Down with This Sort of Thing: Seth Heringer and the End of the Historical-Critical Method

Abstract

This essay critically assesses Seth Heringer’s important recent contribution to the debates surrounding theological accounts of history, as presented in his monograph Uniting History and Theology.1 His arguments arrive at a time when Christian theologians and biblical scholars are growing in confidence in their criticisms of the historical-critical method. For example, Francis Watson asks, “Does historical criticism exist as anything other than a rhetorical figure, useful for ideological purposes?”2 After all, some historical methods have been applied to reading Scripture for as long as the church has existed; it is the ideological narrative that has changed. Samuel Adams, in vigorous critique of the historical method of N. T. Wright, similarly concludes that Wright’s method cannot address its own subject matter, namely Christian origins and the question of God.3 But Heringer’s thesis is arguably the most theoretically rich of all recent works pertaining to the subject of history and theology, even if its theological argument is less developed than that of Adams.4 For this reason, it deserves sustained analysis of its primary contributions. Heringer’s argument unfolds in four chapters: (1) “Revisiting German Historicism” (1–41); (2) “Christian Reflection in the Shadow of Ranke” (43–104); (3) “The Construction of History” (105–75); and (4) “The Theological Interpretation of History” (177–219). This review will be structured according to these four parts before finishing with a critical assessment.In his first chapter, Heringer argues that German historicism,5 as appropriated in biblical studies, is synonymous only with a particular reading of Leopold von Ranke and Ernst Troeltsch. It is a flat reading that has incorporated only naturalism and “scientific objectivity” into its procedure. On the contrary, the historicists themselves reflected an idealism that could include such notions as art, aesthetics, poetry, and, yes, theology. Precisely these, however, have been stripped out in biblical scholarship. It follows that “Christian historiography needs to revisit its intellectual heritage and reengage these German thinkers” (1).Heringer proceeds with an account of Troeltsch that includes a few surprises for those only acquainted with secondary literature (2–6, 19–28). Troeltsch divided the supernatural from the natural, yes, but he believed both of them to be necessary. Indeed, this dualism ran deep in Troeltsch’s work such that Heringer, with Toshimasa Yasukata,6 maintains that his “life’s work was an attempt to combine his religious convictions and the contemporary intellectual world” (3).Heringer documents his case with care for biblical scholarship tends to assume Troeltsch is best credited for the three principles of criticism, analogy, and correlation. But Troeltsch’s grasp of the relationship between theology and history is more nuanced. He critiqued Heilsgeschichte for being inconsistent, for example. It wants to use the historical method (including correlation, analogy, etc.) but only selectively. The method is incongruently abandoned when the historical conclusions appear uncomfortable. Troeltsch’s work is an attempt to reconcile the uniqueness of Jesus Christ with his principles of historical criticism in a manner which avoids the weaknesses of Heilsgeschichte.Even more important and misunderstood is the figure of “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” fame, Leopold Ranke (as discussed in 9–19). Heringer insists that Ranke is neither the founder of historical-critical method nor, following F.C. Beiser, the “archetype of positivist historiography” (11).7 Similar to Troeltsch, Ranke attempted to “synthesize two different interests: science and art” (11). The latter (art) is the historical pursuit of underlying causes, the spirit of history. Ranke wanted to remove bias or prejudice from historical work. Hence he proffers rules, for example, for distinguishing between good and bad sources. But he also wants art to play a significant role in his work, for “history is not merely analytical but also creative” (15). Further, because art reveals and is elevated by facts, art and history must go together. “Art,” Beiser argued, reflects Ranke’s idealism; he wanted an underlying order that unifies and brings morality to bear upon history, something he can even occasionally name “God” (16–17).These insights allow Heringer to demonstrate the substance of the mature Troeltsch’s historical theory. Following Ranke, he recognized that “unfettered science could lead the world into materialism and naturalism; unfettered historicism to anarchy and skepticism.” Hence, “his main concern [was] to find normative ethical principles in the flux of history,” to “discover why historicism does not necessarily lead to the relativizing of all knowledge” (19). While Troeltsch didn’t give theology voice in this, he realized that there was more to history than matter and causation. Both Ranke and Troeltsch, then, mobilize two tendencies. One involved “objective,” source-critical historical work. The other pointed to idealism’s desire to find an underlying unity or coherence in history.But this is not how biblical historical-critical scholarship has read the historicist tradition! Heikki Räisänen, to take a prominent example, adopts only one aspect of the German tradition, and thereby distorts it.8 Räisänen split history and theology, which Ranke and Troeltsch were keen to think together. Heringer thus presents a case in direct contrast to Räisänen. He will seek to show how the aspect of historicism that sought to join history and religion has a brighter future, and that Christian theology has resources to aid this reconciliation with these often hidden aspects of German historicism.Heringer’s opening chapter is a little muddled in terms of structure. It begins with Troeltsch, despite the fact that he follows Ranke, then offers an aside, then addresses Ranke before returning again to Troeltsch. Some may also question whether the chapter is strictly necessary to the developing argument. After all, so what if some have only developed part of the earliest historicist tradition? Methodological naturalism has its own justifications. A more charitable reading of Heringer, however, notes that some key claims have been advanced upon which the second chapter will build.The second chapter offers exacting and devastating criticisms of modern Christian historical work. It maintains that modern Christian scholarship either abandons history, or theology, or consistency, a fact which points back to the concerns of Troeltsch in ch. 1. To structure this chapter, Heringer presents a summary of Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, particularly Frei’s typology.9Frei argued that the premodern unity, in which the world was understood by means of Scripture, was fractured by the arrival of historical criticism. Figural interpretation was summarily rejected, leading to a disjunction between the narrative of Scripture and the “real world.” What followed this rupture is the point of Frei’s fourfold typology. He distinguishes die Sache approaches (of both ostensive and non-ostensive varieties) from “grammatical interpretation.” Frei’s move was to point beyond historical referents and die Sache to “the cumulative narrative of the text and the world it projects” (51). But Heringer rightly asks whether Frei’s approach is a reaction to the worry that the narratives of Scripture are not historical. It is thereby determined by this fear, offering safe haven on the shores of narrative. Following Frei, readers do not need to ask whether the narrative “really happened” or not (52). So Frei’s project fails, but the terms of his typology remain helpful. Thus he examines Martin Kähler as mythophile, and Wolfhart Pannenberg and N. T. Wright as supernaturalists.Kähler’s approach is well documented, but to be noted is how he rejects the historicist “principle of analogy” when it applies to Jesus. He does this because he is committed to the claim that Jesus is unique. Hence, historical-critical work cannot press behind the source material to the supposed “real” Jesus. At best it might offer an account of the disciples’ pre-resurrection vision of Jesus. But this was incomplete, faulty, and left them “in the dark” about the true identity of Jesus. Kähler thus famously pointed to the early Church’s kerygma (the “preached Christ”), which lies “beyond proof” and thus beyond scientific history (57, 59).10 Without offering much by way of critical reflection on Kähler,11 Heringer is rather more cutting in his account of Pannenberg and Wright, to which we now turn.For Pannenberg, in contrast to Kähler, “Christian doctrine is from first to last a historical construct” (59).12 Because revelation is never direct but historical, the historical-critical method is the vital lens through which theology must refract. If it were otherwise, theology would not be grounded in God’s revelation in concrete acts in history. Further, as all of history, for Pannenberg, is God’s “indirect autobiography” (60), Pannenberg famously insisted that divine self-revelation must be understood within the framework of “universal history,” including both past and, importantly, the future. God is “nearer” to the future, and this makes Jesus fit into the scheme of history by being “history’s furthest progression” (63). This is not a fideistic claim for Pannenberg, for all such religious claims must have “purchase in reality” and must be tested against public historical-critical work by means of analysis of a text’s historical origin and the intentions of the author (65–67). It follows that historians become priests of God’s Word, so to speak; they are the ones who mediate knowledge of God.However, Heringer demonstrates how cracks show in Pannenberg’s theory when the historical-critical method problematizes theological