Evangelicals’ date with history

The reception of Scripture involves many stages of faith seeking understanding. This reception includes critical reasoning in the process of doing exposition, theological formulation, and, above all, worshipful reflection. Faith and critical reasoning are held together through a hermeneutical model that is bi-focal, that is at once “from above” and “from below”. This model hearkens to Jesus’ conversation with Nichodemus early in the Gospel of John (3:1-15; cf., 8:23). Jesus speaks of the knowledge of God as “from above” and as “from below”. Paul can also say that he is speaking of revelation “according to the flesh” and “according to the Spirit” (Ro 1:3-4; cf.; 9:5; 4:1). Paul makes a related Christological distinction of titles: “Son of Man” (the historical Jesus) and “Son of God” (the Christ of faith). Jesus alone embodies both realities (above and below) in one person (Jo 3:13) since he is the Word of God incarnate. The hermeneutic “from above” and “from below” is not dualist, but an attempt to account for the demands of historicity and divine action. What is the meaning of the historicity of the gospels for Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah? What does the revelation by the Spirit in the same Gospels provide for Jesus Christ as Lord?

We can also speak of the inspiration of scripture “from above” and “from below”. Historically and theologically, we refer to “the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith”. We also may speak of “the scripture of history and the Bible of faith” – same book, but read according to this bi-focal perspective. The Spirit is the sole source of the Bible’s inspiration but understanding it requires both historical awareness and faith in the revelation.  This truth of scripture is a miracle claim that the history of the text begins with special revelation and inspiration producing a scripture which providentially conveys its unique truth in the world and to the church. This is what makes the Bible “the Word of God”. Although Jesus Christ is the unique incarnation of the Word of God and the measure of all scripture, scripture is the one book which conveys this truth within the flow of ancient events out of which it came to be written and transmitted to us.

Sola scriptura is that distinctively evangelical principle connoting two measurements: one long and short.  The short, is because the extensive Christian tradition is not equal in authority to the prophets and the apostles. The long, is because scripture establishes itself the sole text with divine authority. Scripture’s measure of tradition is itself, all else, the traditions of the particular churches, however vast they may be. When posed this way, one can see the fissure between Reformed and Roman since the former could not lay claim to divine institution as the latter does. Christ is indeed present to the world through the church but there is a challenge of historical consciousness. But scripture is not entirely dependent upon the traditions to be understood. We would claim that the text of the Bible is perspicacious, that is, sufficiently clear to any literate person as to its basic message of salvation. The perspicacity of scripture came to be understood by the Reformation as exposing a duality of correspondent meaning: the inspired external word of the scripture (written, read, proclaimed) becomes the internal word of the gospel in the fullest sense (the same Spirit illumining a person’s heart and mind for trust in this Word). This is essentially what Calvin meant by “the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit”. In the Christian traditions, early on the question of the internalized scripture (its message embraced by faith) was contrasted by the external word of the printed page. Inherited from ancient Greek hermeneutics, there was an “inner word” (λόγος ἐνδιάθετος) and “external“ (προφοροκός) one that by the Reformation would become a common place notion in its understanding of sola scriptura.

The historical critical method, whether applied to scripture or any other text for that matter, is said to arise from modern historical consciousness. Descriptions of historical consciousness include a public awareness that everything human beings know and experience is part of a continuum of events that are contingent to time and place. These include all artifacts of history, and therefore also the scriptures. A famous early instance of the salutary use of historical criticism is the exposé by the Renaissance scholar, Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1407-1457) of the Donation of Constantine as a monumental forgery. For many, the method became attached unnecessarily to a materialist cosmology that nothing happens in history other than physically determined events. No matter that some have offered persuasive philosophical arguments for the possibility of miracles – history does not allow for any! But arguments for the possibility of miracles do not an actual miracle demonstrate. Any reasonable consideration of miraculous events first acknowledge that they are utterly unique, unrepeatable and therefore not accessible or compliant to every day rules of evidence.

For the miraculous, including scripture, historical critical method has been seen to relegate scripture to the category of “myth” or the only slightly better, “saga”. There may be a great deal of material in scripture that would be recognized as “ancient history” but scripture is far more than that. It is, however, not other than ancient and that is where we need to be historically conscious. This is not easy since being revelation and the very grammar of Christian worship, the text is never reducible to history. The measures of scripture lead its readers to heed its message, nothing less, but also nothing more. It does this sufficiently. It may do so always with tradition in some way present, but it still does so sufficiently by not claiming that any particular tradition is itself infallible.

I titled an article once:  “Blessed rage for a supernatural Text” – asking about both the supernatural in origin of scripture as well as its supernaturality at all times and places? Like “inerrancy” the term “supernatural” has been used to express the revelatory sense of scriptural authority – along with others: reliability, veracity, The God who created and sustains the world by his almighty Word has imparted that same Word through the texts of the prophets and the apostles. The divine authorship entailed in the claim of inspiration is nothing other thatn a supernatural claim. Warfield argued along these lines. If God is infallible so is his Word, including its inscripturated form. But what about scripture’s canonization, transmission and translation? Some kind of very special providence must be superintending scripture at all times and places so that its essential message can be received and internalized. But what is the instrument that maintains this within the world? If one were to think of the creation as very much like (homoiosis) God, with all the divine perfections mirrored in creation, the uncorrupted original according to the imago Dei. This is how the patristic theologians saw homoiosis as the original human condition before the fall. If one accords supernaturality to the scripture, God’s truthfulness is seen to be secured by his sovereignty over the revelatory medium  so that it possesses, in some sense, the perfections of his co-eternal Word. The problem of course is at least found at the point of the human fall and its noetic effects. The human being requires supernatural aid to achieve uptake of a supernatural text. Many medievals believed, together with Aquinas, that when human beings truly know something, it is due to their participation in the Logos, the divine rationality that is ever knowable by the human. Knowledge, actual knowledge, was infallible by definition. And since knowledge was like beholding reality in a mirror, the image, if perceived with utter clarity, impressed itself as a perfection and indeed perfectly so in the receptacle of the mind. This is often forgotten even among theologians –  since we are so epistemologically distant from their world. Today, very few would espouse an account of knowledge as such.

