Ascriptive realism and the book of Daniel : Questions for Richard Briggs

[Excerpt] Richard Briggs’s paper, “A Test Case in Ascriptive Realism: The Quest of the Historical Daniel and Its Complex Relationship to the Practices of Scriptural Interpretation,” shrewdly resists typical dichotomies between history and theology. Briggs declines to think of the Bible as essentially about the past, seeing it neither as a record of past events, one that is either accurate or inaccurate as such, nor as an event of past but not ongoing communication—a text that spoke but that no longer speaks in the present. As Briggs sees it, the Bible is not in its essence about the past, but there is still a great deal to be learned, even for the sake of an interpretation that is theologically substantive, from historical investigation of the Bible. Via his case study of reading Daniel as an ascriptively realistic text, Briggs hopes “to illustrate the kind of framework within which one might locate the best practices for integrating historical and theological exegesis: as a single practice that is irreducibly historical, irreducibly theological, and beholden to informed imaginative inquiry from a range of subdisciplinary perspectives.” This is a far more compelling goal than one sees in the all-too-common disjunctions between theology and history. Yet questions remain about how the organizing category of “ascriptive realism” works. There is one formal query worth asking together with a more material issue to consider.