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| Christ Preaching (La Petite Tombe), Rembrandt, circa 1652 (cropped) |
A typical example of the approach pervasive in academia is provided by the now depleted Jesus Seminar grouping of scholars as summarised here:
According to the Seminar, Jesus was a mortal man born of two human parents, who did not perform nature miracles nor die as a substitute for sinners nor rise bodily from the dead. Sightings of a risen Jesus represented the visionary experiences of some of his disciples rather than physical encounters.
Despite the common misuse of text criticism and its many categories, the Church values form criticism, especially the study of literary forms. The Vatican Council in 1965 explained its support:
For truth is expressed in a variety of ways, depending on whether a text is history of one kind or another, or whether its form is that of prophecy, poetry, or some other kind of speech.
And again:
Since God speaks in sacred scripture through a person in human fashion, the interpreter of scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate the meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.
For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of perceiving, speaking, and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the customs normally followed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another.
Key ideas expressed in these two paragraphs that are often ignored by those who see biblical scholarship as a purely "scientific" exercise are that interpretation should have the purpose of elucidating the key message of the text: "to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us", "the meaning the sacred writers really intended", and "what God wanted to manifest by means of their words".
Two factors prevent many biblical scholars from striving toward that goal. The first is that scholars will take a book as a literary unit and examine it on that basis alone without seeing the Old Testament and the New Testament as one interlinked work. The second factor, referred to at the start, is that scholars are so focused on their one-dimensional study of texts that any belief in the supernatural and a personal God that a student has understandably evaporates.
Leading scholar Bart Ehrman states in his book Misquoting Jesus that his belief in the Bible’s truthfulness weakened the more he studied it. In the end it was not the source of God's truth but “a very human book with all the marks of having come from human hands: Discrepancies, contradictions, errors, and different perspectives.”
He now describes himself as an "agnostic" after long service as a Christian. He says he could not reconcile a loving God with the suffering and evil in the world. That he lost his faith is not to be unexpected, given his attitude to the Bible, says pastor and writer Randy Alcorn:
Ehrman emphasizes that even after coming to believe that parts of the Bible were untrue, he kept his faith. He seems to want the reader to suppose that disbelieving Scripture did not contribute to his loss of faith. But how could it do otherwise? Once we call some parts of the Bible false, on what basis do we judge other parts true?
We all trust something. When we abandon trust in God’s revelation, we replace it with trust in our own feelings, opinions, and preferences, or those of our friends and teachers—all of which can drift with popular culture, including academic culture.
Ehrman’s story should challenge us to come to the problem of evil and suffering with a Christian worldview rooted in a well-informed belief in the reliability and authority of God’s Word. If we vacillate on that conviction, we will first reinterpret the Bible, then outright reject it.
In examining Ehrman's desertion of his Christian heritage and in reviewing his book on evil and suffering called God's Problem, Alcorn states:
Most of God’s Problem consists of Ehrman’s critical examination of Scripture. He writes, “Given... that God had chosen the people of Israel to be in a special relationship with him—what were ancient Israelite thinkers to suppose when things did not go as planned or expected?... How were they to explain the fact that the people of God suffered from famine, drought, and pestilence?”
Ehrman surveys answers to these questions, including human free will; God’s anger at disobedient people; suffering as being redemptive; evil and suffering existing so God can make good out of them; suffering as encouraging humility and undermining pride; suffering as testing faith; evil and suffering as the work of Satan, which Christ will overcome in his return; and suffering and evil as a mystery.
Oddly, he thinks that because the Bible’s answers vary, this makes them contradictory. The idea that they supplement one another doesn’t seem to occur to him.
While Ehrman finds it troubling that the Bible approaches the issue in different ways, I find it reassuring. No single reason gives a sufficient explanation, but different threads of biblical insight, woven together, form a durable fabric.
I find the book’s subtitle ironic: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer. The problem is not that the Bible fails to answer it; Ehrman himself documents that it offers multiple answers. He simply doesn’t believe them.
Ehrman states unproven premises reflecting his bias, then draws logical conclusions based on his faulty premises.
Ehrman summarizes, often accurately, the biblical teaching. Then he disagrees with it, usually citing no authority beyond his personal opinion. He seems to assume that any rational person would join him in rejecting Scripture’s claims. His faith in his own subjective understanding at times seems breathtaking. ...
Ehrman states, “If God tortures, maims and murders people just to see how they will react—to see if they will not blame him, when in fact he is to blame—then this does not seem to me to be a God worthy of worship.” But murder is unjustified killing. Where does the Bible speak of God torturing people or killing people without justification? Where does it speak of him doing such things “just to see how they will react”?
