AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Miles, Christ, and Biblical Criticism

Steve Yost’s pointer to Jack Miles’s overview of biblical scholarship includes an invitation to put in my ha’penny’s-worth on Miles’s assessment of biblical scholarship. (Steve wonders whether this would be a good context in which to read my book on postmodernism; I would say that it’s always a good time to read that book, but in this context the strong of heart may find more especially relevant a different book of mine, oriented particularly toward the way criteria function in biblical interpretation. But that one’s also longer and more expensive and less commonly available in libraries, so you have permission to skip it in favor of the cheaper, shorter, more easily accessible one.)

Miles’s survey seems largely to hit the mark; I’d quibble with him on a number of points, but on the whole he seems to have sized up my colleagues in this field pretty accurately. I would probably treat “literary criticism” somewhat differently—his version of lit-crit seems a little too gloriously heroic by my lights—but Miles wisely notes the importance of Hans Frei (and Margaret would quickly add the even greater importance of Henri de Lubac) and the biblical guild’s successful construction of a veil of misprision that insulates the guild from edifying contact with the broader world of critical thinking. I’d be tempted to say simply that graduate study in the Bible trains people to be bad readers—readers whose sense of what’s important about a text derives from extremely narrow and self-justifying premises.

A test case arises in most introductory classes in Scripture. Seminarians typically need to be taught that the modern methods of analyzing Scripture are not risible, but are the exclusively sound and truthful ways of reading an ancient text. They “need” this, that is, because it’s very far from being evident to them. I would say they have good reason to be skeptical about modern biblical scholarship, but that they ought not infer that modern scholarship is a load of dingo’s kidneys. They should instead learn how to distinguish dingo’s kidneys from wholesome, nourishing close reading. Unfortunately, the cultural prominence of modern presuppositions in biblical interpretation makes it hard to say anything more nuanced than Aye or Nay.

Getting back, then, to Miles: the best thing one can do is to learn to read the Bible with sensitivity to theme and character, to what is said, what isn't said, and what may deliberately have been un-said, to the human capacities of amateur authors (even if they be gifted amateurs) and the divine subtlety that brings diverse authorial voices into a collection where they may provide the basis for a harmonious, profound theological testimony—or the discordant jibberish of antithetical yammering, or the monotonous drone of carefully-rehearsed Officially-Approved Interpretive Statements.

I don’t know as my interpretations of the New Testament will align with Jack Miles’s more than incidentally, but that will involve our different purposes, different tastes, different lines of accountability. It will not involve one of the two of us being anti-intellectual, or heedless of historical judgment.

Posted by AKMA at February 23, 2003 03:16 PM | TrackBack