The Nature of Biblical Criticism

I could not put this book down from the moment I started reading. I think this book crystallises the great challenge and opportunity that biblical criticism presents to faith. 'Confessing' approaches demand that we draw from the text what we want it to say - the dogmas of the church. This betrays a lack of faith in the Bible, and it demands a stance that will be closed to recognising what the Bible says. Barton argues that critical scholarship has always been seeking out the 'plain meaning' of the text, and that this desire is what resulted in documentary hypotheses and historical criticism. Such approaches grew out of a plain recognition that the Bible is a collective work, and that it relates to history.Barton's scholarly defence of this thesis is second to none. The enormous import of his conclusions would seem pedestrian to a non-critical reader, but to anyone who has spent years training in biblical analysis, this book is an absolute revelation. There is no tension between historical and literary approaches: A literary analysis of the Bible is the very thing that reveals the significance of its historical narratives. The only 'challenge' which biblical scholarship puts out to faith is to *deepen* trust that we can analyse the Bible on *its* terms and not our own.Two specific observations at the end really floored me. First of all, Barton writes that "far from biblical criticism's having subverted faith, it seems to me that for most people it has not even begun to make an impression on it" (p 185). By keeping critical scholarship at a distance from dogmatic theology and pastoral activity, we are stunting our appreciation of the Bible and failing to appropriate the fruits of human learning.And right at the end, Barton says that "it is commonly said that the findings of critical scholarship are of no value in communicating the Christian gospel to ordinary people. My own conviction is that this because hardly anyone has ever tried" (page 190). Wow. What a great point. I just finished reading ' Patience with God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing In Us ,' and in that book Halik points out that many people's scepticism toward the Bible could be dispelled by simply reading some modern biblical criticism. So he's really saying the same thing. The church is so faithless in trusting that 'taking the Bible at its word' will be fruitful that it has cut itself off from the benefits of scholarly biblical analysis.This book is a tremendous challenge to the current impasse and debate. The challenge is indeed between faithful and faithless appropriations of the Bible, but the divide is the inverse of what is generally assumed. As Barton ominously investigates, "everyone bore the brunt of the sabotaged chicken."