Ehrman identifies with only one biblical book, Ecclesiastes, in determining his worldview; yet he totally ignores that book’s God-related teachings.
Ehrman writes: I have to admit that at the end of the day, I do have a biblical view of suffering. As it turns out, it is the view put forth in the book of Ecclesiastes. ... A lot of bad things happen. But life also brings good things.... And so we should enjoy life to the fullest, as much as we can, as long as we can. That’s what the author of Ecclesiastes thinks, and I agree.
Yet, forty times Ecclesiastes directly speaks of the God that Ehrman says doesn’t exist. I will summarize what Ecclesiastes says about God, not only for the benefit of its teaching, but to demonstrate the inaccuracy of Ehrman’s claims that this book supports his worldview.
According to Ecclesiastes, God is in Heaven (5:2), he is Creator (12:1) and the Maker of all things (11:5), he gave life to human beings (8:15; 9:9), he bestowed our spiritual nature (3:21; 12:7) and set eternity in our hearts (3:11). God plans the timing of all things, appointing the times for birth, planting, healing, building, joy, searching, keeping, mending, speaking, loving, and enjoying peace (3:1–8). God is sovereign over death, hate, war, and every evil. God providentially controls the sun’s rising and setting, the movements of wind, the flowing of rivers, and the evaporation of water (1:5–7). God is the Shepherd (12:11) who seeks people to fear him and tests us to show us we’re finite (3:14, 18). He gives us opportunity to enjoy food and work (2:24; 3:13; 5:18–20; 9:7). He gives us wisdom, knowledge, and happiness (2:26), and wealth, possessions, and honor (5:19; 6:2).
God hears and despises (5:2). He can be pleased (2:26; 7:26) and angered (5:2–6). He is good (2:24–26; 3:13; 5:18–19; 6:2) and holy (5:1–2). Though he may delay punishment of the wicked, God will surely bring it (8:13).
Ecclesiastes says, “Be happy, young man, while you are young, and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see.” These apparently hedonistic words continue immediately with more sobering ones: “But know that for all these things God will bring you to judgment” (11:9).
Ecclesiastes affirms that despite the apparent emptiness of life as viewed without an eternal perspective, the only answer to the meaning of life is to fear and obey the Creator God, preferably before life’s greatest hardships fall (see 12:1–3).
So there's a case illustrating how a "naturalist" approach to the study of the Bible serves no one's interests. Naturalism as defined by Alvin Plantinga is "the thought that there is no such person as God, or anything like God. [It's a] worldview, a sort of total way of looking at ourselves and our world." [*]
Conflicts inevitably arise between Christian believers and scholars with a narrow "this world" viewpoint because those scholars make judgements based on only a partial evidence base, trying to isolate, for example, the historical Jesus from the biblical Jesus. However, Plantinga points out that "it doesn't follow that [the beliefs] are improbable from a Christian's complete evidence base". [*]
Whereas biblical scholarship had been a hallmark of the Church Fathers in the early Christian era, giving rise to the content of the beliefs (dogma) as the Tradition (capital "t") of the Church, modern exegetes have as their origin the Protestant eruption in Germany especially. Scholars joined in Luther's rejection of dogma and Tradition and embarked upon their own "scientific revolution" in exploring the Bible. They began to use nothing as a reference other than the texts themselves.
After a century of this revolutionary style of biblical study, along came the German Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) who, himself, "vastly enlarged the understanding of early Christianity" though it's interesting to note how Britannica summarises his work in such a limited way, as opposed to the grand project: "Insisting that the simple message of Jesus had been obscured by Church dogma, he defined the essence of Christianity as love of God and neighbour", something a farm boy of the day might have said.
The reason for this minimalist outcome was that he took as a key premise that "Christian faith and Greek philosophy were so closely intermingled that the resultant system included many beliefs and practices that were not authentically Christian" [See source].
By 1906, Albert Schweitzer, having compiled a history of the biblical research of the previous century, was compelled to write that the scientific search for Jesus had failed. He said: "We thought we really had him at last, and now he has passed by our age and gone back to being himself." [**]
But in the 20th Century, German Lutheran Rudolf Bultmann pushed on with radical "demythologisation", so that everything supernatural had to be removed from the Jesus of history. He believed this was necessary to evanglise "the modern world", especially the atheistic intellectual elite. Therefore, the redemption, resurrection, ascension and the Second Coming all had to be dispensed with. Christ became simply a prophet of "authentic existence", a stance which happened to be in accord with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Bultmann's colleague.
