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Forgetting the power of leaven: The historical method in recent New Testament theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2014

Seth Heringer
Seth Heringer*
Affiliation:
Fuller Theological Seminary, 135 N. Oakland Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91182, [email protected]
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Abstract

Ernst Troeltsch and Heikki Räisänen have raised significant challenges to the way New Testament theology handles the relation of history and theology. Troeltsch pushed Christian scholars to apply the historical method's three principles of criticism, analogy and correlation consistently to their work and thus embrace empiricism. Räisänen continues this trajectory by splitting New Testament theology into its descriptive and reflective tasks, resulting in a programme which questions the unity of the canon, the appropriateness of prescription and the role of church authority in New Testament theology. With these challenges in mind, this article examines four recent New Testament theologies to see how they use the historical method. It finds that these works exhibit different ad hoc ways of using the historical method, picking it up and setting it down at will. Peter Balla accepts New Testament theology as descriptive and historical while claiming it can also be theological by studying the content in the New Testament. Despite this embrace of the historical method, Balla remains uncomfortable with bare empiricism and pushes back on its naturalism. Georg Strecker splits the world into two: one part which can be investigated by the historical method and another part which lies outside its normal subject matter. The result is that he uses the historical method everywhere except where his main theological concern lies – Jesus’ resurrection. I. Howard Marshall similarly holds the historical method to be necessary for New Testament theology but largely ignores it in light of narrative-theological concerns. Frank Matera takes a purposefully literary approach to New Testament theology and generally ignores the historical method. He does invoke it, however, when the text becomes difficult and alternative readings must be found. The methodological inconsistency demonstrated by these New Testament theologies leads the article to conclude that this type of historical New Testament theology is a failed enterprise. A theological understanding of history based on work by Murray Rae is then proposed as an alternative which allows for methodological consistency in synthetic work on the New Testament.

Keywords

Ernst Troeltschhistorical methodhistorymethodologyNew Testament theologytheology
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 85 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2014 

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References

1 Troeltsch, Ernst, ‘Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology’, in Religion in History (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), p. 12Google Scholar.

2 Räisänen, Heikki, Beyond New Testament Theology: A Story and a Programme, 2nd edn (London: SCM, 2000)Google Scholar. Although both authors focus on the academic study of history, neither believes that anything else deserves the name ‘history’. Both consider history influenced by ecclesial concerns not to be history but something else altogether – namely, theology.

3 I use the term ‘historical method’ to describe Troeltsch's method below. Today this type of method might more accurately be called the historical-critical method, a term Troeltsch uses less often.

4 ‘Once employed, the inner logic of the method drives us forward; and all the counter-measures essayed by theologians to neutralize its effects or to confine them to some limited area have failed, despite eager efforts to demonstrate their validity’ (Troeltsch, ‘Historical and Dogmatic Method’, p. 18).

5 Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), Troeltsch's historiographical forefather, is considered to be one of the first to have given a thorough description of modern scientific historiography. See, however, Clark, Elizabeth A., History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 10Google Scholar, who cites the work of Arnaldo Momigliano as tracing the beginning of scientific history earlier than Ranke.

6 For more on the rivalry between Troeltsch and Niebergall, see Drescher, Hans-Georg, Ernst Troeltsch: His Life and Work, trans. Bowden, John (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), pp. 93–7Google Scholar.

7 Troeltsch, ‘Historical and Dogmatic Method’, p. 22.

8 Ibid., p. 12.

9 Ibid., p. 20.

10 The importance of Troeltsch's three principles should not be overlooked. John J. Collins calls them the ‘classic formulation’ of nineteenth-century critical historiography (Encounters with Biblical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), p. 12). Collins argues that Troeltsch's formulation of these principles influenced William Wrede to consider their implications for biblical theology. Since Wrede has strongly influenced Räisänen, it is reasonable to assume Räisänen also embraces these principles. For example, he describes his basic concern as simply showing that ‘a “historical” account of early Christianity is not to appeal to supernatural or “metaempirical” entities (gods, revelation, inspiration) as explanatory factors nor should it make prescriptive claims’ (‘What I Meant and What it Might Mean: An Attempt at Responding’, in Todd Penner and Caroline Vander Stichele (eds), Moving Beyond New Testament Theology? Essays in Conversation with Heikki Räisänen (Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society, 2005), p. 425). The empiricism of this statement clearly has its roots in the principles of analogy and correlation. The principle of criticism is apparent throughout his work, which doubts the unity, authority and claims of the New Testament.

