Leithart on Plantinga on Historical Criticism

Well would you look at that. One of the theologians I most respect (Peter Leithart) has posted a blurb about one of the philosophers I most respect (Alvin Plantinga) who was himself discussing an intellectual movement I have a certain degree of trouble respecting (historical, 'higher' criticism). Don't get me wrong; historical/critical analysis has given us some positive things - but it has also given us some 'positivistic' things, not least as regards its overall mindset.

If we're going to be real historians, it says, we're going to have to be scientific about it. And everybody who knows anything about the Enlightenment knows what being 'scientific' entails: it means we have to try to model the so-called 'human sciences' upon the so-called 'natural' or 'hard sciences'. And we all know what that entails: it entails that we conduct our theorizing within the boundaries and under the auspicies of scientific law - irrespective of the fact that laws in the hard sciences are derived via frequency-of-occurrence patterns under controllable and repeatable conditions, whereas historical events are non-repeatable, one-off sorts of things whose probability of occurrence cannot be determined as if we were speaking of repeatable events. But no matter: that's the way scientific historians get things done, and the higher critics are nothing if not scientific. The upshot: if you're going to be "objective" and "respectable" and "scientific" when it comes to an historical analysis of the Biblical text, that means you're going to need to begin with the inviolable assumptions that, e.g., dead people must stay dead and virgins must not get pregnant. (These things being among the most important and shocking discoveries of 17th century science.) So here's Leithart:

Alvin Plantinga has great fun skewering HBC - “historical biblical criticism” - in an essay in Behind the Text. He notes that critics lament that Christians go on as if HBC never happened, and asks if the advocates of HBC have given Christians reason to do otherwise. He concludes they have not.

One reason given for HBC is “force majeure: we simply cannot help it. Given our historical position, there is nothing else we can do; we are all in the grip of historical forces beyond our control (this thing is better than either one of us).” He quotes Gilkey: “The causal nexus in space and time which the Enlightenment science and philosophy introduced into the Western mind . . . is also assumed by modern theologians and scholars; since they participate in the modern world of science both intellectually and existentially, they can scarcely do anything else.”

But, Plantinga points out, many do do something else - like believing the resurrection. So, the argument must be modified to the claim that “everyone in the know” accepts the assumptions of HBC:

“Everyone who is properly educated and has read his Kant and Hume (and Troeltsch) and reflected on the meaning of the wireless and electric light knows these things; as for the rest of humanity (including, I suppose, those of us who have read our Kant and Hume but are unimpressed), their problem is simple ignorance. Perhaps people generally do not march in lockstep through history, but those in the know do; and right now they all or nearly all reject special divine action.”

Again, this is falsified by the millions - including people with PhDs in philosophy - who don’t accept the premises of HBC. When John Macquarrie asserts “the tradition concept of miracle is irreconcilable with our modern understanding of both science and history,” Plantinga wants to know “to whom does this ‘our’ here refer?”

He’s just getting started. According to Van Harvey, there is a moral imperative for lay Christians to refuse to draw conclusions about the Bible: “The gulf separating the conservative Christian believer and the New Testament scholar can be seen as the conflict between two antithetical ethics of belief. . . New Testament scholarship is now so specialized and requires so much preparation that the layperson has simply been disqualified from having any right to a judgment regarding the truth of falsity of certain historical claims. Insofar as the conservative Christian believer is a layperson who has no knowledge of the New Testament scholarship, he or she is simply not entitled to certain historical beliefs at all.”

Harvey thus implies that “the flock does not so much as have a right to an opinion on these points - not even an opinion purveyed by the experts. If this is right, “the students do not have a right to believe the results of Scripture scholarship; they are therefore doing no more than their simple duty in refusing to believe them. One hopes Harvey remembers, when teach his classes, not to put his views on these matters in an attractive and winsome fashion - after all, if he did so, some of his students might believe them, in which case they would be sinning and he himself would be giving offense in the Pauline sense.”

For a nice antedote to some of this silliness, see N.T. Wright's discussion of his historical methodology in The New Testament and the People of God and Jesus and the Victory of God. And see especially The Resurrection of the Son of God, which is being hailed (and rightly so) by a good number of theologians and philosophers as the definitive 'historical argument', at least of our own era. Or, if you don't have the time to read an 800+page book, go to his unofficial website and watch the 50 minute "Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection" talk. You won't get everything you would've gotten from reading the book, of course, but you'll definitely get some "nuggets."