Imagine This

 A Confused State of Scholarship

In a simple version of the culture war, hostile criticism would be pitted against belief, and each position would be located in the appropriate social settings.  Criticism would find its home in the academy, and belief in the Church.  But the reality is that the social locations of biblical scholarship are diverse,  and the question of its precise purpose very much an open one.   To properly locate the present situation, a rapid review of the development of critical scholarship within and outside the Church may be helpful.

Before the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, biblical scholarship was carried out exclusively in service of the Christian faith, within its framework in the canon (the official collection of biblical writings)  the teaching authority of the church, and the creed.  Much of patristic and monastic interpretation in fact, took the form of homilies to be delivered at worship.  Even when the medieval universities developed out of monastic schools as independent centers of learning, biblical scholarship was done within the framework of theology the "queen of the sciences," and the threefold norm of church, canon and creed held sway.

The Reformation, especially through the work of Martin Luther changed everything.  Luther opposed Catholicism's emphasis on tradition as norm for Scripture by elevating Scripture to the exclusive font of revelation (sola scriptura).  This made the key to right living dependent on the right reading of Scripture. The context of ecclesial interpretation was weakened further by the principle of individual interpretation,  for the first time made practical by translations from the original and above all the invention of printing, which made Bibles readily available to the laity.  Now the New Testament is not heard mostly in Latin within the liturgy and as expounded by clergy, but can be apprehended directly in one's native language and is open to private interpretation.  It was a combination filled with potential conflict.  Everything essential rested on the reading of a text, but that reading could be carried out by individuals!

Luther was from beginning to end not only an interpreter of the Bible but a passionate lover of the texts and of the One to whom those pointed.  Nevertheless, his approach to the New Testament (which was to prove overwhelmingly influential in the development of critical scholarship) was deeply if unconsciously affected by the intellectual climate of the Renaissance.  This can be seen not only in his preference for the recovered Greek text over the Latin Vulgate proclaimed in the Church (note here the implicit authority of the Greek reading scholar over the latin dependent clergy).  The recovery of the original text was the key to the recovery of original Christianity.  Just as Renaissance scholars, once classical texts were recovered, could measure the inadequacy of late-medieval society against the grandeur of Greece and Rome, so could the theologian measure the inadequacy of medieval Christianity against the norm of the primitive church, or even better, the figure of Jesus, himself.

Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus,  Chapter 3: Cultured Confusion and Collusion

IT IS A COMMON THEME OF FABLES that you should be careful what you wish for because you might get it and find it is not what you think it will be.  I'm sure Martin Luther never would have wanted to ignite the tinder that would burn up so much of what he believed he was restoring in his removal of later human experience (which is what "tradition" as artificially divided from "Scripture" is)* from being considered as the same significance as the published Biblical canon.  The ironies, of course, start with the question as to how the texts of the Bible can be separated from lost streams of tradition that were written down and became the canon.

He, himself, and Protestantism would help to significantly reduce the previous Christian canon of the Bible by rejecting some of the writings that , through the Greek Septuagint, find their ways into the Catholic and Orthodox canons.  He seems to have wanted to throw out the Epistle of James which I think would have been catastrophic because it is almost certainly one of those books closest to the time of Jesus and his closest followers. And it happens to be one of my favorite books in the New Testament.  And subsequent Protestants restored some but not all of the books Luther expunged from Scripture, some of them pretty significant Books.  Luther's deletions from the canon were based on his own theological prejudices, especially his insistence on "salvation by faith alone."  I think that what he could not easily square with that fixation had to go, no matter what.   In that, I think, there is another model for the subsequent modern practice of "historical-critical" criticism.  It is certainly typical of how that is practiced now.

