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Two Reasons We Evangelicals Dislike Historical Criticism

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Let’s talk about why the modern study of Scripture makes us evangelicals twitchy.  Modern study of Scripture (particularly, historical criticism of the Bible) makes us anxious because it treads dangerously near the toes of:

  1.  Our doctrine of Scripture
  2. The doctrines we derive from Scripture

Issue #1 has gotten the most air time in the debate, for obvious reasons. But I rather suspect that we wouldn’t be nearly so uncomfortable about issue #1 were it not for issue #2; that is to say, I’d wager that we wouldn’t be so divided over the way the historical criticism requires us to nuance our description of the truthfulness of Scripture if we didn’t also derive the rest of our doctrines from Scripture.

We sense that tweaking the way we understand the truthfulness of Scripture might jumble our construals of the doctrines rooted in Scripture. Perhaps more pointedly, we’re afraid that historical criticism will tell us that the Bible is untrue and that, as a consequence, we’ll have to conclude that our theology is false too. We worry that the floor could fall out from under our belief and that makes our stomachs turn.  All this anxiety is totally understandable and it’s rooted in an earnest and pious fidelity to teachings of the Church and the revelation of God. 

 

The thing is, however, I’m not sure that doctrine “on the other side of” historical criticism will be much different than it has been for centuries. Of course, it’s hard to say for sure, since we evangelicals haven’t queried the theological ramifications of historical criticism very incisively. We know that some historical-critical scholars have made suggestions would gum up non-negotiable doctrines, but we’re genereally not sufficiently well-versed in historical criticism to respond to those scholars on historical-critical grounds. Consequently, we’ve tried to do an end-run around historical-critical modes of debate by saying that the historical-critical discipline is incompatible with our doctrine of Scripture (issue #1, above) and that it leads to all manner of heresies (issue #2).

 

So let’s talk about these issues.

 

First, the truthfulness of Scripture: in popular discourse, we tend to describe Scripture as authoritative, true, and without error.  In broad-strokes, I’m happy with that. But we all know that there’s a fair bit involved in figuring out what Scripture is saying in order to affirm that message as true. 

At a basic level, we’re accustomed to this process. We know that you have to read the biblical texts in their literary contexts, to define words based on their ancient meanings, to understand biblical utterances in their cultural milieux, to define the intention of a text in accordance with its ancient genre, etc.  In short, as a rule we let ancient culture and literature modify our expectations of what the Bible is and how God uses it to reveal himself.

The problems arise for us when some biblical texts appear to do things that are both typical of ancient literature and potentially problematic for our doctrine.  We don’t mind seeing things like vaticinium ex eventu (“prophecy after the fact”), non-scientific depictions of primeval history, and pseudepigraphic authorship in lots of pieces of ancient literature, as long as those things don’t appear in our ancient literature.

It’s understandable that we would balk when certain features of ancient literature run up against some of our presuppositions of what the Bible is. Nobody likes adjusting their presuppositions, even if an inductive study of Scripture suggests that we should do so. But I wonder if we’d be relatively more amenable to adjusting our presuppositions about the nature of the Bible if we didn’t also have to worry about the impact such adjustment would have on the rest of our theology.

 

This brings us to issue #2: the impact of historical criticism on other doctrines, which we derive from Scripture. Now, as an evangelical I am committed to the belief that Scripture is the foundation of our theology. Still, we also need to bear in mind (what will be obvious to most evangelical theologians) that that there is more involved in deriving our doctrine from Scripture than simply highlighting a biblical text/theme and then applying a fancy Greek or Latin title to it. Systematic theology is rather more complicated than that.

Consider the doctrine of the Trinity: you won’t find the language of God being “one divine essence in three hypostases” in the New Testament; it took the Church a lot of reasoning and synthesis and exegetical debate to get there, and I think that we’re better off for it. Similarly, over the centuries Christians have developed sacramental theologies; we’re big on, e.g., baptism and communion. But we don’t do baptism for the dead, even though Paul mentions it (1 Cor 15.29). Why not? Because the mere presence of an idea in Scripture doesn’t constitute sufficient grounds for including that idea in a contemporary doctrine. The formation of Christian theology entails lots of considerations, especially the applications of Christian tradition, human reason, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. 

