354 - Symposium on Biblical Criticism

Symposium on Biblical Criticism

In a recent article in THEOLOGY TODAY, Paul S. Minear, the wellknown New Testament scholar and ecumenical churchman provoked some disturbing questions about the current state of biblical studies. Addressing teachers of religion in colleges, universities, seminaries, and divinity schools, he asked: "Will we, in the coming years, do our work primarily as a church vocation or as an academic profession?" The drift of the times, he noted, is definitely toward the academic study of religion. While this enhances the "profession" of the religious teacher, it obscures the "vocation" of the Christian scholar. The consequence is that the Bible is being taught not "from faith to faith" but as ancient literature to be studied by approved literary critical methods. (See "Ecumenical Theology-Profession or Vocation?" by Paul S. Minear, THEOLOGY TODAY, April,1976, pp.66-73.)

The problem is not so much with the critical methodology used by biblical scholars. Some in other critical disciplines (literature, art, music, drama, film) may think biblicists are too uncritical of their own apparatus. But most of us have no trouble choosing some form of literary criticism. The really big issue relates to the accountability of biblical criticism. In addition to questions about methodology, we must also ask what its purposes are and for whom it is intended.

Because we believe these matters deserve further attention, we invited the following interpreters to give their responses not only to Paul Minear's critique but to such leading questions as: (1) does biblical criticism tend to avoid the big, basic theological issues, (2) do you think biblical scholarship has any influence on theology and the church, (3) what is criticism's constructive role, (4) how is your own personal faith involved in your research, (5) where will biblical scholarship move next, and what contribution would you like to make?

The respondents were encouraged to pick up any aspect of the theme that appealed to them, but, with notable exceptions, there are few attempts to deal with the specific question about the professional-vocational dilemma of the Christian scholar today.

In some ways, the responses confirm the monopoly of acquired academic norms of criticism. Apparently, for many biblical scholars today the major issue is the refining of technique and the analysis of comparative views. For these, if not for others, there appears to be no crisis of faith for themselves, for their students, or for the ministry and the church. Although urged to prepare their responses in the form of a personal manifesto, if they so chose, it would be difficult to tell from some of the replies what the writer's personal motivation happened to

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be or what personal satisfaction is derived from the pursuit of biblical studies. Maybe this "subjective" approach seemed to them inappropriate.

In any case, whether personal commitment to the Christian faith is of any significance in biblical scholarship, we get hardly a clue from several of the otherwise competent responses. Whether biblical studies, as practiced in seminaries or universities, has any impact on theological discussion, church life, or pulpit preaching, we learn almost nothing.

But there are, as we say, notable exceptions, and several responses in the Symposium reflect a very different mood and suggest a radically revised agenda for biblical studies. For these respondents, methodology is important but not all-important. Criticism is inevitable but not normative. Professional status is good but not the surnmum bonum. Sometimes on the surface, but often between the lines, we can detect from these replies what it means for a biblical scholar to be selfcritical and to want more from the discipline than approbation of colleagues. There are some, obviously, who are peering into the future. They are proposing to translate biblical studies from the safe enclosures of ancient language and literature into the exciting perplexities of contemporary existence.

To decide whether this gratuitous editorial analysis is correct, whether the two broad categories described are antagonistic or complementary, or whether this Symposium generates hope or dismay regarding the state of biblical studies, read on.

Elizabeth Achtemeier
Visiting Professor of Homiletics, Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Va.

Paul Minear's article rang all too true to me. We have a twenty-one year old son who wishes to prepare for the parish ministry. We have been trying to guide him in his choice of a seminary, and therein lies the problem. Where should he apply? Where is the Christian faith still being responsibly and convictionally proclaimed in this country? Where is there a community of scholars engaged in careful critical and historical work who yet know that it is God's ongoing work in Jesus Christ, and not their own, that is of paramount importance? Where is there still a worshiping community of faithful piety, which is sustained in its common life and ethic by the Word of God, unhindered by narrow denominationalism? Where is there any longer a goodly fellowship of learning which tests its knowledge by Jesus Christ revealed through the Scripture, and finds in him, and not in learned-or unlearned-societies, the measure of its truth? In short, where can a young man or woman learn to be a Christian pastor, and not just a professional biblical researcher,

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or church plant manager, or creative communications expert, or secular clinical counselor?

