They have, however, contributed to the rise of contemporary theological approaches.

Theological interpretation was never absent from the Church,236 but theological approaches constitute a thriving contemporary phenomenon.237 At its modern beginnings, we could mention Bultmann (1884-1976 CE), who wanted to protect the Bible against ideologies of Nazism and modern science by focusing on the fact of kerygma,238 which has unfortunately led him to regard the Old Testament as a

234 Ziesler, “Historical Criticism and a Rational Faith,” 271.

235 C. L. Brinks, “On Nail Scissors and Toothbrushes: Responding to the Philosophers’ Critiques of Historical Biblical Criticism,” Religious Studies 49, no. 3 (September 2013): 373.

236 Angus Paddison, “The History and Reemergence of Theological Interpretation,” in A Manifesto for Theological Interpretation, ed. Craig G. Bartholomew and Heath A. Thomas (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), 27, Ebook.

237 See recent monographs by Richard B. Hays (2003), Vanhoozer (2005), Treier (2008), etc. Notice also the Journal of Theological Interpretation (since 2007).

238 David W. Congdon, “Demystifying the Program of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Theological Hermeneutics,” Harvard Theological Review 110, no. 1 (January 2017): 4, 17, 22.

“miscarriage” with but a secondary importance.239 I could also mention Slavomil C. Daněk (1885-1946 CE), a Czech Protestant Old Testament scholar, who hoped to hide before the eyes of science in allegorical abstraction and biblical minimalism.240 However, much more interesting developments took place in the work of latter proponents of canonical approaches, of whom I chose to discuss Childs, Sanders and Brueggemann. If we want to understand those, we will have to take a brief look at Barth (1886-1968 CE) and his doctrine of Scripture.

2.2An Introduction to Canonical Approaches

2.2.1First Pillar: Barth and the Word of God Barth’s view of Scripture was formed when the hey-day of unrestrained historical critical investigation didn’t seem to be fading out. It therefore comes as no surprise that Barth did acknowledge “the right of historical scholars to apply the tools of their trade to the investigation of ancient Israel and the origins of the church.”241 At the same time, however, Barth didn’t feel compelled to choose between historical inquiry and the doctrine of inspiration. On one hand, Barth dispassionately affirmed that the Bible is “the historical record of a Near Eastern tribal religion and its Hellenistic offshoot.”242 On the other hand, he believed that “theology responds to that Word spoken in the history of Israel which reaches its culmination in the history of

239 Bultmann (1964) in C. Clifton Black, “Biblical Theology Revisited: An Internal Debate,” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 70, no. 4 (October 1, 2016): 405. See also R. W. L. Moberly, “Theological Interpretation, Presuppositions, and the Role of the Church: Bultmann and Augustine Revisited,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 6, no. 1 (2012): 21.

240 Sláma, Nové teologie, 183-4.

241 Paul E. Capetz, “The Old Testament as a Witness to Jesus Christ: Historical Criticism and Theological Exegesis of the Bible according to Karl Barth,” The Journal of Religion 90, no. 4 (2010): 478.

242 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), I-A:165. Cf. Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1978), 60.

Jesus Christ.”243 This Word consists of “the one Logos that the prophets and apostles received, the one revelation in the incarnation which the people of the Bible know and attest as either promised or manifested.”244 Barth emphasized that the term “Word of God” is a form of Christian confession. “When we say that the Bible is the Word of God,” Barth points out, “we express our faith in an act of God’s redemption of man in the present.”245 But at this point, Barth also reversely affirms that “[t]he Bible is God’s Word to the extent that God causes it to be His Word, to the extent that He speaks through it.”246 Inspiration is therefore not a given fact, but a “free act of the Holy Spirit.”247 This implies that “the inspiration is a dead thing for us if we have not read, or do not and will not read the Bible as God’s Word.”248 As a result of this, historical inquiry becomes a superfluous discipline, because it has nothing to add to the theological dynamics between the Word and the believer.249 Barth is well known for his Nein! to natural theology. This rejection also includes any external warrant of revelation to its inner witness, which occurred in the incarnation of Jesus.250 But if there is no warrant for theological learning in the natural history, and if Christian reading of Scripture is primarily a theological task, then Barth’s theological hermeneutics is exclusively non-historical. “Revelation is not a predicate of history, but history is a predicate of revelation,” insisted Barth with all persistence and vigor. 251 In

243 Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1979), 19, Ebook.

244 Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, ed. Hannelotte Reiffen and Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), I:92.

245 Barth (1932) in Yeo, Plundering Egyptians, 105.

246 Barth, Church Dogmatics, part one, I:109-10.

247 Geoffrey W. Bromiley, “Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Inspiration,” Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 87 (1955): 74.

248 Bromiley, “Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Inspiration,” 74.

249 Capetz, “The Old Testament as a Witness to Jesus Christ,” 481.

250 Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (London: SCM Press, 2001), 47, Ebook.

251 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. G. T Thomson and Harold Knight, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), I-B:58.

other words, history is not a place where revelation occurs, it is its product. This means that historical research can provide no point of reference to revelation and can not serve as a tool in its interpretation, because there is no overlap between what Barth doctrinally defines as the Word of God and historical circumstance of the Bible’s production and tradition.

2.2.2Second Pillar: Frei and the Non-Referential Narrative

Non-referentiality of the Word of God brings our attention to the second pillar for understanding canonical approaches, which is found with Frei (1922-1928 CE). In a well known book, which seeks to explain developments in biblical hermeneutics since the Reformation, Frei observes that the reformers worked under the assumption that literal sense of the text and its true meaning were two congruent entities. 252 Frei quotes Luther, for whom the Scripture was “most certain, most easily accessible, comprehensible, interpreting itself, […]” etc.253 The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, as Frei called his book, occurred with the rise of historical criticism during the Enlightenment, when the scissors between ostensive reference of the narrative and its historical meaning began to widen.254 In other words, historical criticism which developed in 18th and 19th century found itself detached from the Bible’s narrative shape. Reformational idea of the plain meaning of the text gave impetus to the birth of general hermeneutics in the 18th century (Schleiermacher and others, § 1.2.2), which in turn replaced any notion of multiple layers of meaning (literal, spiritual, etc.).255 Frei then argues that reception of historical criticism into hermeneutical framework

252 Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 18-9.

253 Martin Luther in Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 19. See also Harrisville & Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture, 13-23.

254 Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 44, passim. Barr, History and Ideology, 21-2.

255 Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 55-6.

56 took different trajectories in English-speaking and in German milieus. For Englishspeaking scholars, be it conservatives (e.g. inerrantists, § 2.1) or critics (e.g. Barr, § 2.3.2-3), historical truth behind biblical texts was always of interest. German scholarship, on the other hand, put emphasis on ideas which are communicated by the narrative, on the so called Heilsgeschichte, i.e. “salvation story,” which is witnessed to by the text.256 The issue which Frei took with both approaches was that they presupposed a subject matter extrinsic to the narrative itself, through which the text and its larger units were supposed to mean something.257 If Barth did chastise any attempt to attain an external verification of revelation, Frei disavowed every approach which sought to read biblical narratives only as a source of information which could be extracted and paraphrased.258 For Frei, biblical narratives don’t split into Heilsgeschichte and Weltgeschichte, which occasionally contradict each other, because biblical narratives are non-referential.259 Historical criticism is therefore found guilty of not understanding the text itself, but rewriting it with the help of historical references.260 Frei doesn’t want to understand the text in paraphrase, nor is he interested in the authorial intention. It is the narrative itself, which constitutes meaning of the text, not its historical contingency.261 For Frei, to be sure, biblical narratives do want to explain the world and depict the character of God. But they want to do so in a way which does not look beyond the

256 Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 56, 93. Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 161.

257 Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 277-8, 307-8.

258 Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 278. Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 162. William C. Placher, “Hans Frei and the Meaning of Biblical Narrative,” The Christian Century 106, no. 18 (May 24, 1989): 556.

259 Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 159, 163. Lynn M. Poland, “The New Criticism, Neoorthodoxy, and the New Testament,” The Journal of Religion 65, no. 4 (1985): 472. See also a very similar point made by Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 46-49.

260 Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 164. Poland, “The New Criticism,” 472.

261 Poland, “The New Criticism,” 469.

text itself.262 Frei also does recognize that historical texts are products of their historical situation and that words do bear their meanings today as they did in the past, 263 but he insists that biblical narratives ultimately don’t constitute a history, but a “history-like” story.264 With Frei and the New Critics, narrative becomes something like an ultimate genre, which generates the moment of meaning when historical matters of the text are swallowed by its poetic world.265 This conviction is in itself a doctrine of the text, which operates in quite a similar fashion as that of Barth. Barth required a Christian confession on part of the reader in order for the Bible to become Word of God, Frei required a leap from the outside to the inside of the text by affirming its coherence. Only then does the text become the sovereign Word (so Barth) and an autonomous realistic narrative (so Frei), which, thanks to the initial affirmation, has no referential value and therefore can’t be controlled by an external historical reference.266

2.2.3Third Pillar: The Concept of Meaning and Interpretive Communities

Before we proceed to Childs, it is important to note that the denial of historical reference, which we can see with Barth and Frei, not only weighs the anchor of verifiable historical meaning, but also redefines what the meaning actually is. The very notion of meaning now, as Davies observes, is depending on an interpreter or a group of readers “as a function of the interaction of text, language, reader and

262 William C. Placher, Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1989), 90, Ebook. Davies, “Biblical Studies,” 44-5.

263 Poland, “The New Criticism,” 472.

264 Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 238.

