A once dominant discipline that sought to identify the different forms/genres (e.g., dirge, love-song, legal document, covenant) and how they function in their original life-settings (Sitz-im-Leben) (e.g., funeral, romance, law-court, international diplomacy, respectively). These findings were then applied to the various forms that were thought to have been used and adapted in the biblical text in order to understand their original intentions.
As a discipline the stated principles were, of course, legitimate. In the course of its history, however, form-critics have also adopted presuppositions that were wildly foreign to the biblical world and texts, that led to the atomizing of the biblical text into units and fragments that hardly yeield any meaningful significance. The results have been far from a blessing. Except perhaps in the area of psalm-studies, form-criticism has yielded little of lasting influence. Its limited usefulness was already recognized in the late 1960's and 1969 could probably be recognized as the year when it was pronounced brain-dead when, in his presidential address to the Society for Biblical Studies, James Muilenburg called for a new approach to biblical studies with what he called rhetorical criticism, which assumes the biblical text can be understood only as integral units rather than fragments strung together that form-criticism had made them.
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