Why I’m Not Sold on Modern Biblical Scholarship/Criticism

In a post on another one of my sites I announce a transition: this fall, Lord willing, I will begin teaching engineering at Lee University, which is my church’s undergraduate institution. It is the first time since haunted the halls of the St. Andrew’s School in Boca Raton, FL, that I have been either a student or faculty at a church-affiliated institution. All my degrees and all my teaching experience has been in state schools; it should be an interesting transition.

Bringing up the last church-affiliated institution brings up a topic I haven’t had to deal with very much: modern biblical scholarship/criticism. If I had to pick one topic that has had the most long-term corrosive effect on the integrity of Christianity it would be this one. Science, to a large extent, is an abstraction with our ministers, and it is only recently that many of our Christian institutions of higher learning have really broken the liberal arts mould and embraced teaching the sciences and the scientific professions, thus Lee’s initiation of an engineering program. But the nature of the Bible, its authority and the integrity of its content are at the centre of the whole life of the church.

A combination of the adoption of the German dissertation system and (later) the accreditation system have just about made “modern” (and I don’t use that term in merely a general sense) Biblical scholarship de rigeur for seminarians, and after they graduate they pass this idea along to their parishioners. Evangelicals, buttressed by the likes of Harold Lindsell, have resisted these trends, but now we see those trained in the various types of Biblical criticism coming into view in traditionally conservative institutions. Some (but not all) come in with the fervor of missionaries, determined to extirpate the fundamentalist mentality of the tuition paying youth group products which look back at them during class.

For me, that assault came much earlier. My Episcopal prep school required two semesters of “Theology,” the futile attempts of my father to get me out of the second notwithstanding. By that time I had taken my leave of the PECUSA and the school chaplain who had in part inspired my departure. But in reality the first semester–which I took in Form III (freshman, for those of you uninitiated in the prep school system)–was the first shot. It was taught by an Episcopal priest named Raymond P. Kress, who had the distinction of being the only teacher that my brother and I both had after we went to different high schools. (He went to my brother’s military school the year after he taught me.) One thing for sure, he was consistent: he hated us both. I think he picked up on the fact that I was unreceptive to things like the Apostle John being an “old codger” when he wrote his Gospel. (Kress lived long enough to be one himself.)

As I said, I took my leave but my exposure to modern Biblical criticism wasn’t over. I recount my early days as a Roman Catholic here; my parish priest, a “progressive traditionalist,” introduced me to this kind of Biblical scholarship from a Catholic point of view, especially in inspiring me to acquire the original Jerome Biblical Commentary. Some of the things there were informative, others were faith challenging, but ultimately Roman Catholicism impressed on me one key point: the validity of the Scriptures and the continuity of the Church were mutually supporting. That leads to an important point: the whole business of modern Biblical criticism is a fundamentally (sorry!) Protestant project. Breaking the institutional continuity forced Protestant churches to hang their hats on Scriptures deracinated from an historical context. It became a vulnerable target to shoot at during the Enlightenment.

The first major shooter was Richard Simon, a convert from Protestantism (perhaps the first exvangelical?) My suspicion is that he brought his concept of Scripture and church into Roman Catholicism without realising it. His most vehement opponent was Bossuet, who saw which way Simon was going and where it would end. Unfortunately Simon wasn’t the last shooter, and we’ve had many down to our day.

It isn’t my intent to recount that story but to point out what I promised to do in my title: explain why I’m not sold on the whole project. Certainly some good discoveries have been made, but my problem is that the whole enterprise of “Biblical studies” are based on two assumptions that contradict each other and undermine the entire discipline.

The first is that we can only extract from the Scriptures the meaning that the author intended. No more sensus plenior for us now, the fact that it pervades the NT notwithstanding. The Scriptures were written for a specific time and place, and we cannot derive any meaning beyond that. In a world where the understanding of history is so poor and in a discipline where real historians are so scarce, the usual result is that the Scriptures are reduced to irrelevance.

The second is that the text, being the composite, uncertain business that it is depicted to be, is unreliable and cannot be trusted. How deep that goes depends upon the scholar and his or her school, but textual criticism has had its effect. But it raises an important question relative to the first point: if the text is unreliable, how can we ever know what the original author (who is likewise unknown) meant?

It seems to me that modern Biblical criticism is a self-defeating proposition. Or, to put it more simply, modern Biblical critics are simply talking their own way out of a job. That was very much on display during the 1960’s and 1970’s when this and other trends in the church convinced many in Main Line churches that church was pointless and that they should leave. And they did.

So what is to be done? I’d like to make several suggestions in moving forward.

The first is that we need to look at church history as a continuum from the Apostles onward, rather than this mangy Evangelical idea that there was the “Early Church,” then a millennium and more of darkness, and then ____________________ (fill in the name of the church doing the talking) appeared to rescue the faith. The Canon of Scripture–especially the New Testament, the Old is additionally wrapped up in the complexities of Judaism–is the result of a long and desultory looking process which has inspired catcalls but reminds us that, as Erich Sylvester knew, God doesn’t always move in a straight line in his creation. The flow of the history of the church goes from the Scriptures to the Roman Empire Church without the artificial break fundie and skeptic alike believe took place.

The second is that continuity comes in different forms and we should recognise it. The reason Modern Pentecost has been successful is that people can actually witness God doing the same things today that he did in New Testament times. That’s a form of continuity that flies in the face of the rationalistic, cessationist mentality that dominates much of Protestantism. Today we also have liturgical types insist that their idea is the method of continuity, but as I have tried to point out in my three series on that topic it’s not an either/or but a both/and proposition.

The third follows the second: we don’t need to minimise the importance of the supernatural in the life of the church. Many decisions and assumptions have been made in modern Biblical scholarship based on the implicit (or explicit) assumption that, because it’s supernatural, it can’t be true. But that gets back to the issue of relevance: if this whole thing called Christianity isn’t supernatural, then why do we have Biblical studies?

The last is that asserting the existence of a sensus plenior in the Scriptures is itself a witness to the fact that the Scriptures are an inspired corpus. The fact that people have gone overboard from time to time doesn’t invalidate that statement. People have been going overboard for a long time about many things.

I doubt seriously that what I’ve said here is going to make much of an impact. But this is where I’m at, and I hope that some of you find it helpful.