Social & Historical Approaches to the Bible (Lexham Methods)

Douglas Mangum, Amy Balogh

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781577996651
• eBook ISBN: 9781577997061
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

1 Introducing Biblical Criticism

Amy Balogh and Douglas Mangum

Biblical criticism is a broad term that generally refers to the formal academic discipline of studying the content and context of the Bible. Under the umbrella term of “biblical criticism,” we find a complicated and wide array of perspectives and methods for approaching the biblical text. These approaches typically share the common ground of critical analysis and evaluation of biblical literature.

1.1 Defining Biblical Criticism

In its early years, the academic study of the Bible was divided into two main groups—higher criticism and lower criticism. “Lower criticism” was another name for what is now known as “textual criticism,” an approach with the goal of confirming or recovering the best reading from the available textual witnesses (i.e., manuscript evidence). Determining the best (or most likely to be original) text logically precedes a “higher”-level analysis of the text’s content. “Higher criticism” is an older label for something like what we today call “biblical criticism”—the process of making evaluative judgments about the literary content of the biblical text. Higher criticism of the Bible, however, was initially limited to the issues of authorship, date, and composition of biblical books, which consumed the attention of Bible scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Norman Geisler explains, “Lower criticism has to do with the text of Scripture, and higher criticism with the source of that text.”1 Few scholars today use these labels of higher and lower criticism, but they are common in older publications.

1.1.1 What Is “Criticism”?

Today, the word “criticism” commonly has negative connotations, and “biblical criticism” could be easily misunderstood as “criticizing” the Bible in a negative way. Most English dictionaries list this negative sense first. For example, the first entry in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary says that “criticism” is “the act of criticizing usually unfavorably.”2 In this case, “criticizing” means “finding fault.” With “biblical criticism” the second entry is more relevant: criticism is “the art of evaluating or analyzing works of art or literature.” Merriam-Webster’s provides a third definition of criticism as “the scientific investigation of literary documents (as the Bible) in regard to such matters as origin, text, composition, or history.”3 This third definition reflects well the concerns of the approaches to biblical interpretation surveyed in this volume, but our working definition is that biblical criticism is the academic evaluation and analysis of the biblical text.

1.1.2 The Discipline of Biblical Criticism

As “literary criticism” refers broadly to the intellectual study of literature, so “biblical criticism” refers broadly to the intellectual study of the Bible. However, this label should be understood as limited to the study of the Bible as a formal academic discipline over the last few hundred years. With such a limited scope, biblical criticism does not include ancient and medieval biblical interpretation. Likewise, not all contemporary study of the Bible qualifies as biblical criticism, since criticism implies a rationalistic perspective on the text (that is, concerned with evidence evaluated by use of reason). Many aspects of biblical research that emphasize spiritual, devotional, or emotional responses to the text do not fall under the umbrella of biblical criticism.

According to John Barton, the term “biblical criticism” is “somewhat outmoded” as a name for the academic discipline of biblical studies.4 He notes how “biblical criticism” as defined above covers scholarship typically labeled generically as “biblical studies,” “biblical interpretation,” or the “historical-critical method” (on the latter, see chapter 2 of the present volume, on “The Historical-Grammatical Approach”). While Barton is hesitant to apply “biblical criticism” in the same broad sense as “literary criticism,” he acknowledges that “biblical criticism means a particular type of study of the Bible,” not all study of the Bible.5

1.1.3 The Assumptions of Biblical Criticism

The “particular type” of biblical study represented by biblical criticism is defined by an evaluative, descriptive, and analytical stance toward the biblical text. Biblical criticism works on the following assumptions. First, it is focused on careful analysis of written texts that requires interpretations to be founded on textual, often grammatical or lexicographical, evidence and rational argument, not intuition, emotion, or revelation. Second, this reliance on evidence and reason requires the critic to approach the text with a certain level of openness. This perspective does not entail a level of antagonism toward the text. Rather, the reader should simply read carefully and question the apparent meaning of the text, considering the possibility that the text may have a more complex meaning than what appears at first glance. This assumption separates many critical readings from theological or ideological readings because the critic does not accept an interpretation immediately and without question. Rather, the critic works with the wording and historical context of the text in order to arrive at an interpretation.

