How to avoid antiquarianism and self-congratulation

Alasdair MacIntyre's words about the value of the history of philosophy are equally true for the history of theology and biblical interpretation.

"It is important that we should, as far as it is possible, allow the history of philosophy to break down our present-day preconceptions, so that our too narrow views of what can and cannot be thought, said, and done are discarded in face of the record of what has been thought, said, and done. We have to steer between the danger of a dead antiquarianism, which enjoys the illusion that we can approach the past without preconceptions, and that other danger, so apparent in such philosophical historians as Aristotle and Hegel, of believing that the whole point of the past was that it should culminate with us. History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation."

Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century (2nd ed. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 4.

Higher Criticism and Winnie the Pooh

What happens when New Testament Form Criticism and Redaction Criticism are applied not to the New Testament but to Winnie the Pooh? The following excerpt is from Richard Bauckham's brilliant, unpublished lecture, "The Pooh Community" (the entire lecture is available on Richard Bauckham's home page).

"... The [Winnie the Pooh] stories afford us a fairly accurate view of some of the rivalries and disputes within the community. The stories are told very much from the perspective of Pooh and Piglet, who evidently represent the dominant group in the community - from which presumably the bulk of the literature originated, though here and there we may detect the hand of an author less favourable to the Pooh and Piglet group. The Pooh and Piglet group saw itself as central to the life of the community (remember that Piglet's house is located in the very centre of the forest), and the groups represented by other characters are accordingly marginalized. The figure of Owl, for example, surely represents the group of children who prided themselves on their intellectual achievements and aspired to status in the community on this basis. But the other children, certainly the Pooh and Piglet group, ridiculed them as swots. So throughout the stories the figure of Owl, with his pretentious learning and atrocious spelling, is portrayed as a figure of fun. Probably the Owl group, the swots, in their turn ridiculed the Pooh and Piglet group as ignorant and stupid: they used terms of mockery such as 'bear of very little brain.' Stories like the hunt for the Woozle, in which Pooh and Piglet appear at their silliest and most gullible, probably originated in the Owl group, which used them to lampoon the stupidity of the Pooh and Piglet group. But the final redactor, who favours the Pooh and Piglet group, has managed very skilfully to refunction all this material which was originally detrimental to the Pooh and Piglet group so that in the final form of the collection of stories it serves to portray Pooh and Piglet as oafishly lovable. In a paradoxical reversal of values, stupidity is elevated as deserving the community's admiration. We can still see the point where an anti-Pooh story has been transformed in this way into an extravagantly pro-Pooh story at the end of the story of the hunt for the Woozle. Pooh and Piglet, you remember, have managed to frighten themselves silly by walking round and round in circles and mistaking their own paw-prints for those of a steadily increasing number of unknown animals of Hostile Intent. Realizing his mistake, Pooh declares: 'I have been Foolish and Deluded, and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.' The original anti-Pooh story, told by the Owl faction, must have ended at that point. But the pro-Pooh narrator has added - we can easily see that it is an addition to the original story by the fact that it comes as a complete non sequitur - the following comment by Christopher Robin: "'You're the Best Bear in All the World," said Christopher Robin soothingly.'..."

Richard Bauckham, "The Pooh Community." Unpublished lecture.

The need for intellectual and scholarly skill

"God's Word is neither a human discovery nor a human invention; it is divinely disclosed truth. It requires all the intellectual and scholarly skill the student of Scripture can muster to determine what a given passage or book means, for the Word of God has been given to us in human words in non-English languages and in ancient historical situations. But when the message of Scripture has been understood, then the believer no longer sits in judgment upon its truth but lets its truth judge and control his life and thinking." 

George Eldon Ladd, A Commentary on the Revelation of John (1972), p. 296. 

Why did God leave difficulties on the surface of scripture?

If [the Bible] is, as we devoutly believe, the very source and measure of our religious faith, it seems impossible to insist too earnestly on the supreme importance of patience, candour and truthfulness in investigating every problem which it involves. The first steps towards the solution of a difficulty are the recognition of its existence and the determination of its extent. And, unless all past experience is worthless, the difficulties of the Bible are the most fruitful guides to its divine depths. It was said long since that 'God was pleased to leave the difficulties upon the surface of scripture, that men might be forced to look below the surface.'

Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901, Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, Bishop of Durham), The Bible in the Church (1864), p. x.

A Hermeneutics of Trust

"To read Scripture rightly we must trust the God who speaks through Scripture. As Schüssler Fiorenza rightly insists, this God is not a God of violence, not an abuser, not a deceiver. This God so passionately desires our safety and wholeness that he has given his own Son to die for us...

"What, then, of the hermeneutics of suspicion? Is all questioning to be excluded, all critical reading banished? Me genoito. Asking necessary and difficult questions is not to be equated with apistia. When we read Scripture through a hermeneutic of trust in God, we discover that we should indeed be suspicious: suspicious first of all of ourselves, because our own minds have been corrupted and shaped by the present evil age (Gal 1:4). Our minds must be transformed by grace, and that happens nowhere more powerfully than through reading Scripture receptively and trustingly with the aid of the Holy Spirit.

"Reading receptively and trustingly does not mean accepting everything in the text at face value, as Paul's own critical shifting of the Torah demonstrates. Cases may arise in which we must acknowledge internal tensions within Scripture that require us to choose guidance from one biblical witness and to reject another. Because the witness of Scripture itself is neither simple nor univocal, the hermeneutics of trust is necessarily a matter of faithful struggle to hear and discern....

"At the same time, we should be suspicious of the institutions that govern and shape interpretation. That means not only ecclesiastical institutions but also academic institutions. If our critical readings lead us away from trusting the grace of God in Jesus Christ, then something is amiss, and we would do well to interrogate the methods and presuppositions that taught us to distance ourselves arrogantly or fearfully from the text ...

"The real work of interpretation is to hear the text. We must consider how to read and teach Scripture in a way that opens up its message, a way that both models and fosters trust in God. So much of the ideological critique that currently dominates the academy fails to achieve these ends. Scripture is critiqued but never interpreted. The critic exposes but never exposits. Thus the word itself recedes into the background, and we are left talking only about the politics of interpretation, having lost the capacity to perform interpretations."

Richard Hays, Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scripture (Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 197-198.