claims Pannenberg will not surrender (cf. Troeltsch, above). So, the historical method is “adjusted” to accommodate the resurrection (69). He thereby reworks the principle of analogy, as well as rejects Troeltsch’s principle of correlation, all for theological reasons informed by eschatology. But this means that Pannenberg’s prior commitments about what is possible in the world are central to his method, mitigating against his claim to establish a public account of theological verifiability. In other words, Pannenberg’s historical-critical work is ultimately one of his own devising, not a neutral or public affair.13 In sum, Pannenberg argues for two contradictory theses. He claims to present a theology which can be publicly respected by historical-critical science, but he also rejects this public critical work as insufficiently theological in its account of reality.Heringer demonstrates similar inconsistencies in N. T. Wright’s project. Positively, Wright moves beyond Pannenberg with a focus on the importance of preconceptions (“stories” and “worldviews” in Wright’s nomenclature). Key to this move is a particular account of “critical realism,”14 which seeks to establish the reality of things as well as our provisional knowledge of the same. This makes access to knowledge possible only through “the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known” (76; italics suppressed). It creates a leveling out of all positions or precommitments—all are provisional and require conversation with other views.15Indeed, those stories and worldviews become central to Wright’s project for it enables him to propose a way to unite theology and history. After all, Christianity has to do with history; it is in history that we find what is normative for Christian faith. But historical work needs theology as an “essential ingredient in the stories that encapsulate worldviews” (79). Integral to this idea is Wright’s claim that history both happens and is best interpreted in certain ways, which leads Heringer to claim that Wright “believes that historical reality contains one, discoverable narrative—what I will term the True Narrative” (80). It follows that the goal of “writing history is not to construct a new and compelling narrative but to show that the proposed narrative is the same as the one that has existed in history all along” (80). This is a goal obtained by applying Wright’s method, which takes account not only of the facts but also of the worldviews and perceptions involved. It leads Wright to his criteria for judging between historical reconstructions in the public domain, such as fit of data, elegance of explanation, and simplicity.16Against this concept, Heringer first argues that Wright underestimates how his proposed method for making the best historical construct is itself shaped by a worldview, a fact that mitigates against claims to offer historical work that can be adjudicated “publicly.” Second, what to make of Wright’s claim that all of the data needs to fit into one’s historical narrative? After all, what constitutes the data? Is Jesus’s walking on the water, for example, a datum to include, or is the datum merely the claim that Jesus walked on water? Different worldviews will answer this differently. There is no pristine data all can agree upon prior to the operation of worldviews. The same problem applies to the assessment of competing worldviews. In theory, Wright’s thesis merely ends up pushing scholarly debate from narrative accounts of the past to the differing worldviews of the historians involved when answering what makes a hypothesis “simple,” “comprehensive,” etc. And why these criteria and not others?So much for Wright’s historical theory. But Wright’s historical practice involves different problems. Importantly, Heringer points to the moments when Wright claims his practice is less encumbered by biases than other historians. These instances are particularly revealing, so Heringer reflects upon Wright’s account of the resurrection as a test case.Initially it seems that the historical-critical method cannot present the resurrection as historical, for an appeal to God as one cause amongst others is not allowed. Wright, of course, resists this conclusion, but he does so—in problematic Pannenbergian fashion—by adjusting the terms of historical-critical methods.17 Once again, the role of worldviews and prior commitments militate against the claim that the presented methods are public. Sensing this tension, Heringer argues that Wright’s practice resolves the inconsistencies involved in his own methodology by prioritizing not worldviews but the prima facie, the known, and the reality of historical data (88). It is for this reason that Wright can claim that his account of the resurrection is the best explanation of the data for anyone “willing to look at the data” (89). Such a claim can only make sense if worldviews have “little effect on how data are seen or adjudicated” (89). Wright is thus inconsistent in the