Cantidad de Residuos Dispuestos (RSD)

True Christianity, the Christianity of the New Testament documents, is absolutely dependent on history. At the heart of New Testament faith is the assertion that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" (2Co 5:19 NASB). The incarna- tion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as real events in time and space, i.e., as historical realities, are the indispensable

74 I Donald A. Hagner

foundation of Christian faith. To my then, Christianity is best defined as the recitation of, the celebration of, and the participation in God's acts in history, which as the New Testament writings emphasize have found their culmination in Jesus Christ. Referring to the gospel narratives, H. Zahrnt

writes: "Here, then, we have not the eternal event of myth but

unique, unrepeatable history; not an idea but a happening; not

a drama, but history in Lesslie puts it

concisely when he describes Christianity as "primarily news

and only secondarily

It is this reality, that God has accomplished our salvation in the historical process, that constitutes the glory of our faith. God has acted not only among human beings in history, but now in the climax of his saving purposes he has acted in, through, and as a Man fully enmeshed in the life of this world. The Incarnation, along with its goal, the Cross, is thus the supreme paradigm of Christianity: Jesus] emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross" (Php

RSV).

But if in this sense the historical character of the Christian faith is its glory, it is also unfortunately its stumbling block to many. Can the Christian faith depend so absolutely on whether or not certain things happened in history? If the answer must be, as I believe, an unqualified yes, then are we not dependent upon, not to say at the mercy of, the historian and the results of historical research? Here the answer must also be but in this case a seriously qualified one. Without question the essence of our faith is by its very nature subject to historical investigation. But the historian, at least by the standards of the scientific historiography that began to emerge especially in the nineteenth century, is unable to say anything about God or indeed anything supernatural, i.e., outside the normal chain of cause and effect. This a priori limitation hardly puts the "scientific" historian in an advantageous position to study the Bible! And it is hardly appropriate for Christians to feel completely bound by such "historical" reasoning. Neverthe- less, we cannot wash our hands of the necessity of historical evidence and historical research. We will be returning to this problem at the end of the essay, but for now we need only to note the problem, and to comment that a religion that has as its

The New Testament, History, and the Historical-Critical Method I 75 essence a code of ethics or a system of ideas does not face the

difficulties in view here.

It is not, however, merely in the bare events of salvation history themselves that Christianity is so utterly dependent on history. In an equally important sense, Christianity is absolute- ly dependent upon the interpretation of God's acts in history and not least of the work of Christ. That interpretation, together with the record of the events, is itself fully a part of the historical process, i.e., it is given by specific individuals in specific places and at specific times. It is not merely in the deeds themselves that God reveals himself, but in the accompanying interpretation of those deeds in the Bible. Revelation thus takes place through a deed/word or event/interpretation

The record of history is simultaneously an interpretation of history that is itself mediated through history; the documents themselves are a part of and a product of history. This is simply to say in another way what is central to the proper understand- ing of the Bible, something that cannot be the word of God comes to us through the words of human

It follows from the preceding paragraphs that

and the New Testament writings can be adequately understood only when they are understood historically. The New Testa- ment is in one sense like the Incarnation: it is historically conditioned. The Bible is the word of God, but in it God has spoken in a lisping Because revelation comes to us in and through history, historical criticism is not an option but a necessity. "Criticism" here means the making of informed judgments. In this sense no one who attempts to interpret or explain the Bible in any way can avoid the "critical"

The fact is that the truthfulness (at least at one level) and the meaning of the New Testament can be determined only through historical study. Critical study of the Bible of this kind was being done long before the invention of the so-called historical-critical method.

There is a sense, then, in which it is fair to say that God has entrusted his purposes for the world to the historical process. For whatever reason, God has chosen to accomplish redemp- tion through the historical event of the life and death of his Son. This supreme redemptive act was itself preceded by a whole series of redemptive acts in history (e.g., in the lives of the patriarchs, in the Exodus, and in the history of Israel) that both anticipated it and prepared its way. As we have seen,

76 I Donald A. Hagner

furthermore, God has entrusted the recording of these events and their interpretation to human beings who were a part of the

historical process. To be sure, these persons were inspired by God for their tasks, that is, they were led into the truth by the Spirit, but not in such a way as to obliterate or even bypass

their historical identity and context. Even beyond this, God has

entrusted his word to the historical process in the formation of the canon, which rests upon human and in the transmission of the text of the New Testament, which was copied by hand for nearly fifteen

The necessity of seeing New Testament theology as a decidedly historical discipline, rather than as a subspecies of dogmatics, goes back to as early as the 1787 essay of J. P. Gabler entitled "A discourse on the proper distinction between biblical and dogmatic theology and the correct delimitation of their In the nineteenth century this historical orienta- tion to New Testament theology was continued by F. C. Baur and the so-called Tubingen school. Most influential, however, was the programmatic essay of W. Wrede published in 1897, entitled "Concerning the task and methods of the so-called New Testament Wrede, like Gabler, took exception to the "doctrinal approach," wherein New Testament theology was reduced essentially to in order to support doctrines already held. He proposed instead that New Testa- ment theology be conceived of as a history of early Christian thought, based on the description of the religious experience that underlay the documents.

It cannot be denied that for all the blind alleys we have been led down through the historical orientation to New Testament theology, we have at the same time reaped enor- mous benefits from it. We have become sensitive to the variety of theological perspectives represented in the NT. We have been made aware of the crucial importance of the specific and many-faceted historical realities that determined what the different New Testament writers wrote and how they wrote. We now realize something of the extent of development within the New Testament itself, of the tensions that existed already in

the early church, of the impact of the surrounding milieu upon

the thinking of the New Testament writers. We have become increasingly aware, in short, of the full humanity of these writers and of the full extent to which they were enmeshed in

their various environments, and how in turn that

The New Testament, and the Historical-Critical Method I 77 affected what they wrote. The rich resources represented by the

major commentary series that have become available in recent years owe very much to the historical orientation to the New Testament.

Not all of this has been without its problems for evangeli- cals, and evangelical scholarship is still in the process of coming to terms with much of One problematic issue, that of the historical Jesus, illustrates some of the difficulties caused by the historical approach as it is commonly practiced.