Pretensions of Objectivity: Toward a Criticism of Biblical Criticism

by Jeffrey L Morrow

Modern historical biblical criticism, while having many strengths, often operates under the pretensions of objectivity, as if such scholarship were neutral and disinterested. Examining the history and roots of modern biblical scholarship shows that such objectivity is elusive, and was never intended by the method's earliest practitioners. Building upon his earlier work in Three Skeptics and the Bible and Theology, Politics, and Exegesis, Morrow continues this historical investigation into the political and philosophical roots of modern biblical criticism in Pretensions of Objectivity, in the hope of developing a criticism of biblical criticism and of making space for theological exegesis. ""One would think that in a postmodern environment, scholars would have learned to be suspicious about any claims to intellectual neutrality and objectivity, but there remains a large pocket of unreformed 'modernism' within the discipline of biblical studies. Morrow helps unmask the covert agendas of this intellectual tradition."" --John Bergsma, Professor of Theology, Franciscan University of Steubenville Jeffrey L. Morrow is Associate Professor at Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology at Seton Hall University. He is the author of Three Skeptics and the Bible (2016) and Theology, Politics, and Exegesis (2017).

146 pages, Paperback

Published March 8, 2019

Reviews

[Alan Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author traces the history of modern historical-critical Bible interpretation from the traditional Christian understanding of a unified story about God and about how to live, to a playground for the highly educated, the elite exegetes who are well versed in the original languages, history, literary forms, etc. Some Reformers provided a model for incorporating figurative language and prophecy within the literal sense. This led to the literal sense alone, eschewing any spiritual sense of Scripture. The Italian philosopher Machiavelli assumed figures such as Moses were religious dissemblers using religion for their own political gain. This provided for a hermeneutic of suspicion in later modern biblical criticism.

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

The real contribution of these books isn't biblical - the territory the author treads was generally covered earlier and more throughly by others - but in showing that Conciliarism and Gallicanism were veiled power plays by the political authority.

By the time of the Ultramontane controversy, the authorities were anti-religious, anti-clerical, and leftist, being drunk from the troughs of the French revolution, Napoleon, Kulturkampf further north, etc. and unlike the authority of united throne and altar of Christendom in the middle ages, was properly a secularizing secular (or temporal) authority. With over 60% of the world's bishops directly appointed or confirmed by the secularizing secular power at the time, Ultramontanism was the only possible alternative, regardless of all of its possible historical and dogmatic flaws, to a Gallicanism which would have the gates of hell to prevail: to give atheistical, anti-Catholic political actors absolute authority in the Catholic Church itself.

(Not that it did much in the long run, with Bergoglio being given the papacy only 150 years after the battle against the Gallicans was won, who is the posthumous champion of those who would have subjected the church to anti-Catholic, secular, egalitarian, modernist rule. In fact, it barely lasted a century, with the Latrocinium of 1965 being the undoing of Ultramontanism's purpose - Döllinger was right.)

These three books ('Three Skeptics', 'Theology, Politics') are incredibly repetitious, both in themselves (just read this one, skip the first two) and of Hahn/Wiker in which they are based. Hahn/Wiker and Michael Legaspi ('The Death of Scripture') comprise a bit over three-quarters of all references in the trilogy between them. The trilogy is basically the marriage of the two covering the timeframe of both (1300-1700 and the late 18th century respectively).

They're also very limited in the range of sources they cite, or often regurgitate: Talal Asad (just read him), Susan Schreiner (just read 'Are You Alone Wise?'), Cavanaugh ('The Myth of Religious Violence' and 'A Fire Strong Enough'), Jonathan Israel, a couple Spinoza scholars, and a bunch of Jews from the middle ages forward (this category overlaps with the categories of Israel and Spinoza scholars). That's essentially it in all three books, so you might as well read the sources yourselves. Add Shagan's 'Birth of Modern Belief' and a standard work on the decline of religious authority, like Gregory or Taylor.

I should have skipped straight to Morrow's collaboration with Hahn ('Biblical Interpretation as a Tool of Statecraft'). Still not bad because we need more works pounding the table about the inherently anti-religious, anti-legitimate authority, anti-clerical nature of the very tools of historical criticism. In this the author fails to go far enough, but Shagan picks up the slack. Even when he doesn't mention the Bible, his insights are applicable to any discipline so that you can see the very thought-world or totalizing metanarrative of triumphant egalitarianism, disenchantment, and autonomy (aka leftism) making alternatives literally unthinkable, on its seven-century long march through the institutions from the Condemnation of Averroistic Aristotelianism in 1269* to the end of history in 1969.

In a way one starts to think that St Thomas wasn't a bulwark of tradition, but a progenitor of modernity...

*Actually a series 1220-1280 with the most famous being Bishop Tempier's in 1277.