Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 49:1 (Spring 1987)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

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WTJ 49:1 (Spring 1987) p. 213

Book Reviews

John Rogerson: Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1984 (American ed.: [Philadelphia:] Fortress Press, 1985). xiii, 320. $29.95.

This book treats, as its title would suggest, the rise of OT criticism in Germany in the nineteenth century and its reception in England. Professor Rogerson explicitly disclaims any ambition to deal with more countries than England and Germany, thus excluding, with an exception made for the Scot William Robertson Smith, even Scotland, Wales, and Ireland from his consideration. Exclusion of the American scene is said to have been motivated by the expectation, unfulfilled in the event, that “the centenary project of the [American] Society for Biblical Literature” should have published a substantial amount on the history of American critical scholarship before his work was complete (p. ix). The book is composed equally of research into the German and the English scenes, there being no attempt made, as the author seems to admit, to avoid concentration, among the English, upon Anglican scholars.

The author sets himself the task of exploring “some of the implications of the fact that although the critical method is the basis of academic Old Testament studies in Britain today, the home of the method and still the place of its most creative use, is Protestant Germany …” (p. ix). Although British scholars, he says, “are presenting to our students results that ought simply to be evaluated on intellectual grounds available to anyone of the requisite intelligence, we are in fact presenting results that originate from a theological and philosophical climate different from our own. “ He speaks of a “ reluctance of some students to come to grips with the critical method” which is “partly born of an unwillingness or an inability to bridge a small, but important cultural gap” (p. x). It is obviously Professor Rogerson’s goal to help bridge this gap.

Professor Rogerson cites two previous histories of OT criticism, those of T. K. Cheyne and of Hans-Joachim Kraus, as being, in at least one way, cautionary examples for his project. In Cheyne’s Founders of Old Testament Criticism (1893), says Rogerson, “the net result is that nineteenth-century Old Testament scholarship is depicted in terms of black and white. Those who contributed to the rise of the critical method are praised, those who are

WTJ 49:1 (Spring 1987) p. 214

judged to have obstructed it are condemned, and those who, in Cheyne’s view, should have done more than they actually did for the critical cause receive only qualified approval” (pp. 1-2). It is Rogerson’s unease with such an historical m...

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