Loss of Transcendence - Lesson 9

In this next section, which may be a concluding one to this theme, I want us to turn attention to the contemporary various intensities of literary criticism or historical criticism that is impacting our understanding of commentaries on the Bible today and then to conclude with some of the steps that we ourselves need to take in facing all of this. Very helpfully, the Calvinist scholar from Calvin College Alvin Plantinga has suggested that there are three intensities of literary criticism or historical criticism that have impacted our commentaries on the Bible today. There’s an ideology, in other words, behind all of these. They have as their common denominator a faith in man and not in God. It’s not faith in inspiration of scripture. It’s not faith in the work of the Holy Spirit as the interpreter and reader of scripture. Its faith in human intelligence. And so these three fundamental forms have dominated Western scholarship.

The first is that of Troeltsch. And Troeltsch’s approach to Scripture is a study in skepticism. It’s what we call a hermeneutic of suspicion. Because you start reading the Bible by doubting that it’s true. You don’t have an open mind to it. You just question fundamentally certain of the presuppositions that previous generations of scripture have held onto. You doubt its divine inspiration; you doubt its historical veracity; you even doubt its Biblical integrity. You start and you end with skepticism. Now, in a law court, you don’t start with skepticism. You start with the fact that you’re not already condemning the poor man in the dock. You’re giving him every opportunity to justify what he’s done or if he’s done it. So there he is in the open box and a judge has an open mind. Not so with the Bible. The Bible’s in the dock, but the criminal is judged as a criminal before you’ve even heard him speak. So that’s what we might call the ideology of intolerance. What seems to be open-mindedness is not open-mindedness one little bit.

The second of Troeltsch’s assumptions was that you are working from the principle of coherence. And what Troeltsch means by coherence is that every effect has a natural, that is to say, a this-worldly, not a supernatural, cause. Now, of course, what lies behind the principle of coherence is what first arose in the 17th century and that is a new form of imagination, an imagination about nature. Nature became, as it were, the overthrow of creation. Creation is now having her ways, not the Creator. And it’s very interesting that about the 1670s, Bishop Boyle, famous for his Boyle’s Law on gas and one of the founding members of the Royal Society, wrote an interesting treatise on the concept of nature vulgarly so-called. It was becoming popular to talk about nature and he, as a Christian, was protesting that you should never talk about nature. You should talk about creation. And as a founding member of the Royal Society, as one of its incipient scientists, he was the one that should know. Well, this scientist is protesting as a Christian that we’re creating a new fantasy of the imagination that we call nature.

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One of my first Christian books when I moved in this adventure from Oxford to Regent was to write a book on I Believe in the Creator. And I suggested in that book, that was written way back in 1974, that Christians should never talk about nature. Never. They should always talk about creation. Well, we as Christians have been very slippery about that ever since.

The third thing that Troeltsch is building on all his criticism is on the principle of analogy. That is to say, that the laws of nature in Biblical times must be the same as they are today. In other words, your vivid imagination about how they crossed the Red Sea doesn’t operate, and again I use the word the laws of nature, but I’m using it in the secular fashion. Or that the dead have never been resurrected, therefore Christ never was resurrected either. So with these three principles, this is how you start your study of criticism.

In contrast to this German critic, a French critic Pierre Duhem living at the end of the 18th century, doesn’t go as far in these assumptions. In other words, he’s prepared to use his reason to reason his way out of some of the enigmas, of some of the difficulties. He’s prepared to explain some of the miracles. But still the premise with which he operates is that the only way of interpreting scripture is by reason alone, that exegesis is rational and therefore it’s adrift from the Hermeneutica Sacra, that is to say, the orthodox understanding of sacred hermeneutics, which is that you open the Bible and you pray that God will illumine you, pray that God will guide you by his Holy Spirit in your interpretation and acceptance of the scripture. He doesn’t stand for that at all. There’s no premise then for Christian meditation and contemplation on scripture. He’s a kind of middle man in-between. He’s moderate. But he’s still intrinsically a rationalist.

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And thirdly, there’s Baruch Spinoza, that we’ve already mentioned—this Jewish renegade that was decried as an atheist both by the Jews as well as by the Christians. And he goes much further in saying that reason alone is the sole arbiter of truth and therefore of interpreting the Bible. For him, faith has no role in Biblical interpretation. And so he’s so much more radical and is not prepared in any way whatsoever to think of the Bible as a sacred text. So with all of these three, none of them accept it as a sacred text. They accept it’s simply a primitive text or a series of texts, but that’s all.

Now, one of the things that had helped very strongly Calvin to understand the plain meaning of the text was to recognise that any fruitful Biblical scholarship in the future had to be based on the double knowledge of both Hebrew and Greek. And the dilemma was that there were those, especially Pietist German theologians, or exegetes rather, who, in admiring profoundly the way of Christ as Christians, saw the importance of the Greek. And this is one of the dilemmas that Biblical seminaries have had ever since. It’s so easy for us to think that we, as seminary students, begin with Greek and not Hebrew. And the answer is, of course, because we’re concerned about the New Testament. Why? By beginning in the New Testament, we’re not understanding the whole counsel of God. And so we have to begin where the scriptures begin, with Hebrew. And so knowledge of Hebrew is primary to knowledge of Greek.

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In the consequence of this, one of the weaknesses of overcoming criticism is that most Christian leaders have a Greek but not a Hebrew background. And as we’ve seen, this has been the weakness of the Church throughout the centuries. So that right through the first 1,500 years of the Church, there were, as we’ve seen, hardly a handful of Hebraic scholars that understood the Old Testament text. And the consequence of this then brings us to the situation that we are facing today and that is that in the context of what has happened, we have lost our moorings much more than we realise.