This should be old-hat to any evangelical theologian. Still, this general awareness notwithstanding, evangelicals have offered very few trenchant evaluations of how historical-critical views impact our doctrines. I worry that we tend to be more arm-waving than adroit in our analysis. It seems like we’re afraid that, if historical criticism pokes at our favorite doctrinal proof-text, then our whole theological system will come tumbling down. And to my mind, this indicates that we evangelicals are performing well-below our potential.

I’m not saying that we should do historical criticism just so that the cool kids at SBL will let us sit at their tables. (They already do!) I am saying that historical criticism raises questions that demand more attention than we’ve hitherto given. It may be that historical criticism will prove a bull in our dogmatic china-shop, that we’ve got to lock it out because it cannot but shatter our theology. But we don’t know that to be the case yet, because our best and brightest have not engaged historical criticism with the same vigor that they’ve applied to exegesis, linguistics, and doctrine.

 

In short, historical criticism does impact our view of Scripture (issue #1), but not in ways for which we lack analogies. I think most of us would be happy to tweak our doctrine of Scripture to accommodate historical criticism if only we were certain that historical criticism wouldn’t eviscerate the other doctrines we derive from Scripture (issue #2). (In the spirit of making this case, I got together with a bunch of my buddies and wrote a new book called Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism).

This is not to imply that historical criticism is toothless. Historical criticism does impinge upon our understandings of biblical texts that are important for our theology.  That means we should explore the issue soberly, asking how exactly historical criticism might influence our doctrines and evaluating whether historical criticism proves disastrous for the faith. By and large, we evangelicals haven’t done that. We’ve tended to be stand-off-ish and sometimes bellicose. I think that we can do a lot better than this. I think we’re braver and more prudent and more patient than our public image sometimes reflects. And even if we’re not, I believe the Holy Spirit can make us so.

Historical Criticism and Evangelicalism: An Uneasy Relationship

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Modern biblical scholarship—also referred to as historical criticism, and less often today “higher criticism”—has an uneasy history with evangelicalism. In fact, evangelicalism’s intellectual component is largely a sustained response to the methods, philosophy, and conclusions of historical criticism. In some cases that response has come in the form of the rejection of historical criticism, in other cases a synthesis or adaptation of its methods and conclusions with evangelical theology.

The tensions are rooted, I feel, in the core commitment of the evangelical movement to the authority of Scripture. Since Scripture is divine revelation, i.e., God’s self-disclosure, its “authority” is tied explicitly to inerrancy and a number of corollaries such as historical accuracy and the essential theological harmony of Scripture.

Scripture’s function in evangelicalism is to lay down the basic map of Christian thought and practice, what we are to understand about God, Christ, Scripture itself, the human condition, and Christian practice. The task of historical criticism, on the other hand, is to peer “behind” Scripture and inquire as to its origins and meaning as understood within the cultural context in which the various texts were written. These two diverse approaches to Scripture are not easily compatible.

In principle, evangelicalism is not inimical to historical inquiry. In fact, one of evangelicalism’s hermeneutical pillars is the interpretation of Scripture in its historical context and in line with its original, intended, meaning—what is typically referred to as “grammatical-historical interpretation.”

The tensions with historical criticism are not over the mere idea of investigating Scripture in the context, but in manner in which historical critics get there and the conclusions that they reach. In both respects, historical criticism has tended to undermine evangelical premises of biblical authority.

What complicates matters considerably for evangelicals, however, is that the general contours of historical criticism are widely persuasive, even universally so outside of evangelical (and fundamentalist) communities. I see four general, interrelated, aspects of historical criticism that are well established in biblical scholarship and also, in various ways, at odds with mainstream evangelicalism’s understanding of the nature of Scripture.

