Remembering an imagined past

by Walter Brueggemann

Scripture interpretation is forever vexed by questions of “historicity.” The problem is engraved in all modern critical study committed to situating each text in its “proper originary context.” While this preoccupation has sometimes served the theological confession “God acts in history,” current fascination with historicity aims instead to resist such theological affirmation.

In Old Testament studies, the enterprise is conducted by those who have come to be called “minimalists”—those who deny much of the historicity of the Old Testament and conclude that the texts are largely quite late theological constructs designed to serve nefarious ideological purposes. Thus the lack of historicity, they claim, undermines theological authority.

In New Testament studies, in somewhat different fashion, the Jesus Seminar (and those who follow in its train) has voted out much of the memory of the church. Not surprisingly, what is left has turned out to be a Jesus who looks and sounds a lot like the voters.

No doubt we must keep asking questions about historicity. In some quarters, there is the hope that “church people” will simply fail to notice the shaky grounds of historicity on which so much is based. But given the importance of these issues, “modernizing” that seeks generally to get rid of stuff is misguided. It's misguided not because one may want to cherish so much in the text that is problematic, embarrassing and difficult, but because priority is given to modernist critical categories rather than to confessional passion—not the passion of religious ideologues, but the passion of those whose risky, faithful obedience attests to their memory. Taking the text apart from a faithful, obedient community is clearly a mistake in categories.

This kind of critical pursuit of historicity always flourishes in an attempt to resist authoritarianism, and it serves to relativize the claim of the text. But the confusion between modernist historicity and confessional memory needs to be sorted out afresh. While modernist criticism tends to be thin and one-dimensional, serious remembering—in a community of self-awareness, moral passion, knowing discipline and generous hope—is thick, elusive and multidimensional. The critics characteristically fail to understand this quality of remembering, instead reacting only to the thin ideologues whom they so vigorously oppose. But the practical theology of the serious rememberers is not open to this critical reductionism, because it lies beneath such categories.

I first read Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Prophets in graduate school. I took it lightly, because Heschel does not take up any “critical questions.” It took me awhile to see that Heschel, like Karl Barth, had long since digested the critical questions and moved on to more serious, demanding issues.

Critical study powered by resistance to ideologues is thin. It remains for the church and the synagogue, in their thick practicality, to keep opting for memory over historicity. To be sure, much of the textual memory is "imagined," as is much of the "critical reconstruction" of the modernists. While the biblical text can and often does lead to destructive ideology, thin criticism hardly touches this. The text can also and often does lead to risky, faithful, generous obedience, with the awesome possibility of being delivered from critical amnesia.

Walter Brueggemann, a Century editor at large, is emeritus professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia.