Seminary - Story of Biblical Criticism 2

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6. Narrative criticism, as practiced by Bauer, treated biblical narratives as self-contained stories. [1] I would use this as a tool in my own doctoral dissertation. A story has the basic elements of events, characters, and settings. Together, these constitute plot. Plot is told from a certain point of view by a narrator. There is narrative time and there is story time.

I sense that narrative criticism was an attractive method to pursue for biblical PhD students coming out of the Free Methodist and Wesleyan world because it was an acceptable way to bracket questions of historicity. You didn't address questions of whether Matthew was historical. You took the story at face value and analyzed it.

The situation reminds me a little of what I heard about Bud Bence at Candler in the 70s, I believe. He was told that he could not study Wesley as part of a theology PhD, because obviously Wesley was wrong. Bence could only study Wesley as a church history PhD.

So it was that biblical studies students could study biblical narratives and take them at face value because they were using a literary rather than a historical approach.

7. Narrative criticism came on the tails of a series of waves in biblical studies, waves that I learned somewhat about in Dr. Wang's New Testament History and Criticism class. As it often is, history is initially difficult for me because there are so many historical particulars and they almost never reduce to nice boxes. As an "NJ," I naturally do best with details that can be put into neat boxes. If I have the history somewhat in mind it is because I have revisited it.

The earliest ventures in modern biblical scholarship largely had to do with the text of the New Testament. This field is called textual criticism. I took a textual criticism course with Bob Lyon my second semester at Asbury. More to come.

In the late 1700s and 1800s, the Enlightenment began to ask its questions of the Bible. In the 1770s, the musings of a man named Reimarus were posthumously published in which he noted that Jesus seemed to say he would come back in a generation but didn't. In 1835, at the age of 33, David Strauss did not wait until he was dead to publish The Life of Jesus. He would never find thereafter a stable teaching position.

His book marks a turning point in the study of Jesus, not because it was particularly good. During my England days I read N. T. Wright's added chapter to Stephen Neill's The Interpretation of the New Testament in which he flogs Strauss for his kindergartenish sense of what a myth is.

However, Strauss raised the question that currently haunts the Lord-Liar-Lunatic argument of Lewis and McDowell. Up to Strauss, skeptics more or less accepted the events of the biblical accounts but explained them differently. So someone may have accepted that people unexpectedly had bread and fish, but really the problem was that others had food and weren't sharing. Or Jesus appeared to rise from the dead but really he was only mostly dead in good Princess Bride fashion.

These were all things I was first exposed to in Dr. Wang's class.

8. The late 1800s and early 1900s saw a gradual unraveling of confidence in the historicity of the biblical stories. The Gospel of John was first to go. It was just too different from the "synoptics" (Matthew, Mark, and Luke, so called because they looked very similar next to each other). B. H. Streeter laid out the four source hypothesis behind the synoptics in 1924--Mark, Q, M, and L. [2]

This was the phase of "source criticism," which in both the Old and New Testaments sought to find written sources behind biblical texts. In the Gospels, it was these. In the Old Testament, there was J E D and P explored behind the Pentateuch.

I've already mentioned William Wrede, who in his 1901 book on Mark, The Messianic Secret argued that Jesus never even claimed to be the Jewish Messiah. In Mark, only the demons really seem to understand that Jesus is the Messiah. And of course Wrede didn't believe in demons.

So Wrede supposes that Mark just made it up. How do you make someone a Messiah who didn't ever claim to be a Messiah, Wrede asked. Why you have it be a secret.

Exploration of written sources soon blurred into exploration of the oral traditions behind them. This phase was called "form criticism." It seems to me that there was a lot of misunderstanding of such things. Recent decades have seen much more informed explorations. It started with Walter Ong's, Orality and Literacy, which Wayne Goodwin exposed me to in my leadership class at Asbury. Works by Dale Allison and Jimmy Dunn also are much more sophisticated.

The culmination of this "first quest for the historical Jesus" was Albert Schweitzer's 1906 depiction of the quest to figure out who Jesus really was. He basically concludes that he was a crazy prophet that we wouldn't really recognize if we met him. Looking back, this was pretty much the end of the first quest.

For a time, Barth and Bultmann would rule the day with their neo-orthodoxy. For Barth, history wasn't what was important. Apologetics is exactly the wrong direction. We simply need to believe in the dogmatic truths about the Word of God, Jesus. Bultmann in a different way said that the Jesus of history was not important. He is prolegomena to Christian faith. What we need to do is demythologize the New Testament. It is really about finding authentic existence by an existentialist leap of faith, like a Jesus rising from the dead.

9. I mentioned that I took a course on Barth at Asbury with Steve Seamands. Barth seemed to be the flavor of the day. He certainly was at Princeton, and John Drury would end up doing his doctoral work on him. When I was there Lawson Stone seemed enamored with him, but that may have been a brief phase.

There were several things I found attractive about Barth. As a Wesleyan who was used to spiritualized readings of Scripture, I found the idea of the Bible becoming the word of God attractive. In my own categories, this was like when the Holy Spirit spoke to you through the words of the Bible or, as a Pentecostal might say, when you received a word of knowledge while reading the Bible. Somehow I doubt Barth meant it to be quite so non-intellectual.

