What Is the Historical-Critical Method?
If Schlier’s life and work eloquently point to the elements of truth found in historical-critical Scripture studies, the question may be asked, “What then is this thing of which so many concerned Catholics are suspicious?” An important distinction must immediately be made, namely the distinction between historical-critical exegesis, understood as the accumulated and ever more quickly accumulating deposit of Scripture studies, and the historical-critical method. The historical-critical method is not, in the first place, a set of theses about Scripture. It is defined by certain types of questions and certain types of tools used to address them. For example, the method of form criticism, first developed by Bultmann and Dibelius, asks the question, “What was the function of a particular passage of the Gospels as it was presented to the community?” The instruments of form criticism are manifold: analysis of the literary form of a particular passage, possible relation to questions that preoc
