Walter Wink: Collected Readings

1. The Bankruptcy of Biblical Paradigm

1 The Bankruptcy of Biblical Paradigm The infamous opening line of this slim volume—“Historical biblical criticism is bankrupt”—defines the arc of Walter Wink’s scholarly career. Faced with a scholarly discipline that was no longer commensurate with, or even cognizant of, its primary purpose—the spiritual transformation of individuals and communities—Wink courageously named the elephant in the room and set himself the task of both delineating and demonstrating an alternative approach to biblical studies. Wink notes that the writers of the New Testament were writing “from faith to faith” with the intention of eliciting or strengthening faith. He then argues that modern historical critical study of the Bible has abandoned the intention of the scriptural texts by adopting a false stance of “objective neutrality” over against those texts. This professed “objective standpoint” from which historical critical scholars approach New Testament texts, Wink asserts, masks the scholars’ unavoidable but unquestioned subjectivity while negating the intention of the texts to address questions of faith arising out of the realities of life as it is lived. It also allows the biblical scholar to avoid being examined by the texts he or she examines, thereby subverting the intention of those texts to examine the examiner, to question the questioner, to interrogate the interrogator. Wink notes that the discipline’s legitimate concern for objectivity has devolved into the ideology of objectivism and thus ignores to its own peril the role of subjectivity—emotions, will, interests, or bias—in the encounter with the text. This, together with a certain “technologism” that elevates technique over text, thereby limiting the scope of questions that can be asked and answered, leads to a discipline that, in Wink’s view, has “outlived its usefulness as presently practiced.” This did not make him popular with the guild of biblical scholars. Source: Wink 1973: Chapter 1 Historical biblical criticism is bankrupt. 3 I use “bankrupt” in the exact sense of the term. A business which goes bankrupt is not valueless, nor incapable of producing useful products. It still has an inventory of expensive parts, a large capital outlay, a team of trained personnel, a certain reputation, and usually, until the day bankruptcy is declared, a façade which appeared to most to be relatively healthy. The one thing wrong—and the only thing—is that it is no longer able to accomplish its avowed purpose for existence: to make money. It is in this precise sense that one can speak of the historical critical method generally, and of its application to biblical studies in particular, as bankrupt. Biblical criticism has produced an inventory of thousands of studies on every question which has seemed amenable to its methods, with a host of additional possibilities still before it. It has a method which has proven itself in earlier historical periods to be capable of remarkable achievements. It has in its employ hundreds of competent, trained technicians. Biblical criticism is not bankrupt because it has run out of things to say or new ground to explore. It is bankrupt solely because it is incapable of achieving what most of its practitioners considered its purpose to be: so to interpret the Scriptures that the past becomes alive and illumines our present with new possibilities for personal and social transformation. How did biblical criticism become insolvent? Here are at least a few of the reasons. 1. The method as practiced was incommensurate with the intention of the texts. The writers of the New Testament bore witness to events which had led them to faith. They wrote “from faith to faith,” to evoke or augment faith in their readers. Ostensibly, historical criticism is not hostile to these intentions, but should serve to make the same decision for faith or unfaith accessible across the gulf of centuries to readers today. In actual practice, however, this seldom happens, and for good reason. For the very essence of scientific and historical inquiry in modern times has been the suspension of evaluative judgments and participational involvement in the “object” of research. Such detached neutrality in matters of faith is not neutrality at all, but already a decision against responding. At the outset, questions of truth and meaning have been excluded, since they can only be answered participatively, in terms of a lived response. Insofar as they are retained at all, “truth” is reduced to facticity, and the text’s “meaning” is rendered by a paraphrase. Such “objective neutrality” thus requires a sacrifice of the very questions the Bible seeks...