Category Archives: Biblical Criticism

The Wicked Bible

The chapters Keen devotes to defending the three interpretive principles aim at achieving objective (1), that is, creating doubts about the traditional interpretation of the anti-gay texts. The chapters that narrate the three experiential facts aim at shifting the burden of proof from the traditional interpretation to the affirming interpretation. Apart from the developments I explored in parts one through seven in this series—Galileo, Locke, and biblical criticism—Keen’s arguments make no sense at all. I can’t imagine anyone even thinking of them.

Such interpreters as Keen read the Bible’s “shalt not” as “it depends.” The Holy Bible becomes The Wicked Bible without changing a word.

A Clarification on the Historical Method of Bible Study

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Some readers of my recent essays on modern historical criticism may have come away thinking that I am against studying the Bible within its ancient historical context. I want to make it clear that I do not reject a historical approach to the Bible. In this brief note I want to clarify my views on this subject.

A Distinction

I make a huge distinction between (1) studying the Bible with the church of the past and present, as the accepted authority for the doctrine and life of the church, with the intention of remaining faithful to the original teaching of Jesus and his apostles and (2) studying the Bible as a historical document on par with other books, outside the church (usually in the university), and with no intention of conforming one’s mind to Jesus’s and his apostles’ teaching.

Historical Study Under Authority

It is appropriate for biblical scholars studying the Bible in way (1) to use every bit of historical and linguistic knowledge they can gain to help the church understand the canonical texts of the Bible. Such scholars seek to serve the church by helping it remain faithful to Jesus and the apostles instead of reading current culture, thought and idiosyncratic fancies into the words of the Bible. The goal is to let the texts speak again as they spoke to their original audiences. It is to respect the authority of the scriptures in the form in which the church received them. This way of studying the Bible is a theological discipline and is of relevance to the church.

Historical Study that Rejects Authority

Biblical scholars who pursue way (2) reject the authority of Scripture for Jesus’s and the apostles’ teaching and may also reject Jesus’s and the apostles’ authority itself. The picture of events portrayed in the canonical texts, they argue, must not be accepted at face value but must be interrogated. The scholar’s aim is not so much to let the texts speak as to search for a history behind or underneath or obscured by the text. Often, the purely academic scholar seeks for human origins for the ideas stated in the texts or the history of the literary composition of the texts. This form of Bible study is a humanistic discipline like others pursued in the secular university.

A Distinction Blurred

I do not deny the possibility of reading the biblical documents as of purely human origin and of humanistic interest only. All one has to do is apply the methods of humanistic study to the Bible apart from faith and submission to its authority or any interest in hearing the word of God in the Bible. One can try all sorts of hypotheses just to see how one can make them fit the data. With the right presuppositions and a vivid imagination one can “find” a purely human Jesus, a gnostic redeemer, an apocalyptic fanatic, or a violent revolutionary. One can find multiple versions of “lost Christianity” and pursue an endless variety of conspiracy theories. The humanistic approach can be quite interesting. In my graduate studies I took many courses that read the Bible in this way. Let them spin out their theories! But they have nothing to say to the church. The church wants to hear the word of God.

However, what concerns me is the influence of the humanistic approach on some biblical scholars in Christian colleges, universities and seminaries. These professors are trained in the humanistic approach to the Bible dominant in secular universities and many of them do not get clear on the difference between the reason the church studies the Bible and the reason humanistic scholars study the Bible. Hence, they fuse the legitimate historical study of the Bible as in way (1) described above with way (2). Apparently, they think that they are obligated to pursue the humanistic study (2) and teach its results to their students because they think it is the only way to apply the historical method to the Bible in a responsible way. And they think they are serving the church and strengthening the faith of their students by doing so. They are mistaken.

For the two ways are incompatible. They begin with different presuppositions and aim at different goals. They overlap in some of the data they study and the skills they employ, and these commonalities are often mistaken for overall compatibility. But that is like saying that robbing banks is compatible with the work of a police officer because the two activities make use of some of the same skills and tools!

The Devil is Always in the Details (of the Method)

The Principles of Historical Criticism Examined

In the previous essay, I listed four general principles of the historical critical method of Bible study. Biblical scholars derived them from the new empirical/mechanical science and the rationalistic enlightenment inspired by this revolution. The pioneers of the enlightenment—Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and Locke—appealed to the stunning advances made possible by the new empirical method as setting a new paradigm for progress in all areas of knowledge. We must, they contended, reject tradition, faith, authority, and common sense, as reliable ways of attaining knowledge and rely instead on our own examination of truth and fact claims. Applying enlightenment principles to the Bible demands that (1) we treat the Bible just as we treat other books, (2) in our biblical studies we rid ourselves of all dogmatic presuppositions, such as those about divine inspiration or the authority of the creeds, (3) we interpret the biblical texts within their ancient cultural, religious, and literary horizons, (4) we must not take fact or truth claims within the biblical texts at face value but must examine them and accept them only to the extent that they are supported by historical evidence.

I titled my previous essay (#5) “How Experts Stole the Bible.” These four principles justify my choosing such a dramatic title. Taken separately or together they wrest the Bible from the arms of the church and place it in the hands of individuals to be used as a quarry from which to gather materials to build their private philosophies or religions. The secular university declares itself the true interpreter of the Bible and the moral conscience of the culture—in direct and self-conscious opposition to the church. Let’s examine each principle separately.

1. Read the Bible Just Like Other Books*

There is, of course, some truth and common sense in this principle. The Bible is written in ordinary human languages with grammatical and syntactical and semantic features that characterize all literature. Its ideas are connected by logical relations and its narratives flow in ways common to literature of its type. The church has rarely disputed this. But the church has never understood the Bible to be in all ways just like other books! It is Holy Scripture! In the early centuries, martyrs surrendered their lives rather than turn over the Scriptures to the pagan authorities. In the Bible, the church hears the word of God speaking through the prophets and incarnate in Jesus Christ. The church gathered and preserved these writings because they contained the apostolic witness to the Word of God, which according to John, “we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). The church never has, does not at present, should not, and never will read the Bible just like other books! And any institution that does so cannot be the church.