11 Troeltsch, ‘Historical and Dogmatic Method’, p. 14.

12 For Troeltsch, however, Jesus himself does not fit his own context. Rather, he has ‘broken’ the ‘limitation’ of his context with a personality which was ‘superior to nature with eternally transcendent goals’ (ibid., p. 27). Troeltsch is never clear how he can hold Jesus as outside the total context of history and still remain consistent with the historical method.

13 When Troeltsch's entire corpus is considered, he is clearly not an empiricist. Nevertheless, the only place these three principles can lead is empiricism. Thus, even though these principles do not represent his entire work, they show his early solution to the problem of dogmatism in Christian historiography.

14 Ibid., p. 15.

15 Ibid., p. 16.

16 An important vindication of the historical method is its success in many and various fields: ‘No one can deny that wherever the historical method has been applied it has produced surprisingly illuminating results, and that confidence in its ability to illuminate previously obscure areas has been consistently vindicated. Such success is its sole – but wholly sufficient – validation’ (ibid., p. 16).

17 Räisänen, Beyond New Testament Theology, p. 8.

18 The separation of the two tasks is important to Räisänen. Although he allows literary intermixing, he wants it to be clear at what ‘level’ one is working. He suggests putting theological work ‘in a concluding section of the historical work, or in an appendix following the historical account’. No matter how these two tasks are juxtaposed, one must ‘clearly indicate what one is doing’ (Beyond New Testament Theology, p. 204).

19 Although Räisänen objects to being seen as arguing for ‘objectivity’ or ‘neutrality’, his protests do not fit with his system. For his more postmodern moments, see his Beyond New Testament Theology, pp. 34, 166; idem, ‘What I Meant’, pp. 420–5.

20 Beyond New Testament Theology, p. 160.

21 Ibid., p. 156.

22 Ibid., p. 157.

23 Ibid., p. 158.

24 Ibid., p. 168.

25 Ibid., p. 176.

26 Ibid., p. 154; italics mine.

27 Ibid., p. 162.

28 See Räisänen, ‘What I Meant’, p. 417, where he criticises Peter Balla's defence of a theological unified canon by saying, ‘I do not see how one could uphold these assumptions today’. For more on Balla's work, see below.

29 Räisänen, Beyond New Testament Theology, p. 154. Räisänen's willingness to allow for an ecclesial NTT, as long as it realises that it is not historical, mirrors an earlier move by Troeltsch when he admits that an ecclesial system and a historical system are ‘consistent within’ themselves but ‘incompatible’ with each other (‘Historical and Dogmatic Method’, p. 25). In short, both allow for theological scholarship as long as it recognises that it is something other than historical.

30 For reviews of recent literature see Matera, Frank J., ‘New Testament Theology: History, Method, and Identity’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 67 (2005), pp. 1–21Google Scholar; Rowe, C. Kavin, ‘New Testament Theology: The Revival of a Discipline’, Journal of Biblical Literature 125 (2006), pp. 393–419CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 That is, the aforementioned five challenges will not be enumerated for each author but will be conversation partners throughout.

32 Marshall, I. Howard, New Testament Theology: Many Witnesses, One Gospel (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), p. 18Google Scholar.

33 Balla, Peter, Challenges to New Testament Theology: An Attempt to Justify the Enterprise (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997; repr., Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1998)Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., p. 3.

35 Ibid., p. 214.

36 Ibid., p. 4.

37 Ibid., p. 40.

38 Ibid., p. 16. Balla's desire to discuss God's action is incongruent with the purpose of his book to defend NTT within the context of Räisänen's historical method. Despite the possibility of a new definition of history, his argument proceeds along historical-critical lines.

