Lecture Twelve
Theology and the Challenge of History
Scope:
Some Enlightenment thinkers had questioned whether historical events — such as miracles — could help prove the claims of religion; others had begun to study the Bible as a historical document. But with the turn to history in the 19th century, led by Hegel, historical consciousness came to dominate Western intellectual culture, thus raising a new set of challenges for religious thinkers. Foremost among these was the emergence of the historical-critical method of studying the Bible as a human, historically constructed text. This approach to sacred texts raised questions about traditional ways of understanding the authorship of the Bible, the history related in the Bible, and the importance of trying to identify the "historical Jesus" beneath or behind the gospel witnesses.
Outline
I. Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel created the framework for
religious thought in the 19th century, especially in two respects.
A. They set the terms for a theological paradigm, dominant in the 19th century and still important today, that has been called "liberal theology."
B. All three, but especially Hegel, bring a new historical consciousness to philosophy and religious thought.
C. We can tie this belief not only to philosophical and religious ideas but to events in the world.
II. Increasing historical consciousness, however, also made possible new challenges to the world views of Christians and Jews, especially once scholars began to apply historical methods to the examination of the Bible.
A. Some important historical questions about the Bible were being asked before the 19th century.
1. Scholars in the Renaissance had examined questions about the transmission and translation of biblical texts.
2. Theological conflicts between Protestants and Catholics had raised questions about the relation of the biblical text to the early Christian tradition.
3. Enlightenment thinkers, especially on the issue of miracles, had asked whether the Bible was an accurate historical witness.
B. In the 19th century, these kinds of questions came to seem more and more important for a few reasons.
1. Theological debates between Protestants and Catholics continued.
2. More important was the work of 18th-century scholars, such as J. G. Herder, who sought to examine the Bible just like any other historical text or artifact, by bracketing its claims to divine status and studying it as a product of human history.
3. This set the stage for the emergence of the historicalcritical study of the Bible.
III. Two examples serve to illustrate the kinds of challenges made possible by historical-critical study of the Bible.
A. The first involves the study of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, traditionally ascribed to Moses.
1. As scholars began to examine these texts in the original Hebrew, of course they noticed that God is referred to by different names that seemed to correlate with distinct styles of writing.
2. In 1805, the German scholar de Witte argued that the book of Deuteronomy could not have been written before the 7th century B.C.E., that is, five centuries or more after Moses was supposed to have lived.
3. In 1883, Julius Wellhausen put forward the "documentary hypothesis," which argued that the books of the Pentateuch, including Genesis, were constituted by four different sources, woven together, all of them later than Moses.
4. He argued that the detailed laws found in Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Numbers date from after 500 B.C.E.
B. In 1835, a German scholar named David Strauss published The Life of Jesus, in which he argued that careful study of the New Testament reveals little if any evidence that Jesus was divine.
1. Strauss argued that the people who wrote the Bible thought in mythical rather than historical terms and that when we separate myth from history in the Bible, we find little to support Christian doctrines of Jesus.
2. Following Hegel, Strauss argued that mythical language is what religion is all about,but that it does communicate a kind of truth: The Bible is true, but it is not historically true.
3. Strauss asked whether the New Testament could serve as historical evidence for the life of Jesus and questioned the historical context in which the text was written.
C. These examples reveal some basic characteristics of historical biblical criticism.
1. Literary and historical analysis of the language suggests that texts that appear in the Bible as unified narratives are, in fact, made up of distinct narrative threads that have been woven together.
2. It is possible to link the text or parts of the text to
historical periods and, in this way, shed light on those periods or use the knowledge of. those periods to shed light on the biblical texts.
3. It is possible to apply historical knowledge and philosophical ideas — for instance, Strauss's distinction between myth and history — to construct hypotheses and theories relating to the Bible.
D. These examples also show why this approach to the Bible was so controversial.
1. It challenged basic claims made by Christians and Jews.
2. It made it easier to treat the Bible as a human book and, thus, to treat religion and history as a human, rather than a divine, phenomenon.