2. Responsible Bible Students Must Rid Themselves of All Faith Presuppositions

The second principle of modern biblical criticism also possesses superficial plausibility, which evaporates when examined. The church looks to the Scriptures as its canon (its rule or normative standard). Of course, the church should always be open to deepening and sharpening its faith by its continual reading of Scripture. But the early church received the apostolic writings as authoritative already having an understanding of the faith received from the apostles, memorized and stated concisely in what they called “the rule of faith.”** The church has been reading the Scriptures for over 1900 years. And it keeps on hearing its “rule of faith” confirmed by every reading. The church does not read Scripture as if it had never read it before. It reads it as a community that reaches back in time, not as isolated individuals. Each generation is taught how to read Scripture and what to expect from that reading. Reading the Scriptures without presuppositions is not only impossible; it is also self-deceptive.

3. Interpret the Bible within its Ancient Cultural, Religious, and Literary Horizons.

The third principle, too, contains much truth and much danger. In general, modern people are more aware of the historical distance between the ancient world and contemporary culture than were those, for example, living in the Middle Ages. This awareness can help us hear in those ancient texts what their first readers heard and avoid reading modern ideas and customs back into those ancient texts. It can also warn us not to take the changing customs of dress and diet as binding for all times. However, there is a tendency in modern thought toward what is called “historicism,” which is the belief that we must interpret ancient texts as locked within the ideological limits of their day. Applied to the Bible, critics account for the origin of all its ideas by borrowings from the cultural, religious, and philosophical systems contemporary with it. Historicism excludes miracles, divine revelation, inspiration, and universally applicable moral and religious truth. On historicist principles Jesus must have believed in demon possession, the coming kingdom of God, the resurrection of the dead, etc., because these were the common religious beliefs of his day.

4. Never Take the Biblical Texts at Face Value

More than the others, this principle embodies the enlightenment demand that would-be rational thinkers think for themselves and examine every proposed belief, weighing its credibility in terms of the evidence that supports it. Whereas the early church received the scriptures as a precious legacy and passes them on to each new generation to be read in faith with a view to obedience, modern biblical critics assert the right—indeed the obligation— to question the early church’s judgment at every point and relitigate every sentence. And yet, the process by which the earliest church received and passed on its knowledge of Jesus and the apostolic witness is largely lost to us, except what we have in the canonical New Testament. The process cannot be recovered. But the church of the 1^st through the 4^th centuries assures us that the end result of the process—the New Testament—is true to Jesus and the apostolic witness. Either we trust it or we don’t.

But modern historians claim to have developed criteria by which to reexamine every detail of the New Testament and judge its historical veracity. They speak with such confidence about “what really happened” you wonder whether they may have mastered the science of time travel! However, the more you read historical critical reconstructions of New Testament history, the more you realize that it’s all speculation and guesswork based on modern notions of what is psychologically plausible, metaphysically possible, and morally and politically desirable. Moreover, scholars reach wildly different conclusions even when they use the same methods. Apart from respect for the canonical texts as they are written, there are no objective standards for interpretation.

*You might be interested in a recent article by James A. Thompson, “Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Higher Critic,” 67. #4 (2025). Restoration Quarterly. Thompson addresses the first principle: read the Bible like any other book.

**See the excellent study by the renowned church historian Everett Ferguson: The Rule of Faith: A Guide (Cascade, 2015).

Next Time: We will see how progressive Christian interpreters use the historical critical method to find justification in the New Testament for acceptance of LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living.

How Experts Stole the Bible

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This is the fifth in our series of essays examining how the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 19), came to be taken seriously by millions of otherwise intelligent people. In this essay we will continue our discussion of biblical authority in hope of discovering how some Christian people could come to think that the church should affirm the whole range of LGBTQ+ identities and behaviors even though the plain sense of the biblical text and the unanimous tradition of the church forbid it.

Faith and Authority

In the previous essay I argued that the most basic reason that the earliest church received the Bible as the authority for its faith and life is that it contains the teaching and deeds of Jesus and the witness and teaching of his chosen apostles. Jesus and his apostles were authorities in the sense that you either believe them and follow them or not. This decision marked the distinction between becoming a Christian and a church member or remaining a nonbeliever and outsider. Late in the first century or early in the second, in the absence of the voices of living apostles, the written and unwritten words of Jesus and the apostles, treasured and passed on by the church, called for the same decision.

Note well that the decision to believe the Gospel was (and is) simultaneously the decision to accept the authority of Jesus and his apostles for all things pertaining to the new faith and life. Moreover, the authority of Jesus’s words and deeds and that of the teaching of the apostles was extended to those writings that the church believed preserved and passed on that teaching, the New Testament canon. That is to say, the church not only accepted the words of Jesus and the apostles as authoritative but it accepted the New Testament as the authority for the location of that inspired teaching.

As I pointed out in the previous essay, by the early part of the second century, the church had for some time been quoting the Four Gospels, Acts, and the thirteen letters of Paul as authoritative for defining Christian faith and morals. By the middle of the fourth century, all 27 books of our New Testament were recognized as canonical, that is, as authoritative. The New Testament canon of the fourth century has remained unchanged since that time—for Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant churches. Though Orthodox theologians tend to quote the ecumenical creeds and the Fathers as authoritative interpreters of Scripture, they recognize Scripture as the foundational authority. Roman Catholic theologians tend to argue from tradition and the authoritative teaching of the church, but they also acknowledge Scripture as the most basic norm. Protestant theologians claim to base all their doctrine and theological arguments on Scripture alone. Scripture, then, is the common language and authority for all three. It is the basis for ecumenical discussion. To refuse the authority of Scripture is to exclude oneself from the historic church in all its forms.