I deeply appreciated his clarification that Jesus is the Word of God par excellence. The Bible gives witness to Jesus, and preaching gives witness to Jesus through the witness of Scripture. It seems to me quite impossible to deny this theologically John 1:14 is not talking about the Bible but about Jesus. Still, I have heard some fundamentalists warn about those who say Jesus is the true word of God.

What over time I decided I didn't like was Barth's rejection of all evidentiary reasoning when it comes to truths of this sort. It is no coincidence that his great work is the Dogmatics. When something is dogmatic, it is not up for debate or discussion. It is not derived by inductive reasoning. It just hangs there in thin air, an assumption to believe, and other things are deduced therefrom.

Let's just say I have intellectual sympathies for Brunner and Niebuhr.

For me, faith is reasonable. It does not "demand" a verdict necessarily, but it is not irrational. It is not Tertullian's "I believe because it is absurd." It is not Kierkegaard's blind leap of faith. It is more along the lines of Pascal's fuzzy sense of things. If you have faith it makes sense, but there is enough room for doubt that the person without faith can conclude otherwise.

I have come to see Barth and post-liberalism as giving up on the rationality of faith. It's like they gave up on trying to make sense of faith in the light of reason and just said that reason isn't what it's all about. It's just something you believe. I've wondered if there is some Reformed theology hiding here. If you are predestined, you will see it, so there's no need for proof.

10. It was after World War II that one of Bultmann's pupils, Ernst Kasemann, revived the quest, starting the so called new quest for the historical Jesus. The New Quest had rigid criteria so that only the most likely of sayings of Jesus made it through the process. [3] One key one was the criterion of dissimilarity. If a saying of Jesus did not fit well either with Judaism or Christianity, Jesus probably said it.

The problem here is that Jesus was a Jew and Christianity came out of him. So most of what he said is likely to stand somewhere on a continuum between both. Wright thus speaks of "double similarity." I slipped over to a conference at Dayton once (at United Seminary) where most of the criteria of such quests were deconstructed.

Somewhere in the 1960s there was a turn away from breaking the Gospels apart to how they were put together. Redaction criticism still looked at sources, but it looked at how the Gospel writers had edited them. The focus was not on the atoms but on the molecules.

Then as I said, by the 80s, narrative criticism had given up look at the sources altogether and was looking at narratives as wholes. Biblical studies was always a few decades behind broader literary criticism. New criticism had given up on authorial intent some time before biblical studies hit narrative criticism. They spoke of something called "the intentional fallacy," meaning that the meaning of a literary work is not dependent on the intent of an author which, after all, is a matter of minds and thus out of reach.

I think the intentional fallacy is in part itself a fallacy, but biblical studies was riding a wave. That wave would lead first to reader-response criticism, where the meaning of a text really was a matter of the reader. Stanley Fish should be mentioned somewhere in here. Then of course we end with Derrida and deconstruction. All of this is laid out well in Stephen Moore's Literary Criticism of the Gospels, which I also read in the first year of my doctoral work.

11. Dr. Wang's class introduced me to this history, and Dr. Bauer helped me join the flow of literary criticism in process. My good friend and fellow teaching fellow Bill Patrick was also on top of such things. He was another person who always made me feel stupid. How did he always know what the latest book was? And he understood them all.

I would in the end accept both the idea of original meaning and the notion of the polyvalence of a text. Was not the basic idea of reader-response what happened when different people read the Bible and (unreflectively) ended up with their own interpretations? Couldn't the Holy Spirit use this?

Once as a professor at IWU, a group of students read Kevin Vanhoozer's, Is There a Meaning in This Text? with me, a title meant to echo Fish. It seemed to me that Vanhoozer softened as he wrote the book. I smiled to think that he was realizing it wasn't as simple as he might have thought when he started writing.

The idea of respecting an author by attending to his or her intended meaning seemed like a nice try, but no dice, a Hail Mary that really doesn't hold up in the end. If I want to twist the words of Shakespeare, it doesn't matter to him. He's dead. It's a book, not a person.

No one who knows me should doubt that the originally intended meaning is important to me. But a text can and will be taken in ways the author never intended--or would like. Paul Ricoeur put it best when he spoke of the autonomy of a text. Once it is uttered, an author no longer has control over its meaning.

I'll end today simply by saying that Asbury set me up well to understand hermeneutics on a deep level. There will be more to say on the topic before I am through.

[1] For a sense of this layer of biblical studies in the 80s, see Rhoads and Michie's Mark as Story as well as Mark Allen Powell's, What is Narrative Criticism? David Smith of IWU was once going to teach Mark at a Christian high school in Indianapolis to give some of its teachers continuing education. When they saw the title, Mark as Story, they cancelled because they took it to mean that Mark was not history. Let's just say that's not what the title means.

When I got to England, I found some people who were not practicing narrative criticism in a disciplined way. They were not bracketing the historical but let their sense of the history "infect" their interpretations of the story.

[2] Mark was written first. There was also a written collection of Jesus' sayings called Q (for Quelle, "source"). M and L represented unique source material for Matthew and Luke respectively.

[3] Wright's chapter in Neill also criticized the tendency of the earlier quests to focus only on sayings and not on events. Sayings are much more polyvalent and thus squishy. Q can be a canvas on which many Jesuses can be painted. The third quest, which Wright was part of, amended that mistake.