Politicizing the Bible

Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture 1300-1700 by Scott W Hahn and Benjamin Wiker, 566 pages

The historical-critical approach to the Bible - examining Scripture as a historically conditioned collection of texts - is generally considered a dogmatically and politically neutral approach which is rooted in the Enlightenment.  Hahn and Wiker trace its origins back 400 years earlier, to disputes over nominalism and realism at the end of the Middle Ages.  In the process, they reveal how the development of historical criticism was involved in the process of secularization, and how both were entangled in the rise of nationalism.  In addition to the expected (Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke), the authors manage to draw in figures that secularized history tends to undervalue and misunderstand (Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham, Wycliffe, Luther).

Hahn and Wiker ably expose the manner in which a supposedly disinterested quest for truth is, in fact, a mission of disenchantment itself inspired by prior ideological commitments, enabled by the Averroistic doctrine of double truth and the Polybian conception of religion as a tool to control the unenlightened masses.  More than a simple study of one form of biblical scholarship, Politicizing the Bible, like A Secular Age and The Unintended Reformation, is an intriguing, enlightening exploration of the intellectual currents flowing into modernity.