Biblical Hermeneutics

Five Views

Stanley E. Porter, Beth M. Stovell, Stanley E. Porter, Beth M. Stovell

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780830839636
• eBook ISBN: 9780830869992
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In this Spectrum Multiview volume five experts in biblical hermeneutics gather to state and defend their approach to the discipline. Contributors include:

• Craig Blomberg with the historical-critical/grammatical approach
• Richard Gaffin with the redemptive-historical approach
• Scott Spencer with the literary/postmodern approach
• Robert Wall with the canonical approach
• Merold Westphal with the philosophical/theological approach

Spectrum Multiview Books offer a range of viewpoints on contested topics within Christianity, giving contributors the opportunity to present their position and also respond to others in this dynamic publishing format.

Part One:

Five Views of Biblical Hermeneutics

1

The Historical-Critical/Grammatical View

Craig L. Blomberg

It is my task in this essay to describe a “historical-critical/grammatical” position, but such a description is by no means straightforward. On the one hand, some would describe the “historical-critical method” as a method founded on Ernst Troeltsch’s three principles of criticism, analogy and correlation. The principle of criticism, also known as methodological doubt, affirms that the study of history arrives at only probable, never indisputable, conclusions. The principle of analogy highlights the similarities among historical events and postulates that nothing can happen that hasn’t already had an analogy somewhere in history. The principle of correlation argues for a closed continuum of cause and effect in a naturalist universe, excluding the possibility of the supernatural and therefore of God, as traditionally conceived.[1]

The grammatico-historical method, on the other hand, refers to studying the biblical text, or any other text, in its original historical context, and seeking the meaning its author(s) most likely intended for its original audience(s) or addressees based on the grammar and syntax.[2] The grammatico-historical method does not adjudicate on what can or cannot happen in history; indeed, its purpose is not one of critique but of interpretation. Believers with a high view of Scripture will presumably want to respond to a grammatico-historical interpretation of a biblical text by seeking to apply it in methodologically responsible ways to their contemporary lives and world. They will look for examples to imitate, commands to obey, promises to claim, dangers to avoid, truths to believe, and praises or prayers to offer to God.[3]

Thus anyone describing a “historical-critical/grammatical” approach must carefully articulate what it includes and does not include, particularly in light of the other positions presented in this volume. Toward this end, it is helpful to address the broader taxonomies of hermeneutics possible and place this approach among them. Various taxonomies of hermeneutical methods today divide higher criticism into three broad categories: historical, theological and literary approaches.[4] My mandate is to discuss the importance of the historical group of hermeneutical methods. This does not mean that I reject theological and literary analyses; indeed, I find them crucial. However, they can be engaged in legitimately only when built on the appropriate historical foundations. Readers, then, who are looking for a polemical “either-or-or-or-or” approach from me to the five approaches discussed in this volume will be disappointed. What they will discover instead is an appreciative “both-and-and-and-and” position. However, if any of the other contributors should wish to make their approach the foundational one (or, worse still, the only one), then we will have some interesting disagreement, because I am convinced that all of the other approaches must build on the historical-critical/grammatical approach in order to function legitimately.[5]

Lower Criticism vs. Higher Criticism

Analysis of ancient documents has typically distinguished between lower criticism and higher criticism. Lower criticism is synonymous with textual criticism and refers to the exercise of collating all known manuscripts of an ancient work to see if there are any differences in wording among the manuscripts that scribal copying produced and then using established principles to determine which text, if any, most likely preserves the original reading at each point where there are differences. The results of these individual decisions are then combined to produce a document that comes as close as possible to reflecting what the lost original most likely contained from start to finish. The more independent copies of a given text that we have, the fewer the number of differences among those copies, the more minor the nature of those differences, and the closer to the original that the existing manuscripts can be dated, the greater the degree of confidence we have that we have closely approximated the original document.[6]

Obviously, lower or textual criticism has to be foundational, even among the historical methods. If we lack the confidence that we have anything close to what an original document contained, there is little point in engaging in theological or literary analyses except to shed light on what a group of people at one given time or place in the past may have believed about a text and their resulting application of it. Christians who are looking for a normative Bible from which to derive theology that makes a difference in their lives today will be interested only in that which is highly likely to approximate closely the original words that they believe God guided the biblical authors and editors to write. To the extent that part of literary criticism analyzes the establishment of a collection of authoritative books[7]—one of the objects of study of canon or canonical criticism in particular—then textual criticism is foundational for literary study as well.

The Principles of This Position

Historical criticism as historical-cultural analysis. If the historical-critical method imposes an antisupernaturalist worldview onto the interpretation of texts, then one might expect a historical-critical/grammatical method to do so as well, while simply adding a study of grammar. Rather, by historical-critical, some scholars refer to the study of “the history behind the text.” Scholars will sometimes distinguish the two enterprises by referring to this latter task not as historical-critical but as “historical criticism” or simply “historical analysis” or “historical background.”[8] With the booming industry of the social-scientific criticism of Scripture—understanding the sociological and anthropological values and customs of a given culture in which a text is written—it is probably worth adding another word to our descriptor and speaking of “historical-cultural” analysis.

