Catholic Hermeneutics Today

Critical Essays

Benedict Thomas Viviano OP

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781625644183
  9781498222174
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630876395
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Biblical hermeneutics, the art of interpreting Scripture, is a controversial subject in the best of times. Lately the debates have been quite intense in the Roman Catholic Church. The debates deal with issues such as the role of the historical-critical method in relation to devotional use and practice, the dangers of relativism, the right relation between tradition and Scripture, the presence of women even in texts where their presence is not immediately obvious (the possibility of women magi), and the trend of theological aesthetics. Can there still be prophets? The Bible and world religions; the Bible and a theology of history; the Bible and the administration of justice; trends in biblical studies in the United States, France, and Germany--before, during, and after the world wars--are other topics treated here.

1

The Historical-Critical Method in Modern Biblical Studies

Yes or No?

Summary

This conference presents an enthusiastic endorsement of the historical-critical method as the most appropriate method for the study of the Bible in an academic context and to some extent in the church. But this endorsement is subject to certain conditions. (1) The method must be understood as inclusive of all the particular methods used in the study of ancient texts: text-criticism, source-, form-, and redaction-criticism , literary analysis, sociological analysis, comparative religious analysis. (2) The method stands midway between a purely edifying approach and an aspiration to mathematical-physical rigor inappropriate to the subject matter of the Bible. Its model is rather the judicial discrimination/weighing of evidence, i.e., degrees of probability. And for the instruction of judges there is much material in the Bible itself (e.g., Deuteronomy 15). (To derive the essence of the historical-critical method from the Bible itself is the most original aspect of the essay). (3) to the extent that the historical-critical method prevails in the church, it must assume the additional burden of the various tasks formerly provided by pre-critical approaches to the Bible: it must assume the additional burden of the various tasks formerly provided by pre-critical approaches to the Bible: it must become a helpful guide to theology, catechesis, preaching, liberation from oppression, personal prayer, faith itself (Walter Wink, The Bible in Human Transformation, Philadelphia, 1973). These additional tasks transform the method itself, but should never cause it to deviate from its goals of historical truth and the literal sense. It must not be forgotten that the Bible itself poses problems that invite comparison and critical analyses, esp. the multiple versions provided of the same event.

The Cultural Context in which the Method Arose

The historical-critical method of studying the Bible has become an unavoidable necessity in the dialogue between Christian faith and advanced Western culture in the epoch which began around 1800. By then the historical turn which Western civilization had already begun to take in the previous decades was becoming the dominant mode of cultural discourse. This historical turn affected both the forces of the philosophical Enlightenment and of the Counter-Enlightenment. Montesquieu, Vico, and Herder vied with Voltaire and Gibbon and prepared the way for Hegel, Newman, and Darwin.

The rationalism of the Enlightenment has been the greatest challenge to supernatural Christian faith since Celsus in the second century. It excluded the possibility of miracles a priori as an illegitimate violation of natural law by the very Creator of the laws of nature. And it excluded the possibility of divine revelation or communication a priori as a violation of human dignity and autonomy (Kant). Voltaire made a mockery of biblical revelation. This was further reflected in his anti-Judaism and anti-Christianity, a revival of ancient pagan critiques.

Montesquieu by contrast prepared the way for a peaceful emancipation of the Jews at the French Revolution, but he also used the method of comparative religion to present Christianity in an unfavorable light. For him as a male and as a libertine, Islam represented a form of sexual liberation from the ethics of the gospels and Paul. This was the message of his Persian Letters. Vico and Herder tried to renew a Christian philosophy of history that would integrate a flood of new data (the recovery of Tacitus, Homer, Irenaeus at the Renaissance, for example) and give a respectful attention to the multitude of newly transcribed oral folk traditions and epic poems. The Brothers Grimm gave a further impetus to this kind of work among the Baltic and Slavic peoples, and Elias Loennrot among the Finns. Herder himself applied this approach to biblical poetry. But the work of Herder was too diffuse. It required a Hegel to achieve a synthesis of the work of Vico and Herder in a Christian philosophy of history inspired by the gospel according to John and therewith to offer the greatest initial Christian attempt to address and to master the challenge of Enlightenment rationalism.

Why was this historical turn important, relevant to biblical studies, and helpful in the Christian and Jewish believers’ response to the criticisms made against biblical faith by the rationalists? The turn was important, relevant, and helpful because on the one hand much of the Bible expressed itself in a historical, narrative mode. This created for the rationalists (especially Lessing) the scandal of historical particularity. Why should we care about individual persons long dead, like Abraham, Moses or David, Sarah, Zipporah or Bathsheba? When this particularity was elevated in the Bible to a level of principle in the doctrine of election (chosen individuals, chosen people) the scandal only worsened. Why? Because on the other hand the Enlightenment took as its model for all valid, legitimate knowing mathematical laws, laws that were universal and immutable. Hence, “all statements with claims to truth must be public, communicable, testable—capable of verification or falsification by methods open to and accepted by any rational investigator.” Thus the only legitimate knowledge was knowledge derived from the mathematico-physical sciences. To such a mind, most of the Bible made no sense. Only the wisdom books were exempt from contempt. Of the biblical authors, only Qoheleth counted as a philosophe.