application of his own methodology, resolving it in one direction. Wright insists that worldviews are inevitable but then problematically chides other scholars for how their worldviews bias them. “How,” Heringer asks, “does Wright know that he has overcome his own biases better than others?” (89).Despite the fact that Heringer is sympathetic to Wright’s method and finds it the most compelling response to the pressure historical-critical methods place on theology, it “falls apart when it posits that humans can penetrate through our [sic] biases, requires that a True Narrative exists in history, and continues the practices of the historical-critical method with a supernatural epistemology added as an addendum” (92).Heringer prefers to avoid two mistakes. On the one hand, both Frei and Kähler, in different ways, problematically abandoned history to maintain theological integrity (whether with a focus on “narrative” or the kerygma). However, on the other hand, both Pannenberg and Wright believed theology and history could be united by developing and tweaking historical critical methods. For Pannenberg this involved focus on the “events of history.” For Wright it involved analysis of history’s True Narrative. But they both believed that the historical task was to present history “as it really was” by presenting public methods in order to assess and adjudicate various historical proposals. However, both fail at this endeavor. Heringer will show that this Rankean goal of “discovering the one narrative account embedded in historical reality” fails to account for modern historical theory, which leads to his third chapter (cf. 106).Chapter 3 presents an analysis of the relationship between events and narratives in contemporary “constructivist” or “postmodern” criticisms of the Rankean tradition. Heringer examines Arthur Danto, Roland Barthes, Hayden White, and Frank Ankersmit.Turning to Danto, Heringer notes a devastating refutation of the logical coherence of the Rankean tradition. Danto asks what the perfect example of Rankean history might look like. The answer necessitates the notion of the “Ideal Chronicler” (who knows everything about their time) and who writes an “Ideal Chronicle” (which represents every detail of their present) (107). But precisely when the perfect Rankean ideal has been articulated, problems are obvious. After all, “the whole truth concerning an event can only be known after, and sometimes only long after the event itself is taken place,” which means that the Ideal Chronicle, “despite its perfect description of the past moment by moment, lacks the necessary future-knowledge to write history” (108). The Ideal Chronicler, to use Heringer’s example, could not write that someone “planted roses,” for this would necessitate “identification across time,” which is not possible in the Ideal Chronicle. Hence, it could not describe historical periods such as the French Revolution or the Renaissance (109). It follows that “the best-case scenario for Rankean historians—a complete record of everything that happens at a given moment—is irreparably hampered by its inability to speak in narrative sentences,” something which needs the “retrospective perspective” offered by future knowledge (110). What is more, because these retrospective narrative structures don’t exist in history, are not part of the Ideal Chronicle (which records everything that exists at a given moment), these narratives are not available to the Ideal Chronicler. The Rankean tradition thus problematically wants to focus on narratives without acknowledging that these narratives are not embedded in the Ideal Chronicle. Danto shows the Rankean model is logically incoherent.With Roland Barthes, Heringer argues that Rankean theory is “deceptive in its claim to objectivity” (105). He focuses on Barthes’s sender/receiver “shifter,” that device which is used in historical writing to distinguish history from fiction.18 It is a practice whereby historians remove themselves from the discourse to allow history to “tell itself” (112; italics original). But of course these events don’t speak for themselves; historians write history (112). In so doing they organize events, draw connections, and give direction to history. They impose these structures upon historical events. It follows, as Barthes wrote, that “historical discourse is essentially an ideological elaboration”;19 it is not and never was “pure description” of events (otherwise, we return to the problems associated with the Ideal Chronicle).Heringer deploys Hayden White’s work to show that the Rankean tradition cannot explain how events and narratives are related. Just as we have no access to “the facts” prior to them being filtered through our conceptual modes and apparatuses, so too our choice of historical narrative is also to “choose a present, and vice versa.”20 This reflects an existential element in the historian’s work that the later White famously ties to literary structures.21 The point of it is simply