Experiencias de las organizaciones de recicladores con otras

As is well known, the historical-critical method has its origins in the revolution of the Enlightenment that gave birth to scientific study itself. The exhilarating freedom brought by the beginnings of the scientific method with its emphasis on hard data and reasoning meant an unrestrained questioning of authority and dogma. It seemed that the scientific method held the key to all knowledge. As it had removed the mystery from nature, and much of the consequent superstition, so too it would make possible a correct (non-ecclesiastical and understanding of the As V. P. Furnish puts it: "Now the Bible itself is on the way to being viewed as a datum of world history, as first of all an object, not to be believed, but to be observed, investigated and rationally

The trouble was that the scientific method had made its impressive advances precisely on the basis of its naturalism, its insistence on the absolute character of unbroken chains of cause and effect. The seemingly natural conclusion was that if historical criticism was also to be scientific, it too had to be conducted on a naturalistic basis. There was no room in the scientific worldview for the supernatural, and thus the Bible had to be understood differently.

Scientific historiography came to be a method "based on assumptions quite irreconcilable with traditional This became very obvious in the classical formulation of the "purely historical" outlined early in this century by the German philosopher Ernst who stressed the follow- ing three The first is that of criticism, namely that all historical knowledge is a matter of probability and thus always open for revision. To this few would object.

The second and far more problematic principle is that of analogy. Here it is stipulated that only that which is analogous with what we have experienced can have a claim to being accepted as historical. Thus, for example, if we do not experience the raising of the dead in our day, no claim about the raising of the dead in the past can be accepted. Obviously

84 I Donald A. Hagner

this amounts to saying that nothing unique can happen in history. Like the criteria for authenticity already discussed, this

may seem to be a "safe" way to but underlying this principle is the presupposition that our experience must be exactly like experience of the past and that the past must have been exactly like the assumption that is obviously indefensible. Such a posited uniformity goes against the occasional occurrence of the surprising and the unpredictable in history. It presupposes a degree of knowledge that is simply unavailable to us. And of course it begs the question we are considering. This principle will not take us very far in recon- structing the past as it has been reported to us and as it may actually have been because it automatically excludes the testimony of ostensibly reliable witnesses. History, unlike science, has as its subject what is by nature unrepeatable. Its reality is available to us only indirectly through those who have left written records.

The third principle, that of correlation, maintains that all of reality is interconnected through an inviolable network of cause and effect. With this principle it is assumed that all of reality is like one large untorn tapestry, a self-contained complex reality that cannot be intruded upon from outside of itself. This a priori conviction, as we have already seen, obviously rules out the possibility of causation from outside the system. By definition, and again on the scientific the supernatural cannot occur, God cannot act in

What we encounter here is a form of positivism, i.e., the insistence that knowledge be defined as only that which can be established by positive facts of the sort one arrives at through the scientific method. This as it is commonly called, is however no longer defensible because the scientific model upon which it is based has in the twentieth century been shaken to its foundations. The modern scientific revolutions initiated by Albert Einstein's of physical reality and by new fields of research such as quantum physics have necessitated a radical assessment of the Newtonian worldview. Recent philosophers of science such as Thomas Kuhn have called attention to the importance of these new To be sure, we still have to reckon with the reality of cause and effect in historical study. But the modern revolutions in science should teach us not only something of our own inescapable subjectivity as observers, but also that we

The New Testament, History, and the Historical-Critical Method I 85 cannot bank on a causation that is limited strictly to that which

is immediately

More recent philosophers of history have begun to take these things into Epistemologically, for example, they have had to admit that there is no such thing as bare fact

without interpretation, that there is no interpreter who is a

tabula rasa, that every interpretation is partial, necessarily assumes a specific perspective, and is value-laden. In philoso- phy itself, postmodern epistemology takes a holistic approach to the achievement of knowledge by insisting upon the validation of truth claims in terms of whole networks of theory rather than upon the attainment of separate, indubitable, and hence facts. Postmodernism further points to the crucial role of the community in determining

the conventions of language as well as in arbitrating standards of

It is not surprising, given the current mood sketched in the preceding paragraphs, to find more and more biblical by no means not only those of a conservative away from the historical-critical method. We have already called attention to some of the weaknesses of a historical method that is modeled on the scientific method. When we add to these the recent trends in epistemology, the historical-critical method may seem doomed. There is in fact at the present among biblical scholars a rapidly growing retreat from the study of the Bible as history to what must be called the newer literary The newest methods are decidedly ahistorical, focusing on the one hand upon the Bible as an object in itself, i.e., as pure literature to be understood in a and on the other hand, and closely related, upon reader-oriented interpretation, i.e., where every reader constitutes his or her understanding of the text, each of

which has equal

There is no need to deny the truth contained in these new trends. It is true that the Bible bears the characteristics of what may genuinely be called literature and that the study of these characteristics can be illuminating. It is also true that every reader unavoidably constitutes the meaning of the text. (It may be questioned, however, whether every reading of the text is therefore necessarily an adequate one, and whether this admission makes it futile to quest after the meaning of an

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largely concerned with recorded history and that therefore

approaches can be only partially satisfactory. If justice is to be done to the nature of these there can be no escape from the necessity of responsible historical inquiry. All approaches that ignore or are oblivious to the historical claims in the Bible involve interpretive methodologies that can only be called

It has become extremely important in our day to insist upon the of the historical-critical Early in this century it was reactionary fundamentalists who declared the historical-critical method invalid and illegitimate. In the middle of the century moderates pronounced biblical theology dead because of its inability to cope with the negative conclu- sions of historical-criticism. Now at the end of the century liberals are declaring the bankruptcy of the historical-critical method itself. This is hardly to be received by evangelicals as good news because with the abandonment of the method comes the abandonment of a historical understanding of the Bible and hence a biblical understanding of the Christian faith. In the current climate, it is the those who are committed to the truthfulness of the gospel in all its historical all who must not give up on the possibility of historical knowledge and hence of the vital importance of the historical-critical method.

The way out of the quandary is neither to continue to use the historical-critical method as classically conceived nor to abandon it outright because of its destructive past, but rather to modify it so as to make it more appropriate to the material being studied. But is this possible?

MODIFICATION OF THE