Jon Levenson, Historical Criticism, and the Fate of the Enlightenment Project [Levenson, J.]

[Source: The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies, Chapter 5. Jon D. Levenson, 1993, 106-126]

Summary

Levenson looks at three problems with historical criticism:

1. Historicism undermines itself. It should recognise that, and stop pretending otherwise.
2. Historical criticism has wrongly monopolised biblical studies. It should make way for a plurality of methods.
3. Historical critics must explain the use of their work, but historical criticism, as a value-neutral discipline, is unable to explain why it is worthy studying. Historical critics must therefore explain the use of their study in other terms, such as its benefit for religious traditions.

1. Historicism undermines itself. It should recognise that, and stop pretending otherwise.

• To explain this, we’ll use the hermeneutics of suspicion as an analogy. It makes a good analogy, since, like historicism, it both undermines itself and tries to solve that problem by claiming that it is an inviolable universal. The hermeneutics of suspicion interprets the bible as mere ideology, as nothing more than a justification for political arrangements. Privileging their opinions over the material’s, its practioners assume that behind the text’s apparent meaning is hidden a political meaning that its writers did not perceive, and that this meaning is the real meaning of the text. Suspicious hermenuts have a problem though: we can suspect them back. What if, when the modern critic writes that ancient religious texts were really about power, he himself is really playing a political game? What if behind their writings lies a hidden political meaning that they do not perceive, and that is the real meaning of their writing? Suspicious hermeneuts answer that they sit outside the systems of politics, and have an all-seeing, universal perspective. They overcome the contradiction of their discipline by claiming that they are the norm by which all else is judged, and can never be in error.
• Historicism follows the same logic. Historicism asserts that all human thoughts and beliefs are historical, destined to perish and be superseded. Historicism has a problem, though: it is a human belief, so it too must be fleeting. To assert historicism is to doubt it. But historicists answer that historicism must be exempted from its own verdict because it is universal, inviolable, and transcends history. And so, like the suspicious hermeneuts, historicists makes their discipline uncontestable. This is ridiculous, and historicists must recognise that that they cannot sensibly make absolutes of their methods.

2. Historical criticism has wrongly monopolised biblical studies. It should make way for a plurality of methods.

2.1 In the Enlightenment, biblical studies sought to rid itself of divisive, monopolistic methods; but it has simply replaced the intolerance of religious beliefs with the arrogations of historicism.

• The structure of the academy reflects the structure of the Wesphalian state. At the time of the Thirty Years War, the public sphere was dominated by clashing and unyielding worldviews, unable to converse or to coexist without devastating violence. The Treaty of Westphalia ended the conflict, and to prevent future wars of religion, it ruled that religious convictions should be kept out of public life: state and church should be separated, and the latter relegated. In this new arrangement, being a citizen of your state is necessary and is your public identity, but associating with a religion is optional and must be done in private. This structure later became one of the crucial elements of the Enlightenment.
• As a child of the Enlightenment, Biblical studies has been arranged according to the same ideals. The academy is the state, scholars are the citizens, religious beliefs are unwelcome, and study is steered away from contentious matters, like ethics and theology, and towards historical criticism, a value-neutral subject matter that everyone can agree on. But historical criticism has become hegemonic, belittling other methods and deriding other areas of study.

2.2 Historical criticism’s monopoly of biblical studies is unjustified, and it must learn to accept a plurality of methods from different traditions. This is for two reasons.

• Firstly, historical criticism is a tradition, a community of interpretation, just like the church or the synagogue, and therefore is no more ‘objective’ than them. As an Enlightenment discipline, biblical studies intended to replace the biases and assumptions of religion with reason and pure, interpreted science. It thought itself neutral, able to produce knowledge that does not need any culture or tradition to validate it. But it’s actually a social group, and shares traits with other traditions.