265 Poland, “The New Criticism,” 472-3.

266 Poland, “The New Criticism,” 469-70. Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 159.

58 method.”267 (Indeed, Barth may have been rooted in the Reformed tradition, but it is no wonder that he serves as a starting point for mingling theology with postmodernism.268) Multiple interpretive theories, not only the Reformed one, are therefore claiming equal legitimacy, and legitimacy is recognized only as far as the theory develops from values which are shared by an interpretive community.269 Interpretive communities, as Fish notes, “are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions.”

270 This reminds us of Ricoeur’s emplotment, which extends the text onto its reader through an activity on the reader’s part, but Fish insists that the reader is a mere social construct defined by his community and that notion of meaning depends not on the author, nor on individual reader, but on the interpretive community.271

This applies well to communities of believers. Fowl for example argues that “a theological reading of Scripture is one designed to shape and be shaped by the faith, worship, and practices of Christian communities.”272 Fowl then proceeds further with an unfortunate claim that theological interpretation is task of the Church, whereas “professional biblical studies” belong to academia.273 This is a disagreeable view, because it implies that historical criticism can’t endorse values of believing communities and that academia is a community with shared values. Neither of this is the case.

267 Davies, “Biblical Studies,” 43.

268 Capetz, “The Old Testament as a Witness to Jesus Christ,” 478.

269 Stephen Fowl, “The Ethics of Interpretation or What’s Left After the Elimination of Meaning,” in The Bible in Three Dimensions: Essays in Celebration of Forty Years of Biblical Studies in the University of Sheffield, ed. David J. A. Clines (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990), 379, 394-5.

270 Stanley E. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 171.

271 Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, 322, 335.

272 Stephen E. Fowl, “The New Testament, Theology, and Ethics,” in Hearing the New Testament: Strategies for Interpretation, ed. Joel B. Green (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 398.

273 Fowl, “The New Testament, Theology, and Ethics,” 398.

Academia ideally works in a demand and supply mode, which is best apparent when paradigm changes. Historical criticism does no longer exercise privileged status in academia, as some keep to assume.274 On the contrary, only seven years after Aichele et al. identified the Journal of Biblical Literature as leaning to historical criticism and not even being conversant with postmodernism,275 an article was published in that journal where Brenner-Idan takes an issue with uncritically negative view of Jezebel and provides a feminist remedy.276 Brenner-Idan mostly surveys scholarship on that matter and indicates that background studies might provide further clues for disentangling Jezebel’s literary character.277 All of this is quite sympathetic, proceeding from less radical strands of feminist scholarship,278 but Brenner-Idan apparently can’t help herself not to note that “the dual trajectory of historical criticism, in the sense of chronology-and-location inquiry and textual-compositional inquiry, has slowly lost its exclusive lofty position, as did considerations of theology.”279 Brenner-Idan obviously doesn’t provide any evidence of the loftiness on the part of historical critics or theological interpreters. Her stance, nonetheless, clearly illustrates Fish’s point, that the concept of meaning is constructed by inner demands of the respective interpretive community. In this case, some feminist currents feel uneasy about those lofty historical critics and Old Testament theologians, who simply want to repeat those aspects of the story which are in need of feminist rereading. The

274 Greene, Metavista, 98. Richard B. Hays, “Reading the Bible with Eyes of Faith: The Practice of Theological Exeges,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 1, no. 1 (2007): 7. Aichele & Miscall & Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room,” 383. Cf. Barton, Canon, Literature and Theology, 35. Barr, History and Ideology, 48.

275 Aichele & Miscall & Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room,” 385.

276 Athalya Brenner-Idan, “On Scholarship and Related Animals: A Personal View from and for the Here and Now,” Journal of Biblical Literature 135, no. 1 (2016): 6-17. The assessment is essentially correct up till now. My point is that there is much place for an open debate even in JBL.

277 Brenner-Idan, “On Scholarship and Related Animals,” 8-15.

278 See especially Phyllis Trible, “Exegesis for Storytellers and Other Strangers,” Journal of Biblical Literature 114, no. 1 (1995): 4, passim.

279 Brenner-Idan, “On Scholarship and Related Animals,” 8.

Torah, however, has as much as “seventy faces,”280 which legitimizes reading the story “against its grain.”281

This example and many others have potential to frustrate historical criticism on its quest for the plain meaning. Speaking from a purely pragmatic point of view, is it profitable for interpretive communities to engage in historical criticism? This is the question which surfaces as we finally approach canonical approaches of Childs, Sanders and Brueggemann. All these three attempts begin by realizing the demand and need the contemporary believing communities and offer an overtly confessional model of interpretation.

2.3Canonical Approaches of Childs, Sanders and Brueggemann

2.3.1Childs’ Canonical Approach

Childs’ contribution to biblical hermeneutics can be understood as an attempt to overcome the divide between historical criticism and Christian dogmatics. In his earlier and influential book, Childs wrote,

There is little hope of the biblical and theological disciplines interacting in a beneficial way unless biblical scholars are working constructively in theology, and conversely challenging the theologians to come to grips with the material described by the biblical disciplines. The proposal is not implying that the traditional division between biblical and dogmatic theology be abandoned, but rather suggesting that to have an area of overlap can aid in creating a genuine dialogue. It simply will not do to limit biblical theology to the descriptive task.282

But how could biblical scholars be “working constructively in theology”? And where to mark that “area of overlap”? Childs’ answer to this question was located in

280 Brenner-Idan, “On Scholarship and Related Animals,” 16.

281 Brenner-Idan, “On Scholarship and Related Animals,” 13.

282 Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1970).

his appreciation of biblical canon as the point of both dogmatic and biblical reference. According to Childs, biblical canon was more than “inert shreds which have lain in the ground for centuries.”283 On the contrary, canon constitutes a special book because of its inner theological and inter-textual coherence. The drama of writing, assembling, editing and debating within tradition of canonical formation is, for Childs, a history of revelation itself, which is witnessed to by the final form.284 This drama is an amalgam of God’s speech and Israel’s response to it, which are two elements of equal theological importance.285 Canonical formation therefore entailed a kind of hermeneutics as an effort to render the tradition accessible to next generations 286 But if Israel’s long-standing reflection of the inspiration has the same theological force as the inspiration itself, then “tradition from the past [is] transmitted in such a way that its authoritative claims [are] laid upon all successive generations of Israel.”287 Childs assumes a theological force governing canonical formation in the process of its historical actualization, which is woven into the text itself as a timeless strand, connecting final form with its predecessors. “Actualization,” claims Childs, “is built into the structure of the text itself, and reveals an enormous richness of theological interpretation by which to render the text religiously accessible.”288 In other words, the focal point of biblical revelation is not located somewhere in history, but in the present, right in the Bibles on our desks. Not taking advantage of this optical system logically results in interpretive dumbness.

283 Childs, IOTS, 73.

284 Childs, IOTS, 76. Stephen B. Chapman, “Brevard Childs as a Historical Critic: Divine Concession and the Unity of the Canon,” in The Bible as Christian Scripture: The Work of Brevard S. Childs, ed. Christopher R. Seitz and Kent H. Richards (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), 66.

285 Childs, IOTS, 79, 81.

286 Childs, IOTS, 79.

287 Childs, IOTS, 78.

288 Childs, IOTS, 78.

Childs’ canonical approach is a sort of marriage of convenience between historical criticism and theological interpretation. On one hand, Childs himself excelled in classical disciplines of historical criticism and he was never strongly against them.289 In his commentary on Exodus, as Barr observes, Childs “provides a detailed source criticism, assigning verses, half-verses, and quarter-verses to J or P or whatever source it may be,” perhaps because he saw these sources “as handing on and interpreting what is basically the same story and the same faith.”290 On the other hand, Childs was well aware of “[t]he modern hermeneutical impasse” which is caused by the fact that historical criticism usually begins by “stripping away those very elements which constitute the canonical shape.”291 His assessment of historical criticism is therefore marked with a certain distance, often addressing “historical critics” as an external group, which on certain occasions may prove helpful, but on other occasions may not.292 A good example of this habit is Childs’ explanation of the “tent of meeting” (לֶהֹא דֵעומ) tradition in Exodus 33:7-11.293 He begins by admitting two problems. (1) First, the problem of discontinuity of this passage with its immediate context, which is concerned with Moses’ negotiation with Yahweh about Israel’s escort on her journey. (2) Second, the fact that the tent of meeting here is built outside the camp (Ex 33:7 vs. Nm 2:17) and that it shouldn’t have existed yet in the first place (Ex 40:14ff). Childs then proceeds to review several synchronic solutions of this problem, but although he sometimes commends pre-critical interpreters for seeing “dimensions of the text more clearly than those whose perspective was brought into

289 See an informative discussion in Robin Routledge, Old Testament Introduction (London: Apollos, 2016), 100. James Barr, “Childs’ Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 16 (1980): 12-23.