to underscore the claim that “history is not ‘discovered’ or ‘found’ but constructed through the use of figural language and tropes” (121–22). Stories “do not exist in history; they are added to history by interpreters” (123).For Heringer, White’s thesis explains the “battle between history and theology over the past centuries” in such a way that clarifies what is at stake. It is not a clash between objective history and theologically biased “history.” Rather, it can now be seen “as one between different conceptions of the world, different figural poetics.”It follows, and this brings us to the heart of Heringer’s argumentation, that the “Rankean tradition is not a place in which the Christian poetic can be heard correctly. . . . Instead, Christian theologians should create an alternative poetic to that of traditional historiography” (122).On a theme Heringer will fill with theological significance in his final chapter, he notes how White works with two levels of discourse: a representational and deeper “level of structure” (123). The latter gives the former direction by linking it to generic story-types. This covers a spectrum of terms. “Events” are sheer happenings without any invested significance in terms of how they should be told as a story. “Historical facts” are events that have entered speech, human discourse. They are not part of “the real world” (124). Between facts and narratives are “annals” (chronological lists of events) and “chronicles,” which are similar to annals but organized around principles. But narratives, and this is important, “do not exist in reality; they are imaginative constructions.” They are invented as much as found, a claim to which we return later (125). Narratives involve meaning and significance. This is the figural level, which takes us beyond mere representation.For White, it follows from this account that historical events do not determine the historical narratives that can be told about them. Hence, figurative language, or narratives, need to be judged on other grounds—Heringer notes “flexibility and the furthering of human freedom” (127). The upshot, for Heringer, is that what the Rankean tradition saw as the greatest threat, the biases of the historian, “White holds as history’s greatest strength” (127). Or perhaps more precisely: “[h]ow historians organize their writing is more interesting than the facts they include” (128).For Heringer’s constructive case, this means that non-fiction is not the only pedagogue; poetics, tropes, deep story-types, and so on all “teach us much about reality” (128). It also means that events can be legitimately narrated in multiple ways. Indeed, this multiplicity is what makes historical work interesting. We do not need to excavate a True Narrative. Furthermore, and following White, it also means that attempts to rule out the miraculous, or even divine agency, cannot be presented as ideologically neutral or objective claims. They are themselves ideologically loaded, “based on specifically Western, aristocratic, racist, gen(d)eric, and classist preconceptions.”Heringer ends this weighty theoretical chapter by examining the work of Frank Ankersmit, who seeks to correct White’s literary relativism; he denies White’s claim that “pre-figuration plays such a strong role in historical construction” (131). Precisely this balance, Heringer thinks, is most helpful for Christian historians who, still interested in historical reality, want to move beyond methodological naturalism. Nevertheless, Ankersmit is not a narrative realist. He also denies that narrative structures “exist in the past” (131). They are constructed, not found.With his later “Aristotelian shift,” Ankersmit connects narratives and reality more meaningfully (for Aristotle united subject and object in experience) (136).22 It allows Ankersmit to push back against White’s tendency to give “too much power to the human mind and not enough to reality” (137). But this is no simple realism. Ankersmit attempts, with his language of representation and truth, to negotiate some fine philosophical balances, such that there is a distinction between reality and representation. But this does not mean that representation is a poorer relative of reality. As Heringer notes, citing Ankersmit, “representations that substitute for reality are often ‘more present than what they represent’” (140). At this point, style becomes important to Ankersmit, for representations do more than resemble reality. As aspects of reality their style leads to presence. It can do this because “representational truth is ‘what the world, or its objects, reveal to us in terms of its aspect’” (141; italics original); objects self-reveal as they reflect the light of representations. Reality ignites a representation so that it “truly displays reality” (142).But following the Aristotelian train, this is language not to be understood in terms of “theory,” “truth,” or “epistemology.” Rather, Ankersmit evokes Romanticism, particularly “the moods