First, I have some gut feelings about present-day theological education. Having been involved in seminary life for thirty years, I suspect that we so-called church leaders are much more interested in impressing the world and our colleagues with our lofty words of wisdom than we are in being fools for Christ by proclaiming the folly of the cross, and that it is therefore not we learned doctors who are sustaining the church but the suffering and faithful meek who Sunday after Sunday occupy the pews.

Second, I get the impression that there is not much prayer being uttered by theological faculties these days. Oh, we have lots of multimedia worship services, with bongo drums and interpretive dance, but not much prayer-which means of course that we no longer know the Spirit praying in us and therefore have not a ghost of a chance of comprehending "Abba! Father!" I will never forget the effect on me as a seminary student in New York when I knelt in chapel each morning for the General Confession and realized that Reinhold Niebuhr, John Bennett, John McNeill, Cyril Richardson, James Muilenburg, and Paul Scherer were bowing down a few pews away and joining their prayer with mine, ". . . Have mercy upon us, miserable offenders." That put human wisdom in its proper perspective.

Finally, in answer to Minear's plea for renewed ecumenism, I am convinced that the church becomes most truly one when we each, to the depth of our being, live faithfully and fervently in our own tradition. If I approach my tasks in faith, then careful study of the Word leads me inevitably to the sacramentalist's altar; regular prayer and worship send me necessarily out into the ethicist's world; concerned struggle in the world compels me back to search the Word and wrestle with the Spirit. To know the risen Christ, the crucified One, is to be made one with one another. But apart from him, we theological professors very literally can do nothing in accord with the purposes of God. The crisis of faith in the church today is almost entirely the crisis of its teachers and preachers. Perhaps the Word of the Lord we clergy need most to heed is, "Repent, and believe in the Gospel," for blessed are those who are not offended.

J. Christiaan Beker
Professor of Biblical Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, N.J.

The problem of "church-vocation vs. academic profession" is more complicated than Minear suggests; at least for me, as a seminary teacher. The issue of historical authenticity over against theological relevance may be even more complex in the seminary than in the university. In the university, the problem of relevance is clearly the

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issue, since here historical authenticity threatens to bury the text in a frozen past. Strangely enough, the seminary is also faced with the problem of relevance. In the seminary, relevance is the premise for biblical studies; however, since relevance is presupposed, the question is whether authentic relevance is an open possibility.

To what extent is Christian tradition in fact counterproductive? For too many students, the obvious canonical relevance of the Bible has stifled authentic relevance of the text and has become the obstacle to hearing the text.

Instant gratification of relevance is more dangerous than a patient search which does not shun the fires of historical criticism. The search for authentic relevance in a situation where relevance is presupposed may be more difficult than when the question of relevance is wide open. The climate of openness, which we so much hail in the seminary, that is, openness to religious relevance, must be critically re-examined. To what extent is the text of Scripture able to transform and renew a prior understanding of tradition in the broadest sense, a tradition which so often has shaped the life-story of students and to which they so often cling tenaciously because it has become a part of their Christian identity? In too many cases this tradition is An almost impenetrable fortress and leads students to identify their previous experiences and religious upbringing with the Christian faith as such.

Thus whereas in the secular situation Scripture is often viewed as an alien text from an alien world, that is, as a document from the past which belongs to religious history; in the seminary situation, the opposite danger is true. Here Scripture is assumed as familiar and as part of the constitutive character of what it is to be a Christian. Here familiarity breeds premature self-identification with the text. Preunderstanding of the text and its authentic understanding are fused in a movement which confuses the alien claim of the text with its psychohistorical appropriation in the life-story of the hearer. The text is thus muted and accommodated to a prior reality. My gamble in the seminary is whether the story of the text can in any significant way transform or redirect the stories of hearers, and so enlarge their world.