Western civilization and Christian faith were on a collision course. The philosophers of history (Vico, Herder, Hegel, etc.) came to the rescue by realizing that the mathematico-physical model of knowing was too narrow to account for the totality of human life and experience. Particular historical events could at times have universal, irreversible consequences (the Exodus, Marathon, the Crucifixion, Waterloo). The impasse between rationalism and faith could be broken by the historical model of knowing. But this meant further that a purely devotional, spiritual, edifying, or allegorical reading of the Bible, which had become customary in the church, for pastoral reasons, and which took the complete historicity of the biblical narratives for granted, without examination or criticism, was no longer adequate or sufficient in educated circles. (St. Thomas for example usually presupposes historicity in his use of the Bible but sometimes also defends it with arguments.)

A historical, critically historical method had become indispensable, an absolute necessity, if the Bible were to be rescued from the rationalists, its educated despisers, even if this meant offending the devots.

Concretely, this meant that, at least initially, as a first step, the historical parts of the Bible had to be read as one read Herodotus and Thucydides; the prophets and psalmists read as one read other ancient poets, Hesiod and Sophocles; the biblical laws as comparable to those of Solon and the early Romans; biblical wisdom as one read the Stoics and Epicureans. Historical analogy must prevail. Comparisons must be made with the world outside the Bible. Only then could the Bible begin to be understood in its original context. Only then could its proper contribution be appreciated, its religious and salvific value be seen in its full splendor, its dangers avoided. Only then could the mockers be silenced, indeed, intrigued and, God willing, converted to a better mind. The real risks involved were outweighed by the hoped-for advantages.

Another aspect of the cultural context in which the historical-critical method became a historical necessity in the study of the Bible was the political one. I refer to a growing dissatisfaction in Europe and the Americas with government by a hereditary aristocracy and absolute monarchs. Against these arose the esteem for parliamentary and eventually egalitarian democracy as well as for representative government. This political context is typified by the revolutions in America and France, the Reform Bills in Britain, the unification of Italy and of Germany, the fall of the four empires in 1918: Austrian, Prussian, Russian, and Ottoman. From a Catholic point of view it must be said that the Holy See showed little positive interest in the rise of parliamentary democracy until Christmas 1944.

No group in the church was more helpful in enabling the Episcopal and papal magisterial to face up to the new cultural and political challenges than certain, mainly French, provinces of the Dominican order. I refer of course first of all to Henri-Dominique Lacordaire (1802–1861). He, by his heroic fidelity after the condemnation by Mirari vos (1832) of the newspaper L’Avenir, more than any other single individual, but of course with many allies (Montalembert), enabled the church eventually to accept and then to embrace positively this form of government, first in civil society (1944), and then, to some extent, in the ecclesial society (1965), helped by the long experience of the Dominican constitutions, the mother of the mother of parliaments. Lacordaire did this at a time when leaders of other major orders, Benedictine, Jesuit, Augustinian of the Assumption, were deeply compromised in the hopeless tasks of monarchical restoration politics.

Before Lacordaire died in 1861, his spiritual successor, the future Marie-Joseph Lagrange, was born (1855). It was his task to apply the historical-critical method to the Bible in the Catholic church, as you know well enough. It is important here to underline that he chose to accomplish this delicate task, which he did with heroic fidelity during the long years (1903–1938) when he labored under suspicion of modernism, in the Dominican order, in a province which still kept alive the spirit of political liberalism given it by Lacordaire. Lagrange made this choice consciously, because he knew that he needed the conditions of minimum psychological freedom in order to do honest work.

In his turn, Lagrange was the direct inspiration for M.-D. Chenu and Y.-M. Congar, who modeled their historical-critical reading of St. Thomas Aquinas on how Lagrange had tried to read the Bible. These four men together gave us some of the most important impulses that received their acknowledgment in the Second Vatican Council, including their ecumenical openness and their concern for the urban masses alienated from the church. The point here is that the historical-critical method applied to both Scripture and tradition, in a context of increasing political freedom, was the instrument of theological and pastoral renewal in the church.

Thus far we have argued from the broader cultural context for the necessity of a new approach to the Bible after 1800. But that is not the only reason a new approach was needed. The uninformed might imagine for instance that a new approach to Genesis 1–3, the creation stories, was imposed by new scientific data and theories on the antiquity of the planet earth (fossils, paleontology) and on the evolution of species. And it is true that a reading of Darwin did shatter a certain naïve British-American Protestant manner of reading those chapters of Genesis. (A reader of St. Thomas’ questions on the Hexaemeron, S. T. I, qq. 65–74, would have had little difficulty with Darwin.) But the natural sciences were at best a remote cause or impetus to the new approach to the Bible. The proximate factors came from the opening up of the Near East to archaeological and philological exploration, discovery, and decipherment. The decryption of first the Rosetta stone, the Bisitun (Behistun) inscription, then the discovery of Hammurabi’s and other ancient law codes, with their parallels to the Mosaic legislation, treaty forms that provided models for Deuteronomic and other covenants, the Gilgamesh epic with its parallels to the Noah story (Genesis 5–9), then later the royal archives of Ugarit with their parallels to the Psalms, Daniel and the Book of Revelation, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls—all of this required a great development of biblical studies which went beyond the traditional methods. The new approaches came to be given the comprehensive name “the historical-critical method.” In reality of course this simple designation referred to a wide variety of quite different types of criticism, as we shall see.

