Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism, eds. Christopher Hays and Christopher Ansberry (Baker Academic, 2013).
You should buy this book and read it. I don’t suggest that because I agree with the basic premise of each chapter, but because I disagree with it.
This book takes various historical-critical conclusions and determines whether they can be squared with Evangelical (or even orthodox) dogma. The tension between Evangelicalism and historical criticism tension is perhaps felt more in Old Testament studies, with dating conclusions in constant flux and authorship dogmatically refused to the traditionally understood authors. I should note that this hypothetical nature of the book creates some ambiguity regarding the authors’ actual beliefs, which are not always made explicit.
This book is very valuable to me, and I am incredibly appreciative of the editors for putting it together. (I had the chance to share my thoughts on the book with Christopher Ansberry and he was kind enough to return detailed responses.) I am on constant lookout for anything from historical criticism that can fit with an Evangelical approach to Scripture, mainly because I am interested in interdisciplinary methodology. That means I welcome tools from outside of biblical studies that help illuminate the Scriptures we study. But generally, I don’t find much in historical criticism (as understood in biblical studies) that will improve the way I read Scripture while allowing me to remain submissive to apostolic and prophetic authority. I know that’s not everyone’s jam, but it’s mine.
The various topics dealt with include the historicity of Adam, the historicity of the Exodus, the date of Deuteronomy’s composition, unfulfilled OT prophecies, pseudepigraphy, the historical Jesus, and the Paul of Acts. Some of the chapters move as far from orthodox opinion as possible when constructing a hypothetical position (e.g., no historical Adam, Deuteronomy composed during the exile), while some are more moderate (historicity of Exodus) and some quite conservative (historical Jesus and Paul of Acts). For a fuller summary of the chapters, see the link to my published review at the end of this post.
So here is a live example of using historical critical assumptions (e.g., lack of supernaturalism, lack of future-foretelling prophecy, etc.) and trying to salvage the Scriptures as inspired and authoritative. I categorized my hermeneutical problems with the authors’ conclusions into three groups.
First is the constant attempt to place inspired meaning in the writing, rather than the author. If we suppose that Deuteronomy was created in the seventh century BC with a political agenda by an author who was not a prophet, using Moses’ voice, then the original meaning of the document involves a political power play. To suppose Deuteronomy later becomes inspired when it is included in the canon is to suppose that the fictitious world created by the original authors becomes the “real world” for readers of the canonical Deuteronomy. In other words, the document changes meaning based upon its canon. Such a theory is reminiscent of the New Criticism literary theory, which has been criticized heavily by literary critics, notoriously by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. in Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), and even by historical-critical biblical scholar John Barton in Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study (Rev. ed.; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1996). While this is not the place to argue that meaning cannot be tied only to a text, the point here is that the authors of this work failed to discuss this fundamental hermeneutical issue. Aside from the philosophical issue, the Bible was concerned with authorship (e.g., Lev 26:46; 2 Thess 2:1-2; 3:17), as was the early church who set apostolicity as a standard of canonicity.
A second, but related issue is their constant punting to the Holy Spirit to save pseudepigraphal documents as Christian revelation (86; 130-31). They suggest that canonicity implies the document’s inspiration by the Holy Spirit and that he guided it to the canon. However, this is a strange anti-rationalistic turn in a thoroughgoing rationalistic project. Scripture claims to be inspired, but the classic statement (2 Tim 3:16) is in a disputed Pauline letter. Thus, even the clear self-attestations of Scripture to inspiration may only be power plays (like Deuteronomy), an attempt to legitimate one’s own pseudepigraphal letter with a claim to inspiration. So how can the authors believe that the Holy Spirit inspired these writings (and did he inspire the original meaning, or the canonical meaning)? What evidence suggests such a phenomenon? Moreover, to believe a document is only inspired because it landed in the canon is to place authority in the final redactor rather than in the text, since the text would lack authority apart from the redactor’s decision to include the writing. On the other hand, we could believe Scripture’s self-attestations to inspiration are trustworthy, but more importantly for this issue, that the biblical authors were mostly, if not all, prophets. Moses, Samuel, the major and minor prophets, David, the apostles, and perhaps other biblical authors (Solomon? Hebrews? Luke?) were endowed with the Holy Spirit as prophets of God, hence we know that God channeled revelation through them. Such a position could be considered a more rational reason to believe Scripture contains prophetic revelation from God, and in that respect could be more “critical” than some of the authors of this work.
A third issue relates to exegesis and argumentation, which sometimes leave something to be desired. For example, on p. 61 Ansberry suggests Ramesses II cannot be the pharaoh of the Exodus because he “lies entombed, not at the bottom of the Sea of Reeds but in the National Museum in Cairo.” But Exodus nowhere says pharaoh drowned in the sea, only his troops. Page 62 claims “not even the Bible paints a univocal picture of the exodus event,” but only Pss 78 and 105 are cited, which may be explained as poetic developments and interpretations of the historical narrative in Exodus. The discussion of unfulfilled prophecies completely ignores premodern and Evangelical solutions. For example, the change from Tyre to Egypt in the prophecy of destruction (Ezek 29:18-19) could possibly be explained by a theological assumption of Ezekiel, such as corporate solidarity, or a number of other possibilities. But the authors simply assume v. 19 is a redactional addendum after the prophecy in v. 18 failed. I noted earlier the skirting of the issue of stated authorship by a simple claim to a difference in views of authorship from the premodern to the modern era (140), but this ignores premodern Jewish and Christian obsession with ascribing biblical books to singular, prophetic authors. These are only a few examples of the tendency to ignore contrary evidence, to mistake what the biblical text actually says, to make sweeping generalizations without proper support, and to ignore competing interpretations. These sorts of problems seem common in the attempt to harmonize the conclusions of historical-criticism with Evangelical faith.
At the root of these problems is, I conjecture, the definition of historical-criticism as a “tool” (19, 205) by Hays and Ansberry (although Hays may be responsible for the definition, since he was the sole author of p. 19). Historical-criticism uses many tools—redaction criticism, source criticism, literary methods, sociological analysis, comparative study—but historical-criticism is not a tool. It is an approach to interpretation that necessarily entails a worldview. This anti-supernatural worldview was defined classically by E. Troeltsch, who expounded the principles of doubt, analogy, and correlation, which effectively ruled out any explanations of Scripture that involved supernaturalism (there are varieties of historical criticism, but they stem largely from this classic definition). Therefore, historical-criticism is not a tool, wielded by Baur, Troeltsch, and Bultmann and then handed off to the Evangelical to try his hand at more academically respectable results.
Ultimately, I’m grateful to the editors and authors for this volume. It allowed me to once more wrestle with various historical-critical assumptions and conclusions and determine whether they can be consistent with orthodox theology and hermeneutics. I’m open to bridging this gap as much as possible, but not at the expense of a solid hermeneutical method that is sensitive to close exegesis, philosophical issues of meaning, and other related issues. If another volume were to be written like this one, I suppose it would need to be a rigorous academic monograph dealing with all the philosophical, linguistic, sociological, hermeneutical, and theological issues involved, and it would need to be much larger. Also, it would probably need to be one incredibly learned individual who has mastered these various realms of knowledge and is able to handle each one responsibly and all of them in a coherent and valid system. But until then, Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism is a unique and thought-provoking volume to begin with.
See my fuller review of this work here, p. 58-61.
