Childs on the dangers of historical reconstruction
At the SBL conference last week one of the plenary speakers presented a paper on the dangers of pseudo-historicism in academia. In attempting to provide a “proper historical context” for various biblical passages, he argued that many in his field do not practice sound historical methods. There was much merit in his comments, and many in the evangelical community would have done well to listen to what he had to say. Yet, while I wholeheartedly agree that sound practices and methods must be used in seeking a historical context, sometimes (read: nearly all the time) that context either obscures or disintegrates what valuable work the final editor of a biblical book had done. In other words, we must view the work of the final author of a book as a historical event in making a text. The final book transcends what may have been a prehistory for a text. It is one thing to use linguistic evidence to date a book of the bible (or a passage) to a certain time period, and it is yet another thing to use that for interpretation of the text in its final form.
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