• Like other traditions, it has assumptions, not all of which are self-evident: that the past is analogous to the present—at the very least, the same laws of nature prevail; that every event in history is dependent on causes, and has effects; that prior commitments should be distrusted; that skepticism should be part of one’s methodology.
• Like other traditions, it has social processes for validating knowledge, since knowledge has a social character. The academy validates knowledge not by papal bulls or excommunication, but through hiring, promoting and giving tenure, or through ignoring, criticising, withholding funding, or refusing to publish someone’s manuscript.
• Like other traditions, there is a correlation between the character of its social body and the nature of the knowledge it validates. In the past, most universities articulated the perspective of a Christian society, so they privileged the study of Christianity and minimised or misrepresented other religions. Today, universities suppose that religion is irrational, so they privilege the perspective of the irreligious outside observer, and minimise or belittle religious convictions. And tomorrow it will prefer and privilege another viewpoint.
• For comparison, take Child’s canonical method. It prefers certain interpretations and presumes a certain view of Christian faith, and those who do not take its view will not like it. But that’s no different from thoroughgoing historicism: it too corresponds to a particular community founded on discrete assumptions.
• Secondly, if recontextualisation is possible, then although the historical method is necessary, it is not sufficient. Something is recontextualised when it survives the culture in which it was produced, and means something in another context too. Canon is an example of this, since the texts of the canon have been taken from their original context and recontextualised into another: the bible. Recontextualisation can never wholly divorce the text from its original meaning: that’s why historical criticism is necessary, since it focuses on things in their original context. But unless historical critics want to claim that the bible did not deserve to survive that context, unless they think it means nothing today, they must accept that historical criticism should never be the only method we use. It must abandon its totalistic claims, it must make room for and learn to interact with other senses from other traditions, neither surrendering to them or demanding their surrender.
• Hence, historical criticism must neither demand that other traditions surrender to it, nor surrender to them. It must abandon its totalistic claims and must embrace a plurality of methods, learning to interact positively with them.

• A note on this: Scripture, like all texts, has multiple senses, some of available across community boundaries, others not. Marxist and protestant evangelical communities will share some methods, and have some methods that the other community cannot accept. So we must embrace pluralism, but we must do so without degenerating into relativism.

3. Historical critics must explain the use of their work, but historical criticism, as a value-neutral discipline, is unable to explain why it is worthy studying. Historical critics must therefore explain the use of their study in other terms, such as its benefit for religious traditions.

3.1. Historical critics need to explain the usefulness of their study. [Note: The following bulletpoints one continuous argument.]

• The humanities today understands that a normative claim informs every selection of subject matter, and demands that projects explain why they’re worthwhile.
• This is a problem for historical criticism because it cannot explain its own worth. Some subjects can make that explanation on their own terms: the subject of ethics can itself explain the value of considering how best to live. But because historical criticism is value-neutral, it cannot explain in its own terms why it is worth studying. It cannot even protest that its value to biblical traditions makes it worthwhile, as it does not attach any value to biblical traditions itself: As a neutral historical discipline, it distances itself from religious traditions, and reserves the right to interpret the bible against them; and as a merely historical discipline, it is concerned with the bible’s past, not its relevance, value or trans-historical message.
• A second reason this is a problem historical criticism that it can no longer presume society will think their study is important. Until recently, society, including the academy, generally took the bible’s message seriously, and historical critics hardly had to defend their work. Yet now that culture has become secular and multicultural, it has a lower view of the bible and of religious cultural traditions, and is increasingly demanding that they explain the worth of their study.
• Therefore historical critics must explain the worth of their study (the second problem), explaining things in a way that goes beyond the terms of historicism (the first problem). If their motivation is religious, that’s okay, but they need to be explicit that they rely on the values, influence and money of religious traditions. Secular motivations are okay too. Historicism is intrinsically secular, and secular practitioners will help their religious friends produce more honest history; but secular practitioners must not parasitically depend religious traditions: they must give a secular justification for studying the bible.
• If historical critics argue that they’re studying the Bible because it is significant for Western culture, they must explain why Western culture matters more than Indian or Indonesian culture.

3.2 This means that historical critics must also explain their choice of methodology etc.

• Historical critics must explain why they’re studying the canonical bible. The canon is a religious creation, so historical critics need to explain why they’re studying that, rather than, say, looking at all ANE documents. They also need to explain whether they will study the OT or the Tanakh, and if the former, whether they will credit christological claims, and if not, why not.
• Historical critics need to explain how their method, historicism, fits in with their motivations. If they’re motivated by religious values, they will need to explain whether an exclusive focus on historical criticism best helps them uphold those values.
• If the ‘ancillary disciplines’ (Syro-Palestinian archeology, or Northwest Semitic philology) want to stand alone, apart from biblical studies, they can no longer rely on their relevance to religious biblical interpretation. There may be good secular reasons why one should study Coptic over Hungarian; whatever they are, they need to be stated.