The Christian who goes to college almost invariably has a religion instructor who casually suggests that two centuries of higher critical scholarship on the Bible have demonstrated the book to be full of contradictions and utterly untrustworthy. We hopefully demonstrated that the Bible is accurate history in the last lesson. Nevertheless, we have to deal with the question of higher criticism, the type of biblical scholarship done in most universities over the past century.
To understand Higher Criticism, we need to locate it within the larger intellectual program of Modernity. Modernism, remember from the first lesson, was an attempt beginning with the Enlightenment to make human reason alone a source of truth. The possibility of God acting within history—be it through miracles, an incarnation, prophecy or an inspired Bible—was rejected outright. Man was the measure of all things, and he could attain truth without any help from outside this universe. Each area of knowledge, then, was redefined to further this modernist vision.
Education, for example, ceased to be about religious character formation and became simply information-dumping. Biology and paleontology were forced to take upon themselves, not the glorious task of investigating God’s good creation, but instead the task of proving that God didn’t create the creation at all. Philosophy took upon itself the task of disproving the possibility of God speaking to humanity, and—you guessed it—religious studies received the call to de-supernaturalize all religion, and especially Christianity, locating Christianity among the religions of the world as just another superstitious attempt to spiritualize a world that had no real spiritual existence. Enter Higher Criticism.
Thus these “200 years of critical scholarship” were not really about scholarship in the sense of investigating new data. Rather, the purpose of this critical scholarship was to undermine the credibility of the claims of Jesus Christ. But if the Church as an important cultural institution was to continue, then one simply could not reject Jesus outright. Instead—and notice the idolatry here—the path they chose was to redefine Jesus in such a way as to fit with the Modernist vision for the world. Jesus had to cease being a religious figure and become instead a moral instructor and ethicist. He was stripped of his miracles, his claims to divinity as the Son of God, and his promise to return. He was turned into a Jewish Confucius. And to this day “scholars” of this type assume that Jesus was just a Jewish ethicist, even though they present their findings to the media as objective scientific data. Take the infamous Jesus Seminar as an example. Each year around Easter and Christmas these academics announce to the press that their scientific research shows that Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead, wasn’t really the Son of God, wasn’t born of a virgin, and didn’t perform miracles. How do they know? They cite no evidence. None at all. Not even bad evidence.
In The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? for example, the Jesus Seminar states that Jesus definitely did not say 82% of what the gospels say he said. The remaining 18% is doubtful, but may be authentic. How did they get this information? They voted. They gathered together and voted on which verses they thought Jesus would have actually said. No outside evidence was taken into consideration. How did they know? They came to their decisions by following “Seven Pillars of Scholarly Wisdom,” which they printed in their book. They did not seek to establish any of these pillars; they function as assumptions on which their conclusions are based.
Among the pillars? The Jesus who lived in history is nothing like the Christ we see in the Bible. That’s a powerful assumption going into this project, don’t you think? From that assumption they then examine the Bible and conclude “scientifically’ that Jesus was not what the Bible says he was. This isn’t science! It’s just Unitarianism! Another pillar? John’s gospel is a complete fabrication. That’s the assumption going in. The Jesus Seminar then examines the Bible and concludes “scientifically” that John’s gospel is a complete fabrication. No wonder they don’t need evidence. This game is easy. Want another of their pillars? The real Jesus never said he would return and never spoke of judgment. They then “conclude” that Jesus never spoke the sayings that speak of a coming judgment and a second coming. They’re a part of that 82%.
The Books of Moses: One finds unbelieving assumptions at work when higher critical scholars suggest that the five books of Moses are actually a cut-and-paste amalgam of four different sources. This is assumed, not demonstrated. The only instance in which a source other than Moses is evident is with the account of Moses’ death. Critics do terrible violence to the integrity of the books, taking away their narrative and leaving us only with a de-contextualized reading.
Paul’s Letters: The same circular reasoning is at play with Paul’s books, many of which are said by some to be forgeries. How do they know? Because Colossians, for example, speaks of Jesus as being God, and Paul didn’t believe Jesus was God. How do they know that? Because the Pauline books that speak of Jesus as Divine weren’t really written by Paul. This is circular reasoning. Still, I remember hearing of an examination of a higher critical textbook that found that the book’s author was actually half a dozen different authors.
The Gospels: When applied to the gospels, this kind of scholarship stresses the differences between one gospel and the next. Do the gospels differ? Of course they differ—otherwise God would have only given us one of them. But difference does not imply contradiction. Were I to ask each of you to write down what I’ve been doing for the past ten minutes, each of you would write a different account. But none of you would be lying. Your accounts would differ, but not contradict. Higher Criticism tells us almost nothing about the biblical books themselves. It only tells us about the philosophical and religious presuppositions of the critics. After a decade of theological education in seminaries and universities, I am convinced that religious scholars dropped the ball 200 years ago when they stopped believing the Bible and put themselves over it instead of under it. Theologians today need to pick the ball back up where it was left. It was actually the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner—a critical scholar himself—who summarized the whole religious project of Modernity in one word: unbelief.