A third assumption for biblical criticism is that texts have an inherent and objective meaning that can be discerned. According to E. D. Hirsch, “Meaning is that which is represented by a text; it is what the author meant by his use of a particular sign sequence; it is what the signs represent.”6 While completely unbiased objectivity on the part of the interpreter is now recognized as an unattainable ideal, it does not negate that an author produces a text with the goal of communication, and it therefore assumes meaning is there to be discovered. Many critics have substituted the modernist assumption of their own objectivity for a postmodern self-awareness that acknowledges the theological, ideological, and philosophical presuppositions that they bring to the text and attempts to correct for those and read the text on its own terms—finding meaning in the text itself and not bringing meaning to the text.7

1.1.4 The Goal of Biblical Criticism

The ultimate goal of biblical criticism is simply a better understanding of the text’s meaning.8 This statement of the goal may come as a surprise, since, as mentioned above, “criticism” still has a negative connotation in some circles. Approaching the text as a “critic” has popularly been taken as an indication of an interpreter’s goal to disprove and discredit the Bible. In this popular (but mistaken) caricature of biblical scholarship, the critic sets out to prove the truth claims of the Bible must be false. Individual critics inevitably approach the text with biases and presuppositions, but scholars disagree whether those biases and presuppositions are an inherent part of the method itself (see §1.2 The Need for Caution with Biblical Criticism below).9 While it is true that some interpreters throughout history have had an agenda to prove the Bible was false, an honest application of the critical method requires the interpreter to avoid any a priori elimination of possible interpretive options.10 Biblical scholar Joseph Fitzmyer states it this way:

[The biblical texts] have to be analyzed against their proper human and historical backgrounds, in their contemporary contexts, and in their original languages. In effect, this method applies to the Bible all the critical techniques of classical philology, and in doing so it refuses a priori to exclude any critical analysis in its quest for the meaning of the text.11

If the goal of biblical criticism is a better understanding of the text, then the interpreter should be initially open to all the options and not arrive at the text with some conclusions already discarded. This common misunderstanding about the goal of biblical criticism—that it is about disproving the text rather than understanding the text—is at the heart of the suspicion and controversy over using academic methods to examine the Bible.

1.2 The Need for Caution with Biblical Criticism

Biblical criticism, as defined above, is part of the larger enterprise of biblical interpretation. Complete interpretation, for a Christian interpreter, involves theological conclusions and contemporary application of the text for the benefit of believers. Biblical criticism is not inherently opposed to theology or contemporary application, but the work of the critic generally focuses on the past, leaving the present to the theologian. The complex issues involved with interpretation and application are addressed in many introductory texts on hermeneutics and exegesis.12

1.2.1 Terminology

Discussions of method or findings in biblical interpretation often run a high risk of misunderstanding due to widespread use of shared vocabulary without widespread agreement on definitions. In other words, interpretations are likely to be misinterpreted. The most commonly used but potentially misunderstood terms are “hermeneutics,” “exegesis,” and “meaning.”13 Hermeneutics, in its most basic sense, refers to the methodological principles of interpretation. In practice, the term is used somewhat haphazardly to refer to anything from specific techniques of interpretation to the search for a text’s contemporary relevance to the interpretive process as a whole.14 The term “exegesis” is used to refer to both the process of interpretation and the resulting interpretation of a specific text.15 Fitzmyer says that exegesis “seeks to draw out the meaning of the passage intended by the inspired writer” and includes “religious and theological meaning” as part of that process.16 Here, meaning is understood as the conclusion or takeaway of the process of exegesis—and there may often be more than one possible meaning.

1.2.2 Presuppositions

The critical method has been associated with presuppositions that call into question the Bible’s status as sacred and authoritative Scripture, so the method itself has been pronounced guilty by association even though those presuppositions are not a necessary part of biblical criticism.17 In defining biblical criticism here, we have been careful to emphasize that “critical” means analyzing, not attacking. That distinction has not always held true for all interpreters. The rise of biblical criticism as a methodology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was accompanied by rationalist rejection of the supernatural along with intellectual skepticism about the dogmatic claims of traditional Christian theology.18 Fitzmyer notes that with these interpreters the “fault was the presupposition with which the method was used, and not with the method itself.”19 However, the solution is not found in “presuppositionless” interpretation—the impossible ideal o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Series Preface (Douglas Mangum)
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introducing Biblical Criticism (Amy Balogh and Douglas Mangum)
• Chapter 2: The Historical-Grammatical Approach (Judith Odor)
• Chapter 3: Source Criticism (Amy Balogh, Dan Cole, and Wendy Widder)
• Chapter 4: Form Criticism (Gretchen Ellis)
• Chapter 5: Tradition-Historical Criticism (Gretchen Ellis)
• Chapter 6: Redaction Criticism (Jeffery Leonard)
• Chapter 7: Social-Scientific Criticism (Coleman Baker and Amy Balogh)
• Bibliography