Concerning theological and historical presentism

And it happened, as He was alone praying, that His disciples joined Him, and He asked them, saying, ‘Who do the crowds say that I am?’

So they answered and said, ‘John the Baptist, but some say Elijah; and others say that one of the old prophets has risen again.’

He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’

Peter answered and said, ‘The Christ of God.’ (Luke 9:18-20)

Note: I wrote a very condensed version of the following essay for a school project. It’s been a minute coming. My weakness of pedantry and over-emphasis on contingency has been as tempered as it can be for this longer (five-part) presentation. I hope anyone reading enjoys and finds it edifying!

May it be blessed!

The Western esoteric tradition, which emerged in its modern form during the 18th century, gave rise to movements like New Thought, the Theosophical Society, and especially the New Age movement. These systems often claim to uncover the “true” teachings of sacred texts, including the Bible, but their interpretations are rooted in a subjective individualism that divorces Scripture from its original context.

This interpretive method, known as eisegesis, reads modern assumptions and desires into ancient texts, leading to a theological and historical presentism. By ignoring the communal and covenantal dimensions of Christianity, these movements reduce its universal message to a personalized, often pantheistic spirituality.

Such distortions not only misrepresent Christian doctrines but also undermine the Scriptural foundation of the Church. The Bible, particularly the New Testament, was written within a specific historical and theological context—the Second Temple period—and reflects the lived reality of early Christian communities. Historically faithful interpretation, as exemplified by the Church Fathers, emphasizes the communal nature of Scripture as a guide for entering the cosmic story of Christ’s redemption.

Yet modern systems like New Thought use biblical passages to affirm individual self-realization, ignoring their broader theological significance. This essay explores how such reinterpretations erode the universal truths of Scripture, replacing them with subjective frameworks that reflect the values of Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic individualism.

There is no knowledge or worldview that is self-evident unto itself. All spiritual beliefs and metaphysical models exist within a context or paradigm. When we attempt to extract an element of a belief system—whether a sacred figure, text, or symbol—and reframe it within our own worldview, presuppositions, or a personalized, syncretic spirituality, we unknowingly commit a fallacious engagement with the tradition. This error is called theological presentism. In historical research, a similar fallacy is called presentism, which occurs when scholars project contemporary values, ideas, and assumptions onto past events or texts, distorting their original meaning and context.

This distortion often leads to misinterpretations of historical actors or movements as well as unjust critiques of the past. Theologically, presentism erodes the foundational context from which religious traditions and doctrines arise. In relation to Christianity, it not only undermines its historical and theological coherence but also risks disassociating Christian doctrines from the worldview in which they were formed.

The Christian Bible, specifically the New Testament, falls under a unique category in theological and historical study due it its being both theological in nature and composed of primary source documents. These primary source documents, eyewitness accounts making up the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul, John, James, etc. were all written in a particular historical and theological context. This context was the Second Temple Period, with its audience being primarily early Christians either coming out of Judaism or, in the case of the ministry of the Apostle Paul, the Gentile community. Exegetical interpretations consider the context in which these texts were written and presented.

This form of interpretation, or hermeneutics, far from removing the reader from the story they were reading, worked to actually engross the latter in the former. The story they were reading was the story they were in, as the scholar Hans Frei reports, “Western Christian reading of the Bible in the days before the rise of historical criticism in the eighteenth century was usually strongly realistic, i.e. at once literal and historical… all those stories which together went into a making of a single storied or historical sequence.”[1]

The Biblical corpus functioned as a natural foci for the Christian reader, where it was not only that the world around them emerged from the sequential episodes in the text, but they, too, arose in relation to this historical sequence, “Since the world truly rendered by combining biblical narratives into one was indeed the one and only real world, it must in principle embrace the experience of any present age and reader.”[2] The model of interpretation was not to extract Biblical passages and apply them when applicable or to negate them where it was not, “but its direction was that of incorporating extra-biblical thought, experience, and reality into the one real world detailed and made accessible by the biblical story.”[3]

This form of interpretation and its subsequent application is, while the Reformation and Enlightenment did skew things in the West, closer to the original exegetical work put forth by Patristic sources.  The Patristic writers, or the Church Fathers, are typically thought to have written from the end of the first century to the eighth century (the seventh ecumenical council). The Patristic sources are invaluable due to Church Fathers’ own historical context, being disciples of disciples, such as Clement of Rome, Polycarp, and Irenaeus of Lyons. Four presuppositional categories arise when looking at the realistic interpretive lens of (even) Western Christians pre-eighteenth century, giving us an indication of how the early Christians understood themselves and how they engaged with texts within their own worldview.

The first presupposition is corporate solidarity, “that important Semitic complex of thought in which there is constant oscillation between the individual and the group—family, tribe, or nation—to which he belongs, so that the king or some other representative figure may be said to embody the group, or the group may be said to sum up the host of individuals.”[4] This relates to the ekklesia, the early Church and its contemporary counterpart are a united whole made up of singular persons who contribute to that unity, otherwise known as the Body of Christ. The Scriptures themselves are a part of the Liturgical and Sacramental structure, they are embedded in this function, and while personal study is encouraged (if not mandated), the Bible is primarily a communal text, meant to be read within community. 

The Church functions as a unity of persons, therefore the reader of these texts using a realistic lens would certainly understand themselves in relation to others. This is precisely the basis of which the Patristic commentaries are adamant about the literal interpretation of caring for the poor, Sts. Basil and St. John Chrysostom’s homilies On Social Justice and On the Gospel of Matthew, specifically and respectively. Additionally, the larger world is encompassed in this worldview crystallized by The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ by St. Maximus the Confessor, with its central premise that the Incarnation was not simply for the restoration and reconciliation of man, but of the entire universe.