Biblical preaching in the church is often so sterile, because biblical courses in seminary have added learned information to the already possessed piety, but have not transformed the world of the student. As anywhere else in life, conflict and risk are at a high premium, even in a setting of vocation.

Robert A. Bennett
Professor of Biblical Studies, Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass.

Paul Minear's call for bridge-building raises some acute issues for the biblical scholar. Yet given the nature of our multi-racial and plu-

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ralistic society, I am surprised that the summons does not include concern for dialogue between Protestant and Catholic, Christian and Jew, black and white, and male and female.

It has been these broader concerns which have affected my own sense of vocation and professionalism as a biblical scholar. The questions with which I have been confronted by black, feminist, and liberation theologies have aided me in scholarly research, rather than-as some fear-diverting or impeding that endeavor. Black theology, for example, emerged in response to the hard questions put to the church by black militants. Addressing these questions holds import for black and white alike, as well as for the manner in which the Bible is studied and taught.

The questions being raised by students and church people, by black and white, by male and female, by Christians and Jews focus on what the Bible "meant" or had to say about matters of race, society, sexual roles, about God's non-convenanted people as well as covenanted folk. These serious queries demand a response, one which involves biblical criticism's descriptive method in unlocking the viewpoints of the past. Yet this aspect of setting the record straight, and freeing it from the now dogmatized interpretations of previous generations, also elicits those bermeneutical skills for letting the ancient word speak as Scripture for today. The modern questions are no more irrelevant or irreverent than those of the Reformation on the nature of the church or those of ante-bellum America on the issue of slavery.

The contemporary questioner is paying the biblical scholar a cornpliment-whether deserved or not-by suggesting that our research and writing can contribute in the shaping and reshaping of humanity and society. In this we can join vocational and professional training and establish dialogue between school and church, academe and society. The voices raised in militancy, rather than fragmenting and disrupting biblical research, may indeed be the occasion for finding wholeness in our callings and the impetus for bridging some of the many chasms of our fragmented society. And not the least of these is our need to span the gap between the descriptive task of what the Bible meant onceupon-a-time and the hermeneutic challenge of what it means for us today.

Brevard S. Childs
Professor of Old Testament, Yale University Divinity School, New Haven, Conn.

Professor Minear's courageous article has touched on many of the basic problems which have continued to haunt the whole modern theological enterprise. The study of the Bible in the American church involves a strange paradox. On the one band, the historical critical method has achieved an almost total hegemony throughout the entire

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spectrum of the Christian church. The different degree of its application between conservative and liberal seminaries is actually irrelevant. On the other hand, the historical critical method increasingly offers diminishing returns for a serious understanding of the Bible within the church. The method has not dispelled the widespread confusion regarding the Bible's authority, it has seldom enriched the study of Scripture for the average Christian, and in general knowledge of the Bible has dropped. Nor has it provided a link between the church and the world by which the gospel can be more effectively proclaimed.

In my judgment, the seriousness of the present situation facing the Christian church calls for a bold and radical change in direction. We need to enter forthrightly into a post-critical era of biblical scholarship. This move entails a sober recognition that the battles of the pre-critical period are behind us. Historical criticism is here to stay; it is as much of our culture as the automobile. But likewise, the critical period must also come to an end. As a very limited method of inquiry, historical critical research is incapable of handling the full dimension required by a genuine theological study of the Bible.

The post-critical scholar understands all too well how to interpret the Bible as a human document, to analyze its sources, traditions, and redactions. What is now being sought after is how again to hear the Word of God, how to use the Bible with authority and insight in all the hard theological and ethical decisions of daily life.