The Scientific Revolution Again

As I argued in Parts 2 and 3 of this series, in developing their empirical/mechanical philosophy Galileo, Descartes, and Locke destroyed the classical and common-sense belief that creation reveals itself truly—even if only partially—in the way it appears to us. They drove a wedge between the human mind and the “external” world. For Locke, human identity, the self, is not determined by one’s place in the order of creation or even by dwelling in a particular body but only by consciousness. The identity of the self is its continuity of consciousness or its consciousness of continuity. One cannot achieve scientific or reliable knowledge of nature or the self by faith, uncritical acceptance of tradition or submission to authority. One must apply the methods of science to examine all truth claims and judge for oneself. Only then can one claim to be a reasonable person.* What, then, of the authority of Scripture?

The Rise of Modern Biblical Criticism

If you’ve read the previous essays in this series, it won’t surprise you when I assert that modern biblical criticism owes its genesis to efforts to apply the methods and standards of modern science to the Bible. From the second to the seventeenth century, the Bible had been quoted, preached and studied by the church as an unimpeachable authority. In its creeds, confessions of faith and theological disputes, the church quoted the Bible as the final word on the subject under discussion. Faith, tradition and received authority had been for eighteen centuries the grounds of the authenticity, truth and certainty of the Bible.

But by the dawn of the 18^th century, the philosophies of Galileo, Descartes, and Locke had made faith, tradition, and authority seem unreliable sources of knowledge. The new science demanded that all traditional truth claims be critically examined by rational/scientific methods. To refuse to examine one’s traditional beliefs critically was to risk being labeled superstitious, gullible, irrational, or in other ways backward. From what I have read, this cultural shift in what it means to be a rational person lies at the beginning of modern biblical criticism.

Of course, the Bible is not a physical object that can be studied by empirical science and expressed in mathematical language; it is a historical text. And some biblical scholars began to develop a science of biblical studies in analogy to the new science of nature.** Among the first principles of such a new historical science of the Bible as it developed in the 18^th and 19^th centuries are (1) read the Bible just as one reads any other book, (2) biblical studies must rid itself of all dogmatic presuppositions, such as those about divine inspiration or the authority of the creeds, (3) interpret the biblical texts within their ancient cultural, religious, and literary horizon, (4) fact or truth claims within the biblical texts must not be taken at face value but must be examined and accepted only to the extent that they are supported by historical evidence.

At first reading, these critical principles may seem to lead only to radical skepticism and unbelief. In fact, however, these four principles were used in the 18^th and 19^th centuries to reach conservative as well as radical conclusions and the whole range of opinion between. Conservative scholars, who trusted the church to have preserved and passed on the original and true faith, used historical critical principles in their efforts to justify the traditional faith on rational grounds. Theodor Zahn (1838-1933), for example, argued that the Four Gospels and the letters of Paul were considered canonical before the end of the 1^st century. In our own day, N.T. Wright (b. 1948) carries on the project of using historical critical principles to support a conservative reading of the gospels and Paul. Other scholars of a more skeptical bent argued that much that had been accepted on faith and authority in the past could not be supported by sound historical examination. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) argued that much of the New Testament teaching about Jesus is not history at all but myth. Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860) concluded that hardly any of the letters attributed to Paul were actually written by him and that much of the New Testament was written in the 2^nd century. According to Baur, the development of the earliest church was driven by division between the extreme Jewish party led by Peter and the Hellenistic party led by Paul. The resolution came only in the 2^nd century with the creation of the catholic church.

The story of the rise and triumph of modern historical criticism is much too long and complicated for me to tell in these essays. But I believe the essential feature of all its forms is this: since the triumph of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment based on it, a person who wishes to be known by peers as an intellectually responsible thinker must not appear to accept any truth claim on mere faith, tradition, or authority. One must, instead, place all truth claims on the witness stand for cross examination. Only those that withstand scrutiny may be accepted with intellectual integrity. As a corollary to this principle, because the number of things we can know with absolute certainty are few, the quality of beliefs may be ranked on a scale that ranges from certain knowledge through various levels of probability to the clearly false. Intellectual integrity demands that one proportion belief to the level of probability. It does not take much imagination to guess that many biblical critics severely reduced the extent of our knowledge of Jesus and the early church compared to that assumed by tradition.

Demystifying Modern Historical Criticism

The social location of the leading historical critics plays an important part in our assessment of their project. To engage at the highest level of modern historical criticism a student must gain an elite education in one of the great universities in the Western world under the supervision of a recognized scholar in the field. One must spend 10 years or more mastering ancient languages and cultures and undergoing thorough socialization into the history of the discipline. The only social location where such rigor can be sustained is the university. The modern university—especially from 1800 to 1960***—is a community of intellectuals bound together by shared academic values: respect in the community depends on adhering to the critical principle mentioned above, that is, the scholar’s conclusions must be supported by reason and evidence alone, not by faith, tradition, or authority. People who do not live within (or near) this elite subculture do not feel the same pressure to conform to this rigorous rationalism as do those whose identity and livelihood depends on its good graces. Indeed, they may find it snobbish, abstract, irrelevant, arrogant, speculative, and irreverent.

Though the number of elite biblical critics is small and they live within the cloistered walls of the university and speak an obscure language hardly anyone outside can understand, their influence extends beyond this narrow circle. (1) Many college students take religion or Bible courses during their college careers at secular or church-related universities. Not many of these courses are taught by top historical critics, but they are taught by the second and third tier students of those elite scholars. Or, students read textbooks that present the skeptical conclusions of biblical criticism as if they were established facts. Perhaps more importantly, students absorb the enlightenment skepticism toward faith, tradition, and authority. (2) University educated people, especially those who attended graduate schools, tend to adopt an elitist identity, which views people of traditional religious faith as unenlightened and backward. They couldn’t defend their elitist views or explain why faith, tradition, and authority are not good grounds for belief. They simply adopt the snobbish attitudes of their teachers. (3) Even professors of Bible, theology and ethics who teach in Christian universities and colleges for the most part received their graduate training under the influence of modern critical scholars. Some of them uncritically adopt the critical methods and conclusions of their teachers and pass them on to their students. (4) The clergy of most denominations are taught some form of historical criticism in their seminary educations and socialized to some degree into the skeptical and elitist academic attitude.