Suggested Reading:
Strauss and Eliot, The Life of Jesus CriticaIIy Examined. Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century.
Questions to Consider:
1. What are some of the main historical questions scholars pose to biblical texts?
2. What does Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis suggest about the way in which the Hebrew Bible was created?
Lecture Twelve — Transcript Theology and the Challenge of History
Over the last few lectures — as we have discussed Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, in addition to Pietism and Romanticism — I've been laying the groundwork for considering the religious thought of the 19th century. Of special importance, consider how: Kant defines the limits of reason and makes room for rational faith in God; Schleiermacher defines piety, which he considers to be a general human capacity in terms of feeling, and experience, and an immediate connection with the infinite. Finally, keep in mind how Hegel argues for the rational apprehension of God and the whole of reality as a historical process of the divine and the human coming to self-consciousness. Each of these thinkers contributes a new understanding of faith to our consideration of faith and suspicion, but together they lay the groundwork for one of the dominant theological paradigms of the 19th century, one that is still important today — liberal theology.
Liberal theology is largely an apologetic effort to show how Christian thought not only can accept modern views of reason and human life, but, in fact, that Christianity finds its most proper expression in modernity. A crucial strategy in this effort is to emphasize the humanness of religion, and Christianity in particular. As we see in Kant, religion is intimately related to human reason. In Schleiermacher, religion is an integral aspect of human experience, and in Hegel, God comes to self-consciousness through humanity. To some degree in all three thinkers, but especially in Hegel, Christianity — especially Protestantism — makes possible the consummation of religion and the convergence — the folding into one another—of religion, knowledge, and modern European state and society.
Recall that in the end of the last lecture, I talked about how Hegel divinizes the state. So, central to this idea of the consummation of religion was Hegel's focus on the development of religion and humanity in history, and this process coming to an end in 19thcentury Europe, essentially. Although both Kant and Schleiermacher took history more seriously than many Enlightenment thinkers did, Hegel, as we have seen, placed history at the center of his system not only making it integral to the way we know ourselves, the world, and God, but arguing that the process of history is a process of God coming to full self-consciousness. But in the early 19th century,
Hegel was not alone in stressing the importance of historical consciousness. One way to think about religious thought in the 19th century is to say that if "reason" was the watchword for the Enlightenment, "history" is the watchword for the 19th century. In this lecture, then, I want to consider the significance of this shift.
I'll first discuss briefly how the kind of developmental view expressed in Hegel's philosophy informs liberal theology. I'll then return to liberal theology in more depth in the next lecture. But the main point I want to make in this lecture is that the intensifying of historical consciousness we find in Hegel and others presented a new set of challenges to the defenders of religion — for it inspired the development of new historical methods and areas of inquiry, such as the critical study of the Bible or the theory of evolution, and these raised troubling new questions about revelation and religious authority. So, while historical consciousness shaped the liberal theological paradigm, it also raised new challenges for those who argued for the compatibility of religion and modernity.
I indicated early in these lectures that one of the hallmarks of modern consciousness is the idea of progress. Throughout the Middle Ages, and especially before the Renaissance, most intellectuals and cultural authorities agreed that the best of human civilization was in the past — and that, therefore, the voice of tradition was the best and most: authoritative guide to human affairs. Modern thinkers, however, were suspicious of tradition and embraced the authority of reason. With this shift, Western intellectuals became more and more confident in the ability of human reason in the present to use reason to determine the truth, and they began to look to the future as an ever-expanding horizon of new possibilities and new achievements. That said, many Enlightenment thinkers were relatively "ahistorical" in their thinking. So, despite his belief in moral progress, for " instance, Kant believed he had discovered the universal and permanent structures of human thought. Though Schleiermacher argued for the superiority of Christianity, this was not a historical superiority — that is, Christianity did not, for him, represent the culmination of a human history of the development of religion. For Hegel, though, as we've seen, it was not just that the present was different from the past, but that the past had led to the present — that the past was constituted by a series of necessary stages that made the . present and future possible and that could be grasped and narrated by reason History for Hegel, in other words, was seen as a process of gradual and necessary development
Of course, Hegel did not leave much room for future development since he thought that with his own philosophical perspective, the histories of rationality and Spirit had been consummated — in this, he is not that different from Enlightenment thinkers. What they share is a sense that modern Western civilization marks the pinnacle of human achievement — and whether other civilizations are still mired in darkness of unreason or represent earlier stages of human development, Hegel and others saw the West as the model for humanity that all others should imitate. We can tie this belief not only to the philosophical and religious ideas we've been exploring here, but we can connect them also to events in the world. The French and American Revolutions of the last quarter of the 18th century introduce new conceptions of the rights of human beings and new forms of political organization that underlie Hegel's conviction that human society had been fully realized.
