Always Means Never Meant
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash
Along with many other Old Testament teachers and scholars of my generation I was introduced early and thoroughly to historical critical perspectives as the only viable approach to the text. An historical perspective included both an adoption of the “assured results” of scholarship taken to be objective, and learning the methods practiced in this perspective. Attention to “the historical approach” includes two very different enterprises. On the one hand it concerned the actual “historicity” of events remembered in the text, for example, the date of the Exodus from Egypt. Historical critical study, aided by archaeology and the interplay of ancient Near Eastern texts has arrived at a near-consensus perspective on a “timeline” for the text, though it has been judged that nothing “historically reliable” can be dated before the tenth century BCE, or perhaps the eighth century. In the US this “recovery” of the past was led by the archaeological school of William Foxwell Albright at Johns Hopkins University and his learned students, including G. Ernest Wright and John Bright, whose A History of Israel provided a summary of the findings of the Albright school. (Only much later did Burke Long, Planting and Reaping Albright: Politics, Ideology, and Interpreting the Bible (1997), make the case that Albright himself was something of a fundamentalist who set out to “prove” the historicity of the biblical text). His approach (that has dominated US scholarship) was propelled by confidence in its investigative methods and conclusions.
On the other hand a very different project of historical criticism was the dating and sequencing of ancient texts that allowed for much more inventive perspectives. That approach, following a model of evolutionary development, culminated with The Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1885) by Julius Wellhausen. In that definitive book Wellhausen summarized the “documentary hypothesis” that, against the grain of the text itself, concluded the Priestly tradition that seemed to frame the early traditions of Israel was in fact quite late in its articulation. Thus the “literary history” of the Old Testament is very different from the attested historicity events, a tension and contest that became the primary project of scholarship.
While this perspective has continued to dominate the discipline, it is important to notice that there has always been a “minority report” that tilted in a more romantic direction (contra Wellhausen’s rationalism) represented by Johann Gottfried Herder in German scholarship, specified by Herman Gunkel with his formulation of “form criticism,” culminating in the US with “rhetorical criticism” in the venturesome work of my teacher, James Muilenburg. This alternative perspective, however, has had in great measure to accommodate the prior claims of historical criticism that have been widely accepted in US scholarship.
The effect of this twin preoccupation with the “history of events” and the “history of the literature” has placed the biblical text securely in the past as a remembered and treasured deposit from an earlier time. Such a perspective found it possible to study the “history” of ancient Israel without needing to pay any attention to the theological claims in the text. As a result, theological claims made for God as an actor in real history were beside the point, an argument given more-or-less pure articulation in the work of Philip R. Davies, In “Search of “Ancient Israel: A Study in Biblical Origins (1992).
This long German tradition of historical scholarship (that dominates the field and in which I was schooled) was less reductionist than in the US and was able to allow for some theological dimension, though Wellhausen himself made no such allowance. The possibility and problematic of such a reading is made clear in the assertion of Gerhard von Rad who himself had little interest in positivistic history:
In the last 150 years critical historical scholarship has constructed an impressively complete picture of the history of the people of Israel. As this process took shape, the old picture of Israel’s history which the Church had derived from and accepted from the Old Testament was bit by bit destroyed. On the other hand, it is just the most research into the Hexateuch that has proceeded to deal with the extremely complicated origin of the Old Testament’s picture of Jahweh’s saving history with Israel. Scholars are even beginning to allow a scientific standing of its own to the picture of her history which Israel herself drew, and to take it as something existing per se which, in the way it has been sketched, has to be taken into account as a central subject in our theological evaluation. Research in the Hexateuch has established that this picture is based on a few very old motifs around which subsequently have clustered in organic growth the immense number of freely circulating separate traditions. The basic motifs were already pronouncedly confessional in character, and so were the separate traditions, in part very old, which made the canvas so very large (Von Rad, Old Testament Theology I 106-107).
