Historical Criticism’s Value for the Church

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We all know the scenario. Perhaps you have lived it. A student takes her first undergraduate or seminary Bible class eager to learn more about God’s Word, a text that has shaped the person she has become. But it doesn’t take long until she hears that Moses may not have written the Pentateuch. Not only that, but four or more sources may have contributed to the shape of the Pentateuch. From there we pile on analogous literature from the ancient Near East, the fact that the Bible records two heroes felling Goliath (1 Samuel 17; 2 Samuel 21:19), and let’s not start with the so-called “quest for the historical Jesus.” Such are classic examples of “historical criticism,” the scholarly look into the past behind the words of the Bible. The introduction of this discipline to the faithful has sparked a crisis in many a spiritual journey.

For many, these are faith-shattering moments. Founded on a modernist reading of the Bible as a historical sourcebook, the flimsy faith of such readings cannot withstand a mere introductory course on the Old or New Testament. But let’s get this out of the way quickly. The Bible has some of what we might call true “history writing,” and I have been a fierce defender of it in many places. But our brand of history writing with critical “autopsy” of historical events and evaluation of sources was in its nascent stages during the writing of Old Testament texts and is much more present in the New Testament (see Luke 1:1–4). As regards the whole of scripture, its primary intention is to tell us about God, the human condition, and how God relates to us. Historical accuracy is undeniably important in matters such as those confessed in the creeds. But there are several places in the scriptures in which historical accuracy is not of the utmost concern for the biblical authors.

For others affected by the introduction of historical criticism, this scenario requires a recalibration of sorts. Part of such reorienting in the past half century of biblical scholarship has been to note that historical questions like these do not matter. Rather than looking to the world behind the text– a world short of time machines we do not have access to–we should focus instead on the final form of the text. Popular approaches to reading the Bible have thus arisen from Robert Alter’s literary readings, Brevard Childs’s canonical approach, and Jamie Muilenburg’s rhetorical criticism. While historians have been spilling ink and grasping for tenure over whether David or Elhanan killed Goliath, final-form critics can ask questions on more certain foundations, such as, “What does the preservation of both of these stories tell us about how to read these as a part of a meta-story?” or “How do these two traditions shape the church?”

We cannot, and should not, undervalue these exegetical approaches for teaching and preaching in the church. I was largely formed in these approaches and have made ample use of them myself. They are exceedingly useful for the community that accepts the final form of the biblical text as authoritative for life in the church. If we agree that the words on the page are God-breathed, then they become the certainties around which we can order our communal life.

But despite these fresh modern approaches to reading the Bible, their presence has not derailed traditional historical criticism. Archaeologists, though their present aims are more sociological than Indiana-Jones-esque, continue to unearth and debate finds. Source and rhetorical critics argue over J, E, P, and D in the Old Testament, as well as Q in the New Testament. Comparativists, such as myself, try to understand how the Bible was shaped in light of ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman literature. 

And this is not only true for the descriptive task, but historical criticism occasionally finds its way into works of biblical theology. Even Alter, who otherwise ignores “excavative” approaches to interpretation (The Art of Biblical Narrative, 1981, 13-14), can be found arguing for Song of Solomon’s time of composition (The Art of Biblical Poetry, 1985, 185); and Leo G. Perdue, who writes about the “Collapse of History” as the dominant interpretive paradigm in biblical studies, concedes that historical criticism may still bear some usefulness for the church (The Collapse of History: Reconstructing Old Testament Theology, 1994, 4). It turns out the attraction for some scholars to find out “how it actually was” in the world behind the biblical text has been too strong to ignore.

This leads us to Leopold von Ranke. Ranke, who coined the phrase “how it actually was” and is widely seen as the father of modern historical study. He sought a rigorous method for historical study with an optimistic outlook toward determining what we could discover about past events and persons. His work inaugurated a modernist understanding of the past, followed in many areas of historical study, including that of the Bible.