I think it is very likely that Luke Timothy Johnson is justified in identifying the historical critical movement of the New Testament as a product of the Protestant Reformation which very quickly started generating separate and competing factions inspired by those individual readings of the Bible, coming to some very different interpretations of Scripture and "original Christianity" and, certainly enough, Jesus.  That was certainly not unknown during the previous centuries but the Reformation in which, if you lived in the right places, would free you to come to your own conclusions about those things and not have to worry so much about being oppressed or killed as a heretic.  But this isn't about that, this is about the origins of the historical-critical tradition.   By the way,  in this context, isn't tie idea of historical-criticism as a tradition rather supremely ironic?

You can read some of even the very early Reformation figures and justifiably suspect the one thing they were most in agreement on was that the Catholic Church is evil.   And, of course, much of it, like much of everything dependent on human minds and characters, was wrong and some of it evil. Even as the wickedness of many or the late medieval and Renaissance and baroque Popes and hierarchs is not honestly denied, the wickedness of some of the Protestant churches - I'm thinking especially of the Church of England, especially in its beginnings in the Tudor and Stuart periods - rivals that of the worst Catholic hierarchs and corrupt Popes of the time.  Especially those churches which sought political power (the King or Queen of England was the head of the English Church) and economic wealth for themselves (the dissolution of the monasteries and convents the destitution and murder of their members and the theft of their property), those corruptions in the Vatican and other power centers being the primary corruptions that Luther, himself, began the whole thing over.

How much of Luther is left in today's various Lutheran churches and denominations associated with Lutheranism is worth considering but it's hardly an apparent thing.  Like the often quite anti-Calvinist character today of Churches and denominations that began as orthodox bastions of adherence to Calvin's theology, much of today's Lutheranism is quite un-Lutherlike.  And much of Protestantism today is quite collegial with many Catholics and members of the hierarchy and vice-versa.  I'd never want to go back to the 1950s or earliest 60s when it was considered a mortal sin for a Catholic to attend Protestant worship and, on a popular level, reading Protestant theology would have been considered clandestine, though apparently Pope Pius XII read Karl Barth with a level of approval.  I would be almost no lay Catholics at the time would have been made aware of that.

For my purpose, the last paragraph of this section is the most interesting, so far, so I'll go over that a bit more.

Luther was from beginning to end not only an interpreter of the Bible but a passionate lover of the texts and of the One to whom those pointed.  Nevertheless, his approach to the New Testament (which was to prove overwhelmingly influential in the development of critical scholarship) was deeply if unconsciously affected by the intellectual climate of the Renaissance.  This can be seen not only in his preference for the recovered Greek text over the Latin Vulgate proclaimed in the Church (note here the implicit authority of the Greek reading scholar over the Latin dependent clergy.) The recovery of the original text was the key to the recovery of original Christianity.  Just as Renaissance scholars, once classical texts were recovered, could measure the inadequacy of late-medieval society against the grandeur of Greece and Rome, so could the theologian measure the inadequacy of medieval Christianity against the norm of the primitive church, or even better, the figure of Jesus, himself.

All of that, apart from imagining the Church in their own time, in the places they were familiar with, is a product of imagination.  The imagined classical Greek city states and Roman empire were certainly nothing much like what those were in real life, their imaginations being constructed of the surviving words of an elite minority of the wealthiest Greeks and Romans who were certainly biased and predisposed to tell a version of their societies based on their own prejudices and self-interest.  Almost all if it told by entitled males, almost none of it told by Women, the lower classes and, with the fewest of exceptions, the huge numbers of slaves and those violently occupied and lorded over by them.** 

I would guarantee you that every evil and wickedness of the late medieval Church was more than matched by entirely routine evils of those grand Greeks and Romans imagined clean and pure, rational and enlightened by the romantic view of them in the Renaissance.  The subjugation of Women and children under patriarchy, the huge and rampant slave economies in all of it, the brutal wars of conquest and the continuing wars of subjugation are generally either not taken into consideration or those are imagined with the evils of the side telling the tales translated into ersatz virtue in much the same way that American myths of white supremacy and celluloid tales turn the brutality of American history into virtue - I would contend the foremost corruption of Christianity in the United States, Catholic, Protestant and cargo-cult-night-club "churches".   The Republican-fascist imagination of American history is so tied up in racist violence and the "white evangelicals" apart from such as voted for Hillary Clinton and other democrats, mix that with a "Jesus" of their imaginations.  As a Catholic, I will point out that if Luther is responsible for the dangers of illicit reading or imagining of Scripture (and I doubt most of them actually spend much time in independent and serious reading of Scripture) the trad-Catholics are full blown Lutherans of a sort, today.

