More on Williams and Wiles...

Has Williams succeeded in outflanking Wiles? Has he, in other words, managed to burrow into the world of the text such that krisis – that moment of decision when we are confronted, yea even judged by what we meet in the text ­­– is allowed its prominence? Williams attempts to see from within: but has he smuggled in an objectivism – the kind of objectivism he repudiates – somewhere along the line? Tendenzkritik, that form of criticism most interested in uncovering in the text the interests of various individuals and communities, per definition tends to be hypersuspicious of ‘interests’. It holds as its moral starting point the critique of power itself. Is it not the case, however, that Williams’ version of krisis – his teaching on the judgement of Christ – resembles the values of Tendenzkritik?

That is to say: Williams seems to operate with a definite set of moral presuppositions. For example, he is tentative in his claims about language because of the tendency of individuals and groups to use language – and perhaps religious language more than any other kind – for their own interests. This is what the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth exposes to us, on his account. Williams would argue that Kritik is the right kind of intellectual work prompted by and encounter with Jesus: it takes his judgement and applies it self-critically to the practice of Christian speaking and thinking about God. Yet is it not surely the case that this reading of Jesus, and this application of Jesus’ teaching, is itself generated by the application of critical methods to the New Testament? It goes without saying that the history of New Testament scholarship is dominated by the triumphant revelation by each generation of the prejudices and preferences of the previous one.[1]

My charge is that Williams’ exposition of krisis is a product itself of Kritik, rather than the other way around. The problem is, once Tendenzkritik is in the tank, it tends to devour all the other fish. Where does Kritik end and krisis begin? Can we so readily shift from one to the other? Is this a moral possibility to have a text which is so beset with interest-laden and inadequate human talk as authoritative Scripture, as the catholic church has always held it to be? It is difficult to see how, on Williams account, we can read the New Testament with any confidence that we are able to apply the right filtration to the text and so be judged by it in exactly the right way. Can we really be both radically suspicious and humbly naïve about the text at one and the same time?

[1] See Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1986, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).