At one level, this involves little more than what historians and interpreters have agreed on or intuited for centuries. The better one wants to understand any communicative act, the more one needs to know who spoke or wrote it, when, where and under what circumstances. If it is possible to recover or surmise the original addressees, one can discern even further limits on possible meanings.[9] It is very unlikely that the originally intended meaning of the message, whether written or oral, could be something that an original audience couldn’t possibly have conceived.[10] The same is true with cultural analysis. Unless contemporary interpreters of ancient texts consciously remind themselves that they are reading documents from very different cultures, they can envision all too easily the activities those texts depict as if they were taking place today, or at least they may evaluate the thoughts and motives of individuals from other cultures by anachronistic, modern analogies.[11]

One objection put forward against historical approaches has come from twentieth-century hermeneutical conversations concerning “the intentional fallacy”—the inability of interpreters to recover the mental actions of dead speakers or writers.[12] Critics argue that all we have to interpret is the text an author left behind. However, with documents for which we have reason to believe that communicative intentions were largely successful, this proves much less of a problem. What is described as discerning “authorial intent,” moreover, is often really shorthand for discerning the most likely meaning of a given text in light of all that we can recover about its original author(s), audience(s) and the historical and cultural milieus in which they lived.[13] We are not seeking irrecoverable mental processes. Rather, we seek what has been disclosed of those processes by virtue of the very texts still in existence, along with any additional information we may have about the circumstances surrounding the production of those texts.

More complicated is the question of a “fuller meaning” that goes beyond an author’s historical intention but which remains consistent with it. Speakers and writers have regularly had the experience of receiving feedback from addressees along the lines of, “It seems to me from what you have said that you intend . . . [or “you mean . . .”],” when in fact what comes next is something the speaker or writer had never thought of at all. But upon reflection one can reply, “I see where you get that from and I think I’d be happy to affirm that.”[14] This forms still one more dimension of historical criticism, though it can overlap with theological or literary analysis. It examines a reader’s response, but it is an authorial reader’s response—the intended audience’s interpretation. This phenomenon proves especially important when we assess New Testament authors’ use of Old Testament texts.[15]

Historical criticism as tradition-critical analysis. Biblical cultures and modern cultures differ in their production of texts. With the advent of the printing press, the production of written documents became dramatically simplified; in the digital age, it has become easier still. In contrast, in the biblical cultures, writing materials were costly, scrolls were cumbersome, and even some fairly bright and well-born individuals were not skilled at reading or writing.[16] Thus writers might memorize an outline in considerable detail of what they wanted to say before beginning to dictate to their scribes.[17] Ancient orators might commit to memory the entire wording of a lengthy speech before delivering it, so that the contents and the desired effects would be as precise as possible.[18] In short, the biblical cultures were oral cultures.

What this meant for the production of historical and biographical literature, which constitutes almost half of Scripture, was that groups of people who particularly valued the preservation of accounts of the people’s lives and events important to them would commit to memory narratives of the significant teachings or actions of those individuals and their times. The more sacred or valuable the narratives became, the greater the care taken in their preservation. Yet, as long as stories and traditions circulated entirely by word of mouth, they could be retold with a fair amount of flexibility. Any given public recitation could abbreviate, omit, explain, expand, paraphrase, interpret and highlight as the speaker saw fit. Still, there were fixed points, known to the audiences, that had to be told certain ways, and it was the right and responsibility of the listeners to interrupt and correct a speaker if these fixed points were left out or not recounted accurately.[19]

For the most part, disciples of ancient philosophers or rabbis did not take notes but memorized their masters’ words. Nevertheless, various forms of ancient shorthand did develop, while students did sometimes write down some of their teachers’ words after a given period of instruction.[20] As time elapsed, collections of such teachings might be committed to writing. A significant majority of ancient histories or biographies refer to earlier written sources, now lost, as well as to oral tradition or eyewitness interviews, as the backdrop for their compilations.[21] It is a modern myth that the ancients were seldom concerned with historical accuracy in the narratives they compiled or that they could not distinguish between fact and fiction the way we do. Of course the Mediterranean world of old had writers who were either unable or unwilling to write accurate history, just as we do. However, people understood the difference between good and bad history, had established criteria for distinguishing between fact and fiction, and recognized a time and place for each genre.[22]

A bigger difference between ancient and modern historiography involves ideological spin. The idea of preserving a dispassionate chronicle of events for posterity—with no necessary lessons to be learned from it—is largely a modern invention.[23] But deriving morals, supporting a political or religious viewpoint or improving society as purposes for history (or biography) writing are not inherently related to the question of how accurately events are recounted. It is possible to be a poor chronicler with no particular ideological bias or a good chronicler who believes that there is a pattern to the events chronicled that supports a particular perspective. As modernity increasingly gives way to postmodernity, the whole notion of historiography for the sake of advocacy is again taking a large and deserved place at the scholarly table, as long as authors candidly acknowledge their presuppositions and the causes that they are supporting.[24]

This discussion thus sets the stage for a definition of the historical-critical/grammatical method that includes source, form, redaction and tradition criticism. Source, form and redaction criticism form a natural triad of disciplines that are often treated together.[25] This order of listing the three methods corresponds to the sequence in which each had its heyday in late-nineteenth- through late-twentieth-century scholarship. In terms of analyzing the composition of ancient documents, including biblical narratives, the chronological sequence in which to consider them is form, source and redaction criticism. Form criticism studies the period of time between the composition of the first written sources about a given individual(s) or event(s) and the occurrence of the original event(s) or life of the original individual(s). Source criticism then analyzes the written sources that were later utilized to produce the actual document being analyzed. Redaction criticism, finally, studies the theological or ideological distinctives that the final author(s) introduced into the text—both by what they added to their sources a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Five Views of Biblical Hermeneutics
• Part Two: Responses
• Interpreting Together
• Contributors
• Notes
• Name and Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Praise for Biblical Hermeneutics: Five Views
• About the Editors
• Spectrum Multiview Books from IVP Academic
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press