1. Biblical origins. The Old Testament we know today has a lengthy developmental history, both oral and written. The drawing together of these traditions that did not commence in earnest until the Babylonian exile (6th c. BC) and did not come to an end until sometime during the Persian period (roughly 5th and 4th centuries BC) at the earliest. This does not mean that the Hebrew Bible was written out of while cloth during this period. Some books or portions of books clearly were, but many others were added to or updated in some way.

Issues surrounding the formation of the New Testament are similar, but involve a much shorter period of time.

2. Perspectives of the biblical writers. When speaking of their past, the Old Testament writers were not working as modern historians or investigative journalists to uncover verifiable facts (as we might put it). They were more storytellers, conduits for generations—even centuries—of tradition, which they brought together to form their sacred text. In the Old Testament we have Israel’s national-religious story as seen through the eyes of those responsible for giving it its final shape.

This is not to say that they invented these traditions on the spot, but they “packaged” their past as they did to address their present crisis—exile, return, and an uncertain future. Israel’s inscripturated story both accounts for this crisis and also points the way forward to the hope that God has not abandoned his people but has a glorious future in store for them.

A similar issue holds for the New Testament, where the Gospels reflect the experiences and thinking of various Christian communities a generation and more after Jesus’ ministry on earth. They, too, are presentations of Jesus and the early missionary activities that reflect the perspectives and needs to the respective communities.

3. Theological diversity. Given historical criticism’s focus on matters of biblical origin, the diversity of the various biblical texts is highlighted with no pressing concern, as we see in evangelicalism, to draw these diverse texts into a harmonious whole. Hence, historical criticism speaks freely of the different theologies contained in Scripture.

One practical implication is that the evangelical hermeneutical methodology of allowing “Scripture to interpret Scripture” tends to fall on deaf ears among historical critics. Reading Genesis, for example, through the eyes of Isaiah or Paul in order to understand the meaning of Genesis would be like reading Shakespeare through the eyes of Arthur Miller and expecting to gain from it an insight into what Shakespeare meant.

4. The problem of historicity. This last aspect of historical criticism in effect summarizes the previous three: the Bible does not tell us what happened so much as what the biblical writers either believed happened or what they invented. This is not to say that historical critics think nothing of historical importance can be found in Scripture, but that any historical information is inextricably bound up with the perspectives and purposes of the biblical writers. 

There are other ways of outlining the nature of historical criticism, of course, but this will do to highlight why tensions exist between historical criticism and evangelicalism. The former presents us with a Bible that the latter is loathe to accept in toto because of its significant theological ramifications.

Yet, most evangelical biblical scholars understand the persuasiveness and positive impact that at least some aspects of historical criticism have had on our understanding of Scripture. One need only glance at a decent evangelical Study Bible or commentary to see that impact. 

The tensions between evangelicalism and historical criticism have not been settled, nor will they be in the near future, at least as I see it. There seems to be an implicit détente, where it is acceptable to mine historical criticism and appropriate its theologically less troubling conclusions but to draw the line where those conclusions threaten evangelical theology.

This sort of back and forth dance can ease tensions temporarily, but it virtually guarantees that each generation of thoughtful evangelicals, once they become sympathetically exposed to historical criticism, will question where lines should be drawn and why seemingly arbitrary lines have been drawn where they are.

The fact that these inner-evangelical tensions keep coming up anew each generation after suggests that older solutions to these tensions are not persuasive but more a temporary stopgap measure to maintain evangelical theological stability. A possible way forward is to promote an explicit synthesis between evangelical theology and historical criticism in order to achieve, potentially, amore more lasting peace. The difficulty here, however, is that such synthesis might threaten the very structure of evangelicalism to the breaking point.

I am an advocate for such a synthetic discussion, though I would also stress that historical criticism is not the end all of biblical interpretation for the spiritual nourishment of the church. But where historical matters are the focus, historical criticism is a non-negotiable conversation partner.

As I see it, the pressing issue before evangelicalism is not to formulate longer, more complex, more subtle, and more sophisticated defenses of what we feel God should have done, but to teach future generations, in the academy, the church, and the world, better ways of meeting God in the Scripture we have.