The second presupposition is correspondences in history, which stems from corporate solidarity, “wherein the nature of man, the relations between man and man, the interactions between man and the universe, and the relation of both to God, their Creator and Redeemer, are viewed in a wholistic fashion. In such a view, history is… expressive of the divine intent and explicating the divine will.[5] These presuppositions form a wholistic paradigm that is grounded in interpretive realism and emphasize communal identity and shared history which is a continual revelation of God and His will.

The exegetical interpretation is, theoretically, faithful to this coherent paradigm, with the text forming a cohesive stratum through which the faith practitioner can engage and become a part of the sequential history of this community. The communal aspect of the realistic lens, i.e. at once literal and historical was (and is in some traditions) foundational to the applicable hermeneutics of early the early Christian world, where “not only was it possible for [the reader], but it was also his duty to fit himself into that world in which he was in any case a member… He was to see his disposition, his actions and passions, the shape of his own life as well as that of his era’s events as figures of that storied world.”[6] The text, ground in its historical and theological context draws the reader in, no matter where or when that reader is, with the categories of God’s love, mercy and compassion transforming persons and societies becomes universally applicable.

The third and fourth presuppositions are eschatological fulfillment and Messianic presence, respectively. “For the earliest believers, this meant that the living presence of Christ, through His Spirit, was to be considered a determining factor in all their biblical exegesis, and that the Old Testament was to be interpreted Christocentrically [sic].”[7] What these two presuppositions support is the idea that the Incarnation, the Word becoming flesh, in time contributes to the redemption of time and emphasizes the inherent advancement toward a particular telos, or purpose, of time. And by providing a telos for time this ipso facto ties purpose for humanity. This time-bound telos and communal solidarity are ground in correspondence in history, with a people sharing a history that is woven into revelation and God’s will.  

The covenantal reality of the early Christian worldview, abiding by the messianic message from Jesus Christ to love they neighbor and live in a loving, self-sacrificial way are universal imperatives. These imperatives, however, can be easily reduced by extracting Jesus’ teachings from their historical and theological context. This reduction and the previous interpretive schema began in the eighteenth century through the German theological tradition developing Biblical criticism in a synthesis with Enlightenment rationalism and ideal humanism which formed the basis for Fredrich Schleiermacher’s innovative eisegetical interpretation, “the German Protestant theologian… [emphasized] the importance of ‘feeling’ in the religious life.” [8]

Schleiermacher developed an eisegetical framework based on psychological processes and linguistics, pulling in intuition and feeling to understand the Scripture one was reading to with the ask of the researcher to understand “the discourse first as well as and then better than its originator.”[9] Schleiermacher’s post-Enlightenment eisegesis was an artform combining grammatical and discursive interpretations,[10] that furthered the Protestant focus on “the relationship of the individual to God.”[11]

Schleiermacher highlights the changing lenses that theologians were using to interpret Scripture, the reconstruction of meaning for the interpreter was of a higher order than the original intent of the author precisely because the interpreter can see how it fit into the cultural context as well as the evolution of such culture in the sequential march of time.[12] The interpreter, in this discipline, now becomes the meaning-maker of discourse due to their position outside of the discourse. It is reflective of the change of direction of exegesis, where at once the Scripture rendered the world, the world was now beginning to render Scripture.

Scripture being rendered by the world meant that it, due to the German theological school of the late eighteenth century, would be fed through the post-Enlightenment rational thinking which helped to develop textual criticism of Scripture. Schleiermacher’s innovative thinking was, in part, due to his Enlightenment rationalism and in part due to his Romanticist philosophy that promoted the philosophy of individualism. Though, these philosophies are historically at odds, his blend paved the way for the early nineteenth century movement called New Thought, which prided both the potential of the individual and their good being actualized by self-reliance and metaphysical monism.

The prolific New Thought author, Horatio Dresser, wrote in his history of the movement, in the wake of the interpretive changes of the eighteenth century,

“The nineteenth century was also the epoch of religious liberalism… For the less enlightened, the smaller minds among liberals, freedom of religious thought developed according to the tenets of the new or higher criticism imported from Germany. Undertaking to explain how the Bible came into being, with the variations and errors of texts, the imperfections of language, the conflict of opinions due to the fact that the books of which the Bible consists were brought together by other hands long after the supposed writers flourished, the critics proved too much and exemplified a habit of judging by the letter. Biblical criticism became destructive and had much to do with the weakening of faith still apparent among us.”[13]

Germany’s export of higher criticism undermining the West is not simply a post-Enlightenment, Romanticist contribution to Western society and thought. Schleiermacher’s innovations were apart of the German theological tradition as well as the German spiritual and intellectual currents which blended to support the commercialization of his hermeneutics. I mention this, because just as we are meant to look at the historical and theological context for Scripture and figures of the past, it would behoove us to look into the waters in which the modern discipline of biblical criticism emerged.

Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ

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[1] Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 1.

[2] Ibid. 3

[3] Ibid.

[4] Richard N. Longenecker, Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1975), 93.

[5] Ibid. 94.

[6] Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 3.

[7] Longenecker, Biblical Exegesis, 95.

[8] Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2005), 38.

[9] Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 294.

[10] Ibid. 298.

[11] Carrette and King, Selling Spirituality, 39.

[12] Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 294.

[13] Horatio W. Dresser, A History of the New Thought Movement, first published 1919 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.; electronic ed., Cornerstone Publishing, 2001), accessed July 19, 2024, https://nevillegoddardbooks.com/uploads/4/0/9/5/4095367/horatio_w._dresser_-_a_history_of_the_new_thought_movement.pdf, 2.