In the first half of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was well under way, and the promise of prosperity for many seemed very real. As we turn to the 19th century, we enter a period in which the colonial projects of the Western powers were at their height, and the ideas shared by intellectuals, politicians and missionaries that it is the duty of the West to export their culture and their religion was relatively uncontested. Of course we can and also point to the dark sides of these achievements: the reign of terror of the French Revolution the rapaciousness of colonialism, and the poverty and exploitation that were inherent to industrialism. But the fact remains that for those proclaiming that history had realized its goal, these problems were basically swept aside as we continued to progress beyond them, or at least as they thought we would continue to progress beyond them. As we'll see in the next lecture the history of humanity and the history of religion together find their goal in 19th century European culture and Christianity becomes a central point of the liberal theological tradition.
In summary, then, many of the leading intellectual figures of the 19th century, religious and non-religious alike, were full of confidence about humanity and about its future. But as I’ve indicated, questions of history will also challenge these thinkers, and I want to spend the rest of this lecture explaining why — especially with reference to questions of religious traditions and the Bible. Some of these questions of history were not new to the 19th century, but, in fact, go back as far as the Renaissance. So let me begin with some of these starting with the Renaissance.
One of the achievements of the Renaissance was to devote renewed attention to classical ideas and texts from Greek and Roman antiquity. As part of this process, scholars created and refined techniques for the careful study of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew texts. Latin, of course, was still at this time the scholarly language of Europe, but at the time of the Renaissance, learning in Greek and Hebrew — the original languages of the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, respectively — had been declining in the West for centuries. With this renewed attention to the texts and ideas of antiquity, came increased expertise—not only in issues of translation, but also in the careful study of how ancient texts were transmitted. This kind of expertise could be brought not only to the classical texts of antiquity, but also to the Bible, and it raised the following kinds of questions.
What happened when the Bible was translated from the Hebrew or the Greek originals to Latin? Did the Latin translations of the Vulgate, which was the official Latin translation of the Bible — did these capture all the nuances of the Greek perfectly, or did the meaning of certain words change slightly — or even a lot — in the process? Did texts retain their original shape and meaning after centuries of being copied by hand? Scholars in the Renaissance knew that in the centuries during which the Bible had to be copied by scribes, a range of variant biblical texts had been produced as a result not only of inadvertent errors of copying, but also sometimes the intentional addition or omission of passages. If, then, through this process, we have a number of ancient copies of a text, each slightly different from the other, how can one tell which is the oldest or which is the closest to the original? Scholars also were aware during the Renaissance that there was controversy over exactly which books of the Bible actually belonged to the canon.
Although we generally think of the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish Torah, as being the same as the Christian Old Testament, there were some books in the Hebrew Bible that were not in the Vulgate Old Testament, and there were some books included whose status had been debated. Even some of the books of the New Testament were disputed: When Martin Luther produced his German translation of the Bible, he relegated the book of Revelation to a kind of marginal status by placing it at the end of the Bible, without page numbers. Here, then, we have the study of history raising very fundamental questions: What, exactly, is the Bible? Which words are the right words? Which books are really part of the biblical canon — which are not? A second point, one that becomes important as a result of the Reformation and the split between Catholics and Protestants, might be expressed this way: What authority does the Bible have for Christians?
