Critical allegory

In a JSOT lecture, published in a 1989 issue of JSOT, James Barr probes Brevard Childs’s claim that “a fundamental characteristic of the critical movement was its total commitment to the literal sense of the text.” Not so, Barr argues. On the contrary, the whole impetus behind biblical scholarship since 1800 has been the conclusion that the literal sense of the Bible is often false. Critical scholars were thus faced with the choice of abandoning the Bible as a source of truth in any sense, or of locating the truth of the Bible at a different level than the literal. Most took the latter option, and thus came up with a method of exegesis “with some likeness to allegory.”

He also challenges the claim of Daniel Migliore that critical scholarship was a kind of historicism in which “the interest . . . focused primarily on establishing ‘what really happened,’ what could be declared ‘factual’ . . . The meaning of the BIble was separated from the literary form and located in the ‘facts’ behind the text.” He defends this conclusion by pointing to what actually happens in critical commentaries. Far from trying to explain “what really happened,” most commentaries don’t even raise the question. He does find one branch of scholarship that is obsessed with historical facts behind the text, “conservative scholarship,” which he says is “worthy of the criticism of being historicistic, for it is on the conservative side that people insist on the ‘historical accuracy’ or ‘reliability’ of the Bible.”

What does appear historicist in critical scholarship is not biblical commentary but “introduction,” which focuses on “the circumstances of origins of books, the dates, the degree of their historical reliability.” Commentaries don’t have this interest.

Barr also argues that biblical theology is an offspring of critical scholarship, and tries to trace the connection between them. Critical scholarship, he says, has always been more interested in the “theology” of the biblical text than in its factual truth: “Critical scholarship used the literal sense, it saw it within a wholly or partly historical vision, but what it worked towards, and produced, contrary to what people always say, was the theological sense , the theology that operated in the minds of those who created the biblical literature.” Critical commentaries aim to tell “what is the mind, the theology, that lies behind this particular way of telling the story.” When commentators look at Genesis 1, they don’t pretend to know “what happened” or even what the biblical writers thought happened, but instead aim at “the theology , the ideas and mind of the writers. The question is not: what exactly happened; but what was in their mind, what theology did they have, that led them to express their ideas about creation in this way and not in some other .”

Critical scholarship thus is “closer to allegorical exegesis than to literal or historical.” Modern biblical scholarship, though, differs from medieval allegory in that it pays closer attention to the context – both the literary context of a particular passage and the larger cultural context within which it was written. Instead of decontextualizing Jacob’s two brides as emblems of the active and contemplative life, modern scholarship attempts to understand the theology “behind” the story in a way consistent with the surrounding literary context. Critical scholarship thus aims at a kind of allegory that is “contextually defensible” and “culturally appropriate.”

Several brief comments on Barr. First, Barr certainly has a point in saying that critical scholarship resembles allegory. Second, against Barr, it does seem characteristic of at least some forms of critical scholarship to reconstruct a historical setting “behind” the text, and then read the text in the light of that “factual” setting. The exegetical uses made of the Documentary Hypothesis certainly move in this direction. Barr also says nothing about the new “social-scientific” interpretations, which also interpret the text in the light of “what happened.” Third, one of the values of Barr’s analysis is to highlight a crucial difference between traditional and critical biblical study. He’s exactly right that conservative scholarship is interested in history, while critical scholarship aims to discover the “mind” or “ideas” in the writers. That’s because conservative scholarship is motivated by traditional affirmations about the historical shape of the Christian faith, and of the Bible itself. Barr makes it clear that the conflict in hermeneutics is a conflict, as Machen recognized, between Christianity and a form of gnosticism.