Wellhausen's resignation

In his own words:

I became a theologian because the scientific treatment of the Bible interested me; only gradually did I come to understand that a professor of theology also has the practical task of preparing the students for service in the Protestant Church, and that I am not adequate to this practical task, but that instead despite all caution on my own part I make my hearers unfit for their office. Since then my theological professorship has been weighing heavily on my conscience.

For details (this quote is taken from a James Kugel speech), see Menahem Mendel.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the following quote from that genius, Paul Minear:

it is increasingly difficult for the historian, within the domain of conventional historiography, to deal with texts that claim to embody God's address to mortals. on the one hand, the Bible presents us with stories of God's eternal power working in, with, through, under, and beyond temporal events. On the other hand, historical methodology suggests that these stories are best dealt with if that power were not present. This methodology is weighted in the direction of a historicism that A.E. Loen has described in these terms: "Historical reality is complete in itself and God as a transcendent reality must be bracketed out" (in The Bible and the Historian, 38).

My take on "verbal revelation"

I recently quoted James Smart, who claims that

revelation is in the text itself, in the words ... It is through these words and no others that God intends to speak to us, and, when he does, we know that there is no other kind of inspiration than verbal inspiration.

Criticisms were made in the comments. Particularly insightful were those of Bob Macdonald:

Torah is not text but engagement with the one to who the text points. The medium is neither the messenger nor the source of the message (emphasis mine).

I agree with both points of view. They don't contradict each other, rather, they are pointing to two different dimensions of the issue. Smart's comment refers to the place where revelation is accessed now, whereas Bob's comment refers to the revelation itself. Revelation itself is, as Barth put it, the reality of God-with-us (Immanuel), and this is hardly a text but a living reality.

Nevertheless, what does it mean to say that “God is with us”? What is the nature of this reality? Our dogmatic assumptions must shape our approach to the text.

In the Bible, God's self revelation is seen as progressive (Exodus 6:3). The “one to whom the text points” is a profound being (Andrew Louth puts it eloquently here), one that needs to be sought. He certainly reveals himself suddenly and without expectation—and still does!—but he also hides himself and wishes to be found. In the Old Testament he is to be sought at specific places: cultic centres and ultimately the temple. He also reveals himself through the laws of the universe (the burden of Wisdom literature), through his written Torah, through the example and teaching of elders, priests, and parents. Within this universe, text is at least one medium of revelation.

Within this unfolding story of the Bible, however, we see that texts take on more and more significance. Moses receives his revelation directly from God, but he writes it down and the text becomes the vehicle of ongoing revelation and guidance (see my post, God, Moses, and Scripture). According to Jer 36, Jeremiah has his prophecies written on a scroll which survives to speak to new generations. C. Seitz summarises the implications of this chapter as follows:

the chapter tells of the victory of the Word of God. The king can kill prophets who speak God's word (see Jer 25:23); he can debar God's spokesman from the temple (Jer 36:5); he can callously burn God's word in a brazier until the entire thing is consumed (Jer 36:23). But the prophet lives to speak the word anew, and the scroll is recomposed (Jer 36:32). And more to the point: the new scroll will outlive the divine spokesman and the evil generation headed by Jehoiakim. In the end, God's word cannot be thwarted (ZAW 101:1, 1989, p. 14).

Indeed, Seitz sees a parallel between Jeremiah's scribe Baruch and Moses's successor Joshua:

just as Joshua brough new tables of the tôrāh to a new generation in a new day, so too the scribe Baruch symbolizes the survival of a new scroll from the prophet Jeremiah which will address a new generation of faith “in all the places to which (it) may go” (Jer 45:5) (p. 18).

He concludes that in Jer 45

we see a foreshadowing of the movement of prophecy into a new mode, as clarified in a later rabbinic dictum: “Since the day when the Temple was destroyed, prophecy has been taken from the prophets and given to the wise” (B. Bathra 12a).

