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This conclusion discusses the fate of Michaelis’s classical project, its reception among figures like Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Johann Georg Hamann. It also evaluates Michaelis’s legacy, arguing that a clear understanding of it has important implications for the study of the Bible today. It also revisits the notions of the scriptural and academic Bibles. Too often the relation between them has been seen as an expression of stale antitheses between reason and faith, history and revelation, historical criticism and theology, the secular and the sacred. The history of modern biblical criticism shows that the fundamental antitheses were not intellectual or theological, but rather social, moral, and political. Academic critics did not dispense with the authority of a Bible resonant with religion; they redeployed it. This point is essential to any discussion of the relation between modern biblical criticism and those who read the Bible principally as scripture.

In the present methodological ferment in biblical studies it is necessary to articulate a methodological approach to the study of food in the Old Testament. The methodology outlined is fully responsive to research on the anthropology of food, the literary form of the biblical text and historical-critical biblical scholarship. The necessity of all these aspects is demonstrated through an analysis of work on the Israelite dietary laws in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14. For this classical interpretative puzzle Mary Douglas's work, Purity and Danger, has been a decisive turning point. Her analysis has stimulated many biblical scholars, but this has required her own views to be re-articulated in light of closer readings of the text and the work of historical-critical scholarship. The conversation not only shows the need for well informed use of anthropological research, literary analysis and historical-critical scholarship, but also the necessity of moving beyond tired debates between materialists and structuralists, or, in the usual terms of biblical scholarship, diachronic, and synchronic.

Continuing an examination of proposed defeaters for Christian belief, I turn in this chapter to some of the issues raised by contemporary historical biblical criticism, arguing that contemporary historical biblical criticism does not serve as a defeater for Christian belief. After a brief discussion of the divine inspiration of Scripture, I distinguish and examine two different kinds of Scripture scholarship: (1) traditional biblical commentary and (2) historical biblical criticism (also called “higher criticism,” “historical criticism,” “biblical criticism,” and “historical critical scholarship”). Historical biblical criticism (HBC) is an effort to look at and understand the biblical books from a standpoint that relies on reason alone (not faith), i.e., it is an effort to determine from the standpoint of reason alone what the scriptural teachings are and whether they are true. I discuss three different types of HBC and briefly point out some of the tensions between HBC and traditional Christianity: as Van Harvey remarks, “So far as the biblical historian is concerned. . .there is scarcely a popularly held traditional belief about Jesus that is not regarded with considerable skepticism.” I then argue that none of the varieties of HBC provides a defeater for Christian belief, either because (a) they begin with unsupported assumptions that are contrary to Christian belief, or because (b) they ignore sources of warranted belief that Christians believe they have (like faith and the interior instigation of the Holy Spirit) and fail to give good arguments that Christians do not have such sources of warranted belief.

Beginning in the late 1870s, liberal Protestants including Washington Gladden, Lyman Abbott, Theodore Munger, Newman Smyth, and Charles Briggs endeavoured to construct a form of Christian orthodoxy that could make its peace with evolution and historical criticism while expressing the religious and moral experience of modern Christians. The final chapter traces the impact of antislavery, the Civil War, and emancipation on the New Theology of the postwar decades, including the liberal Protestant acceptance of evolution and historical criticism and the early development of the Social Gospel. This chapter also traces the dual postwar trajectory of abolitionist theology in both “free religion” and budding fundamentalism.

According to the classic formulation of Roman Jakobson, poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics. This idea of the poem as verbal object is so commonplace in modern criticism that one may seem perverse to question it. Still one must do so, for the ‘problem of historical method’ — whether ones approach it from an ‘intrinsic’ or an ‘extrinsic’ point of view — will never be opened to solutions until one sees one of the signal failures of modern criticism: its inability to distinguish clearly between a concept of the poem and a concept of the text. If the poetic work is understood either as a cultural experience or a cultural event, its special structures of uniqueness must be consciously graphed, at some level, in socio-historical terms.

This chapter explores readings of Genesis 9 that run counter to the orthodox interpretive paradigm. These counterreadings are identified in the commentary of rabbis and church fathers, the tracts of abolitionists, and the work of historical critics of the Bible and authors of fiction and poetry. These Bible readers have challenged Noah's curse by clarifying the historical context of Genesis 9, by denying its putative racial dimensions, by employing logic and the rules of biblical exegesis, and by undermining textual assumptions through creative rereading.

This chapter discusses muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens's 1926 book Moses in Red in relation to developments in historical criticism, and social gospel Christianity. It also looks at Steffens's identification of Moses with Lenin, and the Promised Land with Soviet Russia. It discusses the difficulties surrounding the publication and promotion of the book, particularly in relation to similar, yet popular competitors such as Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows, and argues that Moses in Red (from its author's standpoint) unexpectedly failed because it breached the cultural agreement about the meanings of the Exodus story in 1920s America.

This chapter examines the way in which Emerson has exerted tremendous imaginative influence over 20th-century literary critics, causing them to place his “American Scholar” at the center of their intellectual and cultural projects to remake America by redirecting the way it considered its past. Emerson's little-known involvement with the 1834 New York elections reveals how he assimilates political language so as to trope it. This innovative troping resists coercive and conventional modes of thought and discourse, but has also led to critical misreadings as to the social efficacy of Emerson's writing.

In the areas of evolutionary psychology and scientific scripture scholarship (also known as historical Biblical criticism) there are claims and assertions incompatible with theistic or Christian belief. This chapter argues that even though Christians are committed to a high view of science, and even if these disciplines do constitute science or good science, these developments in evolutionary psychology and historical Biblical criticism do not offer, or even threaten to offer, defeaters for Christian or theistic belief. Hence there is conflict, but it is merely superficial.

The concern in this chapter is with those truths, of a particular sort and degree, about which biblical criticism in its various aspects has something to say. The particular focus is on the question of contingent historical truth, and in this regard biblical criticism is starkly conscious of the distance that has to be travelled before ultimate historical issues can properly be addressed. The chapter considers first the degree of uncertainty even within the two traditional bases of criticism—textual criticism and translation—before turning to the so‐called ‘higher critical’ methods of source, form, and redaction criticism. Although each is recognized to provide significant truth about the Bible, they also constitute barriers to accessing the actual events and oracles in which the authoritative truth of scripture is traditionally thought to reside. However, for those critics who still consider historical truth a quest worthy of their efforts, this chapter then offers encouragement by consideration of two often neglected factors in scholarship—the moral integrity of the mediators of the biblical record, and the idea that known historical effects demand the hypothesis of sufficient historical cause. Throughout this chapter the Resurrection narratives in the Gospels are discussed by way of example, and it is suggested that the position of ‘programmatic scepticism’ adopted by some biblical critics is in fact perverse and uncritical. The question of historical truth remains foundational to the task of biblical criticism, however arduous the task may be to answer it.