<scp>J</scp>ohn <scp>M</scp>ilbank and Biblical Hermeneutics: the End of the Historical‐Critical Method?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is perhaps ironic that a methodology still convinced of its radical iconoclasm and progressive nature should at the same time be regarded as critically backward, a by‐product of a disappearing philosophy. Such a view of the historical‐critical method is held by J ohn M ilbank who argues that because of its dependence upon heretical philosophies that affirm the ontological autonomy of a world without reference to or participation in G od, it should be confined to theological history. This essay will argue that M ilbank's challenge ought to be taken seriously by C hristian biblical interpreters and suggests that historical‐critical study, in the form criticised by M ilbank, needs to be rejected. M ilbank exposes the philosophical bankruptcy of the method from a C hristian perspective; nevertheless, M ilbank overstretches himself. His rejection of the historical‐critical method results in a hermeneutic that has no place for a biblical text's historical particularity and sense. Because of this, he is left subsuming historic texts into the regula fidei of his philosophical meta‐narrative, whether they fit such a move or not. This is particularly the case with M ilbank's treatment of biblical texts, which, it shall be argued, operates as a refusal of history and a refusal of the particularity and alterity of the text. This highlights the need for an historical hermeneutic for C hristian biblical interpretation, based on theological presuppositions, which takes the theological value of both historical particularity and the text seriously.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it