I suggest three guidelines in the pursuit of this goal:

(1) The study of the Bible must involve the whole community of faith. (Surely Jews cannot be excluded.) Unless the Bible is used and studied at all levels of the church's life, there can be no recovery of its authority. That its study be placed in the context of the prayer and praise of a worshipping community is not a pietistic vestige, but essential to the faith.

(2)The study of the Bible must be carried on within the full gamut of dogmatics, ethics, church history, and pastoral care. It cannot be allowed to function in isolation as a relic of Ancient Near Eastern or Hellenistic culture. The mutual dependence of theology and biblical study is crucial to a fresh start. Christian theology without the Bible becomes speculative and heretical; biblical studies without theology appear trivial and irrelevant. Indeed, the modern breakdown of serious systematic theology through fadism remains a major burden for biblical studies to bear.

(3)The study of the Bible must be accompanied by an eager expectancy that the Spirit of God will again awaken the church through a fresh enlivening of the Scriptures. In the history of the church, rebirth has sometimes preceded the rediscovery of the Bible. Other times a fresh grappling with Scripture has been the major force behind renewal. However, it is characteristic of the ways of God that these two elements come together in moments of surprise and wonder.

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Avery Dulles
Professor of Systematic Theology, The Catholic University of America, and Research Associate at Woodstock Theological Center, Washington, D.C.

As Paul Minear recognizes, professionalization has brought solid gains to theology. Also, the pace and character of professionalization are not identical in all universities. Yet with these reservations, Minear is correct in issuing a clear warning on the dangers of professionalization. The academic scenario, with its competition for higher enrollments, its struggles for tenure and promotion, its interdepartmental wars, its quarrelsome senates, and its stiffing bureaucracies can be harmful to any branch of learning, but especially to theology as a church-related discipline. In many universities today, theology is fitted to a Procrustean bed of academic regulations that tend to blunt its impact as a reflection on the commitment of faith, and to neglect the real needs of students preparing for Christian ministry.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, contemplating the weakness of German university theology in its response to National Socialism, was moved to write:

The whole ministerial education today belongs to the church monastic-like schools in which pure doctrine, the Sermon on the Mount, and the liturgy are taken seriously. In the university, all three are not taken seriously, and it is impossible to do so under present circumstances.

Minear predicts that by the twenty-first century "all respectable theological work will be lodged in university departments of religion." That may be true if such departments can make adequate provision for the specific concerns of theology, and in particular the three concerns articulated by Bonhoeffer. But if university theology is forced to conceal or deny its relationship to faith and to the living community of faith, theology may have to migrate to more congenial territory-the monastery, the seminary, the apostolic center, the theological institute.

William R. Farmer
Professor of New Testament, Perkins School ofTheology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

Biblical scholarship should continue to progress along lines that are genuinely inter-confessional, ecumenical, and global in context. Real progress is impeded, however, when biblical criticism is not sufficiently self-critical. There is perennial need to subject the discipline of biblical criticism to historical critical scrutiny. When done, this dispels the notion that "received" scholarly consensus is in no need of reassessment.

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In our time, for example, there is a particular need to reassess Marcan priority.

Christian theology depends upon scholarly consensus in biblical studies. Such consensus as develops is partly shaped to meet existing theological needs. The problem arises at a later time when the theological component in consensus is forgotten or repressed. For then "received scholarly consensus" is often transmuted into "assured results," upon the base of which ever new hypotheses are erected. When this happens, critics can sometimes perceive themselves as being scientifically objective, while actually they are presupposing positions that were developed to meet the theological needs of an earlier period. The end result is our present biblical scholasticism where "more has become less," and where theologically dislodged trajectories spring up at random with research agendas that are often quite remote from the actual needs and interests of the church.

But the danger ought not to be exaggerated. The Bible is Scripture for a living community. This fact stands as in irreducible surd in the path of any long term tendency to completely secularize biblical studies. Study of the Bible as literature and study of the Bible as scriptural canon can and should advance together.

