ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #20 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Earlier you mentioned that one of the eventual results of the Reformation was the development of the historical grammatical method, the approach to reading the Bible that emphasized history and manner. We've been learning about this in other classes, of course. But you didn't say much about literature. How does an understanding of the kind of literature that we are dealing with in the Bible come into play? >> Nick, the recognition of the significance of literature is an outgrowth of form criticism of course with its emphasis on different kinds of genre and their significance. And really this emphasis on literature has come into form in the last 30 years or so within biblical studies. And this takes us beyond form criticism and tradition criticism into a variety of developments that have happened in the last 20 years. And I'm not going to go into each of these in detail. There's a document that I prepared for you in your course pack that summarizes the basic points about each of these. But we should at least mention them and highlight some of the more recent developments. The reason I'm not going to spend a great deal of time on them here is that you're not likely to run into these in the commentaries that you read today. Where you're likely to run into these are the commentaries that you read five to ten years from now. So these are out there. They are important in the realm of scholarship today. But they are not as well documented yet as the older forms like the documentary hypothesis and form criticism and tradition criticism. Well, one of the things that has grown out of form criticism and its children like tradition criticism was an increased interest in the text as we have it. What we sometimes call the final form of the text. This has led to an approach to reading the text that we usually call canonical criticism. That is to say reading the canonical form of the text or reading the text in its canonical context. As far as the Old Testament is concerned, two scholars in particular have contributed to this development. Here in the United States a scholar by the name of Brevard Childs has been at the forefront of this movement. And in Germany a scholar by the name of Rolf Rendtorff has also been very involved in this. And both of these scholars have done significant work in the Pentateuch. So they do deal with the books of Genesis and Exodus, as well. The focus is on the final form of the text. Now, we should be sure that we're not confused about this because neither Childs nor Rendtorff could be called a conservative. They don't approach the biblical text from the perspective of one who believes that the Bible is the word of God. For example, a more reasonable understanding of their position would be that Rendtorff, for example, argues that the text has gone through so many stages of development and so many different processes of editing that it's simply not possible to go back beyond the form of the text that we have to identify earlier forms. This is sort of taking the documentary hypothesis and form criticism and tradition criticism and all the huge variety of conclusions to which they have arrived and looking at it as sort of throwing up one's hands in despair and saying, you know, nobody can actually agree on these things. Therefore, we might as well give up trying and recognize that you really can't go back beyond the text that we have. And so we might as well just focus on the study of the text as we have it. So that's hardly a conservative view of the origin of the Old Testament. But it does at least lead to focusing on the text as we have it. And that's a positive step forward. One of the side effects of this development of canonical criticism is that those who have been engaged in the study of the final form of the text have often produced results that are quite fruitful by our standards. That are actually helpful and insightful with regard to the text. And so we can sometimes appropriate their studies and make use of them, even though they don't necessarily approach the text with the same convictions about the Bible and the word of God as we do. Another development that has continued over the last 20 years is a movement that's most commonly called rhetorical criticism. Rhetorical criticism is an extension of form criticism that focuses on examining the individual units of the text. The difference between rhetorical criticism and form criticism is that form criticism tended to focus on what a text had in common with one another that was the same between different texts. Whereas rhetorical criticism tends to focus on what makes each text distinctive and unique. And so that's a helpful observation. There are really two varieties of rhetorical criticism. One focuses on what the author does as he organizes and presents his material, its rhetoric, as organization and presentation. The other approach within rhetorical criticism is to focus on the impact of the rhetoric upon the reader or the hearer of the text. So these are two different emphases within the broader scope of form criticism or I should say within the broader scope of rhetorical criticism. Of these two the focus on the organization and presentation of the material is often very fruitful again because the -- those who engage in that research are often asking the same kinds of questions about the text as literature that we would ask. Now, where they are weak is in theology. They aren't really all that interested in theology. They are interested in the text as literature. So there's valuable insight there that we can make use of, again, even if we don't share all of their presuppositions about how the text came into being. Another variation on this theme is sometimes called narrative criticism. Narrative criticism is like rhetorical criticism in that it, too, is an extension of form criticism. But it tends to focus on the examination of narrative units. And it has specific concerns about things that are characteristic of narratives. For example, what is the point of view of the narrator and how does that shape the text? What is the audience expected to know or what is the audience informed of in the process of the unfolding of the narrative? What's the role of character or plot or setting or the narrative flow, the rise and resolution of tension or conflict within the narrative? These are all the kinds of questions that narrative critics often ask of narrative text. And here, again, there's a lot of similarity between what they are doing and what we would often do as we examine the text as we have it in front of us as literature in narrative cases. In fact, I mention this because once we get into the book of Exodus as we're going to be starting into very soon here, you'll notice right away that I'm going to be asking these same kinds of questions. I don't like to call what I do narrative criticism because from my perspective, the term criticism implies a certain presupposition about the text and its authorship. I would prefer to call what