Again from Mark Bowald’s Rendering the Word in Theological Hermeneutics this time assessing Nicholas Wolterstorff’s theological hermeneutics,
If you take the fundamental significance of the Bible to lie in its being a record and report of divine discourse and revelation that are of prime interest to you, and if you believe that on matters of such importance one should never believe writers on their say-so, then obviously you are forced to consider the reliability of these reports. In the course of that consideration you will naturally bring everything you firmly believe into the picture. If you believe that miracles do not occur, then you will find yourself trying to get at the real events that lie behind the miracle stories in the Bible and offer hypotheses as to why the writers would have used miracle stories to describe non-miraculous events. If you have convictions as to the criteria for a literary text being well composed and you assume that the biblical writers operated with the same criteria, and if you then find that the biblical text at certain junctures violates those criteria, you will speculate that the text was assembled by somewhat absent-minded redactors from previously existing documents that did not satisfy those criteria. If you are of the theological conviction that God’s economy moves from law to grace, and you find that the Old Testament text as we have it does not exhibit that pattern very well, you will propose a dating and reorganization that will exhibit it. If you find discrepancies in the biblical narratives, you will try to peer behind the discrepancies to see what really happened and will offer hypotheses as to why there are those discrepancies. I have called this whole cluster of inquires the “historical-critical method” because that is what it is customarily called. But what impresses me, as someone looking in on the discipline from the outside, is how little there is of the historical, how much of the critical. So far as I can see discoveries in the sand play a quite subordinate role; the discipline has been shaped almost entirely by theological convictions, by epistemological convictions, by convictions as to what does and does not happen in history, by assumptions of influence, and by literary and rhetorical convictions as to how reasonable human beings would and would not compose texts (emphasis mine).”1
And furthermore for traditional evangelical convictions,
The fundamental root of the difference between evangelical position and that of the the typical historical critic is the differing assessment of the evidence for the reliability of the biblical writers. The evangelical interprets the evidence available to us as pointing to inerrancy. And he concludes from this that the Bible came about by inspiration, on the ground that only divine inspiration could account for inerrancy on the sorts of matter we find in the Bible. In turn, what especially leads the evangelical to differ from the historical critic is his difference of theological conviction as to how God works in history. The evangelical, unlike the typical historical critic, has no difficulty attributing to God the performance of miracles, nor any difficulty attributing to God the enabling of prophets to foretell the future. Where he does have serious difficulty, as it turns out, is in dealing with the apparent contradictions within the biblical text.”2