This book is so good...so profound...so penetrating. It is as if Barton knew everything I have been chewing on for five or six years, anticipated the questions, answers, problems, and solutions, gathered it all together, and lucidly arranged it all in a veritable tour de force. There is really nothing I can say about what Barton has done well in this book that will do anything but subtract from his genius. So instead, this review will focus on the two negative criticisms I have that prevent me from awarding the book a five-star rating. If my criticisms are harsh, it is only because I am so enamored of the job Barton has done and feel like the star player has momentarily let the team down.A particular choice of terminology or definition.Barton unnecessarily obfuscates his discussion by using Positivitic terms like "objective," "value-neutral," "detached," or "without distortion" in non-Positivistic ways (and also attributes his highly questionable definitions to the Positivists themselves).For instance, when Barton says "objective," he means something like "refusing to simply read one's own ideas into the text" or "having a sense of detachment from the text." In other words, to be "objective" for Barton is to say "what I think and what the text says are probably a little different." Talk about a ludicrous definition. As if scholars using the term "objective" meant to differentiate their work from those who had no concept of a distance between themselves and the text. Who exactly were those people? Even the Surrealists of the Post-Modern movement had an awareness of something real beyond the subjective self--the "Sur" real. Even the most conservative interpreters understand that the text has a meaning that exists outside themselves (which Barton admits outright on p. 172). Few are the extremists who have ever thought or said "there is no way of encountering the text other than one already totally colored by one's own presuppositions," who seem to be Barton's talking partners (p. 49). If that is what is "not objective," then Barton's definition would be perfectly reasonable. But in my estimation, it is a mammoth caricature of those who are "not objective" and those who saw themselves as being "objective" in opposition to them.When Barton says "value-neutral" or "detached," he doesn't mean "without bias or prejudice," which would be its plain sense, Positivist definition. Rather, he means something like "allowing one's perspective to be questioned." If someone is unwilling to question their perspective, they are not value-neutral or detached, but who are those who have been totally unwilling to question their perspective? The problem wasn't that nobody thought "maybe I should allow what I think the text means to be questioned." The problem was that certain folk were okay with allowing what they thought the text should mean to come before attempting an understanding of the text (this is Barton's own argument here). Biblical critics were reacting to the later situation, not the former. So what's the point of the weird definitions? "Value-neutral" and "detached" are words that simply should no longer be used.And when Barton says "without distortion," he doesn't mean that we are not influencing the meaning of the text at all as one would expect, but something along the lines of "even though understanding is a self-involving exercise, one should seek to not completely distort the message that the text can convey." Again, who are the ones that this definition is opposing? Biblical critics weren't responding to those who had no sense of the distortion they could cause to a text, but to those who were willing to let their religious belief dictate what the text could mean instead of trying to let the text dictate what they believed. Biblical critics sought to do otherwise because they had respect for the biblical scrolls as literary texts (instead of treating them as an "inspired jumble"). Barton's re-defining of terms causes unnecessary confusion. Positivistic phrases like this are better left abandoned.Failure to incorporate the reader.Barton recognizes that meaning is determined in part by the reader. This is one of the four "coordinates" of literary understanding that he draws on as illustrated by M.H. Abrams (p. 75). He indirectly depends on this dynamic, for instance, when he refers to intuition as the primary way of undertaking the biblical-critical exercise, by saying that "scientific" or "method" is not the appropriate way to describe it, or by saying that what is involved is understanding instead of processing. Unfortunately, however, he constantly neglects to include this coordinate anywhere in his arguments.For instance, Barton says biblical criticism "is precisely an attempt to avoid trying to master the text, but instead to allow it its own space, to make its own points in its own way, and to receive it without the distortion that is produced if we try to control it and twist it to our own ends" (p. 58, note 63). But he forgets to mention that we do control and twist the text by every act of understanding we undertake. If three people go into a room, come out, and someone asks them what they saw, they will each say they saw something different, or they will describe the same thing(s) differently. That isn't because there is nothing in the room to see and not because they are wrong about what they saw, but because all three interpretations are formed and constrained by those who make them. Barton knows this. But he doesn't seem willing to make that dimension clear.He says on the same page "biblical criticism contains in essence three central features: (a) attention to semantics, . . . (b) awareness of genre, and (c) bracketing out questions of truth," but leaves out (d) imposition of our own perception. Barton knows that our perception is part of the equation, which is why he calls so strongly for a struggle with and against it. So why is (d) missing? Why is he leaving out the fourth coordinate in literary competence?Again, Barton says "what constitutes it as critical is that it asks about the sense the text makes if it is read without a constraining framework of expectations" (p. 108). But Barton knows that there is no such thing as interpretation without a framework of expectation. His own argument throughout the book is that biblical criticism developed because of a specific framework of expectation: biblical texts are literature and thus should be understood as literature. So why isn't his argument more nuanced? Why isn't he saying what either a Positivist or Romanticist would not?Barton says "our aim as critics is not to translate the text . . . into our own terms, but to get inside it and understand it from within" (p. 113). And yet, it is only by the terms of the one who goes into the text that the text can be understood. All understanding is colored by our particular perceptions. This doesn't mean we can't say something true about the text, and it doesn't mean there is unlimited meaning, but it does acknowledge that the reader influences understanding. Barton could have said as much, but didn't.Barton comes close to bringing this aspect into the conversation is when he notes "in postmodernist thinking, . . .it is believed that the very perception of meaning is entirely determined by where one is standing" (p. 162, note 43). But then he doesn't engage that line of thinking. Surely he doesn't believe one can step from where one isn't already standing. Surely he must realize the obvious link between his two-fold argument (A. most biblical scholars are people of faith and B. if anything, scholarship has been slanted in favor of faith perspectives) with the quote above. What people think influences how they think! One cannot think in a manner foreign to our own selves.Only two sentences in the entire book gave me what I was hoping for. And so I end with that stunning revelation: "How can we be sure that our own concerns and preoccupations are not contaminating our reading of past texts? We cannot, but we can try" (p. 181).

Barton has done an excellent history of how the Biblical and Apocryphal literature has been studied since the late 1st century AD by the theological and academic communities.