39 Ibid., p. 41.

40 Ibid., p. 46. The problem with this type of openness is that the historical method will never allow such claims to rise to the level of possibility. Even if supernatural acts are not ruled out by definition, analogy and correlation will prove them false before the inquiry has really begun.

41 Ibid., p. 85.

42 ‘I would argue that reconstructed creedal elements may have formed parts of the “basic theology” of the early Christians’ (ibid., p. 205). See, however, p. 208 where he seemingly contradicts this point by wondering if a theological unity will ever be found for the NT, leaving only ‘theologies’ of the NT.

43 Ibid., p. 101.

44 Ibid., pp. 100–1.

45 Ibid., pp. 112–14.

46 Ibid., p. 116.

47 For more on the connection between canon and theology, see Jenson, Robert W., Canon and Creed (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010)Google Scholar.

48 Balla would argue that ‘theology’ is maintained insofar as one is concerned with the task of describing early church theology, but this is only historical description by another name.

49 Strecker, Georg and Horn, Friedrich Wilhelm, Theology of the New Testament, trans. Boring, M. Eugene (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000), pp. 1, 252CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Strecker's NTT was finished posthumously by Friedrich Wilhelm Horn and first published in German under the title Theologie des Neuen Testaments in 1996.

50 Theology of the New Testament, p. 252.

51 Ibid., p. 269.

52 Ibid., pp. 269–70.

53 Paul Veyne describes history as ‘an account of events. . .it is a narration’ which ‘simplifies, organizes, fits a century into a page’. But narration alone is not enough, for narration must use ‘true events’: ‘A fact fulfills a single condition to be worthy of history: it must really have taken place’ and thus ‘history is the relating of true events’ (Writing History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), pp. 4, 11–12). Hayden White also shows the importance of real events narrated properly when he writes that ‘it is not enough that an historical account deal in real, rather than merely imaginary, events. . . .The events must not be not only registered within the chronological framework of their original occurrence but narrated as well’ (The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 5).

54 Strecker and Horn, Theology of the New Testament, pp. 268–9. One could reply that the empty tomb has nothing supernatural about it and falls within the ken of historical inquiry, thereby proving him consistent. In the context of Strecker's book, however, the empty tomb narratives were created to show ‘the earthly reality of the resurrection in a manner that can be demonstrated’ (p. 267) – a definitely supernatural reality, thus a reality which should lie beyond historical inquiry.

55 Hume gives the clearest statement of this argument in section 10 ‘Of Miracles’ in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. There Hume argues that when natural laws based on experience are assumed, the evidence for miracles can never overcome the evidence for natural laws, thus making it impossible to argue for a miracle. The historical method certainly uses natural laws and experience similarly to Hume.

56 Although these arguments are not identical to Balla's, they demonstrate a similar trajectory.

57 There is a logical circle in how Marshall discovers a unity in the canon. He uses the criterion of theological unity to defend the historical canon, then ‘discovers’ a unity in the canon after examining the individual documents – a unity which had already served as a canonical criterion.

58 Marshall, New Testament Theology, p. 28.

59 Ibid., p. 47.

60 It is problematic to contrast narrative and history as I am doing here, especially in the wake of Hayden White's argument that narrative is the form of history (e.g. Content of the Form). Nevertheless, the word fits because Marshall is interested in the narrative world of the authors, which he believes can be historically reconstructed.

61 Marshall, New Testament Theology, p. 130.

62 Ibid., p. 111.

63 Ibid., pp. 497, 593.

64 Ibid., p. 141.

65 Ibid., p. 54. What these tests are, he does not mention in this work.

66 Ibid., p. 26.

67 Ibid., p. 43.

68 Ibid., p. 46.

69 Matera, Frank J., New Testament Theology: Exploring Diversity and Unity (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007) p. 2, fn 2Google Scholar.

70 Ibid., p. xxvii.

71 Ibid., p. xxvii.

72 Ibid., p. 279.

73 Ibid., p. 81.

74 Rae, Murray A., History and Hermeneutics (London: T&T Clark, 2005)Google Scholar.