Post-traumatic texts

Since the 19th century, biblical study has accepted history as its defining cognate discipline. History has dictated the questions asked of the text, whether by fundamentalists who find the whole Bible to be historical, or by minimalists who want little of it to be historical, or by the Jesus Seminar with its circular arguments, or by historical criticism in general.

At the turn of the last century, however, the unquestioned mastery of history as the defining cognate discipline for biblical study was being challenged by the rise of social scientific methods that ask other kinds of questions of the text, not eliminating historical questions but breaking the monopoly of such investigation. Among the great variety of newer cognate disciplines has been trauma studies, which arose in the 20th century in re­sponse to the deep and multiple traumas leading to posttraumatic stress disorder, with its “story of a wound that cries out.” Given that compelling body of research into the searing experiences of disaster in the 20th century, it is inevitable that trauma studies should become a fresh cognate discipline for scripture, as evidenced in the work of Daniel Smith-Christopher and Kathleen O’Connor.

David Carr, professor of Old Tes­tament at Union Theological Sem­inary in New York, rereads the familiar materials of the Bible in light of trauma theory and opens the way for a fresh and suggestive interpretation. He brings to the work his personal experience of a biking accident followed by months of healing and rehabilitation during which, he writes, “I barely lived.” His simple thesis, worked in many layers, is that scripture was formed over and over as a response of faith to deep historical trauma. The term resilience in his title refers to the capacity of communities of faith to continue in the face of disaster.