Notes

*Locke himself applied these methods to Christianity in his book The Reasonableness of Christianity.

**Many books have contributed to my understanding of this subject. One of the most important is Werner Georg Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems, trans. S. McLean Gilmour and Howard C. Kee (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972).

***Beginning in the 1960s the postmodern model of the university began to compete with the modern/enlightenment model. The postmodern university abandons rationality to embrace leftist ideology and activism.

Next Time: How progressive exegetes and theologians use the principles of modern biblical criticism to ignore the plain meaning of the biblical texts and find their own thoughts behind, underneath, and beside the words of the biblical texts.

The Logic of Biblical Authority

The Genesis of Biblical Authority

The earliest church looked to the Old Testament, the teaching of Jesus, and the apostolic witness as the authorities that defined its identity. As we see clearly in the gospels, Jesus came to call the Jewish people to repentance in preparation for the coming kingdom of God. He spoke with a new authority, not to reject the law and prophets, but “to fulfill them” (Matt 5:17). Jesus prayed to the God of the Jews as “our father” (Matt 6:9-13). The early church proclaimed the resurrected Jesus as the long-anticipated Messiah (King) of the Jews. It understood itself as a continuation of the chosen people of God. Hence it treasured the Old Testament as one of its defining authorities.

The church, however, read the Jewish scriptures in light of the new thing that happened in Jesus. Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom, his miracles, exorcisms, welcoming of outcasts, conflict with the Jewish religious authorities…and above all his crucifixion by Jerusalem and Rome and his resurrection from the dead—all of these things signaled that God had done something new and completely unexpected in Jesus the Messiah. From now on, the people of God must gather around Jesus, trust him, listen to him, remember him, and follow him (Mark 9:7). Everything must be understood in his light: the meaning of the Old Testament, the character and purposes of God, and the moral life. Hence the words and deeds of Jesus were treasured by the church as of equal (if not greater) authority with the Old Testament.

Jesus’s words and deeds were heard and seen by many people, especially by his chosen twelve apostles. The Twelve and many other disciples, including Paul, were granted an appearance of the resurrected Jesus. It seems that strictly speaking an “apostle” is one personally commissioned and sent by the resurrected Jesus as a witness (Acts 1:21-22; 1 Cor 9:1-2). Because of their unique relationship to Jesus as his designated witnesses and the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit, the apostles possessed authority to proclaim the teaching and deeds of Jesus, to interpret the meaning of his death and resurrection, and to govern the early church with wisdom. Hence the writings that preserved the teaching and the deeds of Jesus and the apostolic teaching were received with the same reverence as the teaching they contained.

These three authorities—the Old Testament, Jesus’s teachings and deeds, and the apostolic witness and teaching—are reflected in our Bibles today: (1) Old Testament, (2) Four Gospels, and (3) Acts, the letters, treatises, and the Apocalypse. Hence the authority of the Bible to which the church appeals today is derived from the authority of Jesus and his apostles. Specifically, the Bible’s unique authority is grounded in its preservation and communication of the original teaching of Jesus and his apostles.

What is Authority?

So far, I have used the word “authority” without defining it. But it is important to get a clearer idea of this concept. Authority is a quasi-legal concept. It implies power, legitimacy, and competence. Authorities are identified as directed to a particular community or subject area—Roman law, the US Constitution, the King of Spain, etc. An authority has the first (as author) and last (as power) word on a subject. Authorities declare what is or shall be and invite trust and obedience or disbelief and disobedience; they do not propose opinions for negotiation or debate. Jesus taught “as one who had authority,” not as a mere commentator or one offering a likely opinion (Matt 7:28-29). He spoke with divine authority, which called for decision, not quibbling. The apostles spoke with authority derived from Jesus—that is from their firsthand knowledge of Jesus and their appointment and empowerment by Jesus to speak on his behalf (Matt 28:18-19).

For those who wish to be recognized as disciples of Jesus, that is, as Christians (Acts 11:16), submitting to the apostolic authority and teaching is essential. Recall what Jesus said to the seventy in the limited commission:“Whoever listens to you listens to me; whoever rejects you rejects me; but whoever rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Luke 10:16). And who can forget what Jesus said to Peter: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matt 16:19).

The Bible Today

The church of today appeals to the Bible consisting of the 36 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament as the authority to define and regulate all things Christian. The Old Testament scriptures collected in our Bibles were already current in Jesus’s day and were held by most Jews to be holy. As one can see from the quotations in the New Testament, the early church appealed to the full range of Jewish scriptures, the law, prophets, and writings. The story of the collection of the 27 books of the New Testament is a bit more complicated.

As far as we know, Jesus did not write down his teachings. He traveled around Galilee, Judea, and eventually Jerusalem teaching by word of mouth. His disciples followed him and listened to him. They witnessed his miracles, words, and his death and resurrection. The apostles, too, after Pentecost proclaimed and taught by word of mouth. After persecution broke out in Jerusalem, believers were scattered everywhere preaching as they went. They spread throughout Judea, Samaria, and Syria (Acts 7-9). The Christian gospel was first proclaimed, passed on, and remembered by word of mouth by faithful disciples and institutionalized in such offices as prophets, elders, and bishops. And as long as the first generation of disciples and apostles were alive there was no great impetus to write it all down. The essential gospel could be memorized and recited in a few minutes. Besides, they possessed the Old Testament with its moral teaching, prophetic admonitions, psalms, and wisdom.