290 Barr, History and Ideology, 113-4.

291 Childs, IOTS, 79.

292 Childs, IOTS, ix, 159, 205, 229, 291, 590, etc.

293 Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary, 2004, 589-93.

focus by purely historical questions,”294 this time he admits that old attempts are unhelpful and agrees with “historical critics” (3rd person, plural) in their assertion that vv. 7-11 is an Elohist fragment preserving an earlier concept of the tabernacle, which is parallel to the later Priestly accounts. But then he changes his tone and states, I fully agree with the literary-critical assessment of the passage as reflecting an old tradition […] However, I disagree basically with the usual approach of the critical commentary in failing to reckon with the role of the passage in its present literary context. Regardless of what the pre-history of the text was, the task of determining its present role in ch. 33 remains the primary one for the study of the Old Testament as scripture.295

What follows thereafter is an attempt to explain the real, canonical function of vv. 7-11. Childs notes that the chapter begins by describing Yahweh’s dissatisfaction with the people and presenting his decision not to accompany Israel any more (vv. 16). This is followed up by vv. 12-17, where Moses intercedes for Israel in order to reverse Yahweh’s decision. According to Childs, the purpose of vv. 7-11 is to serve as a connection between these two pericopes by joining the people and Moses in an act of worship of Yahweh and thus to provide Moses with a warrant to intercede. To render the tent of meeting outside the camp is to indicate impurity of the people (cf. Ex 29:14), but God-seeking individuals were allowed to come before the Lord (v. 7).

This illustrates an important feature of Childs’ program. As far as historical criticism plays nice, as far as it doesn’t interfere with theological structure of the text, it is tolerated. But when it denies or neglects this structure, it invites a rapid correction.296 In a review of this commentary Sanders writes that “Childs’s ability at tradition criticism is the best on this continent, as section after section of the book reaffirms. But Childs has as much of Barth in him as of Noth; and the combination is

294 Childs, IOTS, 82.

295 Childs, The Book of Exodus, 591.

296 Barr, History and Ideology, 113-4.

64 not easily categorized.”297 This is most apparent on the example above, too. What exactly has followed after Childs said to historical criticism yes, but? Was it Noth (traditio-historical approach) or Barth (theological interpretation)? Perhaps it was both! With regard to the book of Zechariah, Childs similarly protested “the referential reading of Zechariah which assumes that its text can only be illuminated when it is properly correlated with the historical moment from which it emerged” and simply noted that “the text has not lent itself to this requirement of historical scholarship.”298 Barr seizes this claim and asks whether historical analysis “should be applied only to texts that ‘lend themselves’ to it.”

299 Obviously not, but this is typical of Childs and betrays his similarity to Frei (§ 2.2.2). When he claims here and there that historical criticism is not what biblical texts expect to be visited with, he means that historical critical data were not “assigned an independent integrity,” because “the witness to Israel’s experience with God lies not in recovering such historical processes, but is testified to in the effect on the biblical text itself.”300 So even though Childs does engage in historical issues, his main interests are located in his reported “unabashedly theological” momentum directed toward the present theological meaning of the present final form.301

The link between Childs and Barth (§ 2.2.1) is in their common interest in deconstructing the iron curtain between biblical studies and dogmatics.302 Of course, Barth was a systematic theologian and Childs was a biblical scholar. But it is exactly

297 James A. Sanders, review of “Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary by Brevard S. Childs,” Journal of Biblical Literature 95, no. 2 (1976): 289.

298 Childs, IOTS, 485.

299 Barr, “Childs’ Introduction, 15.

300 Childs, IOTS, 76.

301 Childs, The Book of Exodus, ix.

302 Gignilliat, A Brief History, 124, Ebook. Charles J. Scalise, “Canonical Hermeneutics: Childs and Barth,” Scottish Journal of Theology 47, no. 01 (February 1994): 69. Filip Čapek, Hebrejská Bible, její kánon a možnosti výkladu: kánon jako interpretační možnost rozvedená na pozadí díla B. S. Childse a J. A. Sanderse (Jihlava: Mlýn, 2006).

65 complementarity of these two professions which is so typical of Childs’ program.303 Both Barth and Childs ventured to reduce constraints of modernism and both shared in the conviction that theological issues take precedence over the historical ones.304 If Barth envisaged a “hermeneutic that breaks with the intellectual constraints of modernity,”305 as Capetz suggests, Routledge contends that Childs “wants to free the theological meaning of the canonical text from the historical uncertainties that may surround its context, and so recover the Bible’s authority.”306 This also means that Childs is susceptible to similar kind of criticism as Barth. Barton notes that the widespread neglect of Barth’s exegesis, no matter how detailed and careful, is a mere consequence of “the suspicion that, however deeply he delves into the text and however much he knows about it, we already know what he will find there, because it is dictated by his prior theological convictions.”307 This also applies to Childs, because “when a systematic theologian is also a biblical critic—as in a sense is true of Childs —then the critical side of the personality needs to be, precisely, critical of the other, not subordinate to it.”308 Barr similarly exposes Childs as not a biblical, but a dogmatic theologian, because of his strenuous insistence on dogmatic category of the canon.309 Barr basically describes Childs as a Barthian dogmatician, who interprets the Old Testament through dogmatic lenses of his own production.310 This also implies a substantial congruence with Frei (§ 2.2.2) and a substantial difference from the inerrantist approach: Whereas inerrantists put highest theological stakes in historicity

303 James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 360, Ebook.

304 Scalise, “Canonical Hermeneutics,” 63, 75, 77.

305 Capetz, “The Old Testament as a Witness to Jesus Christ,” 478.

306 Routledge, Old Testament Theology, 36, Ebook.

307 Barton, “Canon and Old Testament Interpretation,” 51-2.

308 Barton, “Canon and Old Testament Interpretation,” 51-2.

309 Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology, 362, Ebook.

310 Chapman, “Brevard Childs as a Historical Critic,” 65.

of God’s actual acts in the real history, Childs puts highest stakes in the canon. So, ironically enough, even if God was confirmed to be literally active in history, e.g. by a historical critical confirmation of the empty tomb and of the Joshua’s long day around 1400 BCE (Jo 10:13), it wouldn’t matter so much, at least not without the canon!311 Even the question of date and authorship is of a second-rate importance, which is why some conservatives suspect that canonical approaches might “bypass the vexed questions relating to the historical validation of the revelation.”312 This is exactly the kind of argument which the historical critic Barr draws against Childs313 and it only underlines that both conservatives and biblical critics are playing by the same rules, whereas canonical approaches represent a radical revision of this old model.314

2.3.2Sanders’ Canonical Criticism

Childs’ stance toward historical criticism will be further clarified by his comparison to Sanders, who is often put in the same category with Childs and overshadowed by him, although his approach is, as I propose to show, fundamentally different. Both Sanders and Childs appreciate biblical canon as a context for proper historical critical enterprise.315 What Sanders does not accept is Childs’ dogmatic insistence on the one fixed canon. Indeed, Childs is often criticized for preferring Hebrew Bible over other versions. Davies for example complains that the Septuagint and Vulgate, which both have enjoyed high measure of authority within many believing communities of the

311 Barr, “Childs’ Introduction,” 16.

312 Oswalt, “Canonical Criticism,” 325.

313 Barr, “Childs’ Introduction,”16.

314 James A. Sanders, Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), xvi. Robert D. Miller, “Yahweh and His Clio: Critical Theory and the Historical Criticism of the Hebrew Bible,” Currents in Biblical Research 4, no. 2 (February 1, 2006): 153.

315 James A. Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999), 156-63. Childs, IOTS, 40. Childs, The Book of Exodus, xv.

past, are now “marginalized, regarded almost as an ancient mutation.”316 Loader points out that there were various final forms perceived as canons, even after the Reformation317 and Barr objects in the same vein that Childs’ own heroes, Luther, Calvin and Barth, had very different opinions about biblical canon. Luther is well known for his christocentric filter, Barth believed that the Church could, in theory, change the canon’s content, while Calvin would forbid them both for such a nerve.318 Unlike Childs, Sanders maintains that final dimension of the text is only a part of its value for contemporary believers, because canon is a primarily historical, not a theological concept.319 It is not a unifying theological category, but a historical dynamics which transcends the whole history of tradition. Childs insisted that the canonical shaping does not only involve Israel’s experience with earlier tradition, but also brings this experience to its end. From the canonical fixation onward, there is no further canonical shaping, only interpretation.320 But Sanders points out that ancient communities seldom read their final forms in canonical context, which means that canonical reading as such is not exactly what connects us with them 321 Instead, Sanders’ approach sees text and its interpretation as two equal elements in canonical formation.322 He explicitly states, “The whole of the Bible as canon, from earliest bits to final texts (of whichever length, order, or community), is both text and interpretation, or text and commentary.”323 But if interpretation itself is an integral part

316 Davies, “Biblical Studies,” 46.See also Philip R. Davies, Whose Bible Is It Anyway? (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 31.

317 James A. Loader, “The Canon as Text for a Biblical Theology,” HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies 61, no. 4 (October 13, 2005), 1046.

318 Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology, 353, Ebook.

319 Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 4. Scalise, “Canonical Hermeneutics,” 85.

320 Childs, IOTS, 370.

321 Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 169. See also Barton, Canon, Literature and Theology, 36.

322 Sanders, Canon and Community, 31.

323 Sanders, Canon and Community, 31.

of the canon, then we must ask, what kind of interpretation have believing communities employed in canonical formation? What were the hermeneutic principles of the ancient communities? Sanders lists several of them, but as the basic one he identifies the principle of “monotheizing.”324 Monotheizing is a hermeneutical capacity of a believing community through which it retells its traditions in order to pursue “the Integrity of Reality.”325 Recognizing this inner-canonical hermeneutical dynamics is what Sanders considers to be the most important task of our present reading. Instead of moralizing and absolutizing customs of antiquity, Sanders wants the present reader to seek for “the unrecorded hermeneutics that lie between the lines of Scripture” and “theologize in order to hear what God does.” Only then we may find out that “the energy of the struggles of our ancestors in the faith to pursue the Integrity of Reality is the most precious heritage the canon has to offer.”

326 Instead of focusing on the final form, Sanders is much more concerned with “existential needs of the communities in the periods of intense canonical process.”