The attribution of infallibility or inerrancy to the scriptures in their original autographs has particular consequences. It says nothing about canonization, transmission and translation, let alone exposition. Nevertheless, it is overwhelmingly the majority view of Catholic, Orthodox and Evangelical traditions. Inerrancy of scripture is promulgated in documents of Vatican II. Indeed, one aspect of claiming ecclesial infallibility in Orthodox and Catholic traditions is the securing of the infallibility of scripture continuously through time into the present moment and beyond.

The history of modern biblical studies is one where Christian scholars have been attempting to demonstrate that historical consciousness is not antithetical to doxological consciousness. The thoughtful human being can be both historically and believingly oriented to reality. Various hermeneutical strategies of reading have been developed to express this. Some of them borrow heavily from anthropological or literary perspectives on myth. Although the two perspectives are rarely combined, the common approach is the mythic narration of reality. Allegorical, but sometimes not, as in the case of typological interpretation. These are ways of appropriating the mythical text, seeking a metaphysics of the text. I would say, somewhat abruptly, that perhaps the long term effect that C.S. Lewis has had on contemporary reading of the Bible, particularly the gospels, with his “mythopoeic” hermeneutic, is to provide a way “inspired” myth, through the back door. We should really take our cue from Barth on this: “myth” is not viable category for Christian theology.

What it precisely means is another question. When it came to something of a crisis in the 1970’s, Fuller Seminary was viewed as having failed the community by permitting the historical critical method to be practiced by its scholars according to a hermeneutic of faithfulness. The hyper-sensitivity of those theologians who still remembered the Fundamentalist / Modernist controversies which split the denominations along lines, not pertaining to slavery (as they had half a century earlier) but now over the supernatural origins of the Bible. Profound fixation was exhibited over technicalities inherent in German terms: “historie” (straightforward narratives of historical fact) and “geschichte” (the interpretations of this facts by religion and culture) which contained as more meta-history than what modern historians were supposedly doing by achieving von Ranke had declared must be the standard reporting of “as it actually happened”. But what does it mean to claim a supernatural exception to history that otherwise displays only tell tale signs of the supernatural? And what does it mean, after all, to affirm the supernatural?

As understood by the three great traditions, it was by divine supervenience, the authors of scripture had accomplished two things: 1) preserved from error in all that scripture affirmed and 2) transmitting a fully reliable account of all that “actually happened” in its many narratives. And by divine providence, scripture is sufficiently preserved through canonization and epistemological faithfulness according to the divine purpose for history itself.  At least one could by the completion of epistemic functioning through the call to faith by revelation and become something more than the camp song: “God said, I believe it and that’s good enough for me!” (But a more ironical quip would be, inerrant, infallible and unread – biblical illiteracy is a whole other problem!)

The historical critical method itself can be subjected to its own critique of how neutral it might be about revelation claims. Since the Enlightenment, although methodology merely required historians to demur about divine knowledge claims: there is no evidence either for or against them, inspiration and authority of scripture on all matters to which it speaks its truth, sets a very tall order indeed. The dominant tendency has been historiographically therefore not only to remain agnostic about revelation, but to subject “revelatory content” to every manner of scrutiny.

We think there was a time when church / state authorities, like the Inquisition, could immunize scripture from critical scrutiny. As the work of Reventlow shows, much of the groundwork for historical criticism began in the Middle Ages, among the copyists and commentarists themselves. When empirically based scientific methods took hold in the 17^th century, Christian apologists attempted to maintain the epistemological superiority of scripture over all knowledge while hoping to substantiate it message on the basis of science itself. As Michael Buckley, in his great study of modern atheism has shown, overblown claims by apologists created a whole new kind of skepticism.

There is in the American evangelical environment a strong tendency to discredit science in favor of the Bible – as if this were necessary. Although many orthodox evangelical theologians of the 19^th were not perturbed by the implications of evolutionary science vis-à-vis the Bible, profound anti-evolutionary sentiment sprang up in the first quarter of the 20^th century. Immense segments of the population believe in young earth creationism. By the end of the 20^th century young earth narratives of geological and cosmological history could no longer be squared with scientific ones. Beyond this, both Jewish and Christian interpreters were faced with pressing arguments that basically all the narratives of the Bible prior to late exilic Judaism are tribal – nationalistic fabrications. What is the truth of the Tanakh (the Hebrew canon) if only a scant few passages are historically true? If this is what scientific history is going to supply “biblical historians” many see nothing helpful there. Many would have liked to see the Bible reign supreme over all human sciences and just saying that the ancient text must not be expected to speak with scientific precision, this touches very deeply the attendant problem of biblical authority and what it could mean.

Certainly, no one can provide an immunized Bible with regard to critical inquiry. The only alternative is something like medieval morality codes enforced by religious orders or church appointed morality police. There is a continuing battle within the Muslim faith as to the application of Sharia, and how strictly behaviour is to be prescribed.  Where everything is designed to secure the protection of the Qur’an and in many respects causing the loss of respect for it among its elites.