As I've pointed out, the Catholic Church claims two main theological authorities: the Bible and the Church tradition, which means the institutional authority of "apostolic succession" — the line of bishops as traced back to Christ's original disciples — and the theological authority of the Church Fathers and the early Church councils, such as the Council of Nicea in 325, which decided questions regarding the doctrine of the Trinity; and Chalcedon in 451, which decided questions regarding the doctrine of the humanity of Christ. So, the Catholic Church gives a lot of authority to these early decisions and these early creeds, Protestants, by contrast, significantly downplay the authority of Church tradition and generally recognize one main authority: the Bible, as we saw with Martin Luther and his idea of Sola Scriptura. This means that in debates between Catholics and Protestants, historical study of the period between the time the books of the Bible were written and the establishment of Church doctrines can be very important. Catholics tended to argue that if we examine closely the history of the early Church, we see that it developed its institutions and doctrines in a way that coheres very closely with the biblical vision. By contrast, Protestant study of history tended to show a kind of break between the Bible and the tradition — even to the point of claiming that the early Church misapplied and corrupted the biblical vision. Of course, since many of the books of the New Testament were not written until decades — even a century — after the life of Jesus, one can also ask historical questions of Catholics and Protestants alike about how well the books of the Bible represent the ministry and ideas of Jesus.
Finally, we should consider Enlightenment questions about the reliability of the Bible as a guide to history. As we have seen, for a thinker such as John Locke, biblical testimony regarding miracles such as Jesus turning water into wine — should be taken at face value, and these miracles, then, should be understood as attesting to the divinity of Christ. For others, though, such as Voltaire, belief in miracles is the kind of superstition that needs to be overcome in order for human beings to be able to embrace true — that is, natural religion. Hume asked to what extent should any historical witness compel us to believe something that our reason suggests cannot happen? He argued that reason forces us to side with our experience of the consistency of natural laws, rather than believe historical testimony that these laws have been overridden in some way. For him, it takes a miracle to believe in miracles.
More generally, we can consider the following kinds of issues. The Bible tells a story. It's one that is easy to read as a historical account of events from long ago — say, the Israelite conquest of Canaan and the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel. But how do we know we should read it as history? What did the writers of the Bible intend? Did they write it as history? What do we know about the historical context of these writers that might help us answer this question? If it was written as history, is it accurate history? From within the Bible, itself, it appears, and this has been supported by the tradition, that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible — and that followers of Jesus, eyewitnesses to his life, wrote the Gospels, the first four books of the New Testament. Does historical study support these claims?
As we approach the 19th century, these kinds of questions came to seem more and more important, and new ways of asking and answering them were being proposed. Theological assumptions and arguments, Protestant or Catholic, continued to inform biblical criticism (and they do to this day), but in the work of some scholars of the 18th century, perhaps most of all in the work on the Old Testament by the German scholar J. G. Herder in his book, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, a different approach, a more scholarly — that is, secular and scientific — approach to the history of the Bible had been developing. The basic question underlying this approach is this; If the study of history is the study of the causes and effects of natural phenomena or human actions, could we not explore just the human history of religious texts and traditions, putting aside — or bracketing as it were — any assumptions about the influence of the divine on these texts and traditions? Put more simply, can't we study the Bible from a historical perspective just like we would any other historical text?
These kinds of questions found a home in the universities of Europe — particularly in Germany — which were undergoing dramatic transformations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to reflect a more modern, secular vision of the role and purpose of research in the human and social sciences. With this, we enter the realm of what came to be called "the historical critical study of the Bible" — or "the higher criticism" — which in the 19th century produced some fascinating and illuminating findings and generated incredible controversy. I think the best way to talk about this approach to the Bible is to look at some of these findings and controversies. The first involves the study of the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch is the name given to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. I've already mentioned that we should not simply conflate the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament — for the most part, their content is the same, but they order these contents differently. Moreover, the idea of an Old Testament is a Christian idea, right? Jews do not think that their scripture has been superseded by something new.