Roland Mushat Frye
Professor of English Literature, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.

What is criticism's constructive role? However complicated critical approaches may have to be (and they should be neither more nor less complicated than necessary), the essential role of criticism remains simple: to help a literary work come alive and be powerful in its full breadth and depth, and to lead readers to understand and appreciate it to their fullest capacities. To that end, many critical techniques now being effectively employed for secular literature can and should be widely applied to biblical literature. Narrative techniques (ways of relating events, their effects, and significance) and techniques of character) can throw clear light on the mission, message, and person of Jesus, and on the "character" of God, as biblically revealed. To this point, the critical approaches may be quite similar for the Bible and for, say, a play by Shakespeare, but then we must face another question.

How is your own personal faith involved in your research? To cite again the greatest example in secular literature, Shakespeare does not call upon us to accept him, or his characters, or his narratives as essential to our salvation either here or hereafter, whereas the Bible persistently and consistently does do just that. The Bible calls on us not only to see, to understand, and to appreciate its message and meaning, but also calls us to accept that message and meaning as

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central to our entire lives. In the Bible, therefore, and climactically in the New Testament, literary forms and techniques are employed to communicate to me an understanding of my nature and destiny as a human creature, and the norms for my relationships with myself, my neighbors, and my God, In the Bible, I find enacted the drama of my own salvation, and of the salvation of the human race.

Robert W. Funk
Director, Center for Scholarly Publishing and Scholars Press, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana

With the word limitations of a telegram, it is necessary to resort to aphorisms and limit observations to biblical studies.

(1)The shift from an ecclesiastical to a secular context for biblical studies is occasioned, from the one side, by the church's disinterest in issues biblical, not for theological but for practical reasons. The scientific study of the Bible is not a practical component of churchly existence in the world. From the other side, the shift represents a desire to pursue the real issues free of feigned constraints.

(2)If the church wishes to set different standards for biblical study, it must pay the bills. Scholars are like everyone else: they can be had for a price.

(3)The canons of historical criticism are indeed sterile.

(4)The interpretation of scripture from faith to faith, however, runs the danger of circling harmlessly in antiseptic precincts.

(5)Unlike Jesus and Paul, we do not know what it means not to presuppose faith, but it will be therapeutic to learn.

(6)The shift from a vocational to a professional case is necessary for the survival of the discipline.

(7)The fear that biblical studies will lose its impetus as a result of the shift is born of nostalgia. Because many of us took up the study of the bible as a result of vocational decisions, we assume everybody must. English letters and colonial history do not suffer from want of cultic underpinning.

(8)Those who fear that the Bible will suffer eclipse if studied "secularly" have lost touch with the power of the tradition.

(9) The American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) are supplanting the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the National Council of Churches (NCC) out of care for the tradition.

(10)Biblical studies ought to be ecumenical in the root sense, for which a secular, that is, non-monastic, context is entirely appropriate. The Oikumene is the indwelt world, the sphere of our habitation, the mundane locus of transactions with the real.

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Harold Lindsell
Editor, Christianity Today, Washington, D.C.

When I contemplate the state of the institutional church, I am apprehensive. The reason for this is simple. Tomorrow's clergy are today's students. As the institutions go, so go the students. The increasing impact of a historical critical methodology, influenced so largely by Bultmann and his disciples, bodes ill for the churches. This methodology often cuts the theological foundations from under the students and leaves a void that is reflected later in vapid preaching that deals inadequately with the essentials of the Christian faith.

In too many churches, evangelism is dead. Socio-economic-political involvement, which should normally be harnessed to evangelism, becomes its replacement. Fewer converts enter the front doors of the church each year, while many more leave by the back door through death, disenchantment, or even frustration over the secularization of the churches.

Dogma is dead and easy-believeism is really no belief as comparative religion studies undercut the uniqueness of the Christian faith. When all religions are thought to be adequate vehicles through which to find salvation that is nebulous, subjective, and in defiance of the law of contradiction why shouldn't people opt for eastern religions which say ultimate truth is ineffable?

