Steve, I take your point. There is a distinction here that needs to be
clarified between a foundationalist epistemology and something that I have
trouble putting a label on but which has a lot to do with coherence: is
our reading of the New Testament coherent with other things that we know (eg.
about the Old Testament, about first-century Judaism, about how historical texts
work, about ancient language, and so on)?

What interests me about critical-realism is not that it provides us with
better grounds for believing that God raised Jesus from the dead but that
it gives us a better – and in some sense, therefore, a ‘truer’ – methodology
for understanding what it means to say that God raised Jesus from
the dead. I’m not trying to prove anything, just understand better. This is an
important distinction. I have been part of a small local story-telling group.
Today we looked at Propp’s structuralist analysis of fairy-stories. You can go a
long way towards understanding how these stories function, how different
conventional plot elements work together to produce a particular effect, without
having to make a judgment about whether they are true or not. Of course, meaning
has implications for reference: my own experience is that a better understanding
of what the New Testament story means gives me greater confidence in the
veracity of its details; a reading of the New Testament that appears to cohere
well with its various interpretive contexts is bound to be more credible than
one that doesn’t. But these are nevertheless distinct tasks.

There is also a pragmatic issue here. The argument for critical-realism at
the moment is a counterweight to certain distorted or false hermeneutics that
have held sway over both scholarly and popular biblical interpretation. There
has been too much suspicion on the one hand and too much dogmatism on the
other, and to that extent at least Tom Wright’s work provides a timely
corrective: it is a ‘response to the narrow and neurotic epistemology of modern evangelicalism’.
But it would be a mistake to make it an exclusive method of reading scripture or
disallow subsequent developments or modifications to our core hermeneutic
(‘core’ seems a better metaphor than ‘foundational’) as our thinking evolves.
There are various legitimate and useful ways of reading scripture, but they do
not necessarily serve the same purpose. If critical-realism is of particular
importance at the moment (not least for an emerging theology), it is because it
performs a particular task, it functions at a particular level of our
theological thinking, it shapes a particular component in our belief system. It
has a limited role, but I’m not sure that it’s wrong to seek some sort of
consensus in this area. It seems to me that one of the distinctive traits of the
emerging church is a growing commitment to understand our historical-theological
origins better.