Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§5.6 The Flight from History
worldview more and more gave way to the world of Einsteinian relativity and the
essential uncertainties of quantum physics, so the possibility of the older scientific
objectivity came to be seen as less and less realistic — still more or less effective
for most of the time but wholly inadequate, even misconceived, at both
the macrocosmic and microcosmic level. Biologists who retain the old
nineteenth-century optimism that they are able to discover everything there is to
know about life may still believe that they represent a scientific method of universal
validity for all 'scientific' research, but 'science' no longer speaks with a
united voice on the subject. The reverberations of this shift in the selfunderstanding
of scientific method are still rippling through those other disciplines
which have been accustomed to acknowledge that the sciences provide a
methodological paradigm for academic research.
Postmodernism is the outworking in the humanities and particularly in
literary criticism (from the 1970s) of this new appreciation of the relativity of
all things and processes. In the discipline of history it has resulted in the abandonment
not only of the idea of strictly objective knowledge, of 'facts' independent
of interpretation, but also of the concept of linear time and so also of a
single unified historical development or, in a word, of a 'grand narrative'. 137 In
the 'linguistic turn' of postmodernism, history has been reclaimed from the patronage
of the sciences and restored to its ancient place as literature, but with
the old distinctions between fact and fiction, history and poetry now again
blurred, and the assumption that historical texts refer to a reality outside of
themselves called into question. 138 The main impact of postmodernism, however,
has been to call into question the traditional hegemony of the author, to
liberate the meaning of texts from their originating context, and to bring the
reader to centre-stage in the hermeneutical process. Already in the so-called
'New Criticism' of the mid-twentieth century, the classical idea that the author's
intention is the criterion of meaning had been called in question. Rather,
it was asserted, the text should be regarded as 'autonomous', self-contained, to
be appreciated in its own terms. This emphasis was reinforced by the exposure
of 'the intentional fallacy': the intention of the author was a private state of
mind, which lay behind the text; the text should be allowed to speak for itself.
139 It is just this autonomy of the text from its author which makes it possible
for 'the "matter" of the text [to] escape from the finite intentional horizon
of its author' to impact within the reader's world of meaning, a 'decon-
137. Iggers, Historiography 56-57; K. Jenkins, 'Introduction' to The Postmodern History
Reader (London: Routledge, 1997) 5-9, 17-18.
138. Iggers, Historiography 100; see also Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth
ch. 6.
139. Thiselton, New Horizons 58-59, citing R. Wellek and A. Warren, Theory of Literature
(1949), and W. K. Wimsatt and M. Beardsley, 'The Intentional Fallacy' (1954).
93