Theological institutions avoid basic theological issues for a very simple reason. They have been discarded or denigrated for so long that few believe them. What is there left to discuss? Until someone invents new theological issues, there will be no discussion-unless, of course, old beliefs gain new currency.

The dismal fact is that the church has been secularized to an amazing degree so that there is little to mark off the Christian from the non-Christian. Moreover, an assumed or implicit universalism doesn't demand extensive theological discussion. And if all go to a heaven many doubt exists, in a bodily resurrection more and more refuse to believe in, evangelism and the church become superfluous.

What really is needed is a great awakening. But it is doubtful that it will come from Athens. We still will have to go back to Jerusalem.

Carlyle Marney
Director, Interpreters' House, Lake Junaluska, North Carolina

For me, biblical criticism is to theology what reason is to religion. If reason's function is to make impossible "all religion save the best," so biblical criticism has a disciplinary, constrictive, as well as constructive relation to theology. But especially here, the biblical scholar's predilections must be watched. One does not forget easily Luther's characterization of reason as "the great whore" who would work for any body.

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All critics who are serious about their work represent some theological concern with ultimates. As a journeyman inquirer, I am obligated to ask competent biblical criticism to serve me as a disciplinarian and corrective, but I need to know the "personal equation" of the biblical critic. For even in the so-called "objective" world of the biblical critic there is no escape from Augustine's order: credo ut intelligam, I believe in order to understand.

All inquiry begins in some kind of commitment. All biblical critics who are serious represent some faith-investment, and they are all theologians. (Competency is really the issue.) In Michael Polanyi's great chapter on the commitment that brings anyone to inquiry of any consequence we are very close to Anselm's insight: fides quaerens intellectum. Faith everywhere seeks to make sense of itself. Where biblical criticism serves this need to make better sense of itself there will always be a gap between the critic and established systems, housed opinions, frozen memory. Religious establishment will always heap maledictions on its critics who examine foundations. And here, the most competent biblical critics I know have deep longings for a "church" they could honestly join.

But here we have to wait. Here Minear is right that the goal should really be a genuine ecumenism, but our deadly transference syndrome traps us into giving the weight of a proper noun to mere adjectives. What if words like Baptist, Catholic, Southern, German, Christian, white, black, are really adjectival modifiers at best, and the noun isn't even theology, but humanity?

What if biblical criticism and theology, qua theology, are always to be held in instrumental (dative) case? What if both are always means to an ecumenical end? What if the end is a beatitudio resident within a Kingdom that is coming, and what if unanimity of opinion about sources, memory, and tradition holds nothing together worth keeping? What if I have to keep my Augustine-Pelagius, my Tertullian-Marcion, my Luther-Anabaptist splits, and a long list of delightfully promising heresies as subservient to the interests of an ecumenism of the species?

Roland E. Murphy
Professor of Old Testament, Divinity School, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

I am in basic agreement with Minear's analysis and judgment concerning the four trends he describes, but I am optimistic that the effect upon ecumenism will not be as disastrous as he thinks. I doubt that theologians will shirk their role in the church, and the current bilateral ecumenical conversations seem to bear me out. Indeed, the time has come for a practical implementation of the far-reaching agreements between the teams of theologians.

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I would like to single out for comment the trend among biblical scholars to adopt historical and philosophical methodology for the study of Scripture. This approach has become the darling of academe, and no one would deny its propriety or necessity. It supplies needed insights and correctives to the total theological enterprise. However, it is an ideal that can be only approximated and is itself beset with an implicit, though often unacknowledged, hermeneutical bias. "Objective" biblical interpretation is not as clear and antiseptic as it looks. Moreover, the life of the community is touched only peripherally when biblical interpretation remains on the level of Religionsgeschichte.