However, both the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament do begin with the Pentateuch, and both describe the books in the Pentateuch as the books of Moses, because Moses traditionally has been considered to be their author. However, as scholars began to bring the resources of historical and linguistic analysis to these books — studying them in the original Hebrew, of course, and looking at the vocabulary and the style of writing — they noticed some things. For instance, they noticed that in different places, God is referred to by different names — in some places as Yahweh, and in some others as Elohim. Moreover, they noticed that these different names for God seemed to be correlated with different styles of writing and different geographical and political concerns. This led them to suspect that perhaps the writings that make up the Pentateuch were composed from different sources that at a later point in time had been woven together to produce the text of the Bible.
By itself, this would not necessarily preclude the idea that Moses had authored the books, for he may have borrowed already existing writings and incorporated them into a larger whole, as a kind of editor. However, in 1805, the German scholar W. M. L. de Witte argued that the book of Deuteronomy could not have been written before the 7 century B.C.E,— that is, at least five centuries or more after Moses was supposed to have lived. Even more ambitious and influential was the work of Julius Wellhausen, who — in a book entitled Prolegomena to the History of Israel (published in 1883) put forward what he called the "Documentary Hypothesis," and this Hypothesis claimed that the books of the Pentateuch, including Genesis, came from four different sources — all of them later than Moses. Examining these books from this perspective and making persuasive arguments that dated the different sources, Wellhausen then attempted to reconstruct the history of Israel to show that much of the Pentateuch—especially the detailed laws found in Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Numbers — date from after 500 B.C.E. This date is important. In 586 B.C.E., the Babylonians had conquered Jerusalem and had exiled many leading Jews to Babylonia. In turn, in 537, the Persians conquered the Babylonians and allowed Jews to return to Jerusalem, and there they rebuilt the Temple and — according to Wellhausen and many since — produced the Torah and the legal and religious framework of Judaism. This means, then, that Moses did not write the Pentateuch — and that we should be very careful about viewing the Bible as history. It also means that we should consider that Judaism does not really take shape until much later than reading the Bible as history would suggest.
The second area of biblical studies I want to discuss briefly is what has come to be called "the quest for the historical Jesus." Basically, the question in its original form is this; What can we know about the life of Jesus? Obviously, a primary question here is whether the New Testament Gospels give us a reliable historical account of his life. Today, as a result of critical study, historians generally agree that the New Testament Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which tell the story of the life and death of Jesus and are the first four books of the New Testament — were, in fact, written between 70 and 100 C.E.— that is, at least 40 years after the death of Jesus. These are basically the only sources we have for learning about the life of Jesus. There's no other real reference. I think there may be one or two very minor references to this person, Jesus, in other sources outside of the Bible, but nothing of substance. But if the Gospels are not eyewitness accounts, and if, as it seems, each one came out of a different context and has its own religious or theological agenda, the question is: What can they tell us about this historical figure? In 1835, a German scholar named David Strauss caused a sensation when he tried to address this question in his book, The Life of Jesus. The book immediately caused a controversy in Europe in large part because Strauss argued that careful study of the New Testament reveals that there is little — if any — historical support for the absolutely fundamental Christian idea that Jesus was divine. Strauss's main strategy in the book was to separate, invoking a number of well-articulated criteria, what he called the "mythical aspects" of the biblical text from the historical aspects. By "myth," Strauss did not mean simply false or fanciful stories, but rather he argued that if we think about the people of Jesus' time in their historical context, we should conclude that they experienced the world in mythical—rather than in scientific or historical—terms.