We need to add to this our growing understanding of the nature of Biblical tradition itself, which went through a process of textualization or “inscripturation.” We see this in particular in the case of the “Book of the Twelve.” The “reality of revelation” within time and space to particular prophets is one thing, but within the context of God's economy of salvation it seems that the witness to this original Word has been enriched and expanded so that its true dimensions, understood with the advantage of hindsight (e.g. exilic redaction), find literary (“verbal”) expression in the final form of the text.

This is the conclusion of a scholar not known for his commitment to “synchronic” reading: Jörg Jeremias. See his comments on the literary (though not "historical" - in the narrow sense of the word) interrelation of Hosea and Amos:

The book of Amos very probably never existed without Am 7:10-17, and 7:10-17 very probably never existed without its hermeneutical key in Am 7:9. this verse urges the reader not to perceive Amos as an isolated prophet but to relate his message to the message of Hosea. They are to be seen as two messengers with one common message … .

The curiosity of the modern historian about the specific and singular elements in one prophet was quite alien to the traditionists. They did not want the words of either Hosea or Amos to be read with historical interest for a distant past but with a current interest in their words as a help for present problems. They were asking about the one message of God by two messengers (but without creating something like Tatian's harmony of the gospels). … (1996: 181, 182-183)

(I've posted a similar quote by Jermias in German, in Canon and the essence of prophecy)

This is simply a brilliant way to express the key concern of Childs' canonical approach. See also my thread on New Testament scholar Paul Minear, who holds that the Bible's view of “reality” should challenge that of the historian's - with hermeneutical implications.

Christian eschatology and historical methodology: the case of John

I have been posting a lot recently on the challenge that the content of Christian faith poses to traditional historiographical methodology, inspired mostly by Paul Minear's magisterial work, The Bible and the Historian (click for SBL review). I have now summarized these posts here. It is time that I padded out the theory with some concrete examples. The following is a series of quotes in which Minear looks at the ontology of John.

“This is an area where responsible historical study of New Testament eschatology is producing the greatest strain on methodology. It has made us aware that an eschatology radically at odds with the pristine Chrsitian faith is implicit in our modern historiography. This is not an issue that affects merely the location of the outermost boundary of the historical process. It affects both the perception of each event in history and the interpretation of that event. This is perhaps most obvious in the realm of conceptions of time. We have noted how a scientific hermeneutical method operates with a clear set of attitudes toward time. Any change in these attitudes will condition the application of the method everywhere. What happens, then, when we discover in the Bible attitudes toward time which not only claim to be true, but which also commend themselves to us with increasing power? The entire hermeneutical system is placed in question.” (54)

“The conception of endless, unilinear, one-way time must be modified if we are to accept the apostolic testimony. ... If the end has actually been inaugurated, then historical time is capable of embracing simultaneously both the old age and the new. No methodology whose presuppositions on time are limited to the old age will be adequate to cope with the historcicity of the new age or with the temporal collision between the two times” (55).

"The New Testament not only confesses the manifestation of eschatological realtiy within history in the form of an event, it also proclaims this event in terms of a person. ... Implicit in this eschatological confession is the demand to adopt a throughly Christocentric exegesis." (55)

"The substance of history itself becomes eschatological, existential, and personal." (56)

“How should we speak of an ultimate reality that conjoins the divine and the human? [John used a literary device, that is] by telling one story in such a way as to embrace many stories. But this is more than a literary device. It is a way of perceiving reality. He saw each story as fully historical, and yet as fully eschatological. ... He perceived each separate place and time in terms of its content, that corporate historical action that “filled it." He discerned behind this action a transhistorical model that linked each story to the others." (61)

"This is a comprehensive rather than a disjunctive mode of seeing and thinking. It apprehends events in terms of their inner structure as responses to God's action. ... Behind this mode of viewing was a distinctive ontological stance, to which we should give more attention that we usually do.” (63)