Paul’s letters are our first preserved Christian documents. Paul wrote First Thessalonians around 50 AD, about 15 years after his conversion. With the exception of Romans, Paul wrote his letters to deal with problems that had recently arisen in churches he founded. He did not write with a view of preserving the history of Jesus and the church. But his letters are invaluable witnesses to the gospel and history of the early church.

It is important to distinguish between the act of writing the New Testament documents and the acts of collecting, copying, distributing and recognizing them as authoritative. As we can infer from the Prologues to the Gospel of Luke (Lk 1:1-4) and Acts (1:1-3) and a reference in Hebrews 2:3, the second and third generations began to feel the need to compile and record the teaching of Jesus and the history of the early church. Before the end of the first century Paul’s letters were being copied, collected, and distributed as witnessed by the New Testament book of 2 Peter, the letter of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians (95 AD) and the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (110 AD). The Four Gospels were probably collected and circulated in the late first or early second century. All were listed in the Roman Church’s Muratorian Canon (170 AD) and in Irenaeus’s list of NT books (190 AD). It seems that by the end of the second century most of the 27 books of the present New Testament were recognized as authoritative (i.e., as canonical). A few, however, were disputed and not universally recognized until later: Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter. The gospels, Acts, and the letters of Paul were never disputed and were passed on as part of the apostolic tradition. The disputed books were questioned because of doubts about their apostolic origin. By the middle of the fourth century, they were universally and formally accepted because their connection with an apostle or the apostolic tradition was acknowledged.

A few observations are in order at this point: (1) The teaching of Jesus and the witness of his apostles did not become authoritative because the church recognized them. They are foundational for the church in that the church came into being by accepting them. (2) The first century church taught and passed on the same authoritative tradition by word of mouth and written word without distinction or tension between the two. Only in the middle of the second century did questions arise about the limits of the written canon. Hence only with respect to a few writings—Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter—can it be said that the church deliberated and decided the canon of the New Testament. The heart of the New Testament canon was determined before the church became conscious of the need to set limits to the canon. (3) In this process—whether informal and unself-conscious or formal and self-conscious—the authority of the oral and written tradition derived from the divine authority of Jesus’s words and deeds and his designated witnesses, the apostles. Hence the authority of our Bible derives from its role as the unique deposit of the tradition of Jesus’s words and deeds and the apostolic witness to Jesus.

Next Time: we will pursue the questions: do our Bibles perform this function, and how do we know this?

How to Use Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine

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In my previous essay I made some suggestions about how to read Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God. In that essay I asserted that we should not read the book as if it were Christian theology, philosophy, psychology, or sociology. It is rather a “phenomenology of homo religiosus” or religious man; that is to say, it is a study of the ways in which human beings perceive and respond to the divine. In this essay I will suggest a few ways in which the book can be useful to Christians.

Why Read Peterson?

First, it is important not to be afraid to incorporate the wisdom of non-Christian thinkers into our thinking. Of course, we must do this with care. But faithful church leaders and even apostles have done this from the beginning. In Acts 17, Paul quoted two Greek poets, Epimenides (6^th century B.C.) and Aratus (4^th and 3^rd centuries B.C.), approvingly: “In him we live and move and have our being” and “We are his offspring.” Paul taps into the near universal belief and experience that the divine is near, around, within, and active everywhere. The pressing question within the religious horizon of the Old and New Testaments was not “Is there a god?” but “What is the true nature of the divine?” and “Who is God?” And that is what Paul proclaimed to the Athenians that day.

We, however, cannot presume that our contemporaries experience the overwhelming, self-evident presence of the divine. They do not. It is doubtful that even we who believe in the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit experience it as well as the pagans in Athens did. We wrestle with the question of the existence and presence of God in a way no ancient person did. For many people, belief requires heroic effort. This modern feeling of divine absence is why we need to listen to Jordan Peterson and other thinkers who can awaken us to the universal divine presence felt so vividly by the Athenians and all premodern people.

The Question of God is Inescapable

As I argued in the first essay, Peterson reads biblical texts for their witness to the universal experience of the divine. Human beings are by nature religious, that is, human consciousness is so constructed that we cannot help but raise religious questions, questions of meaning, of life and death, being, eternity, and divinity. Unless we are taught otherwise, we experience the power and beauty of nature, the inner call of conscience, the threat of death, and the lure of love as intimations of the divine. We feel the tension between the upward call toward the good, true, and the beautiful and the downward pull into sensuality and chaos. Peterson criticizes such modern errors as scientism, race and gender ideology, and utopian revolutionary theories (“idiocy” he would say) that blind us to what lies open before us: We live in Someone else’s world and we can never become what we could be unless we respond sacrificially to the divine call.

From a Christian point of view, Peterson does not provide satisfactory answers to the two questions Paul posed and answered in Acts 17: (1) “What is God?” Paul’s answer: “God is the Creator of heaven and earth!” And (2) “Who is God?” Paul’s answer: “God is the One who raised Jesus Christ from the dead.” But Peterson sets the conditions wherein these questions make sense. If we come to perceive the divine all around and within us, and if we feel compelled to choose between seeking the divine and falling into chaos, the next step naturally appears before us. It is to ask: “What and Who are you, Lord? How may I seek you and find you? What would you have me do?”

Peterson and the Bible

Peterson does not read the Bible as the canonical text for the Christian church. Nor does he read it according to the modern historical critical method, which seeks, not to hear the religious/moral message of the text with a view to obeying it, but to uncover the history of the composition of the present texts and to reconstruct the “true” historical events behind the text, neither of which we can know for sure. Peterson takes the biblical texts seriously as speaking universal truth learned in genuine encounters with the divine. Unlike modern historical interpretation, Peterson finds an existentially relevant and religiously compelling message in the Bible. It articulates a command built into human nature that we must obey or disobey. Once we have heard it, we can never return to our naive secular existence.