327

He suggests that relationship between canon and the believing community is symbiotic: “The communities and the canon (of whatever length) understood each other: they gave each other life.”

329

328 Unlike Childs, Sanders further claims that the same hermeneutical dynamics is present in contemporary believing communities.

But if the canon is defined not so much as the theological structure of the final form, but rather as a hermeneutical force, then the final form becomes less significant.330

324 This principle recurs throughout Sanders’ writings and is source of all other principles. See e.g. Sanders, Canon and Community, 60.

325 Sanders, Canon and Community, 51-2, 71. Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 4.

326 Sanders, Canon and Community, 62.

327 Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 82. Sanders, Canon and Community, 31.

328 Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 165.

329 Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 167.

330 Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 166-8.

Contrary to Sanders, Childs insisted on canon’s static literary situation. In response to Sanders, he wrote, “I believe that the witness of the Old Testament lies in the historical shape which the Jews gave their Scriptures, and not in the historical processes which gave them a shape.”331 Sanders, on the other hand, insists that canon is not a static, but a dynamic, adaptable hermeneutical process.332 This is his primary concern, as he writes,

Hermeneutics is the midterm between canon’s stability and its adaptability. Discerning the hermeneutics used by the ancient biblical thinkers and authors in adapting the early authoritative traditions to their contexts, for their people, is the essence of canonical criticism.

[…]

Canonical criticism […] stresses the ontology of the Bible as a paradigm of God’s work from creation through re-creation out of which we may construct paradigms for our own works, rather than as a jewel box of ancient wisdom to be perpetuated. It seeks the biblical hermeneutics whereby we may adapt the new wisdoms of our age just as they back there adapted the wisdom of the ancient Near East from many peoples.333

This leads us toward the two most important features of Sanders’ program, which make it miles apart from that of Childs. (1) Firstly, Sanders in practice performs rather thematic and methodological studies, not commentaries and introductions to biblical books.334 Of course, this may be a result of his professional occupation, but I’m tempted to see a link here to his overall approach. If the primary task of an interpreter is to “ferret out,” as he likes to call it, the unrecorded intracanonical hermeneutics, which transcends all communities and all canons, then microscopic exegesis is only important when it happens to clarify exegesis of the

331 Brevard S. Childs, “Book Review: A Call To Canonical Criticism,” review of Torah and Canon by James A. Sanders, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 27, no. 1 (January 1, 1973): 90.

332 Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 167.

333 Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 83-4.

334 See Sanders’ comprehensive bibliography in David M. Carr and Richard D. Weis, eds., A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays on Scripture and Community in Honor of James A. Sanders (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 274-285. On one place Sanders even complains about Childs’ Exodus that Childs was “constrained by the commentary form to focus on the larger literary units within a single book.” Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 172.

intra-canonical hermeneutics. Sanders makes it very clear throughout his writings that he is concerned with contemporary issues.335 He wants, for example, to reshape Christian educational programs in the light of hermeneutical advances achieved by him and by those of the same ilk.336 (2) Secondly, canon is not a theological force which wants to harmonize ancient revelation with our present theological concerns, but a hermeneutical force governed by the Holy Spirit.337 The Spirit unites us with our ancestors in faith throughout all stages of canonical formation, reception and interpretation, and directs us toward continuing hermeneutical enterprises.

Unlike Sanders, Childs is known for his reservations about historical criticism, as we have already seen. And whereas Childs thinks of his approach as an answer to iniquities of purely historical critical approach, Sanders sees his canonical criticism as an extension of it rather than its substitution.338 Let us hear Sanders’ elucidating words:

There may well have been one or more geniuses stationed at every point in such a history, but simply to locate them does not complete the task biblical criticism must now accomplish. One must then ask why the believing communities accepted what they did rather than set it aside, and that is crucial to determine, if the history is to be conceived and traced. We may not always succeed, for we may not have all the data we need or the tools for studying them; but we must now adjust our own thinking (our own scholarly hermeneutics, as it were) as students of the formation of the Bible, if we are to move on to the next important tasks.339

Simply put, after historical criticism finishes its job, we need more of it, not less, because only through it we can see what we want to see. A possible failure, for example due to lack of evidence, should cause us to mourn the loss, not to celebrate a

335 E.g. Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 6.

336 James A. Sanders, “The Creative Word: Canon as a Model for Biblical Education by Walter Brueggemann,” Journal of Biblical Literature 103, no. 3 (1984): 436.

337 Sanders, Canon and Community, xvii.

338 Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 170.

339 Sanders, Canon and Community, 37-8.

blind spot where we could hide more theology. So if for Childs historical criticism is a strange bedfellow, with Sanders we have a completely different situation. It is exactly with Sanders’ approach that the difficult questions, which have haunted historical critics for three centuries, regain their significance. Questions of literacy levels and ideologies of communities in Palestine throughout various periods before Christ, text critical issues, impacts of ancient literary backgrounds, etc., can’t be disregarded by an appeal to the final form, because they relate to canons of ancient believing communities and to intra-canonical hermeneutics which canonical criticism aspires to disentangle.340

Sanders makes effort to reconstruct the process of canonical formation, but Childs virtually doesn’t want to hear about it. The historical process of canonical formation “is largely inaccessible to critical reconstruction” and “[t]he history of the canonical process does not seem to be an avenue through which one can greatly illuminate the present canonical text.”341 This was a thorn in Sanders’ eye, as he asks, “How available to future generations of believers is Scripture when the historicity of the ones which gave it to us is denied?”342 Such a statement alone would fit a conservative polemics, but Sanders adds in a single breath that historical critical approach is “a gift of God in due season,” which only generates problems when it is “taken as an end in itself.”343 For Sanders, canonical criticism is only a next stage of historical criticism, which could make it more “scientifically thorough.”344 This is

340 Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, eds., The Canon Debate (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2002). On literacy levels see Davies, on ideologies see Blenkinsopp, on textual criticism see Epp.

341 Childs, IOTS, 67.

342 James A. Sanders, “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism,” Horizons in Biblical Theology 2, no. 1 (January 1, 1980): 191-2. Brett, Biblical Criticism in Crisis, 19.

343 Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 171.

344 Sanders, “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism,” 192.

completely different from Childs, who thought of his approach not as of another kind of “criticism,” but as of a completely different kind of inquiry.

It is quite interesting to note that whereas Childs’ approach has stirred so many emotions, ranging from love from theological interpreters (e.g. Seitz & Kent 2013) to resolute reproachment from classical biblical critics (e.g. Barr, Barton, etc.), Sanders’ project has not received much attention. Where is the triumphal ark and where are rotten tomatoes? Barr, an avowed critic of Childs, doesn’t feel compelled to even mention Sanders almost anywhere throughout his prolific writings on biblical theological approaches. This is, as I suppose, not because he saw Sanders as a “little Childs,” but because he didn’t consider Sanders to be his enemy. Barr’s clearest statement about Sanders is that “he does not do much to claim that it leads towards an ‘Old Testament theology’ or a ‘biblical theology.’”345 It is true that Sanders’ work focuses on sophisticated, self-aware study of the growth of the Old Testament. It extends historical criticism while not superseding it.346 It is also true that Sanders didn’t venture to write a biblical theology as Childs did. But we shall hopefully see in the end that this statement of Barr is not necessarily correct. Barr’s and Sanders’ approaches are quite compatible. Barr focused on heterogeneity of Old Testament traditions and Sanders on their function within the canon.347 It is my contention that an imaginary alliance of Barr and Sanders could yield intriguing results on the field of constructive biblical theology.

345 Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology, 391, Ebook. But see also James Barr, Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 156.

346 John Barton, “Classifying Biblical Criticism,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 9, no. 29 (June 1984): 27.

347 Henning G. Reventlow, Problems of Old Testament Theology in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 122-3.

2.3.3Barr and the Possibility of Biblical Theology

Barton explains that Barr was an evangelical Christian, whose faith was “rooted in Scripture” and who “devoted so much attention and care to analyzing what he saw as unsound and inadequate exegesis precisely because of his profound regard for the place of the Bible in Christian belief and theology.”348 Barr’s critics often dismiss his work as nonconstructive. Bray for example complains that Barr “could demolish almost anything he came across but had nothing constructive to put in its place.”349 Barr was indeed particularly disturbed by biblical theologies which were adhering to a particular confession. But if he criticized such a theology, as for example that of Childs, it was only because he believed that “the Bible should be interpreted entirely from within, not bringing to bear any concepts from the general intellectual world” and that it should “be read freely and allowed to mean what it actually meant, not what Christian faith might like to think it necessary meant.”350 Barr simply felt that Childs’ canonical approach is a massive example of systematic eisegesis and that his biblical theology is, as Barton has put is, “a Reformed textbook on Christian doctrine.”351 Barr believed that what the Christian community really needs and wants to hear is not an interpretation which looks through theological lenses, but the plain historical meaning of the text itself.352 He did recognize the need for interpretation, but he was extremely cautious about hermeneutical frameworks which purported to be

348 John Barton and Ernest Nicholson, “James Barr Remembered,” in Bible and Interpretation: The Collected Essays of James Barr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I:xxxi.

349 Gerald L. Bray, “Biblical Theology and From Where It Came,” Southwestern Journal of Theology 55, no. 2 (2013): 207.

350 Barton & Nicholson, “James Barr Remembered,” I:xiii. Barton, “James Barr and the Future of Biblical Theology,” 264.

351 Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 166-7. Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology, 362, Ebook. Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 62.

