Christian Faith and Biblical Criticism

Biblical criticism in some form or other is accepted practically everywhere these days. While every Christian readily admits the importance of knowing as accurately as possible the geographical and historical background and authorship of each book of the Bible, many have gone much further. The so-called higher or internal critical methods have frequently tried to prove that a biblical book is not an integral unity but is made up of the writings of a number of different authors. Other arguments have claimed that some of the biblical writings err in their statements of fact as well as in their claim to a certain authorship.

Some Christians have responded to this situation by accepting the results of critical studies of the Scriptures while at the same time clinging to their trust in biblical authority. Despite all the assumed historical evidence to the contrary, they insist they can still accept the Bible as God’s authoritative revelation to man because the Spirit of God witnesses with their spirits that the Bible is the Word of God.

The difficulty with this position is that, as one young student put it to me after hearing an address on this theme, it is pure subjectivism. With this as our only ground of belief, she insisted, the Koran, the Vedas, and any other religious books may have the same authority if we have the feeling that they are divine revelation. It is virtually impossible to prove that one’s acceptance of the Bible, despite claimed historical inaccuracies and errors, is the result of the testimony of the Holy Spirit, and not merely of wishful thinking.

Other Christians respond to destructive biblical criticism by attacking it and trying to demolish its conclusions. Then, bolstering their claims with internal and external evidence, they attempt to show the historical accuracy of the Bible’s statements and the scientific validity of its concepts, in the hope of proving its divine inspiration and authority.

Although in some circles this second tactic has been commonly used for a century or so, it also has great weaknesses as a rationalistic point of view. The fact is, Christians cannot prove certain biblical statements or ideas according to modern historical and scientific standards because essential links are often missing from the chain of evidence. By claiming to prove their whole position logically and scientifically, these Christians set up human scientific reasoning as the ultimate standard of truth; then if their claims do not meet the demands of this way of thinking, their proof collapses from within.

What the Christian must do is face the question of history itself, for while the Bible is not a textbook of history, it is a collection of historically generated sources, such as chronicles, poems, prophecies, and letters. Like the historian, the biblical scholar has to take into account the critical problems of the external aspects of the biblical writings and also of the supposedly assured results of internal criticism. He has to look at the evidence as carefully and as objectively as possible so that he can properly evaluate the critical assertions.

At the same time he must also accept the idea that, no matter how hard he works, gaps will appear in his evidence. After all, he, like the historian, has as his facts only the remains of past events left on the shifting sands of time. Yet despite this problem of gaps in the available information, the historian carries on his studies confident that he can attain at least a partial knowledge of what happened in the past. The scholar dealing with Scriptures is in the same position: he can attain a certain knowledge of the biblical background, but he can never gain complete knowledge of every event. There will always be gaps in his understanding of the Bible and in his arguments for its historical accuracy.

Furthermore, the problem goes far deeper. A person’s approach to the Bible ultimately stems from his basic view of the nature of reality. If he begins by denying that God exists or has revealed himself, he can only approach the Bible with the attitude that it is a collection of ancient myths and fables that have no authority except as expressions of what men believed many centuries ago. If, on the other hand, he believes that God does exist and that he has revealed himself to man in and through Jesus Christ, his Son, his attitude toward the Bible will be very different. One’s acceptance or rejection of the Bible is ultimately determined, therefore, not by his historico-grammatical exegesis of the biblical text, nor by a critical analysis of its background, but by his religious faith—even if that faith is atheism.

This message becomes clear when we turn to the history of biblical criticism over the past two centuries. Out of the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Hegel flowed streams of thought that ran beneath much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century biblical study. Kant’s denial of man’s ability to know anything but the phenomenal, i.e., the space-time world—and his insistence that in that area man’s judgment was final stimulated much of the early attack on the truthfulness and dependability of the biblical record. Although Hegel, building on Kant’s thesis, did not deny the possibility of a knowledge of the transcendent, he made such knowledge fundamentally subjective, while at the same time presenting a scheme to make history operate in a dialectic manner that eventually reconciled all opposites.