Indeed, and here we see the strong influence of Hegel on Strauss, he argues that mythical language is what religion is all about and that it does communicate truth — but that this is not cognitive, propositional truth, but figurative or imagistic truth. The Bible is true, he claimed, but it is not historically true — and this claim, not surprisingly, caused a scandal. After the book's publication, Strauss lost his teaching post at the University of Tubingen in Germany. Then, after a period of four years, it appeared that his academic exile was coming to an end. He was appointed to a position at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, but after protests that included a petition signed by 40,000 people — imagine that happening about an academic controversy today — 40,000 people signed this petition, and the Swiss government withdrew the appointment. Strauss never taught again. For many scholars, however, Strauss's findings were extremely influential, and though today scholars generally think that Strauss overemphasized the mythical elements of the New Testament, they acknowledge the importance of his efforts to apply the critical method in a radical way to the Gospels. Strauss showed the importance of thinking carefully about the extent to which the Gospels can serve as historical evidence for the life of Jesus, and he also showed the importance of examining the historical context in which these texts were written.
From these brief examples of biblical criticism, we can see a couple of basic things — first, the importance of close analysis of language within the biblical text. Literary and historical analysis of the language can suggest that texts that appear in the Bible as unified narratives are, in fact, made up of distinct narrative threads that have been woven together and into which sentences or longer passages have been inserted. These can be identified on the basis of different styles of writing and/or grammatical construction and vocabularies that historical work shows to be derived from different time periods. Second, it's possible to link the text or parts of the text to historical periods and, therefore, use the text to shed light on those periods — or use the knowledge of those periods to shed light on the texts. Third, it's possible to apply historical knowledge and philosophical ideas — for instance, Strauss's distinction between myth and history — to construct hypotheses and theories about both the history and the text. These are just some of the methods and ideas that were being developed by biblical critics during the first half of the 19th century — and from these examples we can also begin to see why, in the 19th century, biblical criticism becomes so controversial.
I'll talk about this in more detail in the next couple of lectures, but let me just make a few basic points here. As I've noted, for Catholics, and Protestants, and Jews, the Bible is the Word of God. It' s certainly possible to study the Bible using historical critical methods and still believe that it is the Word of God, but it's also clear that these methods can challenge certain ways of thinking about what that might mean. For instance, if the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but only centuries later, what does this mean for thinking about the Pentateuch as offering a true history of God's creation, and the Exodus, and the earliest religion of the Jews? Does the Bible offer an accurate picture of what happened to the Jews in Egypt or of the sources of Jewish law — or is what we find in the Pentateuch actually a reconstruction of events or simply a story about those events told centuries later? Perhaps even more problematic were the possible contradictions between the distinct religious visions that scholars were identifying in the texts of the Old Testament and the New Testament. Was God revealing himself in different ways in different times and places? Was it possible to make all of these cohere in a consistent theology or knowledge of God? Finally, biblical criticism brings us up against the question of naturalism that is, the idea that the biblical texts, and by extension other religious phenomena, can be explained simply in natural, historical terms in the same way that other forms of human literature and culture are explained. Again, this is not a necessary conclusion, for one can apply what we might call "methodological naturalism" to the biblical text — that is, we can examine it as if it were the product only of human actions and ideas for the historical knowledge that this might provide — but the more one does this, the more the idea that the Bible is only human, all too human, becomes a live possibility. Even more radically, once historians start looking at what we call "empirical history" — once, that is, they begin to question the overarching narratives we find in the Bible or in Church accounts of the tradition — once we start looking carefully and closely at history on the ground — once we start looking, for example, at the early debates over what should be included in the Christian Bible or over which doctrines the Church should agree on — we find that things are very messy and complicated. Then, it becomes very natural to wonder about the claim that God has arranged all of this — or is revealing all of this. The past suddenly becomes very messy and complex, and one might conclude that not only is God not involved, but that there is no intrinsic pattern, no real development at all, evident in this history.
These are the kinds of questions that would lead thinkers, such as Nietzsche, at the end of the 19th century to raise the specter of nihilism and to note how historical consciousness was undermining religious consciousness. However, as we shall see in the next lecture, there did remain many Christians who did not find this to be the case, and who were able to incorporate this historical consciousness into their religious vision.