352 James Barr, “The Bible as a Document of Believing Communities,” in Bible and Interpretation: The Collected Essays of James Barr, ed. John Barton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I:56.

cure-all for every interpretive problem.353 He also did recognize the need of biblical theology, but he hoped for such a theology that would “capture the theological ideas of the Bible read on its own terms.”354 To Barr’s great displeasure, many extant approaches have missed this point.355 It is like the unifying message which transcends his polemics with protestant biblical theologians (e.g. von Rad), the biblical theology movement (e.g. Wright), fundamentalism, theological interpretation (Barth) and canonical approach (Childs): You must read the Bible on its own terms! Barr was always erudite, strict, prolific and persistent like a bloodhound. We could understand Barr as a parallel to Spinoza. Employing history to repudiate dogmatic mistreatments of the Bible, advocating for historical criticism as a beneficial product of the Enlightenment,356 emphasizing the role of reason and natural theology in interpretation, all of this are characteristic features of both Barr and Spinoza.357 Yet somehow it can’t be said of Barr, as it was said of Spinoza that history served him as a coffin where he buried the Bible.358 On the contrary, history was meant to provide a greenhouse, where theological message of the Bible could flourish. Barr held that “theology cannot be simply read off from the text as it stands: literal interpretation does not give us the theology. The theology does stand ‘behind’ the text.”359 Knierim similarly notes that whereas “[e]xegesis explains what the texts themselves say, […] biblical theology

353 Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 244. Barr, History and Ideology, 46.

354 Barton, “James Barr and the Future of Biblical Theology,” 272. See also Richard R. Topping, Revelation, Scripture and Church: Theological Hermeneutic Thought of James Barr, Paul Ricoeur and Hans Frei (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 11.

355 Topping, Revelation, Scripture and Church, 11-14.

356 Barr, History and Ideology, 54.

357 Cf. also the striking similarity between Spinoza’s and Barr’s outline of proper biblical interpretation. Spinoza in Israel, Theological-Political Treatise, 101-2, § 7:5. Barr, History and Ideology, 40-43.

358 Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, 95.

359 James Barr, “The Literal, the Allegorical, and Modern Biblical Scholarship,” in Bible and Interpretation: The Collected Essays of James Barr, ed. John Barton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), II:317. Gerhard F. Hasel, Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 96.

must explain what is not, at least not sufficiently, said by the texts of the Bible; namely the relationship among the different theologies of the texts.”360 This statement seems to be self-evident and I presume that Barr would himself agree with it.361 To a certain detriment of Barr’s legacy, which is acknowledged both by his defenders and his critics, Barr has never been entirely clear in defining how to go beyond biblical text for its theology and what to exactly look for,362 so in pondering Barr’s biblical theology, we are left with but several hints.

(1) Firstly, Barr believed that Barth’s square rejection of natural theology has been responsible for letting biblical scholars turn into dogmaticians of unsound methodological basis and he has appreciated Mowinckel for going against this grain.363 Barr renders Mowinckel not as a biblical theologian of Childs’ sort, but as a scholar who has recognized the Bible as “a document containing evidences of religion,” and required its interrelation with evidences from other sources and cultures, thus reducing its ability to generate a theological scheme.364 This is quite interesting, because Mowinckel himself did employ a kind of canonical approach somewhat similar to that of Sanders365 and he was, as we have already seen, concerned with those features of ancient Israelite religion which might relate to piety of the

360 Rolf P. Knierim, “On the Task of Old Testament Theology,” in A Biblical Itinerary: In Search of Method, Form, and Content: Essays in Honor of George W. Coats, ed. Eugene E. Carpenter (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 153.

361 It can be traced in Barton & Nicholson, “James Barr Remembered,” I:xxix. James Barr, Old and New in Interpretation: A Study of the Two Testaments, 2nd ed. (London: SCM Press, 1982), 150. James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 200.

362 Barton, “James Barr and the Future of Biblical Theology,” 272. Bray, “Biblical Theology and From Where It Came,” 207. Hasel, Old Testament Theology, 96.

363 James Barr, “Biblical Law and the Question of Natural Theology,” in Bible and Interpretation: The Collected Essays of James Barr, ed. John Barton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I:424, 427, 432, 440.

364 Barr, “Biblical Law and the Question of Natural Theology,” I:439. Cf. Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 9-10.

365 Sigmund Mowinckel, The Old Testament as Word of God, trans. Reidar B. Bjornard (New York: Abingdon Press, 1960), 107-13. Rolf Rendtorff, “‘Canonical Interpretation’ ‐ a New Approach to Biblical Texts,” Studia Theologica - Nordic Journal of Theology 48, no. 1 (January 1994): 3-4.

contemporary believing communities (§ 1.3.2). (2) Secondly, Barr believed that what the community needs the most is “the meaning of scripture itself,” not a theological preconception.366 The reason why a believing community should pay attention to the Bible itself is its inspiration. Barr’s conception of inspiration is worth a quote. The relationship through which God is with his people in his Spirit in the formation of their life and tradition is not essentially different in kind from the mode in which he is with his people today. But the factual formation of scripture, and the consequent result that new tradition formation no longer becomes scripture, but has exegetical character as interpretation of an ancient scripture, separates the effects of that same inspiration from the effects which it had when scripture was still in process of being created. It is thus possible to say that the relationship which we call, or may call, by the name inspiration is a relation that is constant throughout history, but nevertheless to allow that the actual production of scripture is a once-for-all effect of that relationship.367

This notion of inspiration seems to be, in Barr’s thought, warrant for significance of the Bible for believing communities.368 And isn’t it also similar to Sanders?

(3) Thirdly, a biblical theological principle could be observed in Barr’s idea of the relation between the two testaments. Barr believed that the New Testament did interpret the Old Testament, but not in the way that it would impose correct interpretations upon the old texts, but only with reference to the “new substance,” new heart of the issue.369 The new substance was simply Jesus with his teaching, life, death and resurrection. Barr was against christocentric interpretation of the Old Testament,370 because he recognized the new substance as entirely self-standing, although linked with the Old Testament by a chain of allusions.371 So it is all the other way around than usually understood. Instead of looking at the Old Testament through christo-

366 Barr, “The Bible as a Document of Believing Communities,” I:56.

367 Barr, “The Bible as a Document of Believing Communities,” I:57.

368 Barr, “The Bible as a Document of Believing Communities,” I:59.

369 Barr, “The Bible as a Document of Believing Communities,” I:59-60. Barton, “James Barr and the Future of Biblical Theology,” 270.

370 Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 152. Barr, “The Bible as a Document of Believing Communities,” I:59.

371 Barr, “The Bible as a Document of Believing Communities,” I:59.

logical lenses, New Testament is looking at Christ through Old Testament lenses. “The kerygma,” explains Barr, “used the prophetic predictions and depended on them, and yet in essence it was the announcement of a new substance. Its task was to interpret this new thing, and it carried this task out with the help of interpretation of the Old Testament.”372 This shift has helped Barr to allow Old Testament exegesis to operate independently of New Testament fuller senses. Barr has seen an important influence of the Old Testament on the New in the very idea of history,373 which has formed “the mental matrix of salvation.”374 Because idea of history has enabled the connection between Old and New in a soteriological dynamics within tradition, which culminates in its variegated answer to the new substance in Christ. Barr explicitly writes,

Our argument, as we have worked it out, suggests that tradition is ambiguous in its nature, working in the plan of salvation both negatively (to reject the Christ) and positively (to show forth the lineaments of the Christ); and that a crisis between these two can constitute the centre of judging and saving actions by God. The question for modern ideas of tradition would be how far they could provide for such an explosion in the tradition, if we are right in describing things so.375

Had this statement been wrongly ascribed to Sanders, no one would ever notice.

With Barr, we have a history of what we could call canonical tradition with embedded and equally important history of interpretation. Canonical formation is governed by the persistent hermenutical crisis. It is the crisis between rejecting and accepting Christ, it hasn’t ended and it can be re-imagined. Barr furthermore acknowledges that “response of tradition is not a perfect response; while faithful and obedient, it is also

372 Barr, “Biblical Criticism as Theological Enlightenment,” I:167. These views of Barr are comparable to Schleiermacher’s. See Paul E. Capetz, “Friedrich Schleiermacher on the Old Testament,” The Harvard Theological Review 102, no. 3 (2009): 300.

373 Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 156. Barr, History and Ideology, 2.

374 Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 156, 158.

375 Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 161.

sinful and resistant.”376 This allows Barr to envisage a process which might discern within canonical tradition also bad and contradictory theological strands.

2.3.4Brueggemann and Interpretive Imagination

A different approach is taken by Brueggemann. On one hand, Brueggemann explicitly adopts Childs’ intense interest in biblical theology and he considers himself “instructed” by him. On the other hand, Brueggemann is one of those who critiques Childs for his dogmatic preoccupation377 and wants to insist that “the text both embodies and insists on ongoing work of imaginative interpretation that does not and will not conform to the strictures, limits, and demands of church faith.”378 This would seem to make Brueggemann closer to Sanders. However, what makes him much closer to Childs is his distrust of historical criticism. Occasionally he complains about “the disproportion of intense criticism and thin interpretation,”379 as though these couldn’t be joined. Brueggemann understands himself as operating within the mode which Ricoeur has called “second naiveté.” This mode comes “after one had abandoned a first naiveté and after one has seriously engaged in criticism and pushed it as far as it can go.” Second naiveté “does not invite a refusal to think critically,” but “[i]t recognizes that in the midst of such rationality, there is nonetheless a ‘surplus’ that cannot be vetoed by critical thought, but that continues to be generative when the

376 Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 162.

