Methods of Critical Study Flashcards
Historical criticism uses what to try to understand how the text came to be?
Critical thought
What overarching term describes the field that tries to understand how the text came to be, find its original meaning in historical context, and reconstruct the history behind the text?
Historical criticism
What methodologies study the text “though time”?
Diachronic methods
What methodologies focus on history of the text, study how it got to its present form, and look for meaning in previous forms and settings of the text?
Diachronic methods
What methodologies study the text “with time”?
Synchronic methods
What methodologies focus on meaning within the text itself and look only at the final form of the text?
Synchronic methods
What field looks for “seams” (contradictions, repetitions, different vocabularies) and believes these are clues to different underlying documents pieced together?
Source criticism
What field examines similar literary forms of expression and tries to get back to an original, postulated oral form, as well as studying the original life settings when that form was in use?
Form criticism
What field tries to understand the motives and beliefs of the authors or editors of the text that brought it into its final form?
Redaction criticism
What are the three presuppositions of the historical-critical method?
- Methodological doubt
- Analogy
- Correlation
What is methodological doubt?
We can only know what happened in the past with some probability, and never complete certainty.
What is analogy, in the context of a historical-critical presupposition?
Our present experience should dictate what was possible in the past as well.
What is correlation, in the context of historical-critical presupposition?
Events are inter-related in a chain of natural causes and events.
Which presupposition of historical-critical method explicitly rules out divine interventions and the supernatural world?
Correlation
Which two presuppositions of the historical-critical method are contradictory?
Methodological doubt (events are unique and we cannot know for certain) and analogy (we must assume the past is as the present)