“I have been seeking to execute an historian's task of describing the pattern of thought charactersitic of the Apocalypse. As a theologian I believe this pattern to be relevant, though not necessarily normative, for current discussion of hermeneutics, ethics, ecclesiology, and ontology. As a ,oe of communication, the Apocalypse is an example of the radical interdependence of these four apsects of biblical thought, an interdependence too often absent from current thinking. I believe that as biblical shcoalrs we have a responsibility for making this interdependence as clear as we can. This sort of investigation of the ontological viewpoint of the Apocalypse should be extended to the other genres of literauture in order to obtain a more complete idea of the ontological perspective that is in some degree paradigmatic for the entire NT.” (68-69)

"Early Christian apocalyptic has been rightly called “the mother of Christian theology” (E. Kasemann). I should also be call the mother of Christian ontology, because it viewed historical decisions and events in the light of an ultimate concern for their ultimate context in the purpose and action of God.” (70)

Thread Summary: The Bible and the historian

The following is a collection of posts dealing with the challenge of the content of Christian faith to historiographical methodology, inspired mostly by Paul Minear's astounding work: The Bible and the Historian.

1. Heaven and historiography
2. Ethnography and exegesis
3. Incarnation and B.S. Childs' subtle dialectic
4. The transcendence of God and human historicity
5. Is this proper source criticism?
6. Christian eschatology and historical methodology: the case of John
7. Barth's exegesis

Is this proper source criticism?

Paul Minear is rapibly reaching the heights of Childs and Seitz in my personal estimation, which anyone acquainted with this blog will know is extremely high. Here's a quote taken from his magesterial work, The Bible and the Historian:

Weigh again, historian, the presence of the Spirit in unspectacular but powerful ways, though unseen. Weigh again the following evidence, historian: being crucified with Christ produced new ways of viewing all people, eliminating distinctions between sexes, classes, and religions. Listen again to the prayers of gratitude at all times for everything, even to the hymns of joy resounding from Roman prisons. Such things do not emerge ex nihilo. With all other readers, historians must also answer, and not simply ask, questions about the source of such gifts.

Paul Minear, The Bible and the Historian, (Eisenbrauns, 2002), 201

The Transcendence of God and Human Historicity

This morning I posted a quote by Childs on the Incarnation as an analogy for the dialectical relation between the Bible as a human creation and the Bible as a witness to God. The following quote by Paul Minear, from his astounding book The Bible and the Historian (go here and here), serves as the perfect compliment. He is interested in the significance of the paradigm of modernity (á la Kuhn) for Biblical exegesis:

At the moment we are especially interested in how this paradigm deals with the dimension of transcendence. The simplest answer is that the method encourages either antagonism or neutrality toward the presence of such a dimension. Altizer, for example, says, “We inherit the historical revolution of the nineteenth centruy, a revolution which stripped all historical events of a transcendent ground” (Thomas J.J., The New Apocalypse, xiv). In the less enthusiastic words of A.E. Loen, the historical process has been “de-divinized,” since the message of the Bible comes to be seen as “determined exclusively by historical factors.” The sequence of historical events is sundered from its metaphysical ground, so that “forgetfulness of the sphere of being robs history of its essence, just as it robs man of his.” (Secularization, 7, 10).

Can exegetes transfer that task to the preacher and the theologian and limit their own work to the business of objective historical description? Should they do this, their decision will reflect their mastery by the paradigm of historical science as well as mastery over it. (pp. 40-41)

Minear concludes his chapter with the following words of wisdom:

The task of contemporary exegetes is to allow Scripture itself to criticize both the assumptions and the methods that are used in its study. They must listen also, of course, to secular historians and to theologians. Success in their task will be possible only through a conviction that the temporal distance between this and earlier centruies is itself bridged by the eternal purpose of God and by the participation of the church in that purpose. But it will also be possible only if there is more effective collaboration between historians and theologians. Even the ideal cooperation among scholars, however, will never lead to reducing God's transcendence to the size of our various conceptual boxes. (49).

Oh how not only the academy but also the church needs to hear this!