377 Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 62. Walter Brueggemann, “Texts That Linger, Not yet Overcome,” in Shall Not the Judge of All the Earth Do What Is Right?: Studies on the Nature of God in Tribute to James L. Crenshaw, ed. David Penchansky and Paul L. Redditt (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2000), 35.

378 Walter Brueggemann and Tod Linafelt, An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), x.

379 Walter Brueggemann, Like Fire in the Bones: Listening for the Prophetic Word in Jeremiah, ed. Patrick D. Miller (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2011), 37, Ebook. Brueggemann, “Texts That Linger,” 34.

text is heard in a kind of truthful innocence.”380 This in turn means that historical critical endeavor is of second rate importance, not of first rate importance, as we saw with Sanders. Second naiveté can also be diagnosed to Childs and to a number of contemporary interpreters of the postcritical sort.381 Barr, however, observes that whereas Childs longed for return to premodern condition, Brueggemann assumes a postmodern stance.382 The effect of this approach, mainly in its appreciation of the inner rhetorical situation of the biblical text and its possible appropriation by a believing community, shall be of utmost interest against the backdrop of the next chapter which purports to present historical criticism as a tool in interpretation.

380 Walter Brueggemann, A Pathway of Interpretation: The Old Testament for Pastors and Students (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008), xx.

381 Dale A. Brueggemann, “Brevard Childs’ Canon Criticism: An Example of Post-Critical Naiveté,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 32, no. 2 (September 1989): 311-326. This would also be the case with Archer, Vanhoozer, etc.

382 Barr, History and Ideology, 55.

3CHAPTER THREE:

HISTORICAL CRITICISM AS A TOOL IN INTERPRETATION

It is commonly said that the findings of critical scholarship are of no value in communicating the Christian gospel to ordinary people. My own conviction is that this is because hardly anyone has ever tried.

—John Barton383

3.1The Problem of Violence in the Book of Joshua

3.1.1Brueggemann, Barr and Violence in the Bible

By the end of his published lectures on natural theology, Barr notes that one thing which biblical theology failed to address was the problem of divine violence in the Old Testament, for example in the conquest of Canaan narratives.384 Barr observes that biblical theology most often simply pretends like there was no problem at all.385

This may be partly true of Childs, who attempts to solve this problem simply by exclaiming that the book of Joshua depicts a specific, time-bound role in God’s economy, as a “forfeited heritage.”386 This doesn’t seem to be a particularly fortunate strategy, because it doesn’t explain how exactly should one read the unsettling texts which are, after all, part of the most cherished canon. Childs compares the book of Joshua to “the lost garden of Eden.”387 But this makes it even worse, because Eden

383 Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 190.

384 Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 212.

385 Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 213-4, passim.

386 Brevard S. Childs, Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 96, Ebook.

387 Childs, Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context, 96, Ebook.

81 stories do have theological significance in one way or another. Avalos, writing from atheist perspective, observes that even though biblical scholars usually maintain critical distance and try to bracket out these difficult passages by emphasizing more peaceful traditions, they unfortunately still seem to think that the Bible is relevant for our culture.388 This might be the case with Childs. Brueggemann, however, contrary to Barr’s general assertion, does take a more sophisticated theological position.389 He basically appreciates unsettling passages as “data for theological understanding,” which should be celebrated rather than brushed away.390 Brueggemann emphasizes, as is typical for him, that the testimony of violence is not actual violence but “an act of public imagination.”391 This, as he agrees, is not the solution. Indeed, if Brueggemann wants to insist that Yahweh of the Old Testament “lives in, with and under the rhetorical enterprise of this text, and nowhere else and in no other way,”392 (see similar tenet in Frei, § 2.2.2) how does he explain then the horrible killing sprees of this “textual God”? Yet Brueggemann resists to any attempt of philosophy or systematic theology to settle this matter. The problem with “essentialist claims,” as Brueggeman feels it, is that when they attempt to externalize God and make Him independent on these horrible traditions by moving discussion to other than textual grounds, they are ripping the text of its theological value while not really solving the textual problems.393 Brueggemann instead suggests to “take the texts in a dramatic way, as a

388 Hector Avalos, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005), 144-5, Ebook. Hector Avalos, “The Letter Killeth,” Journal of Religion, Conflict, and Peace 1, no. 1 (Fall 2007), accessed March 29, 2017, http://www.religionconflictpeace.org/volume-1issue-1-fall-2007/letter-killeth

389 Brueggeman’s “Texts That Linger” was, however, published 9 years after the Barr’s incidental surmise.

390 Brueggemann, “Texts That Linger,” 31.

391 Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 244.

392 Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 66.

393 Brueggemann, “Texts That Linger,” 32. Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 66.

82 script for a drama,”394 which leads him to accept Yahweh for who he is, even as a profoundly unsettling character.395 Brueggemann’s solution begins where Childs ends, as he affirms that the texts in question are horrible and that they belong to Yahweh’s past.396 Then he, however, adds that Yahweh as a dramatic character evolves, and His overall canonical picture moves beyond unsettling texts, but not at the expense of their availability. The community can still fully embrace them, because they constitute an undeniable stage of Yahweh’s career.397 Embracing them leads the community to appropriate woundedness of the texts on its way toward “a healing present and a healed future.”398 Brueggemann’s approach is acceptable as an invitation to theological valorization of the respective passages, but as the solution of the moral problem of violence it remains problematic. The question is whether such a horrific testimony as the conquest of Canaan can be simply counterbalanced by other scriptures, which represent further developments in Israel’s canonical tradition. I would contend with Seibert that they can not.399 To fully recognize the respective texts as unacceptable and not to try to vindicate them is, however, a commendable step which Brueggemann has taken.

Barr approaches this problem from a different direction. If Brueggemann denounced natural theology as an alien force, Barr suggests that natural theology is intrinsic to the text itself. This in turn suggests that even if natural theology was rejected on dogmatic level, it would have to be integrated into biblical theology,

394 Brueggemann, “Texts That Linger,” 32.

395 Brueggemann, “Texts That Linger,” 28, 35.

396 Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 383.

397 Brueggemann, “Texts That Linger,” 39.

398 Brueggemann, “Texts That Linger,” 41.

399 Eric A. Seibert, “Recent Research on Divine Violence in the Old Testament (with Special Attention to Christian Theological Perspectives),” Currents in Biblical Research 15, no. 1 (October 1, 2016): 20.

because it is a basic biblical idea!400 Barr observes that the command to “utterly destroy” every living being in Canaanite settlements by Joshua and Israel does not have many ancient parallels.401 Barr for example considers the Moabite Stone, which contains records of a ḥrm (i.e. “to utterly destroy”) practice performed by king Mesha against Israel (cf. 2 Kgs 3).402 Mesha claims to have slayed “seven thousand men, boys, women and [girls] and female slaves, for [he has] consecrated it to AshtarKemosh.”403 This parallel could mean that ḥrm tradition in the Old Testament was based on “a piece of natural religion, practiced by Israel because it was shared with elements of the surrounding culture.”

404 Further examples can be found in Younger’s Ancient Conquest Accounts. Younger not only traces more ancient parallels to biblical warfare and to ḥrm practices, some almost undeniable,405 but on another place he also observes some very intentional literary strategies behind the text’s composition.406 Barr doesn’t want to pretend that finding these parallels suddenly erases all questions of the unsettling text, but the basic contours of his argument seem to be clear. If these texts contain an ideology of total war, which was based on natural religion and which the author shared with his neighbors, then biblical theology might, under certain conditions, critique these traditions as illegitimate.407

400 Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 200.

401 Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 211.

402 Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 210.

403 Thomas Winton (1958) in Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 207.

404 Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 218.

405 K. Lawson Younger, Ancient Conquest Accounts, (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990), 208, 236-7.

406 K. Lawson Younger, “The Rhetorical Structuring of the Joshua Conquest Narratives,” in Critical Issues in Early Israelite History, ed. Richard S. Hess, Gerald A. Klingbeil, and Paul J. Ray (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 5, 23, passim.

407 Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 220.

3.1.2Toward a Natural Biblical Theology

Let me explain by giving another example. It is no secret that Genesis 1 is borrowing from its ancient Near Eastern background. It was long assumed that this background was primarily Mesopotamian and Canaanite, but these parallels would seem to me rather loose.408 Egyptian mythology, on the other hand, can provide much clearer points of reference, especially in its syncretistic version from the New Kingdom era (cca 1550-1077 BCE).409 It is often argued that this background only serves as a negative point of reference and that biblical narrative stands for a fierce polemics against Egyptian conception of the world, mainly in its absolute refusal to address its cosmogony as theogony.410 Genesis 1 would then share its purpose with the accounts of plagues of Egypt in Exodus 7-12 (cf. Ex 12:12).411

This view is basically correct. The Bible always utilizes its background for its own theological purposes. But is every allusion to a heathen legend presented only to debunk it with a revealed truth, which is completely different from the original legend? Perhaps not! Perhaps it is appropriate to acknowledge that biblical writers might have, at times, incorporated an ancient tradition in a way which to us is less then understandable or inconsistent with other biblical traditions. An example of such a mishap would be in adopting the ancient total war ideology and embracing it instead of arguing against it. But if we can see in Genesis 1 that it’s being driven by stark polemics against incorrect testimonies about God, man and the world, does it not

408 James E. Atwell, “An Egyptian Source for Genesis 1,” Journal of Theological Studies 51, no. 2 (2000): 446-8. Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 424. Gordon H. Johnston, “Genesis 1 and Ancient Egyptian Creation Myths,” Bibliotheca Sacra 165 (2008): 194.

409 The topic is too broad to discuss here, but the curious reader should discuss James P. Allen, Genesis in Egypt The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts (New Haven: Yale University, 1988). James K. Hoffmeier, “Some Thoughts on Genesis 1 & 2 and Egyptian Cosmology,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 15 (1983): 39-49. See also Atwell and Johnston cited above.

410 Johnston, “Genesis 1 and Ancient Egyptian Creation Myths,” 194.

411 Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, 253.

follow that we should “exegete” this polemical momentum itself and apply it in our present condition? Perhaps it does. But then we should ask further whether we can drive this biblical polemics back into the Bible itself as a wedge between what does and what doesn’t comply with our understanding of God.

That God is good is not necessarily self-evident on purely philosophical grounds, it is rather a moral or epistemic decision.412 Given the unsettling reality of the biblical texts in question, it is not self-evident on purely biblical grounds either. But once we decide (on our present theological, epistemic or philosophical grounds, through a personal revelation or through natural theology!) that Yahweh is not only supreme God, but also a morally good being, does it not follow that we should argue against unsettling biblical text which depict Yahweh as less than morally good? Such a path has been already taken by a number of interpreters413 and my own solution would be quite similar. I do not deem it viable to decide for God’s goodness and still defend Yahweh’s commands and actions in Deuteronomy 7 and Joshua 2-12. At this point, however, I would like to give reins to Sanders’ approach and to Barr’s insights and ask, why in the first place has the biblical writer incorporated an extrinsic tradition in a way which is so profoundly difficult to get along with? What has led the biblical writer to adopt these horrible traditions? To answer this question, conquest narratives would have to be understood in their close connection to the exodus tradition, because traditions of the exodus and conquest are closely tied by intertextual links and they can’t be understood separately.414

412 Anastasia P. Scrutton, “Why Not Believe in an Evil God? Pragmatic Encroachment and Some Implications for Philosophy of Religion,” Religious Studies 52, no. 03 (September 2016): 346-7.

413 See survey of approaches critiquing God’s violent behavior in Seibert, “Recent Research on Divine Violence in the Old Testament,” 21-7.

3.2Meaning and Significance of the

3.2.1A Liberationist Reading of the Exodus

Ricoeur’s hermeneutics (§ 1.4.1) has introduced the concept of “surplus meaning.” One thing is said by the text, but that thing exists only to be superseded by that which is understood. In case of the exodus narratives, this would mean that these are here to open “a certain state of wandering which is lived existentially as a movement from captivity to deliverance.” This is a surplus meaning, which is screwed onto “the event which, in its literalness, is situated in the observable historical world.”

But surplus meanings don’t want to know about the event itself, they only aim at “deciphering […] a certain ontological condition of man.”415 An obvious rejoinder to such an approach is that Ricoeur’s ends are justified, but his means are not, because he neglects plain meaning of the text. A similar response was given by Levenson to Pixley, who reads the exodus story from a liberationist perspective.416 While Pixley wants to read the exodus with the Third World Christians who “struggle for liberation from the modern tyrants who oppress and repress them as the pharaoh did the Hebrews,”417 Levenson objects that the exodus story is about Israel, not about any people which strives for self-determination. The liberation of Exodus does not even

414 Gale A. Yee, “Postcolonial Biblical Criticism,” in Methods for Exodus, ed. Thomas B. Dozeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 225, 231. Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 358-9, 374, 384, passim. See also Konrad Schmid, “Exodus in the Pentateuch,” in The Book of Exodus: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, ed. Thomas B. Dozeman, Craig A. Evans, and Joel N. Lohr (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 27, 45-6, passim. Hélène M. Dallaire and Denise R. Morris, “Joshua and Israel’s Exodus from the Desert Wilderness,” in Reverberations of the Exodus in Scripture, ed. Michael R. Fox (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 19, 24.

415 Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 66. Cf. Thiselton, The Two Horizons, 121. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 72.

416 Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, 127-60. This text is parallel to Jon D. Levenson, “Exodus and Liberation,” Horizons in Biblical Theology 13 (1991): 134-174.

417 Jorge V. Pixley, On Exodus: A Liberation Perspective (New York: Orbis Books, 1987), xiii.

87 imply self-determination, as understood in the present, it is only a transition from service to Pharaoh toward service to God (Ex 9:1).418 Levenson further notes that the exodus was conditioned by Israel’s covenantal status of God’s people (cf. Ex 2:24; 3:7), not by its social or economic status. “The point is not,” claims Levenson, “that it is Israel’s suffering that brings about the exodus, but that it is Israel that suffers.”419 To be sure, Levenson does warn against omitting the universal aspect of the exodus story,420 but what follows thereafter is a sheer critique of Pixley’s perspective, arguing for the story’s insuperable particularity.421

Levenson’s argument is quite agreeable, but only as long as one follows purely synchronical line of interpretation, or, as long as we stay “within the text.” The way out of this is marked by certain textual phenomena, which are not willing to walk this line. (1) First, when exactly has Israel become God’s people? Before, or after the exodus?422 (2) Second, who were the “mixed crowd” that joined Israel (Ex 12:38)? (3) Third, when did God reveal His name Yahweh? Because if the patriarchs didn’t know it, as Exodus 6:3 strongly suggests, then it follows that their stories were retold from the Yahwistic perspective and that Israel’s identity was retrojected upon patriarchal narratives by an editor.423 This points toward diachronic questions, upon which

418 Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, 141-51.

419 Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, 152. See a similar point in Eugene H. Merrill, “The Meaning and Significance of the Exodus Event,” in Reverberations of the Exodus in Scripture, ed. Michael R. Fox (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 9.

420 Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, 151.

421 Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, 151-9.

422 The latter option is much more convincing on biblical theological grounds. See Robin Routledge, “The Exodus and Biblical Theology,” in Reverberations of the Exodus in Scripture, ed. Michael R. Fox (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 204.

423 R. W. L. Moberly, The Old Testament of the Old Testament: Patriarchal Narratives and Mosiac Yahwism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 70, passim. Joseph Blenkinsopp, “Abraham as Paradigm in the Priestly History in Genesis,” Journal of Biblical Literature 128, no. 2 (2009): 225-241. Gordon J. Wenham, “The Religion of the Patriarchs,” in Essays on the Patriarchal Narratives, ed. Alan R. Millard and Donald J. Wiseman (Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 1980), 161-195.

Pixley’s liberationist reading rests,424 which is something that Levenson throughout his critique of Pixley doesn’t entirely realize.425 Pixley’s attempt is intriguing, because it shows that historical criticism is not depriving the story of its significance, but endows it with new possibilities. Levenson brushes Pixley’s critical reconstruction away as being “of disputed value.”426 But such can be a universal allegation. No sane historical critic, including Pixley, would dictate an absolutist account of the past, “how it actually happened.”

427 On the contrary, I believe that Pixley would subscribe to Miller’s words that the way to avoid “Rankean empiricism, naive biblicism, and the rest of dangers […] is the construction of well-argued plausibilities, of possible pasts.”

428 The question therefore is whether Pixley’s reconstruction is or isn’t historically plausible, but Levenson doesn’t seem to answer this question. As for the possibility of appropriation of the story, while Levenson’s synchronical reading steals it from hands of the communities of faith, Pixley’s historical critical reading reclaims it!

429 Of course, Pixley does admit that his reading rests on a particular set of Christian presuppositions.430 But these are put into play in the world behind the text, not in front of it. This constitutes the major difference between Ricoeur and Pixley and it is also apparent on Sugitharajah’s postcolonial critique of liberation theology, which basically depends on the fact that liberation criticism, however governed by social

424 Jorge V. Pixley, “Liberation Criticism,” in Methods for Exodus, ed. Thomas B. Dozeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 140, 146-7.

425 See e.g. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, 138. Levenson’s critique is at times quite helpful (p. 134), but his argument is all too often dependent on synchronical arguments (p. 138).

426 Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, 157.

427 This is Ranke’s well known quip. Sláma, Nové teologie, 73-4. Miller, “Yahweh and His Clio,” 150.

428 Miller, “Yahweh and His Clio,” 160.

429 On consensus in historical criticism about liberationist character of the Bible see also Aichele, The Postmodern Bible, 66. On the role of historical criticism in exposing religious heritage of the exodus tradition see also Petr Sláma, “Vnitřní a vnější dějiny Starého zákona: Na příkladu exodu” (2015), accessed March 29, 2017, https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.1.5187.2167, 129.

430 Pixley, “Liberation Criticism,” 131-2.

89 awareness and Christian theology, is still closely bound to the world behind the text and is informed by it, which makes it unfit for the task of true postcolonial interpretation.431 I do not intend to repeat Pixley’s reading here, although the approach presented hereby does bear a significant resemblance to his.432

3.2.2Historical Exodus and Memory

In a video recorded speech named The Exodus Based on the Sources Themselves, Richard E. Friedman suggests that “the written sources that gave us the story of the Exodus in the first place still provides us with our best evidence on this subject.”433 Friedman then contemplates Exodus 6:3 as the major source critical problem. The question is not why are there multiple names of God, but when did God made His name known. Friedman notes that the Song of the Sea (Ex 15:1-18) and the Song of Deborah (Jgs 5:2-31) are probably the two oldest parts of the Old Testament. Now while the Song of the Sea gives no hint of a massive exodus and doesn’t even mention Israel as a nation, the Song of Deborah doesn’t mention Levites. Levites that are mentioned in the Torah often have Egyptian names. This leads Friedman to propose a smaller exodus of which only the tribe of Levi took part. After their arrival to Canaan, Levites had spread their Yahwistic religion among the local worshipers of El.434 This hypothesis explains why E and P, which are attributed to a Levite authors,

431 Rasiah S Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: History, Method, Practice (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 45. Rasiah S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial, and Postcolonial Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 242.