Ranke has served as a bogeyman of sorts for final–form critics of the Bible. How can we know with certainty what happened in the past? Further, haven’t we learned the importance of interpretation since the victor always writes history anyway? Focusing on the pages of the text and the faithful responses the text has sparked seem like more certain foundations from which to begin the study of the Bible than a hypothetical past.

In sympathy for Ranke, it’s important to note his context. Ranke’s rallying cry was radical against the background of Romanticists who never let truth get in the way of a good story (Mark Day, The Philosophy of History, 2008, 5-9). Ranke was concerned, by contrast, that historians be fair to their historical subjects who could no longer speak for themselves. Proper historical study in the Rankean sense should place boundaries on what we can know about historical persons and events. Even though historical study often appears arrogant and omniscient, its intention is that of justice for fellow human beings who are no longer with us.

This is a noble aim and one that is not easily accomplished. Historians must operate in the realm of probability rather than certainty (Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 2017, 133). And it is easy to allow our biases to get in the way. This is why historical study is necessarily communal and should be intentionally diverse. The more perspectives willing and able to dig into and interpret the facts of the past, the greater the likelihood that truth-telling about “how it actually was” will be achieved.

So what does this have to do with the study of the Bible? In short, historical study of the Bible is necessary to understand how the faithful have interacted with God. Biblical historians have the task of recovering the lives and events of those who, made in the image of God like us, have experienced the work of God in the world like us. Although they sometimes obscure themselves in the text, we must acknowledge that real people in real times and real places wrote the books, and in many cases used the sources to compose the books of the Bible. Real people in real times and real places are described in the Bible. Historical criticism has value for the church in that it opens up a new world to understand those who engaged with God and were inspired by the Spirit to leave their records to us. 

That they may not have written history like we do should not dissuade us from doing history. It should rather open historical floodgates. If the Bible does not measure up to our modern historical standards, a good historian should ask why. Part of historical study is learning about the literary genres of the past and noting that the ancients did not always write history as we do. This is part and parcel of how we understand these historical actors and their ways. We should not always expect them to meet our expectations for history writing, though many times they do. My own research, for example, argues a redactor of 1–2 Kings used accurate historical sources to report deeds of past rulers in Israel and Judah. But the theological point at play is that we should try to meet these authors where they are to understand how they communicated about their experiences with God.

All of this is to urge that we need not be frightened to enter the world of Julius Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis or Albert Schweitzer’s quest for the historical Jesus. For one, they may be wrong and, if so, we are bound not to ignore their work. Second, these scholars and so many others who have inaugurated new historical questions about the Bible were not attempting to pry the Bible away from the church, but instead to be curious about the world of the Bible and those who lived in it. Although such studies may have taken unholy turns, we should not veer from their original intention, which is to try to understand that God was active in the lives of ancients as God still is today, even though the world of the ancients was different in so many other ways. 

In fact the unholy turns historical criticism has taken through the years may provide us common ground upon which to converse with non-believers about the scriptures. Although non-believers will often demur in conversations about theology, perhaps historical criticism is a place of shared dialogue between us.

I cannot leave this space without mentioning George Santayana’s famous dictum for historical study, namely that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (The Life of Reason or, The Phases of Human Progress, 2021, I:68). Even though Santayana was thoroughly secular, the most devout of prophets can affirm he was correct in this assessment. Still, I would like to give Christians one more rationale for studying the past that is not quite as myopic about bygone days as Santayana insinuates: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to forget God was there. 

A wise teacher of mine once reminded our Old Testament class that we shouldn’t think the people of the ancient world were somehow dumber than we are. In our contemporary world that often portrays the Bible as primitive mythology, historical study of the Bible drives us to see that the authors and characters of the Bible were no different than we are today, creatures made in God’s image, prone to sin, but redeemed by the actions of God in the world.

Drew S. Holland is Assistant Professor and Program Chair in Religion and Philosophy at the University of Tennessee Southern. He is also an elder in the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church.