These two systems of thought underlie nearly all subsequent non-Christian Western thought, including the modern philosophy of existentialism, which is usually frankly atheistic. The trend of thought in the Western world for two centuries has been toward denying the possibility of divine revelation, even when admitting the existence of a god, on the grounds that such a being could not be truly personal. Arnold Toynbee, who accurately reflects contemporary thinking, has expressed this point of view in many books and speeches. To deal with the Bible from this standpoint is to deny from the beginning its claim to be divine revelation.

This rejection of the Bible as the Word of God has produced such phenomena as the documentary hypothesis, an attempt to reconstruct from the Old Testament various writings for which there is no tangible evidence but which were supposedly compiled by ancient editors into the present text. This destroys the whole fabric of the Old Testament as it stands. It is then reorganized on the basis of a Hegelian dialectical interpretation of history. No historian does this with any other historical source, ancient or modern. In New Testament scholarship the same philosophical presuppositions have produced the demythologizing technique of Rudolf Bultmann, Ernst Fuchs, and others who have carried the process out to its logical conclusion. The result is the wrecking of the Bible, not only as divine revelation, but as a historical source of even the same degree of integrity as Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War or Livy’s Annals of Rome. It is a not unexpected result, given the negative presuppositions produced by modern philosophy.

The Christian’s answer to this is, first of all, that no one can truly believe the Bible is the Word of God unless he is enlightened by the Holy Spirit to see that it is so. Without “the testimony of the Holy Spirit,” all the argument in the world, no matter how logical and correct, will not bring anyone to believe that the Bible is inspired. The Apostle Paul points this out specifically in First Corinthians 2, and Christ implied as much on numerous occasions while he was on earth. The Old Testament was in fact a closed book to the Jews until the Spirit of God made them see its true meaning and authority (John 5:36 ff.; 6:36 ff.). As Christ pointed out to Nicodemus in John 3, before anyone can truly speak of spiritual things, he must be “born again,” by the Spirit. His spiritual eyes must be opened to see that the Bible is truly the Word of God (Ps. 119:18).

Yet this does not relieve the Christian of the responsibility of making a careful study of the biblical text and its background and authorship. After all, to the Christian the Bible is both a divine and a human book. While prophets and apostles spoke as they were carried along by the Spirit, the Spirit of God never destroyed their humanity; they were still human beings writing in human situations. Furthermore, their own statements indicate that some of the books are collections of prophecies pronounced at different times, while others are the result of extensive historical research or of personal experiences. Consequently the use of extra-biblical evidence for understanding and validating biblical statements is quite proper: histories, archaeological remains, and the like throw much light on the biblical text. Through them the student comes to a deeper knowledge and understanding of what the Bible has to say.

As he works, though, the Bible historian must apply the same high standards of scholarship and methodology that he would follow in other areas. In studying Thucydides, for instance, the historian never attempts to take the liberties with the text that many “higher critical” or “demythologizing” students of the Bible assume is their prerogative. If we approach the Old and New Testaments with the proper and “humble” historical methodology, we discover that it is a much more reliable historical document than many today are prepared to admit.

The answer to the problem posed to the Christian faith by biblical criticism, then, is neither to retreat into a completely subjective defensive position nor to advance to the attack with the idea of proving the Bible’s historical, scientific accuracy and divine inspiration by some form of philosophical argument or historical evidence. No man will accept the Christian position as long as his presuppositions, his religious beliefs, incline him away from it; “a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” Only when he is converted through the action of the Holy Spirit will he adopt a different approach and be willing to investigate the Bible as he finds it, without attempting to foist on it his own religious or irreligious opinions. When that happens, he will discover that from both the historical and the spiritual points of view it effectively proves itself to be the Word of God.

W. Stanford Reid is professor of history at Wellington College, University of Guelph, Ontario. He received the Th.M. degree from Westminster Theological Seminary and the Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

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