Theology, Politics, and Exegesis

Essays on the History of Modern Biblical Criticism

Jeffrey L. Morrow

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781532614927, 9781532614941
• eBook ISBN: 9781532614934
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Modern biblical scholars often view the methods they employ as objective and neutral, tracing the history of modern biblical scholarship to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this volume, Jeffrey Morrow examines some earlier, lesser known roots of modern biblical scholarship. He explores biblical scholarship from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries and then discusses its new place in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century where such scholarship would flourish. Far from merely an objective and neutral method, such scholarship was never without philosophical, theological, and political underpinnings. Morrow concludes the volume with a look at the separation of biblical studies from theology, using the example of Catholic moral theology in the twentieth century.

1

An Overview of the History of Biblical Criticism Prior to the Enlightenment

In this first chapter, I provide a brief overview of the history of biblical criticism prior to the eighteenth century. The chapter will be much briefer than the first chapter in my earlier Three Skeptics and the Bible, and it will not cover as broad a terrain, but it will help orient readers to prepare for the subsequent chapters in this volume. Here I follow the basic outline of Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker’s Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture 1300–1700.1 I rely on their work for the most part because it remains the most important work to date in the history of modern biblical scholarship. They show the ways in which the interpretation and the study of Scripture have been secularized over the course of centuries, sometimes inadvertently, but often for the express purpose of being redeployed as a political tool. The role of politics and philosophy has been addressed only rarely or briefly in surveys of biblical scholarship. Filling in that gap was one of the main purposes of my prior work, Three Skeptics and the Bible. I continue that work in this volume.

Hahn and Wiker’s more thorough treatment in Politicizing the Bible lucidly and eruditely demonstrates how various political concerns and undergirding philosophies shaped and guided the long process which led to the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation. They situate this process within historical, political, philosophical, and theological contexts, and through the biographies of the key figures, which prove so necessary for understanding this history. Moreover, they consider an expansive and often neglected period within the history of modern biblical criticism—namely, the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries. In this present volume, I take that history further, delving into the eighteenth, nineteenth, and even twentieth centuries.

I am in agreement with Hahn and Wiker’s overarching argument, articulated in their first chapter, “that the development of the historical–critical method in biblical studies is only fully intelligible as part of the more comprehensive project of secularization that occurred in the West over the last seven hundred years, and that the politicizing of the Bible was, in one way or another, essential to this project.”2 Hahn and Wiker’s work demonstrates that the historical-critical method has far deeper roots than is generally considered. Whereas scholars are accustomed to dating the historical-critical method of biblical studies to the nineteenth century, or perhaps the eighteenth century, they extend the genealogical tree back into the fourteenth century. The figures they examine, moreover, indicate the link between the roots of historical-criticism and modern politics. As we examine this history, what we discover is that the distinctiveness of modern historical biblical criticism is not the various scholarly tools of textual criticism, philology, archaeology, etc., but rather, “This union of tools with secularizing presuppositions.”3

Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham

Although, as I showed in Three Skeptics and the Bible,4 the roots of historical-criticism are even deeper than Hahn and Wiker’s volume would at first appear to indicate, we can pick up the story where they begin with Marsilius of Padua (1275 to 1342)5 and William of Ockham (1285 to 1347),6 both of whom argued for the subordination of the church to the state, through Averroist and nominalist philosophies respectively. The proximate context of these two figures is the Avignon Papacy and the Franciscan poverty debate,7 both of which are essential for understanding the historical and political background to their discussions of Scripture. This debate involved not only Pope John XXII (reigned from 1316 to 1334), but also Ludwig of Bavaria, who used the Franciscan poverty issue as a political means of attacking the papacy.8

Marsilius and Ockham found themselves right in the middle of these controversies, as they both came to reside under Ludwig’s protection...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: An Overview of the History of Biblical Criticism Prior to the Enlightenment
• Chapter 2: The Psalter and Seventeenth Century Politics
• Chapter 3: Faith, Reason, and Biblical Interpretation
• Chapter 4: Biblical Studies at the Enlightenment University
• Chapter 5: A Parting of the Ways
• Conclusion