Ethnography and Exegesis

In my post Heaven and Historiography I introduced a fascinating book by P. Minear on how the New Testament can challenge the categories the modern historian uses to read it. His book reminded of me of issues that were raised in my cultural anthropological studies. Seeing that the excellent Biblical Studies List, moderated by Jim West, Chris Tilling and Niels-Peter Lemche is primarily focussed on the historical, cultural dimension of the Bible I shared the following thoughts on how Minear's book relates to contemporary cultural anthropology:

Though Minear doesn't make the connection, I think his approach connects well with some modern developments in cultural anthropological methodology. In the 1986 Marcus and Fischer spoke of the "crisis of representation" in ethnography (Anthropology as Cultural Critique), where the ability of the ethnographer to represent "indigenous" cultures was questioned both on epistemological and ethical grounds. Fieldwork, for example, came to be understood as a complex dialogue between the ethnographer and "the natives," a joint venture out of which meaning and interpretation emerge. Amongst the various methodological implications (e.g. treatment of "ethnography" itself as a literary genre; a focus on interpretation and meaning reather than causality and behaviour; a trend away from grand theory and generalization; a renewed emphasis of relativism; author-saturated rather than data-saturated ethnography) was an understanding of ethnography as dialogue. An attempt is made for the objects of study ("natives") to become subjects in a dialogue with the ethnographer, who is herself as much a cultured being. Ethnographies became written in the first person and were accompanied by analyses of the anthropologist's own epistemology and subjectivity. As Nader has obeserved, "Anthropologists have moved from insisting that the anthroplogist stay out of the ethnography to having the anthropologist's presence dominate the ethnography" (1988: 153). Ethnography is no longer simply a vehicle for supplementing the West's knowledge of "foreigners," as if we can take their belief systems and simply integrate them into a pre-existing scaffolding that is assumed to be true. Rather, it has become a vehicle for critiquing the cultural prejudices of the West and thus hopefully lead to some form of renewal at home.

In the same way, Minear's collection of essays attempts to trace the disparities between the worlds of modern historians and biblical authors (New Testament, in this case). He uncovers the particular historicist metaphysic undergirding modern historiography and points out how it is not only different from but actually challenged by the "historiography" of the New Testament writers. He claims that,"The task of contemporary exegetes is to allow Scripture itself to criticize both the assumptions and the methods that are used in its study." If neither worldview is objectively grounded, what are the methodological implications for the historian who finds that the particular eschatology, ontology and cosmology which emerge from the New Testament texts are convincing? What categories of thought are required to get at the subject matter which these texts are talking about? How do our conceptions of "ultimate reality" either open up or mute the witness of these texts?

I've read the book far too quickly to summarize his complex and fascinating suggestions. I just wanted to share it with the list, as it is one of the most interesting, provacative and - dare I say - enriching books I've read in a long time.

Details of the book can be found here. You can read his obituary here.

Heaven and Historiography

I've just finished one of the most fascinating books I've read in a long time. Paul Minear traces the divergences in perspective between the modern historian and New Testament authors. He isn't so much concerned to argue for the superiority of the New Testament's views on eschatology, ontology, and cosmology (how could one do that anyway?) as to show the methodological implications for the historian if he or she were to actually hold this worldview. Faith and the academy are not as easy to separate as some would like to think.

I've read the book far too quickly to give an adequate introduction so I'll just post his overview of one of my favouriate chapters: "Biblical Ontology and Ecclesiology" (doesn't that title just send a shiver down your spine?).

These apostolic and prophetic attitudes toward time become the central concern in the fourth chapter, where I analyze the challenges presented to the historian by specific texts in the book of Revelation. The category of history does not appear in these texts and it becomes quite misleading when the texts are forced into conformity to the modern category. By contrast the category of the heavens, so absent from modern historical discussion, is assumed to be the ultimate reality. Historians are primarily concerned with placing all events within earthly time and the temporal process; biblical writers are essentially concerned with the eternal purposes and time-transcending activity of the creator of the heavens and the earth. Moreover, in sharp contrast to modern thought, which tends to reduce the heavens and the earth to spatial measurement, biblical writers assume the basic and continual interpenetration of the two realms, with the heavens providing the creative source, the daily sustenance, and the final goal of everything earthly. Because the categories of space and time are no longer of use in measuring heavenly realities, biblical thought makes dubious the modern scholar's reliance on those categories (23).