I'm doing narrative analysis because I'm approaching the text with the perspective that the text is the inspired word of God. But I'm still concerned about the way that God has tried to communicate meaning to us through the text. So we'll ask again many similar kinds of questions and find some of the same references. So like canonical criticism and rhetorical criticism, there's much within narrative criticism that would be helpful even to us even if we don't share the presuppositions of those who are engaged in it. So all of those are outgrowths of form criticism that have grown and continue to be practiced today. However, there's another change of course within contemporary biblical studies that sort of leaves behind the whole process of what we might think of as traditional historical criticism. And so it's helpful to call these approaches by a different name and call them something like post critical developments. These post critical developments in some ways mirror the broader post modernism of modern philosophical movements. These are rooted in the epistemology of Immanuel Kant. Remember when we first started to talk about modern developments we began with Kant's view of the world and how we come to know things? So let's review that very quickly and then see how it's applied to biblical text. Kant believed that somewhere out there there was a real world that was known to us by means of the senses. That from this real world our senses pick up data and they communicate that data to us. And you remember Kant's contribution was the activity of the mind. And so Kant says the mind takes that data that comes from the senses and it assembles it into a picture of reality. But the picture of reality that the mind produces does not correspond exactly to reality as it's actually out there. And so all that we can ever know is the picture of reality that the mind creates. We can never really know the reality as it exists out there beyond the wall of our senses. Now, what this means in literary terms and in epistemological terms in philosophy is that all knowledge is ultimately internal. While we get data from the external world, we can never really know what the external world is like. We can't be sure that the picture our mind is creating isn't a fantasy or isn't a delusion. So all the reality that we can know, all that we can be sure about, is the internal world of ourselves. We can never, therefore, make an authoritative claim for someone else because we don't know whether our picture of reality or their picture of reality is closer to the world as it actually exists. Now, this epistemological theory, this theory about how we know things, has led to a wide range of developments in philosophy. So we get Friedrich Nietzsche and his theory of nihilism. We get Ludwig ***Visenstein, the great Austrian philosopher of language at the beginning of the 20th century who developed a very sophisticated understanding of the way language works and the way that we use words to communicate meaning. We get the more recent French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his theory that usually goes by the name of deconstruction. The method of reinterpreting text by throwing out the old standard interpretation and approaching the text from a new and different perspective. And then we also get a variety of what we might call post modern approaches that are ideological or driven by principle. Like third world readings of the text. Or feminist readings of the text. Or gay readings of the text that are actually very popular in biblical studies these days. So this leads to a way of reading the text that's very different from traditional study of the text because it focuses not on the meaning in the text but on meaning as it develops within the reader of the text or within the engagement between the reader and the text. And this leads to a very different conclusion about what the text means. And again, I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail about that at this point. Because frankly, you're not likely to encounter much of that in the kinds of commentaries that you'll be reading for this text. If you go out and read some of the avant garde journal articles that are current in biblical studies today, these are the kind of things that you'll encounter. And they are certainly the kinds of things that will be out there in the next 20 years. The difference fundamentally is that they don't believe that the intention of the author really provides any meaning for us. The only meaning for us is the meaning that we develop in our encounter with the text. So we've seen a wide variety in the way that the biblical text has been studied. Today the difference between conservative traditional biblical studies and the post critical approaches that we've been talking about in the end -- and I don't want to oversimplify too much here. But they tend to boil down to this: Traditional biblical interpretation asks the question: What does the text mean? Contemporary post critical approaches ask: What does the text mean to me? In other words, they confuse what we might call the meaning of the text with what we would prefer to call the application of the text. And this is a very important distinction that we need to keep in mind. We saw that the same thing happens within allegory in the Middle Ages. The different levels of meaning tended to confuse what the text actually says with the way that we apply that text in our lives today. And as we approach the text, we want to be very careful in distinguishing between what we say the meaning of the text is and then the way that we apply the text in our life. One last observation before we wrap up our discussion of the history of interpretation here. You'll remember that we said that historical criticism really got its beginning in the desire to seek a scientific form of interpretation to which everyone would agree. Everyone could use this method and approach the text and it would then come up with the same result. So that there would be a reliable trustworthy sort of scientific way of reading the text. And this they believed would do away with the differences between churches. I hope that from our survey here you can see that historical criticism judged by its original goal has been a complete and utter failure. Not only has it not produced a scientific way of reading the text that everyone could agree to but, if anything, it's fragmented the world of meaning in the text in a way that was far worse than anything that would have happened without it. So in this sense, while historical criticism has led to an intense study of the text that has produced some valuable observations and insights along the way, as a general methodology, it's been a complete and utter failure. And so for us, especially those of us who believe that the Bible is the word of God, there's really no fruitful ground within historical criticism upon which we can stand, either the most traditional forms of historical criticism or the most contemporary forms of historical criticism. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***