In one of my Old Testament courses taken at Westminster with Dr. Pete Enns, I recall a helpful and thought provoking lecture on the Bible as “theological history.” Below is my synopsis of the lecture.
The Bible is theological history. On one level the operative word is history, but history that is presented to us in a theologically driven manner. In other words, it is history that is presented and presented for a purpose, viz., to teach us about God. The Bible does not simply give us “events” without presentation and purpose because without presentation or purpose, the events have no meaning. Also, without events the presentation and purpose have no basis. Events are the world of history. Presentation/purpose is the world of historiography. As a starting point, Enns wants to suggest that the purpose of the Bible is to get us to encounter God and not simply history (this is not to say that history is unimportant). The purpose of the Bible is not to say that “x happened,” but the purpose is so that we would know God.
A helpful book along these lines is The Art of Biblical History, by Phil Long. Long presents Biblical historiography as an art and says that a book must be judged according to its purpose. So we should ask, “What is the writer trying to accomplish?” This then prompts him to ask, “Is the Bible a history book?” He says, neither yes nor no. Simply to say “yes” does not describe the essential character of the Bible. The Bible has diverse genres, and there is more to the Bible than just telling us what happened. Recognizing this, helps us to refrain from making false dichotomies about the Bible, e.g., that it is either history or literature. Regarding the question, “What is history?”, this requires making a distinction between history in two senses: (1) history as event and (1) history as account (this sounds similar to Von Rad’s distinction between Historie and Geschichte). When one speaks of “accounts,” one is necessarily speaking of how a particular writer choose those events and why he chose those over others. Presentation is the “how,” purpose is the “why,” and events the “what.” Because we are dealing with presentation and purpose, there is an element of artistry in biblical historiography, but this is also the case in all attempts at recording events. So all historiography is an interplay between three elements: the historical, the literary, and the theological. With any historical narrative in the Bible, there is a purposeful artistic aspect to it. That is, there is an artistic-ness to the Bible, and it is driven by a purpose. Long’s approach avoids both the fundamentalist and the liberal drawbacks, as it is aware of the presuppositions driving us all.
Long’s approach is advantageous in a number of ways. For example, Long attempts to eliminate the dichotomy between text and event, yet his approach does not fully answer precisely in what the relation between the two consists. Long says that text and event require each other—i.e., you can’t have one without the other. So both text and event need each other—the text brings the event into the present (that is the case with any historiography). In Westminster language, both text and event are part of redemptive history. So contra G.E. Wright, the events are not the “real” things that one must get “back to”—a view which basically makes the text an impediment (a foundational tenet of modern biblical studies). Likewise, contra Von Rad (to a certain extent), the text is not all that we have. Rather, what we have is text-event–the two being inseparable. In terms of Enn’s “incarnational analogy,” this suggests that Christ Himself is both text and event—He is the Word/Logos—God’s ultimate communication and He is event, time and space humanity. As the God-Man Christ is the ultimate expression of God’s redemptive acts. Acts have accompanying interpretive moments, i.e., you need to be told what the purpose of the event is. So text and event are part of the same redemptive context. Additionally, Long’s approach resists the imposition of modernist, positivistic notions of history onto ancient near eastern texts (i.e., the idea that the text is “neutral” and events are out there waiting to be “objectively” reported). As Enns emphasizes, Long tries to allow the Bible to define its own expectations of historiography. Also, Long’s approach helps to avoid the undesirable apologetic element that at times accompanies conservative exegesis. That is, for Long, the point of a biblical narrative is not to affirm the event’s historicity, but rather to teach something. We have not understood the book of Exodus, when we have simply defended that it “happened,” –that is, its mere facticity. Rather, we have understood it when we have affirmed what the text is saying about the Exodus, which is to say, what it is saying about God.