The church, like Peterson, reads the Bible for its religious/moral message. Unlike Peterson, however, the church reads the Bible as its authoritative scripture, as the normative story by which it measures all its teaching, theological and moral. But it does not contradict the ecclesial reading of the Bible to read it also as a witness to the universal human “perceptions of the divine” as does Peterson. Believers read the Bible as more but not less than Peterson. And this is why a person who is not a Christian can recognize their experience in many biblical texts and a Christian can recognize their experience in some pagan and secular texts. God has not left himself without witness in nature and in human consciousness! Peterson is on the side of the angels here. In my view, then, Christian preachers, teachers, apologists, and theologians could make good use of his work and the work of others like him.

Next Time: Perhaps I will follow up these essays with some reflections on Peterson’s moral and social ideas.

Academia’s Double Standard, Or Orthodoxy for Me but Not for Thee (Seminarian Visits Theology Professor #5)

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Introduction

Today we listen in on the fifth conversation between a recent seminary graduate and one of his former professors. The previous conversation centered on clarifying the critical standard academia uses to test knowledge claims. Taking mathematics and logic as the ideal sciences, academia measures all other endeavors to secure knowledge by the ideal of clear, exhaustive, and absolute knowledge. In sciences other than mathematics, however, this ideal is unattainable and can be only approximated to one degree or another. Not only so, the level of success in approximating the ideal is always a matter of dispute. Because it is unattainable in fields other than pure mathematics, it is open to abuse and selective application. Our professor argues that the dominant academic approach to the Bible and Christian faith displays just this sort of abuse and endless debate.

Setting: The seminarian and the professor agree that friendly conversation is better when you are sharing food and drink or taking a walk together. Warm and sunny, today is a perfect day for a leisurely walk.

Seminarian: Thank you for suggesting that we walk as we talk today.

Professor: Like sharing a meal, walking together is an act of friendship conducive to honest conversation. Where did we leave our last conversation?

Seminarian: As I recall, we were going to examine the ways the academic method creates doubt about the Bible as a reliable source of knowledge of God.

Professor: Yes. I remember. Tell me, then, in the most succinct way you can how academia attempted to diminish your confidence in the Bible as a repository of divine revelation.

Seminarian: I can summarize it in four words. On hundreds of occasions, in scores of different ways, and to every belief I brought with me to seminary, academia repeated the same challenge: “How do you know?” How do you know the Bible is true? How do you know that every book, every sentence, and every word is inspired or God-breathed? How do you know the biblical writings are authentic, that is, written by authors to whom they are ascribed, composed at the times and in places they claim, and preserved uncorrupted? How do you know that the events they recount really happened? How do you know that the authors’ theological interpretations of the events they write about are true? How do you know that the Scribes and Rabbis that selected the Old Testament canon and the churches and bishops and councils that selected the New Testament canon did not make mistakes in the writings they included or excluded?

Professor: Asking “how do you know?” seems more like a rhetorical ploy than an academic argument. You don’t have to know anything about a subject or offer any alternative explanations for the data, to ask this question. Did they make any positive arguments? Do they attempt to demonstrate the Bible’s unreliability or provide an alternative history or theology?

Seminarian: Yes. They did. And they can succeed in creating plausible doubt at some points. In my experience, however, the “how-do-you-know” question is the only way to mount an effective challenge to faith in the Bible’s reliability as the authority for Christian teaching, because most of the Bible’s message is untestable by universally acknowledged criteria. The Bible is the only source of information we have for almost all the history it contains. You have to take it or leave it. True, there are some areas where the Bible’s statements may be tested. The simplest way to test the Bible’s reliability is to examine it for internal coherence or compatibility with external sources. If the Bible seems to assert two contradictory ideas or incompatible facts, this would be a mark against its reliability for those ideas and facts. If the Bible asserts ideas and facts that contradict or are incompatible with ideas and facts sourced from outside the Bible, one must assess which source to trust and to what degree. To take one obvious example, the first eleven chapters of Genesis, taken as history or science in the modern sense, seems to be incompatible with some aspects of modern cosmology, archeology, biology, and the modern understanding of the course of ancient history. And there are many other places where the Bible speaks of historical events, natural phenomena, and moral principles to which some people claim to have independent access.

Professor: Indeed, examples could be multiplied. Hardly a biblical stoned has been left unturned. Biblical scholars have been studying the Bible in this academic way for at least 250 years. Some hoped that academic study would confirm the truth of faith and others seemed to take delight in debunking it. Some were cautious and reserved and others prone to speculation and flights of fancy. They examined it from every angle imaginable and set it within every ideological schema that has been developed: Hegelian, Marxist, postmodern, feminist, and gay. I have read widely in this literature for 50 years, and as I asserted a few conversations back, for all their efforts not much of substance has changed. If you want to know what the ancient Jews believed about God, creation, and other faith topics you still have to read the text of the Old Testament printed in your Bible, which is for all practical purposes the same as that read by Jesus and Paul. If you want to know about the life and teachings of Jesus, you have to read the New Testament Gospels. If you want to know what Jesus’s original disciples and the earliest church believed about Jesus, you have to read Acts, Paul, John, and the rest of the New Testament documents. Don’t get me wrong, biblical scholars have been very helpful in providing insights into the biblical writings. But when scholars use the biblical texts plus their vivid imaginations to reconstruct a picture of Jesus or the early church that is radically different from that given in the New Testament texts, what are we to do? Trust modern scholars and their methods? Which scholars? What methods? Surely, it makes more sense to trust the original sources even if there is no independent way, acceptable to academia, to prove them true. No matter how many scholars you read, you will still have to make a choice to believe the biblical teaching or not.

Seminarian: If I am hearing you correctly you are saying that all attempts to go beyond faith in grasping the truth of the Bible—whether to confirm or deny it—are futile and unreasonable. Am I right?