These two views of Israel’s tradition live in deep tension with each other:
These two pictures of Israel’s history lie before us—that of modern critical scholarship and that which the faith of Israel has constructed—and for the present, we must reconcile ourselves to both of them. It would be stupid to dispute the right of the one or the other to exist. It would superfluous to emphasize that each is the product of very different intellectual activities. The one is rational and “objective”; that is, with the aid of historical method and presupposing the similarity of all such historical occurrence, it constructs a critical picture of the history as it really was in Israel. It is clear that in the process this picture could not be restricted to a critical analysis of external historical events: it was bound to proceed to a critical investigation of the picture of Israel’s spiritual world, her religion, as well… Historical investigation searches for a critically assured minimum- the kerygmatic picture tends toward a theological maximum. The fact that these two views of Israel’s history are so divergent is one of the most serious burdens imposed today upon Biblical scholarship (ibid., 107-108).
Later on von Rad draws this conclusion:
But our final comment on it should not be that it is obviously an “unhistorical” picture, because what is in question here is a picture fashioned throughout by faith. Unlike any ordinary historical document, it does not have its centre in itself; it is intended to tell the beholder about Jahweh, that is, how Jahweh led his people and got himself glory (ibid. 302).
Von Rad contends for a two-sided portrayal of Israel’s memory. But historical criticism, to the contrary, largely eliminated any mention of YHWH as a real agent in Israel’s history, and so kept the articulation of YHWH inside the tradition and not as an agent of the tradition.
Such has been the propensity of scholarship since the rationalism of the eighteenth century and the evolutionism of the nineteenth century. This scholarship embodies immense learning and immense gains for our understanding of Israel’s history amid the ancient Near East. But when theological seminaries largely adopted such methods and perspectives, its graduates, most soon to be pastors and preachers, were left with an historical understanding that did not lend itself readily to proclamation. As a result more conservative interpreters opted for rigid, reductionist theological formulations, and more liberal interpreters looked elsewhere, outside the text, for homiletical resources. Thus the church was left with a text lacking in dynamism, unless the interpreter had courage and imagination to go beyond historical critical perspectives into less clearly defined but more attentively compelling interpretations. It is fair to say that most of us who taught historical criticism in seminaries in a variety of ways “cheated” in order to show students possible avenues of faithful, generative interpretation.
All of this history of the discipline came back to me as I reread The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (1968). In his chapter, “Disavowing Decolonization,” Fanon sees the force of colonialization that has rendered old folk memory and old folk practice as “inert.” In his commentary on Fanon, Anthony Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives (1999) sees that colonialization had reduced pre-colonial cultural forms to a state of petrification (171). Such cultural memories were placed safely in the past where they had no transformative power. But the liberation movements countered that colonization with fresh communitarian practices. Fanon celebrates the emergence of new storytelling practices:
The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and modernize the kinds of struggles which the stories evoke…The method of allusion is more and more widely used…Every time the storyteller relates a fresh episode to his public, he presides over a real invocation. The present is no longer turned in upon itself but spread out for all to see. The storyteller once more gives free rein to his imagination (The Wretched of the Earth, 240).
What was “inert” now carries new energy. Every telling of the old memory caused the memory to be recast in fresh ways that required suggestive allusion and that exercised daring imagination. The storytellers refused to leave the memory in the past, but insisted upon its potent contemporaneity.
The magical transformative power of the storyteller that Fanon has seen so clearly bears upon the church and its practice of its remembered past. When the church conformed to the dominant colonizing order, it will keep the biblical text as an artifact of the past. But when the church recovers its own voice and its own nerve, the biblical text may continue to surge out of the past with a generative forcefulness into the present. Thus we may be amazed that some preachers in the church, without access to critical study, can exhibit the memory and tradition with freedom and faithfulness. This seems to be the case especially among preachers who emerge from communities of suffering. It remains for the church, its preachers and teachers, to find the courage, freedom, and imagination to give the text full transformative power among us.
To be sure, such work requires trusting the old text in defiance of the reductionisms of historical criticism. This is exactly what has happened in liberation movements that let the text speak with its own contemporaneity. Thus for example, Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, writes of the matter persuasively:
So pharaonic oppression, deliverance, Sinai, and Canaan are still with us, powerful memories shaping our perceptions of the political world…
--first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;
--second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land;
--and third, that “the way to the land is through the wilderness. There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching (149).
