Francis Watson of Durham University gave a provocative lecture. He
said we should abandon the term historical criticism altogether for the
following reasons:
(1) Biblical scholars are not historians and should not imply that we
are.
(2) Historical criticism is not a neutral characterization. In its origin the
term referred to textual criticism, which is about restoring texts. Historical
criticism, by contrast, has been about doubting them. The historical critical
movement has had an agenda to criticize, in the harsh sense, other views of the
Bible.
(3) Historical criticism has claimed that its methods are objective, neutral,
and not about dogma. This has been shown to be a farce.
(4) The real issue has been modernity and rationalism versus tradition.
(5) Historical approaches to a text are far from the totality of the work we
do. Much Biblical scholarship is not historical but interpretive.
(6) The distance historical critics claim to put between themselves and the
text is illusory.
(7) Therefore, we should talk about biblical studies or scholarship and make
the term historical criticism defunct.
Sterling Field on 15 Feb 10Straight from the words of Derrida in an interview. Came across this quote which does a good job of describing a deconstructionist approach: Derrida says, "There is the general structure of Messianicity as the structure of experience, and on this groundless ground there have been revelations, a history which one calls Judaism or Christianity and so on. That is a possibility and then you would have a Heideggerian gesture, in style. You would have to go back from these religions to the fundamental ontological conditions of possibilities of religions, to describe the structure of messianicity on the groundless ground on which religions have been made possible (23)".