Pere Lagrange was primarily moved, when he began his work, by the challenges from Hammurabi’s Code, the editio princeps of which was published by his Dominican confrere Vincent Scheil, by other Assyriological texts, and by the literary analyses and redatings of the traditions in the Pentateuch, which had recently been synthesized and radicalized by Wellhausen. Lagrange was shaken by his own efforts to trace the route of the Exodus in the Sinai peninsula. The improbabilities of the biblical narrative struck him with such force that he could never return to the naïve approach. Later, Lagrange’s gifted younger colleague, Paul-Edouard Dhorme, was one of three who cracked the Ugaritic language in 1928. This opened up another whole field of research, which is far from having been exhausted.

A Brief History of the Rise of the Historical-Critical Method

It is important here first of all to understand why the historical-critical method met with such resistance for so long from the church, that is, from certain centers of believing Christians, Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Eastern Orthodox. The origins of historical criticism as applied to the Bible is traced to several major figures of the seventeenth century: Benedict Spinoza, Hugo Grotius, and Thomas Hobbes. Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Jew who had been excommunicated from the synagogue when he was 24 years old because of his rationalist denial of the supernatural element in the Hebrew Bible. He later held, in his Tractatus Theologico-Poloticus, that the Bible “is in parts imperfect, corrupt, erroneous, and inconsistent with itself, and that we possess but fragments of it” (1670). In effect he denied the miracles. Grotius (1583–2645) was a Dutch Arminian, that is, in the eyes of the dominant five-point Calvinism of the Synod of Dort (Dordrecht) a heretic. Hobbes (1588–1679) was a sort of radical Anglican who supported state authority from a rather cynical viewpoint, against independent church leadership. In general, their motives were powerfully affected by the worst of the religious wars flowing from the Reformation, culminating in the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). In regard to the Bible, Hobbes held, for example, that the Pentateuch cannot have been written by Moses, but must have been composed long after his death, and the same is true of the books of Joshua, Judges, and Samuel; the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes were not written by Solomon, and so on. On the other hand, Hobbes could affirm that Moses wrote everything in the Pentateuch “which he is said to have written.” For Hobbes, this includes the “book of the Law” in Deuteronomy 11–27, especially because it legislates that the king takes a copy of the Law from the priests. This is important for Hobbes because it provides a biblical basis for the royal supremacy in religious matters, in opposition to the papacy and to the sects.

Whatever the intentions of this trio, whether they were noble or ignoble (the three remain controversial to this day), the fact remains that at the time they were rejected by orthodox believers as going beyond the permitted limits of theological discussion. Thus the historical-critical method was from the outset associated with authors perceived as hostile to the faith. The method shared in their bad reputation.

It is important to keep in mind that none of these three founding figures was German. It is a common but erroneous and unjust accusation that Germans were to blame for the rise of the method. In reality, the German Protestants entered the discussion relatively late. Men like J. D. Michaelis (1717–1791) and J. G. Eichhorn (1752–1827) simply attempted to bring some order and sober professional discernment of what was sound and what was careless and inaccurate in the work of the amateur pioneers. The German professors did their work at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries; they thus inherited the equally professional labors of the Oratorian priest Richard Simon (1638–1712) and the Anglican bishop Robert Lowth (1710–1787) among many others. It is true however that they began the process of introducing the sounder results of the method into the textbooks (introductions to the Bible) for use in the theological faculties. The integration of the method into the life of the church began with them.

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Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Historical-Critical Method in Modern Biblical Studies
• Chapter 2: The Normativity of Scripture and Tradition in Recent Catholic Theology
• Chapter 3: Review of The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation
• Chapter 4: The Renewal of Biblical Studies in France 1934–54 as an Element in Theological Ressourcement
• Chapter 5: American Catholic New Testament Scholarship
• Chapter 6: The Dictatorship of Relativism and the Right to a Non-oppressive Public Religious Culture
• Chapter 7: The Dogma of the Prophetless Time in Judaism
• Chapter 8: New Testament between Scylla and Charybidis
• Chapter 9: Eschatology and the Quest for the Historical Jesus
• Chapter 10: The Adoration of the Magi
• Chapter 11: The Christian and the State in Acts and Paul (Acts 25:16 and Rom 13:1–7)
• Chapter 12: Apocalypse and Culture
• Chapter 13: Hakeldama, the Potter’s Field, and the Suicide of Judas (Matt 27:3–10; Acts 1:16–20)
• Chapter 14: A Woman’s Quest for Wisdom and the Adoration of the Magi as Part of Matthew’s Program of Solomonic Sapiential Messianism
• Chapter 15: Making Sense of the Matthean Genealogy
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations