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Errors with the historical-critical method and Sacred Scripture
Reference has been made by itinerant1 (#677 Should Catholics embrace evolution?) to the “pre-eminient works of O.T. scholarship by McKenzie” while linking this to the controversial historical-critical method of exegesis also misused by Fr Raymond Brown. Reliance on authors such as these tends to produce false ideas and malformation.
Fr McKenzie without equivocation asserts that “the New Testament says nothing about the ordination of men”, and “in the New Testament there is not a single officer who is the head of a local Church” (New Testament Without Illusion, 1980, p 246) – you will not find priest or diocesan bishop in the NT! Brown puts forward the same falsehood: “No individual Christian is ever specified (in the New Testament) as a priest” and “the affirmation that the episcopate was divinely established or established by Christ himself can be defended in the nuanced sense that the episcopacy emerged in a Church that stemmed from Christ” (Priest and Bishop, p 13, 73). With such errors, it appears that selfism is rampant, rather than real exegesis.
As both McKenzie and Brown appear to be afflicted with selfism, it may not be strange that they were often in conflict.
[Reference *The New Biblical Theorists (Raymond E Brown and Beyond), Msgr George A Kelly, Servant Books, 1983].
In 1978, R. H. Fuller, one of the chief form critics, wrote in the* Catholic Biblical Quarterly*, “It is ironic that just at the time when the limitations of the historical-critical method are being discovered in Protestantism, Roman Catholic scholars should be bent on pursuing that method so relentlessly.” By 1980, the same R. H. Fuller considered the method they followed so relentlessly to be “bankrupt.” [See Fr William G Most, *Catholic Apologetics Today, TAN, 1986, p 237].
The Pope’s *Jesus of Nazareth *(Bloomsbury, 2007) decries the aberrational reconstructions of historical-critical (HC) scholarship on the truths of the Scriptures – of Jesus Himself. But along with the proper use of that analysis, Benedict XVI stresses the need of canonical exegesis which reads the individual texts of the Bible in the context of the whole, and “which carries it (HC) forward in an organic way toward becoming theology in its proper sense.” (Foreword).
“If you read a number of these reconstructions one after another, you see at once that far from uncovering an icon that has been obscured over time, they are much more like photographs of their authors and the ideals they hold ……the figure of Jesus Himself has for that very reason receded even further into the distance.” This is the selfist image constantly promoted.
Reference has been made by itinerant1 (#677 Should Catholics embrace evolution?) to the “pre-eminient works of O.T. scholarship by McKenzie” while linking this to the controversial historical-critical method of exegesis also misused by Fr Raymond Brown. Reliance on authors such as these tends to produce false ideas and malformation.
Fr McKenzie without equivocation asserts that “the New Testament says nothing about the ordination of men”, and “in the New Testament there is not a single officer who is the head of a local Church” (New Testament Without Illusion, 1980, p 246) – you will not find priest or diocesan bishop in the NT! Brown puts forward the same falsehood: “No individual Christian is ever specified (in the New Testament) as a priest” and “the affirmation that the episcopate was divinely established or established by Christ himself can be defended in the nuanced sense that the episcopacy emerged in a Church that stemmed from Christ” (Priest and Bishop, p 13, 73). With such errors, it appears that selfism is rampant, rather than real exegesis.
As both McKenzie and Brown appear to be afflicted with selfism, it may not be strange that they were often in conflict.
[Reference *The New Biblical Theorists (Raymond E Brown and Beyond), Msgr George A Kelly, Servant Books, 1983].
In 1978, R. H. Fuller, one of the chief form critics, wrote in the* Catholic Biblical Quarterly*, “It is ironic that just at the time when the limitations of the historical-critical method are being discovered in Protestantism, Roman Catholic scholars should be bent on pursuing that method so relentlessly.” By 1980, the same R. H. Fuller considered the method they followed so relentlessly to be “bankrupt.” [See Fr William G Most, *Catholic Apologetics Today, TAN, 1986, p 237].
The Pope’s *Jesus of Nazareth *(Bloomsbury, 2007) decries the aberrational reconstructions of historical-critical (HC) scholarship on the truths of the Scriptures – of Jesus Himself. But along with the proper use of that analysis, Benedict XVI stresses the need of canonical exegesis which reads the individual texts of the Bible in the context of the whole, and “which carries it (HC) forward in an organic way toward becoming theology in its proper sense.” (Foreword).
“If you read a number of these reconstructions one after another, you see at once that far from uncovering an icon that has been obscured over time, they are much more like photographs of their authors and the ideals they hold ……the figure of Jesus Himself has for that very reason receded even further into the distance.” This is the selfist image constantly promoted.