More than imagination concerning the text, however, is the imagination to reframe and resituate our own life-context (the context of our preaching) as an arena where the old narrative, with its attestation of God, turns out to be a credible narration. Such reframing of our social reality requires a refusal of the dominant definitions of reality in order to see that our own life-world is one in which the Lord of goodness and of credible commands has sway.
It follows that the church is an arena for the decolonization of our knowledge and our reasoning. While the church wants and seeks to retain social respectability, there are limits to that respectability. Conversely, there is a real chance to assert the truth that defies and subverts our world of respectability. We defy that world of respectability whenever we sing the great hymns of the church that line out a very different world.
The extreme conclusion to which such a claim may be pressed—a claim to which I am drawn—is the judgment that some of the reported memories and claims in the biblical text are indeed without “historicity.” That is, perhaps they never happened. And perhaps such memories in ancient time took on meaning anyway. They function, as Erich Voegelin, Israel and Revelation: Order and History volume 1, 1956) saw long ago as “paradigmatic” models. They never “meant” in any past tense. They always have meaning now if they have any meaning at all. Thus for example, we do not have any access to the Exodus emancipation. But we do know about emancipatory movements that are under way in our present circumstance that defy conventional explanation. Mutatis mutandis, we do not and cannot know anything about the Easter resurrection of Jesus. But we do now witness many Easter resurrections that continue to occur in the life of the world before our very eyes.
Such awareness permits us to characterize the meeting of the church very differently. The church, whenever it meets, is a venue where the testimony of the text is quite present tense concerning an alternative world beyond that of the dominant powers. Thus for example, my friend Roger Greene, an Episcopal priest, leads a study group for the first time in the books of I and II Samuel. He reports that his congregants in this study have been bold to see in quite spectacular ways how it is that the ancient dispute over monarchy in I Samuel is indeed a dispute among us about socio-political power. His students did not need to know much about ancient history to grasp the powerful tension in the text, including attestation about the God who reluctantly allowed the emergence of royal power in the covenant community. Thus it is not necessary to locate a time in the past when the text “meant.” It is enough—more than enough—to see what it means in our here-and-now reading.
Such a capacity to resituate our lives before the text is a rich offer and an urgent possibility. The offer invites conservatives to be done with closed fixed formulation. The offer to liberals is to take the contemporaneity of the text with deep immediate seriousness as we stand before the Holy One who gives good gifts and makes reliable promises. The text “means” presently among us. That is why we properly conclude, “The word of God for the people of God.” This formulation affirms that the biblical text is not the lively “word of the Lord” for those who live outside of and apart from the assembly of the Lord. In that assembly we recognize that we are being addressed in a way that attests that the world is not fixed and closed, nor is it our property or possession. It is the wonder and the burden of ministry to be charged with the task of forming and leading a community that stands over, against, and outside of our conventional colonized world.
Wellhausen and his learned colleagues (including many of us) failed to recognize that they were “colonizing” the biblical text to the mode of German Wissenschaft. Albrightian archaeologists in the US also failed to see that they were colonizing their data to serve the requirements of positivistic certitude. All such practices of German Wissenschaft or American archaeological positivism could not give standing ground from which to refuse the dominant socio-economic order. It is no wonder that the church’s ministry often failed to see that the Bible is variously emancipatory or disruptive, opening to us the reality of the Holy One who is beyond explanation or control. When we receive the text as emancipatory and subversive, we are denied all the certitudes we so much crave. In the assembly of the faithful with such a reading we are on our way in a different idiom—singing, praying, eating and drinking, affirming—in ways that befuddle the rulers of this age. We need not be colonized into dominant practices of fear, greed, and scarcity, precisely because we have a text that attests otherwise to the God who has the whole world in God’s hands! When we are able and willing to step outside such colonialization, we receive energy for transformative work that moves knowingly beyond our own self-interest