At the heart of the matter is the hermeneutical issue, the way in which the Bible is to function within the church. There should be no need to apologize for this in academe where all kinds of literature are subjected to approaches that go beyond the literal meaning. If the full, religious, interpretation of the Bible is carried on in a manner that also honors the integrity of the literal sense, theology will be the richer.

The present divorce between biblical scholarship and the needs of the church (preaching, theology, etc.) cannot be denied, and I do not know how to bridge the gap except by urging a cooperative theological enterprise between biblical scholars and others (speculative and practical theologians). Unless cooperation is achieved, the fragmentation will continue, to the harm of all churches.

James A. Sanders
Professor of Biblical Studies, Union Theological Seminary, New York, N.Y.

What are the responses now available in dealing with the charge that we have locked the Bible into the past, and that we respect the Bible only as grist for the historian's mill-whether in seminary, divinity school, or department of religion?

There are, of course, several possibilities. They range from outright rejection of biblical criticism to a plea for extending more of the same, all claiming to unlock the meaning and truth of the biblical records.

The option I would sponsor can be called "canonical criticism." It stresses the full historical process whereby the canon grew, developed, and was shaped. A full understanding of the process of the shaping of the Torah is the clue to understanding the canon. It sees validity in all the sub-disciplines of biblical criticism and views them all as complementary, but moves on beyond traditional and redaction criticism and focuses on the periods of intense canonical process, after the last individual geniuses had done their work, when the several believing communities either found life-giving value in this or that literature received, or did not. It was in large measure an existential process; for those periods of intense communal selectivity were in point of historical fact moments of death and resurrection for Israel after the

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destruction of the first temple in the sixth century B.C.E., and for Judaism and Christianity after the destruction of the second in the first century C.E.

Canonical criticism recognizes the pluralism in the Bible and celebrates its diversity by underscoring biblical criticism as the means of discerning points scored by ancient "texts" in ancient "contexts." Within that pluralism, it seeks the shape of the canon. In the canonical process, with the aid of the sub-disciplines of tradition criticism and comparative midrash, we are now able through the method of canonical criticism to discern the hermeneutics in antiquity in those crucial moments of adapting older traditions ("tests") to new situations ("contexts"), to derive life-power from them, to continue the community's essential identity and not assimilate to the dominant culture of the time-the very hermeneutics employed by the biblical thinkers and writers themselves from the earliest times to the latest New Testament writings. Study of the function of the Old Testament in the New Testament is but a stage of much longer study of such re-presenting of authoritative traditions well back in Old Testament times, and on into Synagogue and Church History. Canonical criticism considers seriously the possibility that the hermeneutics employed within the Bible (though never recorded in it) may be just as canonical for the ongoing believing communities today as anything explicit in its literature.

Canonical criticism is, in this view, a complementary sub-discipline of biblical criticism, evolving normally out of the earlier critical developments, bringing them to their full validity and capable of redeeming them precisely from the charge of locking the Bible in the past.

Walter Wink
Professor of Biblical Theology, Auburn Theological Seminary, New York, N.Y.

Minear is right, of course. He has been sounding such warnings for decades. And nothing he or anyone else says appears to stop or turn or even slow the stampede. For the prestige, the money, the growth, and the recognition are in the university, and where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Meanwhile, those who care for the integrity of Scripture and church will become increasingly marginalized within the professional field. We will have to be willing to labor in and with the church, and watch the headstrong rush over the cliff-though we will not even then be able to refrain from lamentations. For biblical scholars, this will require a death of sorts so that the church might live. It may mean considerable professional dislocation. But for those of us with any residual sense of vocation, the old academic game is finished.

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I have tried to say this more carefully and thoroughly in a little book I published some years ago. I have been criticized for being too extreme. But evidence is mounting that I was nowhere near "extreme" enough. I do not despair, however, for the objectivist captivity of biblical research has its own built-in futility-point. The critical question is whether outsiders will fashion a new paradigm capable of revitalizing a field bent on selling its soul.