I suppose I found the glosses on Genesis 6:1–6 by Scott Bailey, Jim West, and Claude Mariottini mildly entertaining. I suppose. And I realize that perhaps one shouldn’t take these sorts of parodies too seriously—just as one shouldn’t try to learn about Babylonian religion from Deutero-Isaiah. But I just can’t help myself.

Amused or not, I found the exchange confusing (or confused) with regard to the connections all three versions drew between historico-philosophical periods and the maximalist/minimalist categories bandied about in biblical studies. On the one hand, Scott and Jim associate maximalists with the Enlightenment, while on the other, Claude associates minimalists with postmodernity. This seems to me precisely backwards.

I have not yet quite figured out what Scott and Jim mean by “the sons of historicism,” particularly the word “historicism.” The many different possible meanings one may attach to that term make the word almost useless. Until someone corrects me, I will have to regard the term “historicist” here as roughly synonymous with “maximalist,” and I will have to attribute to it the sense, “one who attributes to biblical narratives a high degree of historical reliability.” But this fundamentalist/historicist/maximalist cluster hardly seems to me to describe an “Enlightenment-influenced” way of thinking. Undoubtedly, all contemporary biblical scholars have felt the Enlightenment’s influence, mostly in ways that I would consider good. However, part of the Enlightenment ethos involved casting off religious authority and elevating an individual’s own reason(ing) over against received tradition. I don’t see how this especially applies to the so-called maximalists. Christian fundamentalism, indeed, grew precisely from a rejection of the fruits of the Enlightenment and its heir, modernity. Maximalism vests biblical narratives with epistemic authority as an outgrowth of the Bible’s traditional religious authority, and suspects that if the free exercise of reason contradicts the biblical sources, then that reason has somehow gone astray. I see more of the Renaissance (ad fontes) than of the Enlightenment (sapere aude) here.

Claude’s linkage of minimalism with postmodernism likewise befuddles me. Admittedly, Jean-François Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (my apologies for omitting the precise citation, but my copies of Lyotard’s works sit snugly in a cardboard box somewhere in Pepperdine’s warehouse at the moment), and one might see in some maximalist rhetoric an incredulity toward what one might call the biblical metanarrative. But if, as Claude says in his “translation notes,” minimalists “say that only evidence can prove truth,” then minimalists stand very firmly on modernist—specifically, positivist or empiricist—ground. Yet postmodernist philosphers tend to reject positivism (for many different reasons, and with many different arguments).

Maximalists bear more resemblance to pre-Enlightenment or postmodern thinkers than to Enlightenment thinkers, not least by putting tradition and testimony on a par with (other forms of) hard evidence. Minimalists bear more resemblance to the modernist heirs of the Enlightenment, not least by (positivistically) insisting on hard evidence perceptible to the senses.

Perhaps this exercise would prove most useful if I were to offer some biblical analogies of my own. Forget Genesis 6:1–6 (well, not entirely, but for the purposes of this discussion). Instead, take as the maximalists’ credo Psalm 44:2 (44:1 in English versions):

We have heard with our ears, O God,
     our ancestors have told us,
what deeds you performed in their days,
     in the days of old.

And take as the minimalists’ credo Deuteronomy 19:15b:

Only on the evidence of two or three witnesses shall a [claim] be sustained.