and emotions of the historian” (144). Here is where the philosophical apparatus of Ankersmit’s claims become clear: Spinoza and Hegel provide a framework to complete the trajectory begun with Aristotle. For Ankersmit, there is “One Substance of dialectical motion where subject and object, language and reality, remain undistinguished.” It is the place of the “timeless present” (145). Representations can truly display reality, albeit in a particular register, namely in that kind of experience which relates to the sublime, the original Oneness. For Ankersmit, it follows that the subject dies in this experience by becoming experience. Only in so doing is what is broken from the One Substance “united again in a new synthesis” (148). The new experience is a returning to that primeval Oneness, beyond the loss and trauma of the dissolution of the One Substance into parts. The upshot of these—perhaps strange to some ears—arguments is that Ankersmit refutes Rankean historiography as false in its rejection of the existential and aesthetic. It is indeed precisely there that historical reality is revealed.This philosophically demanding chapter completes Heringer’s take-down of the claims of historical-critical methodology. It cannot offer a neutral ground for public discourse to take place. “Down with this sort of thing,” is the message of the chapters thus far. But is this just clerical picketing? And what does he offer in its place? What does a Christian theology of history and theology look like? To answer these questions, Heringer presents five theses in his final chapter.23Heringer’s argument has been a relentless rebuttal of the Rankean notion that historians can, unlike theologians, neutrally study the past. Instead of playing these ideological games, Heringer advocates for a Christian reimagining of history from a theologically informed standpoint. All approaches to history are biased, so Heringer presents one with an explicit Christian bias. Importantly, Heringer claims that his proposals will “move away from Pannenberg and Wright and back toward Frei” in such a way that avoids Frei’s rejection of history. After all, “Christians make explicit claims about reality in their theological statements,” as 1 Cor 15:17–18 makes obvious. History matters and “things happened” (179; italics original). Given these commitments, what might a Christian account of history look like? Heringer suggests five theses to mark a way forward.The first thesis is that history has two levels. On the one hand, history is about “what actually happened,” but it is also to tell a story. History isn’t merely listing events, but—consistent with the idealism inherent in German historicism—involves principles and ideas. Likewise, Christians have long supposed that this be done “under the organizing principle of revelation from God,” a point Heringer makes with reference to passages such as Isa 5 and Luke 7:36–50. The contention is that to see the world as God desires, one requires divinely healed “sight.” This Heringer takes to imply that divine action must be involved in articulating the necessary “frame of reference” (182). This frame was key in Irenaeus’s refutation of the Valentinians. The heretics read Scripture atomistically, so Irenaeus claimed, and then rearranged these parts into a narrative that did not correspond with the “Christian narrative” (182). They lacked a proper appreciation for the “order and connection of Scripture” (citing Irenaeus), namely the rule of truth (183). Jesus Christ is the “hypothesis of Scripture, holding together the disparate parts and summing up the economy of the whole” (184). With these claims Heringer reminds the reader of the “dominant patristic theory” (183).24 It follows that a proper Christian understanding of history involves the type of people we are becoming, the kind of desires that shape us, our actions and habits, all of which reflect the two-level nature of history, albeit with a Christian twist.The second thesis involves the rejection of neutrality and objectivity. If historical work involves setting aside one’s biases and commitments, for Christians “this would mean setting aside the claim that God acts in the world.” What is more, it is “impossible to intentionally set aside something one is not aware of” (189). In contrast to certain scholarship analyzed in the second chapter, as well as many other luminaries such as John P. Meier, Michael Licona, and others, Heringer contends that biases cannot be overcome—nor adequately circumvented—by methodology. Nor should they be! Even “modern, humbled Rankean methodology” is “incompatible with a Christian understanding of history” (193). It is incompatible because it hopes for “a public methodology and viewpoint by which historiography can be judged” (193). But this viewpoint is ideologically driven, not objective.The second thesis thus follows from the first. If history involves both events and narratives, history cannot be objective, “for the connections between e