Biblical criticism means nothing but applying to the biblical documents the rational or scientific methods of scholarship which are applied in other fields of study.
No
advanced biblical criticism is needed to let these words speak and to give voice to our own feelings of joy or sadness and even of despair.
The effort was worthy in its own right and in some measure provided a way to use modern
biblical criticism without falling into liberalism.
Problems of
relating biblical criticism and modern philosophies to Christian tradition are still in a state of flux that would seem familiar to an early - century theologian.
For me
historical biblical criticism is fine as long as the agenda isn't «Let's prove it's all made up human nonsense by primitives who are far less sophisticated than Enlightenment mankind».
Both of these books fundamentally changed how and what I thought
about biblical criticism (Sparks) and God's character (Seibert).
Lindsell's analysis at this point reveals an ironic weakness in underestimating the extent to
which biblical criticism has penetrated the evangelical world.
However, they were chiefly concerned to condemn the
new biblical criticism and the Darwinian theory of evolution, both of which had emerged in the 19th century.
To take one instance, there is preserved an admirable piece of
biblical criticism from the middle of the third century by Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria.
There is a sense in which the intention of
early biblical criticism was an effort to restore a «biblical theology» in which the Scriptures were freed from their dogmatic imprisonment.
For the present we note that the association of
biblical criticism with the «liberal» interpretation of biblical history is accidental, and needs to be re-examined.
In fact it is not too much to say that
biblical criticism met the post-Reformation confusion, in which the unity once imposed by the traditional schema had been largely lost, by imposing upon the Bible a new unity, that of an ascertained chronological succession of events and of movements of thought.
Certainly, it is helpful to realize that Jesus did not intend his words to be taken literally, and the demythologizing insights of
biblical criticism save us from an attempt to repristenate the apocalypticism of the first century in a forlorn attempt to be faithful to Jesus» words.
Not only did Briggs
uphold Biblical criticism, he also argued that the authority for religious truth was not found in Scripture alone.
While biblical criticism examines these claims without presupposing that the words are divinely given, the approach of the modern inerrancy writers is one that affirms the absolute factual accuracy of the text and then seeks to explain away any conflicts.
Disagreement about the relation between baptism and church membership, about the relation
between biblical criticism and biblical restorationism, and about the administration of missionary work split the Christian Church again in the 20th century.
Destructive biblical criticism, exemplified for years in the work of the so - called Jesus Seminar, eviscerates the gospel narratives of all theological power and leaves us, at best, with a Jesus made in our own image — political agitator, cynic sage, new age guru, etc..
(The characterization of Yoder as pre-Bultmannian now almost strikes one as humorous given recent developments
in biblical criticism.
As early as the middle of the 19th century Søren Kierkegaard could see the skeptical morass into which
higher biblical criticism was leading.
Walter Wink's now famous one - liner, «
Historical biblical criticism is bankrupt» (The Bible in Human Transformation [Fortress, 1973]-RRB-, may be overstated, but there is some truth in it.
He uses this analogy of the courtroom in order to highlight a fundamental problem in
modern biblical criticism, namely, the entrenched scepticism of the academic establishment when it comes to judging the historicity of the Gospel of St John.
They attacked not only the
new biblical criticism and Darwinism, but also Roman Catholicism and the new sects of Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Science.
In the nineteenth century a growing secular rationalism, such new sciences as geology and Darwinism with their implications for traditional interpretations of the Scriptures with regard to human origins, the rise of
biblical criticism, and so forth, all raised fundamental challenges to accustomed ways of conceiving of Christianity and especially biblical authority.
And perhaps most significantly we should notice that some would trace the emergence of early forms of
biblical criticism to Pietism and its attack on the abstract doctrinal character of orthodoxy.
Of all the commentaries which have appeared since the birth of
biblical criticism, this is the weirdest.