Historical Criticism - More Thoughts

As often happens, I received a very fascinating series of follow-up emails from DFB in response to my previous post on historical-critical method and the possibility of its eventual incorporation into 'faithful' exegesis. He sent this link to James Kugel's thoughts on the matter.

Kugel essentially says that criticism of the Bible and faith-based reading are methods that are irreconcilable with one another, and that faith commitments of scholars (or at the very least a felt need to reverence the Bible in some way) color their judgments, causing them to distort what the Bible actually says.

I agree with Kugel almost entirely. On the other hand, I would like to stand behind what I wrote two days ago, that discoveries from critical methods simply raise new areas of discord in the text, but that perceived discordance has traditionally been seen by Catholic commentators as a spur to further exploration and 'disputatio' in the sense of explaining what it all means (as distinct from what episodes in isolation mean or meant). In this context, I used the word 'harmonize' to describe what traditional commentators do. Having given this more thought, I should qualify or at least define what I mean by that.

I do not mean that commentators are necessarily aiming to display that different places in the Bible say the same thing on the literal level. This certainly has been done, and the gospel 'harmonies' are the best example of this. If Matthew tells us that Mary and Joseph lived in a 'house' in Bethlehem, then it must have been purchased after their sojourn their for the census (when they had to stay in the stable), to give an example. Personally, I don't believe that this sort of literal and historical harmonization is necessary to safeguard the Faith against the possibility of it being untrue.

But these narratives do need to be harmonized in the sense that they each carry a 'leitmotif' about the Incarnation that invites us into contemplation of the condescension of God's logos in human flesh. Harmony does not mean 'homology' in the sense that all parts of Scripture must say 'the same thing'. Part of the essence of Catholicism is what some call the 'both/and' approach (in contrast to the Kierkegaardian Either/Or). We hold in tension things that appear not to go together, but in light of the mystery of God can be understood as cohering. For example, the world is fallen and is a source of temptation, but Christ came into the world not to condemn but that it might be saved through him. Works are of no avail for salvation, and yet faith without works is lifeless. Jesus Christ is both God and man, inseparable and yet without confusion of natures. And so forth. Each datum must be inserted into the entirety of the mystery, where it finds its fullest meaning.

At times, apparent contradictions are simply left to stand as they are within the Tradition. This approach is not unlike the paradoxical koans of some Buddhist traditions. If enlightenment were something that we could grasp totally by our own reasoning, then we would not have needed Revelation and Tradition in the first place.

Because Tradition is a translation into human terms of mysteries that transcend any linguistic representation, the doctrine of the Church, while never 'changing' is always developing and filling out. Historical criticism of the Bible assists this process by drawing attention to tensions within the text that Tradition has not yet addressed. But the essence of the Tradition is not in the end dependent on human readings of the Bible, but on the teaching of the Holy Spirit in the Church. Scripture provides a touchstone, but the fullness of the Truth is the encounter with Jesus Christ, not the doctrinal structure that we can derive from Biblical witness.

I will end with an analogy, hopefully helpful to you.

Von Balthasar's saying that 'Truth is symphonic' can give us an idea of what it means to 'harmonize' ideas. The opening melody of Beethoven's Eroica: what does it mean? Plunked out on the piano, absent the orchestral substructure, it doesn't sound like much at all, but with the accompaniment, and following on the heels of two sharply sounded major chords to open the symphony, this melody sounds 'heroic'. It returns in other contexts and its meaning is altered subtly; it undergoes development and potentialities in it are demonstrated that we might not have imagined at the opening of the piece.

Finally, at the recapitulation, the horn plays this melody in the 'wrong place', four measures too early. Our heroic melody has become a kind of light-hearted spoof. Does this ruin the piece? Actually, for many lovers off Beethoven, it is the moment they cherish above all, precisely because we see that B was not an automaton, but an artist.

Our Creator God is an artist and a lover, not an author of systematic dogmatic treatises.

Is Historical Criticism Damaging to Faith?

This was a question that I was asked to explore a couple of years ago in This Rock magazine. The question was posed for me again this weekend, and it happens that I am re-reading Henri de Lubac's Medieval Exegesis right now and thinking about this difficulty. I won't bore you with the whole argument (again, I refer you to what I have written earlier), but I have this observation to share for today.

In a discussion of the evolution of the term disputatio from an explanation of a difficult point in the Scriptures into a debating point for scholastic theologians and philosophers, de Lubac notes that the goal of early exegesis was to tease out the harmony of the one Spirit and one Faith from what had the appearance of discordance.

"How many passages there were, it seemed, that were 'so different as to be mutually contradictory'! This being the case, it became necessary to show that their differences were not irreducibly 'discordant,' that in reality they were, according to the received formula, 'different but not contradictory'..." (M.E. p. 60)

Thus we have the intense work of allegorical interpretation to bring the meaning of the Old Testament into clear accord with the New, and the ancient genre of gospel 'harmonies'. While non-Christians (Celsus comes to mind) ridiculed the Scriptures for these discrepancies, in the Middle Ages, this was seen as:

"An inexhaustible stimulant to thought: 'There is no discordant note in the way these matters are worded, but our intellectual enthusiasm for researching them is kindled, just as if they were in fact discordant' [Julian of Toledo]." (ibid.)

Now at first glance, the methodology of historical criticism seems to be flatly opposed to this process of harmonization. In particular, source criticism--the technique of examining postulated pre-existent sources behind the final editing of the book we have now--is based almost entirely on discerning contradictions in the text and using them as evidence of two or more sources. Most famously, the two 'different' creation narratives in Genesis 1 and 2 are taken as coming from the Priestly source (chapter 1) and the Jahwist source (chapter 2). More problematic, and from this same impulse, is the effort to determine the ipsissima verba, the most verifiably true statements of the Jesus of history. How would we, at 2000 years distance, know that there are things in the gospels that Jesus did not actually say? We would look for sayings that seemed not to harmonize with what happened, plausibly, in Jesus' lifetime. Perhaps the most famous example in this case is Matthew 18: 15-20, in which the Lord says that if a sinner refuses to listen to two or three witnesses, "tell it to the church." Now, say those who are looking for sources other than the Lord, surely the church did not yet exist, and (crucially) Jesus 'must not have intended' to found a church, and so this must be an example of the early church shoring up its authority by a post-resurrection appeal to Jesus.

In any case, the enterprise rests on an effort to tease out more discordance.

These efforts can easily lead to a frame of mind in which one is habitually skeptical about the coherence of the Biblical witness, and I think that the Church has rightly warned about the dangers of this method. I wouldn't offer this sort of scholarship to persons who are wavering in faith (or whose faith is simple), nor I dare say, is this the sort of scholarship that prepares one to preach, unless it be supplemented by the work that de Lubac is highlighting, the work of demonstrating the truth of the Faith, which implies its coherence.

That said, might it not be possible that the enterprise of historical criticism might not ultimately lead, in Julian of Toledo's words to new apparent discords so that 'our intellectual enthusiasm for researching them is kindled, just as if they were in fact discordant'? If the more obvious difficulties present in Scripture served as a spur to the great Fathers like Origen, Jerome and Augustine to practice ingenious spiritual exegesis, might not the new difficulties produced by honest scholarly effort lead to a new generation of great spiritual exegetes?