That reimagining of Scripture, of Jesus, I'd contend, did as much to perpetuate evils into the modern period as it did to improve on late-medieval Catholic Europe.  The evils embedded into the form of government under the U.S. Constitution, the anti-democratic Senate, for example, was based on a similar imagining of the Roman Republic.  

What little I know of it, the relationship of Lutheran and other Protestants to the Orthodox branch of Christianity which never was without the Greek texts of the New Testament, is not one of complete concord and harmony of viewpoint.  There might not have been the political-economic friction between them and the Orthodox as there was with Latin Catholicism, but they certainly rejected the Greek Old Testament as much as they did the Vulgate Latin translation.  It's a topic I don't know enough about to have very developed ideas about that but it might be something I try to investigate.  Also, I wish I knew more about the closeness of Lutheran and Calvinist and other Protestants view of the Old Testament with that of then contemporary Jewish scholars.  What little I know leads me to think Calvinism might have had a view of at least some of it that was closer to Jewish traditions.  Luther was, infamously, so infuriated with Jews who wouldn't accept his "purified Christianity" that he became an infamous hater of Jews who remained Jewish.

The Reformation view of "primitive Christianity" was hardly uniform, the pretense that that was what they were reestablishing was as true of those churches which more or less just translated Catholic practice into the vernacular with a different hierarchy and no Pope as it was the radicals such as the Quakers a little while later.  I'd love to be able to ask some of the earliest Quakers who held that their practice was close to it to explain the earliest documents we have which proves that the actual physical performance of the Eucharist was as central to their worship and lives as reading Scripture in a language they knew was.  The breaking of the bread and sharing the cup is so well established an act from the earliest documents - the Gospels, Acts, the early letters and the earliest surviving descriptions of Christian worship mention it as central to worship.

All of which shows that imagination of the past is the central act of even the most historical-critical, would be scientific, or consensus based scholarship and like all imagining of the past, what we get is not going to be without problems.  

The actual claim that they could get back to what would be known later as "the historical Jesus" is no less an act of total imagining.  A test of the accuracy of that would, certainly, be based on the degree of uniformity "their" historical Jesuses were to each other and there never was much of complete concord on that matter.  If anything, that lack of concord today, when competitive denominational interests and fixations have given way to the sharp elbows of academics, is likely even greater than that generated by faithful Protestantism.  

Instead of an "historical Jesus" it would probably have been better to try to find a core of what Christianity is.  I have given my two rocks on which any authentic Christianity must stand, Jewish justice and Jesus's commandments of love.  If I were to go through the exercise of making up an "historical Jesus" those would be my tests and I wouldn't base anything on a group of scholars or a synod of bishops and theologians in determining is further elaboration could be held to be authentic if those weren't decisive in identifying something as such.  Walter Brueggeman once was asked about what the bare minimum of Christianity was, he said loving god and loving your neighbor as yourself, which I think is pretty good, too.  If you're not doing that, you're not doing it.  I don't think anyone would be confused by such a state of affairs, no matter what frills and furbelows you attached to it.

As a political blogger who has, against every inclinations of my thinking going back to adolescence, come to the conclusion that the fate of egalitarian democracy is as tied to those two rocks as any authentic Christianity, I have to say that I don't think that's a mere coincidence. 

