Down with This Sort of Thing: Seth Heringer and the End of the Historical-Critical Method

This essay critically assesses Seth Heringer’s important recent contribution to the debates surrounding theological accounts of history, as presented in his monograph Uniting History and Theology.¹ His arguments arrive at a time when Christian theologians and biblical scholars are growing in confidence in their criticisms of the historical-critical method. For example, Francis Watson asks, “Does historical criticism exist as anything other than a rhetorical figure, useful for ideological purposes?”² After all, some historical methods have been applied to reading Scripture for as long as the church has existed; it is the ideological narrative that has changed. Samuel Adams, in vigorous critique of the historical method of N. T. Wright, similarly concludes that Wright’s method cannot address its own subject matter, namely Christian origins and the question of God.³ But Heringer’s thesis is arguably the most theoretically rich of all recent works pertaining to the subject...