Professor: Yes. The Bible’s truth value cannot be assessed with mathematical methods. It makes historical and theological claims, and the methods by which historical and theological claims can be assessed cannot produce “clear, exhaustive, and absolute” knowledge. Academics who nevertheless attempt to transform biblical faith into scientific knowledge will inevitably reduce that faith to a few meaningless historical facts and a short list of culturally acceptable moralisms. Their edited Bible turns out to be even less plausible than the uninterpreted text. Ironically, their failed efforts to rationalize faith actually renders a service to faith. For if the Christian faith could be refuted (or proved) by academic means, it seems that 250 years of scholarly work would be enough to accomplish this task. From an academic point of view, however, it is still inconclusive. And it always will be, for that is the nature of academia.

Seminarian: And that brings us back to the “How do you know?” argument!

Professor: Exactly! Because orthodox/biblical faith cannot be defeated by positive academic arguments, unbelieving academics often resort to the “How do you know?” argument! Because it contains an element of truth, it often ensnares unwary students. It is true that we do not know the truth of the orthodox/biblical faith in the same way and to the degree of certainty that we know that 2 + 2 = 4. So what? Skeptical academics argue or imply that we ought not to trust beliefs grounded in faith. This act, they say, is a failure of rational responsibility and a loss of courage. We ought rather to hold such beliefs in suspense until we can know their truth status one way or another, which implies that we should never embrace Christian faith wholeheartedly and apply it to every aspect of our lives. For we cannot know its truth clearly, exhaustively, and absolutely.

Seminarian: If academics applied this standard to every belief they cherish, they would never embrace wholeheartedly and live by any belief or principle…except perhaps mathematical or logical ones. And you won’t have much of a life if you determine to act guided only by those abstractions!

Professor: But as we all know, the dominant culture of academia does not apply this rigorous standard to every belief and value! Can you imagine the furor that would be created on most college campuses if a guest speaker or a professor were to turn the tables and apply these standards to modern academia’s sacred cows in the following ways? “How do you know that the world is divided into wicked oppressors and righteous oppressed people? Can you prove that all black and brown people are victims of systemic racism? Can you give demonstrable evidence that racism is immoral? How can you prove that socialism is morally superior to capitalism? How do you know that diversity is a moral and social good? How do you know that seeking equity (or even equality!) is morally superior to rewarding merit? How do you know that inclusion is right and exclusion is wrong? How do you know that LGBTQ+ rights are human rights? Indeed, how do you know there are such things as human rights? So, you don’t know? You can’t answer? Well then, you should to hold such beliefs in suspense until you can know their truth status one way or another. If you don’t know them clearly, exhaustively, and absolutely you should not risk living by them or imposing them on others!”

Seminarian: I suspect that such a person would be silenced and perhaps attacked by a mob, fired from their jobs, and even arrested by law enforcement.

Professor: Higher education, too, has its dogma, its orthodoxy. To question it is to blaspheme, and you don’t argue with blasphemy. You silence it and persecute the perpetrator.

Professor: I see that we have been walking for about an hour and its nearly lunch time. Next time, let’s address directly why holding tenaciously to the faith proclaimed in the Bible and attested and passed on to us by the church is a very reasonable thing to do.

Seminarian: I look forward to it!

Professor: See you next time.

Is Faith an Inferior Way of Knowing? Seminarian Visits Theology Professor #4

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Introduction

This post is part four of a multipart conversation between a recent seminary graduate and one of his former professors. In part three, the seminarian outlined the view of the Bible and the Christian faith he learned in church. Today, he will attempt to recreate the steps by which he came to doubt the Bible and the traditional faith.

Setting: Since their last conversation, the seminarian and the professor discovered that they both frequent a little coffee roaster near the seminary. They plan to meet at 10:00am Wednesday.

Seminarian: Hi professor. Have you been here long?

Professor: Just got here.

(After receiving their coffee drinks, they resume their previous discussion.)

Professor: Now, where were we? Oh yes. I think we were about to examine the ways in which the academic approach to the Bible tends to weaken our commitment to biblical authority and render our faith doubtful. To get the conversation started, tell me the story of your first encounter with the modern academic method.

Seminarian: In our introductory class, we were asked to step outside our faith and look at the Bible and tradition as an outsider might. I was bewildered by this suggestion. Having always, along with the church, treated the Bible as Holy Scripture and its teaching as our precious faith, this request seemed to recommend sacrilege and betrayal. But my teachers assured me that this move was purely methodological. We did not have to become outsiders in fact. Taking a neutral stance to faith merely enabled us to ask questions that insiders don’t think to ask because they don’t need to, questions about history, literature, and ways of knowing. In this way, they explained, the academic approach enables us to understand the Bible and the traditional faith in a more comprehensive way. Besides, they continued, if the church’s view of the Bible is sound and the traditional faith is true, they will survive critical examination undamaged.

Professor: Did this justification for applying the academic method to the Bible seem reasonable to you at the time?

Seminarian: Yes and no. Something about it bothered me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. On the one hand, it made sense that if what my parents and the church taught me was true, I had nothing to fear from submitting it to examination. On the other hand, it wasn’t clear to me how the Bible and the faith I receive could be tested in a way that could produce objective results. As historical, experiential and theological, the claims of the Bible are not testable in the way that proposed solutions to math or physics or logical problems are. Even more troubling, I did not see how one could maintain a neutral stance when dealing with such profound and personal issues. The meaning of the whole world, the nature and destiny of every human being, and the way we ought to live…all hopes, fears, and dreams turn on a series of questions to which the Bible proposes definite answers: Is there a God? What is God? Who is God? What does God want from us?