 I believe the nature of those two practices, justice and universal love, the consequences of performing or not performing those in real life, not only on an individual but a societal and universal basis, are what the Jewish Scriptures lay out as the way of life and the way of death.  

Believing on the basis of experience and observation that that is the case, it is absurd to think that any legitimate, beneficial, benevolent politics or government can ignore those no matter what the deists among the "Founders" and the fashions of late 18th century rich, white men claimed to the contrary.  

My reading of human history, my reading of the news, my experience of life and observation of the world around proves that matters as deeply as anything in human life, in human society, as anything in human history matters.  It certainly matters as much and more than anything in all of the STEM subjects put together. Their continuing practice of science, etc.  and their character as benevolent or evil depends on those pillars of morality as much as providing food for hungry children or equal access to voting rights or getting vaccinated so you don't pass on a life threatening virus.  Pretending that any human activity can ignore or deny those or practice their negation is without the most dire of consequences is the most benighted aspect of the "enlightenment" that generated the modern version of historical-critical practice.  That part of it was something you can't blame on Martin Luther.

* It's a question as to why the later bishops etc. who formed "the canon" stopped when they did and didn't include things like the Letter of Clement, I don't know if we have a real answer to that.  Marilynne Robinson once asked the interesting and fraught question of what the New Testament would be like if its canon included the subsequent history of Christianity as the Jewish Scriptures include many fraught centuries of the history of the Children of Israel.  What if "the canon" included the Crusades and the other horrors from when Christianity, against the stated words of Jesus, gained kingdoms of this world?  I think it's probably a good thing that they cut it off from well before that period.  Imagine if today's "white evangelicals" of the Repubican-fascist kind had resort to accounts of the Crusades as scripture.

** I don't think the use of the imagined classical Greece and Rome by the politicians and others in the modern period can honestly be removed from the slave economics they practiced enthusiastically, the genocidal conquests they engaged in, the male supremacy and racism that are as endemic to modernism as scientistic rationalism, nor the male supremacy that also is characteristic of secular modernism.  All of the opposition to those originated in and had their greatest power from the influence of the Jewish and Christian scriptures and those who took those seriously.  The modern myth that egalitarian democracy is a product of scientistic materialism is one of the main absurdities of a falsified history as told by the opponents of religion but one that is refuted by a close reading of the actual literature of abolition, of Women's' equality and what could be considered the scriptures of rationalism, the racism, sexism and imperialism of the likes of Voltaire and David Hume, Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton, etc.

Moldering, aging, decrepit modernism which didn't empower us with science but which is, itself, a product of science, is something that we will have to surpass to survive, due to the deadly products of science, even more than modernism had to surpass what came before it and as Protestantism had to surpass late medieval Catholicism.  As modern Catholicism had to, as well.  That isn't to say we can forget the past, we can't anymore than we can keep the future from happening.  

The current geological-biological period is not the age of dinosaurs but everything we are is dependent on our ancestors who survived that, we cannot ignore that and even if we did ignore it, it wouldn't change much.  We are not the end of history at any point, we are in the midst of it.  We can't regain the past and considering what we know of the past, we shouldn't want to.  

There is a reason that the character of Republican-fascist Constitutional "originalism" is reactionary, anti-egalitarian, oppressive and larcenous. The 18th century of their imaginings was, in fact and as enabled by intention in their Constitution, anti-egalitarian, oppressive and larcenous.  The "originalists" imagined and already partially achieved recreation of it even more intentionally evil.  That is typical of those who imagine a past golden age we are required to return to.  Classicism and its relation to 20th century modernism includes both fascism and Nazism as the various versions of that harking back to "the founders" has its own particular flavor of that.

Creation continues for a reason, if it were not to be different from the past the future would recreate some past and it never has yet.  All of us, in the past, the present, the future are all loved by the Creator all kept in the mind of God, flaws and shortcomings included or none of us would have ever existed. None of us are the ultimate but a part of the whole.