Averroism, Nominalism, and Mechanization: Hahn and Wiker’s Unmasking of Historical Criticism’s Political Agenda by Laying Bare its Philosophical Roots

“The dismemberment of the Bible has led to a new variety of allegorism: One no longer reads the text but the supposed experience of supposed communities. The result is often highly fanciful allegorical interpretation.”

—Joseph Ratzinger, The Nature and and Mission of Theology¹

Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker’s Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture 1300–1700 is the single most important work to date in the history of modern biblical scholarship. As their subtitle, “Secularization of Scripture,” indicates, these authors particularly have in mind the ways in which the interpretation and the study of Scripture have been secularized over the course of centuries. Far too rarely in brief surveys of biblical scholarship has the role of politics and philosophy been addressed, let alone addressed adequately. In this more than 600–page book, Hahn and Wiker demonstrate how various political concerns and undergirding philosophies shaped and guided the long process that led to the historical critical method of biblical interpretation. They situate this process within the broader historical, political, philosophical, and theological contexts in which historical criticism was formed. Moreover, they also situate the contributions of the major figures involved in this process within the context of their biographies, which proves so necessary for understanding this history. Hahn and Wiker consider an expansive and often neglected period within the history of modern biblical criticism.²

Although the authors do not divide the book into sections, I would divide it roughly into two parts (excluding the introductory first chapter and the concluding thirteenth chapter): the first part (chs. 2–7), lays the groundwork for the advent of historical criticism. The second part (chs. 8–12), shows key examples of the development of historical criticism as it evolved throughout the seventeenth century, laying the essential groundwork for the Enlightenment biblical criticism of the eighteenth century and what would follow that in the nineteenth century. First, Hahn and Wiker show how Marsilius of Padua’s and William of Ockham’s arguments justify the subordination of church to state, due to Marsilius’s Averroist philosophical underpinnings and Ockham’s nominalism. Following these two, such Averroist and nominalist philosophies would continue to undergird much of the future of historical critical exegesis.

After this, Hahn and Wiker show how Wycliffe’s attack upon nominalism inadvertently supported the same sort of exegesis and subordination of church to state as had Marsilius and Ockham. Thus, for theological reasons (and philosophical reasons directly opposed to Ockham), Wycliffe brought to English and, through his followers, to German soil the subordination of the church to the state for which Marsilius and Ockham had argued. Thus, the ground was set for the German and English Reformations that would soon follow. Next, Hahn and Wiker turn to Machiavelli, showing how he created a hermeneutic of suspicion in which, much like Averroës, he saw religion as a veil for more crafty political machinations of hypocritical rulers. From Machiavelli, Hahn and Wiker turn to Luther and the Protestant Reformation, where they indicate that Luther and his co-Reformers were inspired in part by the widespread corruption among clerical leaders within the Catholic hierarchy. Luther was a nominalist and self-identified follower of Ockham. Luther built on the groundwork laid by Marsilius and Wycliffe and inadvertently aided in the transformation of the public, civic realm into a secular realm in which state controlled church. After Luther, Hahn and Wiker examine the English Reformation of King Henry VIII, showing how his reforming policy built on all the influential figures previously discussed: Marsilius (directly through Henry’s advisors); Ockham (implied, through the German Protestant influence);³ Wycliffe (through the influence of the English Lollardy that had so shaped English nationalist aspirations and prepared the groundwork in Germany for the Reformation); Machiavelli (directly, through Henry’s advisors); and Luther (through the Protestant reforming agenda in England). They next turn to Descartes, expositing his role in effecting a great cosmological shift in which nature...