JOHN H. ELLIOTT'S SOCIAL-SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM

Trinity Journal, Fall 2007 by Dvorak, James D

I. INTRODUCTION

The past thirty years of biblical studies has seen the substantial growth and impact of social-scientific criticism of the Bible. Barton attributes, but does not limit, its rise to the following factors:

The rise to prominence of the social sciences from the late nineteenth century on, and the impact of the sociology of knowledge in a wide range of academic disciplines; the influence on interpretation theory of the hermeneutics of suspicion represented by such intellectual giants as Nietzsche, Durkheim, Marx, and Freud; the exhaustion of the historical-critical method as traditionally understood, and the failure of form criticism to fulfil its promise of identifying the Sitze im Leben of New Testament texts; shifts in historiography generally away from the "great man" view of history typical of Romanticism to one more attentive to history "from below," with a much stronger popular and sociological dimension; the influence of the discovery of texts and archaeological remains, as at Qumran, which provide important new comparative data for social history and sociological analysis; and the surfacing of different kinds of questions to put to the New Testament in the light of developments in twentieth-century theology, not least, the failure of liberal theology and the urgent concerns (often of a social and political kind) raised by liberation and feminist theologies.1

Because of these factors and others like them, it has become the norm for students of biblical studies to learn that determining the cultural background of biblical texts is as integral a part of the exegetical process as determining the historical background of the texts.2

Several questions come to mind regarding social-scientific criticism: (1) What exactly is social-scientific criticism? (2) How does it relate to the more traditional historical methods of criticism? (3) What real or potential contributions can social-scientific criticism make to biblical studies? (4) What are the limitations of social-scientific criticism? (5) What does social-scientific criticism's methodology look like? The purpose of this article is to investigate the answers to these questions. More specifically, this article will analyze social-scientific criticism from the perspective of its leading American proponent, John H. Elliott. As will be shown, there are different emphases among social-scientific critics, but focus will be given to social-scientific exegesis, which best describes Elliott's method.

II. JOHN H. ELLIOTT

A. Biographical Sketch

John H. Elliott is Professor Emeritus of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco. He received his Bachelor of Arts as well as his Bachelor and Masters of Divinity degrees from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned the degree of Doktor der Theologie from the Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat in 1963, the same year he was ordained a Lutheran clergyman. He has taught at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis (1963-67), Webster College, St. Louis (1963-67), the University of San Francisco (1967-2001), the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley (1977-present), Notre Dame University (1981), and at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome (1978) as the first and only Lutheran scholar since the Reformation.3

B. The Context Group4

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a growing dissatisfaction with the then-current methods of biblical studies, especially the type represented by Rudolf Bultmann.5 Form and other criticisms were not fulfilling the desires of biblical scholars as a means of understanding the phenomena of early Christianity. As a result, scholars like Gerd Theissen, John Gager, Wayne Meeks, Abraham Malherbe, and others began engaging the social-sciences looking for models to describe the social world of the Bible.6 The success of these works attracted more scholars to the enterprise of social-scientific criticism. Eventually, a group of scholars including John Elliott, Bruce Malina, Jerome Neyrey, and John Pilch involved themselves with organizations like the Bay Area Society for Theology and Related Disciplines and various task forces in the Catholic Biblical Association and focused their attention on the relationship between biblical studies and the social-sciences.7 In 1979, Elliott and Malina began a working relationship, in which was planted the seed that would later sprout as the Context Group.8 A mixture of personal friendship, scholarly interaction, and various task forces, birds-of-a-feather groups, and publications continued to attract others to the social-scientific approach. In the Spring of 1990, a core group of these scholars met and formed the "Context Group: Project on the Bible in Its Cultural Environment," and Elliott was appointed Program Chair of the group.9

III. WHAT IS SOCIAL-SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM?

A. General Definition

Social-scientific criticism has been broadly defined as

that phase of the exegetical task which analyzes the social and cultural dimensions of the text and of its environmental context through the utilization of the perspectives, theory, models, and research of the social sciences.10