Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization

Every examination of the bible has an underlying philosophy that provides a context for the author’s inquiry, and controls, to some degree, the outcome of the investigation. Hahn and Wiker track the sources of current assumptions about scriptural interpretation and show that what we hold to be neutral, fact-based approaches actually originate in the political wrangling of 13th and 14th centuries. This wide-ranging volume covers the development of historical criticism and the resulting undermining and fracturing of the integrity of the church. The authors look at the role of the revolutionary writings of Marsilius of Padua and Machiavelli, the political projects of Henry VIII, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, and the quest for an empire of science that emerges in the work of Descartes and Spinoza. A formidable revisioning of how we understand scripture.

In this magisterial work of intellectual history, Hahn and Wiker have tackled the overwhelming bias of modern textual criticism of the Bible by going straight to the Gordian knot of its fractal agenda and cutting it through in a fashion reminiscent of the clarity of the Apostles themselves. As St. Paul (1 Thess. 2:13) put it in his own context, the issue is whether the text is to be received by the Church merely as ‘the word of men’ or ‘as it is in truth, the word of God.’ In taking us back to the late Middle Ages for the roots of the secularizing agenda of the discipline, they give us a far more telling analysis of an ideological agenda and motives and than we could have without these pre-Enlightement foundations . . . This is essential reading, and not just for biblical scholars.—David Lyle Jeffrey, professor at Baylor University and editor of The Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature and The King James Bible and the World it Made