Bultmann's dismissal of Jesus' claims to divinity and all his supernatural "signs", to use John's term, that supported those claims meant his search for the historical Jesus failed: "I do indeed think that we can know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, and are moreover fragmentary and often legendary..." [**]
Such conclusions were challenged even by Martin Dibelius, Bultmann's colleague in the foundation of form criticism:
It must be said quite emphatically that Bultmann's skepticism in all questions of historicity is not necessarily connected with form-critical criteria but with his conception of the nature of the primitive Christian community as well as his emphasis upon the difference between Palestinian and Hellenistic Christianity. [**]
The fault in Bultmann's work, and in all form criticism projects of the naturalistic kind, is the ideology of the scholar imposed upon the work of gospel writers. Not longer would it be accepted that the evangelists wrote works whose immediate audience were certain communities of believers, but who also had in mind the commission to spread to the ends of the earth the knowledge of God's action in the world through His divine son.
Oxford University scholar Eric Eve offers insight into the pitfall that many academics fall into:
He [Bultmann] seemed to know in advance that the historical Jesus was an eschatalogical prophet who issued a radical call to repentance, so that material that reflected such a radical immanent eschatology was most likely to be authentic: his method thus delivered the historical Jesus he expected to find.[***]
Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth was another who ask "Why bother?" when talking about studying the New Testament in particular, if the scholar simply applies a matrix on the work for the sake of a desired interpretation:
How can we decide even before we have read the text what it acutally says, and what is only temporary imagery? And what happens if we use this alien criterion as an infallible instrument rather than as a provisional clue? Is not Bultmann's very concept of myth, the infallible criterion which dominates his hermeneutics, quite alien to the New Testament? Whether or not it is the contemporary fashion, as Bultman claims it is, the question is how it can be used to decide what belongs to the substance of the New Testament and what is merely outward imagery? [**]
So we can take it that form criticism is a useful tool, as I have stated above, that scholars' presuppositions are natural and constructive as a "provisional clue", and that it is legitimate to use scientific methods to understand Christian scriptures to understand God's word better. However, scholars should display their skill by handling the material in a balanced manner:
Therefore, to understand the biblical truth in a truly comprehensive manner we must take the Bible for what it really is: the word of God in human language [italics in original]. The reader or hearer who ignores the human conditions of God's word remains on the outside of scripture by introducting arbitrary interpretations; the reader or hearer who does not recognise in the words of scripture the word of God also remains on the outer surface of the sacred book.[****]
I want to end this study of why Christians can be led astray when they follow some biblical scholars down the path of their unbalanced exegesis. The malpractice in the field starts with the often unstated exclusion of the supernatural, and concludes with the view that little of historical value can be derived from the text so whatever that Church tradition has upheld must be at least suspect.
First a word about the meaning of "myth", one of the literary genres used in the Bible. Myths are stories that have both fictional and nonfictional aspects. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is often used as an example: The story is false but it conveys several truths, such as "the importance of friendship, loyalty, trust, and continuing with a hopeless task because it is the right thing to do". [*****] To see the purpose of the tale otherwise would amount to a perverse interpretation. Let's use a case study:
"Consider the myth of the Fall in Genesis 3:1-24. Adam and Eve had been told not to eat of the fruit of a certain treee in the garden of Eden. Eve was tempted by the serpent, deceived by it, ate some of the fruit, and Adam joined her for a bite. Perverse interpretations of this myth would be that this particular God wanted people to be stupid (that is, not acquire knowledge), or that the Bible teaches that God - being jealous - has an inferiority complex, or that women are the cause of everything that is wrong with the world, and so on.
"I consider these examples perverse interpretations because they are not based on an effort to discover what the author was trying to communicate. It may be that the author was anti-intellectual, narrow in his understanding of God, and a misogynist, but I do not think he was trying to communicate those aspects of his personality in telling us the myth. I think he was trying to say something about finding one's place in the universe and about recognising that the world could have been paradise if human beings had not tried to make themselves gods." [*****]
In conclusion, it is heartbreaking to see the loss of faith among those who have undertaken biblical studies as part of their higher education. I think the right word for this circumstance is "malpractice". This is being perpetrated on young people who are in no condition to defend traditional beliefs, whereas the academics reap rewards of professorial status and the mutual admiration among colleagues in the field who "toe the line", as Ehrman phrased it. Scholars in this field need to remove their mental filters so that biblical exegesis can enter a new era of respect for the truth that God is communicating to us.
[*] Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism, 2011, Oxford University Press.
[**] Quoted in Faith Comes From What Is Heard: An Introduction to Fundamental Theology, 2016, Lawrence Feingold, Emmaus Academic.
[***] Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition, 2014, Fortress Press.
[****] Armando J Levoratti How to Interpret the Bible, in The International Biblical Commentary, 1998, ed William R Farmer, Liturgical Press.
[*****] Michael D McGehee, God's Word Expressed in Human Words, 1991, Liturgical Press.
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