This is why I like reading Pope Benedict XVI aka Joseph Ratzinger – because I cannot read more than half  page without writing notes.

His observation about the need for the historical-critical method to “evolve” and become theological in nature is truly correct and brilliant. He writes in Jesus of Nazareth: Part Two, Holy Week –

“One thing is clear to me: in two hundred years of exegetical work, historical-critical exegesis has already yielded its essential fruit. If scholarly exegesis is not to exhaust itself in constantly new hypothesis, becoming theologically irrelevant, it must take a methodological step forward and see itself once again as a theological discipline, without abandoning its historical character. It must learn that the positivistic hermeneutic on which it has been based does not constitute the only valid and definitively evolved rational proach; rather it constitutes a specific and historically conditioned form of rationality that is both open to correction and completion and in need of it. It must recognize that a properly developed faith-hermeneutic is appropriate to the text and can be combined with a historical hermeneutic, aware of its limits, so as to form a methodological whole.”

TRANSLATION: The best form of historical-critical exegesis and one that will be most complete is that done from a theologically informed faith perspective – recognizing the strengths and limitations of both.

Personally I believe a theologically informed historical-critical approach is the best approach, or at least the foundational approach that should undergird all others.