Professor: Let’s pause a bit before we move on to the next phase of your academic development and try to clarify your ambivalence at your first encounter with modern academia. If I have learned anything in my long career in higher education, it is that many gratuitous assumptions lie hidden in every method of study. Calling on you to lay aside your trust in the church and its tradition to examine your faith critically assumes uncritically that the academic method is superior to faith at producing knowledge. This assumption begs scrutiny. Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and other architects of modern science urged students of nature to treat it as a mathematically structured, material machine. To see the workings of the machine as they exist apart from our subjective involvement, the scientist must maintain a disengaged attitude and look for aspects that can be understood mathematically. Scientists must ignore every aspect of their experience of nature that cannot be thought mathematically. That is to say, our experiences of color, odor, touch, smell, taste, and feelings of fear, pleasure, anger, shame, and so on, do not conform to the scientific ideal of clear thought. To understand these experiences, they must be analyzed and reduced to physical or chemical exchanges, which can be understood only mathematically.

Seminarian: So, even the archetypical natural sciences of physics and chemistry make gratuitous assumptions?

Professor: Let me put it this way: these mathematical sciences seek to understand nature in so far as its activity can be stated in mathematical equations. The meaning of numbers and mathematical operators is perfectly clear. Numbers hide nothing about themselves. They possess no mysterious inner world. They are discrete, abstract, and depend on nothing outside of them. We feel confident that everyone who understands them sees them through and through and alike. We also feel confident that as long as we follow the rules, we can solve any solvable mathematical problem with the same clarity of understanding as we have of the numbers and operators it contains. The mathematical sciences set the bar for what counts as knowledge not only in the study of nature but in all modern endeavors to understand. To know means to understand a thing clearly, exhaustively, and absolutely.

Seminarian: Is this why every non-mathematical, academic discipline seems envious of mathematics?

Professor: Yes. From a methodological point of view, the history of biology could be written as the quest to reduce biological categories to chemical and physical ones, that is, to mathematical equations. And insofar as biology cannot state its conclusions in mathematical terms it seems incomplete and obscure. The same quest and obscurity characterize all other “sciences.” Perhaps you have noticed how the social sciences love statistics. Counting things gives them an excuse to call themselves “sciences” and label their value-laden stories “scientific knowledge.” Depending on the theory being applied, psychological explanations resemble mythology, common sense, or hermeneutics more than they resemble mathematics. However, many psychologists pursue chemical explanations for psychic phenomena. Even logic envies mathematics, as its use of symbols and operators bereft of existential content and its calculus-like operations demonstrate.

Seminarian: I may be getting ahead of myself here, but what does reviewing the history of the scientific method have to do with clarifying the difference between the way of faith and the way of academia?

Professor: Even in the academic study of the Bible the mathematical ideal exerts influence. No one as far as I know attempts to reduce the Bible to mathematical equations. But the ideal of knowledge as understanding a thing clearly, exhaustively, and absolutely lies behind the demand that bothered you so much in your early academic career, that is, that you must step outside of your faith to understand the Bible correctly. The ideal academic student of the Bible disengages from preconceived notions, feelings, commitments, personal relationships, and moral and esthetic values to discover those things about the Bible that can be understood clearly, exhaustively, and absolutely. Of course, no human being can disengage to this extent; nor can the ideal of clear, exhaustive, and absolute knowledge be attained. Still, this unattainable ideal powers academia’s incessant criticism of every knowledge claim it chooses to examine.

Seminarian: I remember feeling a sense of despair. The more I studied the less I knew.

Professor: If academia were consistent and honest with its ideal, it would have to preach universal skepticism. Or, it would at least admit to knowing only abstractions such as those we find in mathematics and logic. Let me tell you a secret not many people know: the “knowledge” gained by physics and chemistry is clear, exhaustive, and absolute only when it is abstracted from real existing nature and stated in mathematical terms. Physicists, chemists and biologists cannot comprehend nature as it exists in itself any more than the untrained person can. Their empirical/mathematical method cannot reveal a thing in its unity and wholeness. Get clear on this: the ideal of knowledge that animates academia mandates that we set aside as unknowable everything about a thing that cannot be translated into a number and be put into an equation. I will let you in on a second secret: Modern American academia is neither consistent nor honest with its supposed ideal. It is driven by leftist political ideology, institutional self-interest, and antipathy for anything traditional, conservative, and orthodox Christian.

Seminarian: It has become clear of late that you are correct. But I still hear the rhetoric of objective science and religious neutrality.

Professor: Of course. But if you pay close attention, you will notice how selectively the ideal of clear, exhaustive, and absolute knowledge is applied. If you come to academia as a political or economic conservative or a moral traditionalist or Bible-believing Christian, your beliefs will be subjected to the strictest application of the criterion of knowledge. They will be inevitably declared biased, if not simply false and evil. Why? It is not because the American university subjects every knowledge claim to examination by this same criterion. It is, rather, because these beliefs run afoul of the ideology and orthodoxy that define modern academia. In contrast, the claims of diversity, equity, and inclusion philosophy (DEI), Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, and many other Marxist-inspired ideologies are praised as morally self-evident perspectives. The dominant culture of American higher education dismisses any criticism of these ideologies as inspired by racism, white privilege, heteronormativity, and other supposed evil motives.

Seminarian: I think I see where you are headed. When modern academia asks us to leave our faith at the university gates, it demands that we live by a set of rules it does not apply to itself. And if, in a fit of careless consistency, it did apply this criterion of knowledge to itself, it would have to admit that the search for knowledge of the world is futile. We cannot know the world as it exists but only as empty abstractions. But then academia would no longer have a convincing rationale to reject faith as a way of knowing while accepting science as productive of knowledge. Paraphrasing Hegel’s assessment of Schelling’s philosophy in the Introduction to his Philosophy of Mind, “in the dark all cats are black.”

Professor: You’ve got it. Next time we meet let’s explore exactly and in detail how academia applies (hypocritically and selectively) its rhetorical ideal of knowledge to the church’s view of the Bible to produce doubt and reduce the number of religious beliefs one can hold in a rational way.

Seminarian: Thank you for giving of your time.

Professor: You are welcome. Goodbye.

Seminarian: Goodbye.

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