Phillip A. Davis, Jr. | Daniel Lanzinger | Matthew Ryan Robinson (Eds.): What Does Theology Do, Actually? (Leseprobe)

Jeremy Punt (South Africa)
Bible and Method
Perennial Questions, Useful Stratagems, and Scholarly
Homes
Introduction
In scholarship, methodologies have always been coming and going, but in biblical
studies, they tend to stay, or maybe keep coming --- at times also when they
were expected to go. The staying power of some methodologies may exceed,
many may argue, their usefulness as reported by biblical scholars and even by
Bible users generally. So too, the arrival of methodologies at times have received
acclaim, but in the end, seem to have over-promised or maybe just underdelivered.
Metaphors of travelling and staying are useful for hermeneutical positions
and methods in biblical studies, but beyond their usefulness, they also
signal those elements that do not always receive adequate attention in biblical
hermeneutics. Travelling and staying also are valuable images to encapsulate
and model scholarly habits in biblical hermeneutics in terms of their spatiality
and temporality, even temporariness. However, the metaphors’ associated agency
is properly located in their practitioners, biblical scholars. General reluctance
by biblical scholars to be methodologically accountable, not so much in execution
as in appropriating methodology, and particularly in accounting for the
socio-political wherewithal of chosen methodologies, exacerbate the dangers of
emphasizing methodology’s rather than scholars’ agency.
This contribution will argue that biblical scholarship remains caught up in a
methodological malaise, with historical criticism still the preferred vehicle of
travel. However, since scholars and their methods are socially located and methods
are scholarly homes that create and define where and how scholars work and
inform their identity, analysis and some repositioning of methodological considerations
are appropriate and can only be in the interest of biblical scholarship in
general.