A Brief History of Interpreting the Bible, Or: The Failure of the Historical Critical Method

Several Christians I know are still overly optimistic about the historical critical method of studying the Bible, without being willing to take the method to its logical conclusion. For those people, Prof. Dale Martin gives something to think about. Here’s a slightly edited transcript taken from one of his lectures:

Before the Reformation, basically the Bible was supposed to mean what the Catholic Church said it meant, what the Pope and bishops said it meant. The authority structure of the church was taken to be the way that you controlled wild interpretations.

People in the ancient world knew that you can interpret a text any way you want to. So what keeps heretics from interpreting this text in false ways? The institution of the church. So Ignatius said that you can’t just interpret scripture any you want to; you must be in agreement with your bishop. The rule of the bishop and the rule of the church was the way to keep control over the interpretation of the text.

Of course in the pre-Reformation time, you did have the rise of humanism and the Renaissance, which started questioning that a bit, and they started going back and looking at the original Hebrew, the original Greek, insisting that you should read these texts in their original languages and not just in Latin. That was before the Reformation. You already had this move toward history and reading the text in historical context in the humanist movement and the Renaissance.

With the Reformation, though, of course you really get it in the sixteenth century with Martin Luther, John Calvin, Melanchthon, different writers saying, “Well, we’re going to throw out this Catholic authority on the text. We’re going to get back to the text itself.” The only authority for the radical reformers was scripture. You know this as sola scriptura, scripture only; scripture only will be the guide for authority for Protestants.

Then they start realizing that different people can interpret scripture differently. They’re very familiar with medieval Christian ways of interpreting scripture to have several different meanings and layers of meanings. And so they say, “The predominant guide of scripture isn’t going to be just scripture; it’s going to be one particular meaning of scripture.” And that’s sensus literalis. The literal sense of scripture is what will be now the guide for the Reformation, not the Pope, not the bishops. Even the bishop must submit to the literal sense of scripture.

Now it’s rather debatable what they meant by “the literal sense” because some of these reformers said that the literal sense of scripture could even be a prophetic sense, so they still said that the literal sense of scripture could be in a Psalm when the Psalm says, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand.’” They knew that the  text would be referring to the Davidic King, but they also said that Psalm also could refer to Jesus, even in its literal sense. The literal sense that they were talking about in the Reformation was not necessarily what we would call the historical critical sense. It was what they took it to be the most fundamental plain sense meaning of the text.

So that was the literal sense. Then again they realized the more they did this that Protestant churches started splitting all over the place. Presbyterians and Calvinists split off from the Lutherans, the Anabaptists split off from the Reformation. And then you have a rise of so many Protestant movements that the idea that scripture alone could settle debates and give you a foundation started becoming questionable.

Beginning somewhat in the eighteenth century but mainly in the nineteenth century, and mainly in German speaking lands, scholars started pushing the historical reading of the text. They said, “We’ve got to get down to what the author meant. What did the historical Paul mean? How did we discover that?” That’s when you have the rise of the dominance of the historical critical method. It was elaborated and invented in the nineteenth century, and in some places it was precisely invented in order to try to make the text of the New Testament and the Bible a firm foundation for doctrine and ethics within Protestantism and within the wide of varieties of different kinds of Protestantism.

Then the last part of this — just in the last, say, thirty years — is that people like me come along and say, “You know, it hasn’t worked. This attempt to use historical criticism, to settle disputes about the meaning of the text, doesn’t work.” Because even the historical critical method can render wildly varying interpretations of these texts.

So you’ve got some people reading Romans 1 as a condemnation of modern homosexuality and thinking they’re doing a good historical reading of this text. You’ve got other people who read the same text, using the same methods of historical criticism, and say, “Are you crazy? He’s not talking about homosexuality, that’s not his concern. It’s talking about idolatry or something else.”

Even scholars using the same method of historical criticism, trained in the same schools, getting degrees from the same places, come up with different interpretations of these texts. And that’s why you have right now a lot of questioning of this method as not supplying the firm foundations that Protestants originally thought it might.