432 For Pixley’s position see Pixley, On Exodus

433 Richard E. Friedman, “The Exodus Based on the Sources Themselves” (presented at the Out of Egypt: Israel’s Exodus Between Text and Memory, History and Imagination, University of California, San Diego, 2013), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-YlzpUhnxQ, time 1:55.

434 Pixley, On Exodus, xviii-xix, 42, 73-6. This view is also adopted by Pixley from Gottwald and Mendenhall.

90

“developed the idea that Israel’s God did not reveal His name to humans until the time of Moses and the exodus.”435

Let us expand on this with some help provided by the insights of Hendel and Na’aman. They both note that after Thutmose III (18th dynasty, 15th century BC), “Canaan became an Egyptian province.”436 Egyptian presence in coastal area and inner plains is attested up till the first part of 12th century BC.437 During this occupation, Egypt demanded slave tributes either for her own purposes in Egypt, or for the forced labor in Egyptian copper mines at Timna etc.438 For many Canaanites, Canaan in 15th12th century might have very well become a “house of bondage” as well (cf. Ex 20:2).

During this period, Canaanite cow-cities were exploited and nomadic peoples identified as Habiru and Shasu were constantly decimated as a potential threat for Egyptian profit.439 But if the exodus story fermented within the same pot as Canaanite traumatic memories, it can no longer be understood as a pure-blooded Israelite story. Hendel moreover explains that the peculiar omission of Pharaoh’s name from the story is effectively extending it “to all who had felt the oppression of Pharaoh at any time in the remembered past.”440 Biblical story of the exodus is therefore not a mere collection of historical facts, but rather common memories, because “the past as

435 Friedman, “The Exodus Based on the Sources Themselves,” time 13:10.

436 Nadav Naʾaman, “The Exodus Story: Between Historical Memory and Historiographical Composition,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 11, no. 1 (September 1, 2011): 43. Mark W. Chavalas and Murray R. Adamthwaite, “Archaeological Light on the Old Testament,” in The Face of Old Testament Studies: A Survey of Contemporary Approaches, ed. David W. Baker and Bill T. Arnold (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), 80.

437 Amihai Mazar, “Palestine in the Iron Age,” ed. Eric M. Meyers, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), IV:218. Na’aman, “The Exodus Story,” 52, passim.

438 Ronald Hendel, “The Exodus in Biblical Memory,” Journal of Biblical Literature 120, no. 4 (2001): 605. Hendel explains, “From the conquests of Thutmose III (1479-1425 B.C.E.) through the reign of Ramesses III (1186-1154 B.C.E.) or Ramesses IV (1154-1148), the land of Canaan was a province of the Egyptian empire.” Cf. Na’aman, “The Exodus Story,” 48.

439 Na’aman, “The Exodus Story,” 44-49, 53. Ramesses III (reigned 1186-1155 BC) writes that he “destroyed the people of Seir among the Shasu tribes.”

440 Hendel, “The Exodus in Biblical Memory,” 604-5. See also James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 110. Tremper Longman III, How to Read Exodus (Downers Grove: IVPAcademic, 2009), 69.

91 people remember it is the meaningful past, the past as perceived and colored by subjective concepts, hopes, and fears.”441 In the words of Davies, it’s “a collection of snapshots of how Israel has been remembered,”442 a “mnemohistory,” which along with a historical germ also reflects history of this germ’s reception.443 Now if the roots of this germ tradition reach back to earlier times, why does it contain no memory about Egypt’s rule in Canaan, which gradually intensified for 350 years after Thutmose III? Why don’t we hear about Egyptians in the book of Judges? Na’aman contends that “the Egyptian presence in Canaan was absorbed within the Exodus tradition and thus disappeared from the collective Israelite memory.”444 Therefore, what Israelite tradents and scribes did was nothing else than appropriation and emplotment of the earlier memories with people, who shared it, be it local highland clans or the levite incomers.

3.2.3Toward Emplotment of the Exodus and Conquest

So in summa summarum, the exodus tradition in the Bible should be understood as an amalgam of “partial, fragmentary, ambiguous histories,”445 as a number of traditions of nomadic communities, outcasts and Canaanite highland clans. Much more could be said about possible character of those early communities and it is my contention that the more would be said, the more decisively would Levenson’s major objection be answered. To place this answer in dialectics between historical criticim

441 Hendel, “The Exodus in Biblical Memory,” 621.

442 Philip R. Davies, “The History of Ancient Israel and Judah,” The Expository Times 119, no. 1 (October 1, 2007): 15. I borrowed Davies’s words although he was not in dialogue with Hendel or Na’aman and his views differ from theirs.

443 Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 9. Assmann defines mnemohistory as “reception theory applied to history.” Hendel, “The Exodus in Biblical Memory,” 603.

444 Na’aman, “The Exodus Story,” 64.

445 Barr, History and Ideology, 177.

92 and biblical theology, I would say this: Yes, Yahweh of the exodus has freed his people only because they were his people and for no other reason. But the multifaceted experience of this deliverance was appropriated by other peoples, which for this very reason, and for no other reason, became Yahweh’s people. Yahweh’s people is Yahweh’s people primarily not because it has been led out of Egypt, but because it has responded to Yahweh’s call, which begins with remembering the exodus (cf. Ex 13:8n). The early exodus tradition is therefore not securing ethnical homogeneity, but detonating it.

My critique of both Levenson and Pixley would be that they do not define the exodus community right. In light of the previous, its basic criterion can not be “descent from a common ancestor” (so Levenson).446 Multiple studies have convincingly argued for an amphyctionic model, according to which ancient Israel was a loose federation of tribes whose identity was gradually formed through their appropriation of the stories declaring mighty deeds of Yahweh.447 But the common denominator of the exodus community can neither be a membership in a particular social group (so Pixley). It is true that 10th century Israelite settlements were economically egalitarian448 and that many laws in Torah are aimed at preventing dispossession (e.g. Lev 25:10) and protecting the disadvantaged,449 but still the truth is that ancient Israelite society was most likely divided in classes. At least there was a class of freemen and a class of slaves (Ex 21). Chances also are that those who joined Israel in Canaan (e.g. Gibeonites, Rahab) constituted a class of townsmen. But what was then a common denominator for the people of the exodus tradition? Why have the highland

446 Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, 153.

447 Sláma, “Vnitřní a vnější,” 122-3. Sláma refers to Noth (1930).

448 Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 72.

449 See esp. Richard E. Friedman, “Love Your Neighbor: Only Israelites or Everyone?,” Biblical Archaeology Review 40, no. 5 (2014): 49-52.

93 clans embraced Yahwistic tradition of the Levites?450 And to reopen an unanswered question, why has the biblical writer also incorporated ḥrm tradition, which is inseparable from the exodus story and thus threatens to revert its liberating message?

In the book of Joshua, there are both Priestly and Deuteronomic strands (chs. 13-22 for P and 1-12, 23 for D with occasional overlap).451 This is quite significant, because purported interests of these “writers” could point toward an answer to our question. The Deuteronomist took advantage of the ḥrm tradition in order to demonstrate his double aetiology of Israel winning her land and losing it in direct proportion to her obedience of Torah (cf. Josh 1:7n; 23:6).452 The Priestly writer was concerned with purity of the land and maybe also with theological fulfillment of creation (cf. Josh 18:1; 19:49-51).453 All of this suggests that ḥrm was used as a mere illustration of the writer’s purposes, a suggestion which is further reinforced by traces of complicated literary conventions used (not only) in Joshua 9-12.454 But how does it connect to the exodus tradition? (1) On a theological level, we could recall Sanders’ “monotheizing” as the pursuit of the “Integrity of Reality.”455 It is always Yahweh versus “all the gods of Egypt” (Ex 12:12), Yahweh jealous of the golden calf (Ex 32), Yahweh commanding genocide in order to prevent idolatry and warning against its consequences (Dt 7). Yahweh’s unique and invincible splendor as perceived by the ancient community of believers could indeed provide a viable rationale for inclusion even of the displeasing ḥrm tradition which would serve as a literary device to

450 Sanders, Canon and Community, 37. “Canonical criticism traces the history of the function of those authoritative traditions which ended up in one of the canons.”

451 Douglas S. Earl, Reading Joshua as Christian Scripture (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2010), 857.

452 Joachim J. Krause, “The Book of the Torah in Joshua 1 and 23 and in the Deuteronomistic History,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 127, no. 3 (January 1, 2015): 420.

453 Earl, Reading Joshua as Christian Scripture, 87-8.

454 Earl, Reading Joshua as Christian Scripture, 89-93. Younger, Ancient Conquest Accounts, 208, passim. Younger, “The Rhetorical Structuring of the Joshua Conquest Narratives,” 5, 23, passim.

455 Sanders, Canon and Community, 51-2, 62, 71. Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 4.

reinforce memory of the exodus and expand on its theological implications. (2) With respect to the historical level, we could add that monotheizing worked as an invitation for variegated communities of faith to break free from the unbearable ideological, religious and physical tyranny, such as can be experienced in this world within any social class or any family tribe. It is when we were “groaning under their slavery” (Ex 2:23), Yahweh has heard our voice and brought us out “with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders” (Dt 26:6ff). Anyone who can identify with this groaning and wants to share in the march to the promised land through wilderness belongs to the people of the exodus.

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