Criticism and Faith

The Bible addresses itself from faith to faith. The Old Testament writings, according to the New Testament, were given in order to bear witness to Christ (John 5:39), to unfold the way of salvation, and to provide the man of God with the spiritual equipment he needs for Christian life and service (2 Tim. 3:15 ff.). And if this is true of the Old Testament writings, it is true a fortiori of the New Testament writings. There is considerable point to the often repeated statement that the avowed purpose of the Fourth Gospel is the primary purpose of all the New Testament writings: “these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).

It is a basic evangelical tenet that, if the biblical writings do not lead us to faith in Christ, their primary purpose has not been accomplished in us. However much we may study them for other ends, however much we may value them for their religious content, yet without faith in the Christ of whom they speak we are in the position of those to whom the charge of Christ himself came that while they searched the sacred writings to find true life there, they could not attain it because they would not come to him, to whom those writings pointed as the giver of life.

FAITH AND CRITICISM

Evangelical Christians accordingly believe that it is in the way of faith that the Bible’s true purpose is fulfilled and its inmost meaning grasped. But the question then arises about the relation between the appropriation of the Bible message by faith and the study of the Bible and its message by means of the various critical disciplines. No doubt there are many Christian believers who are content to hear the voice of God in the Bible assuring them that in Christ he has brought salvation to them. The witness of the Holy Spirit in their hearts assures them that they have not followed cunningly devised fables in accepting the Gospel as the way of life. Problems raised by the critical study of the Bible do not trouble them, and they find it difficult to understand how any believer can be troubled by such things when the eternal verities stand forth in the Bible with all their self-authenticating power. Again, there are eminent theologians, no mean practitioners in the critical arts, who assure us that criticism and faith are so unrelated that even a critical method which reduces the historical content of the Gospel story almost to the vanishing-point need present no obstacle to belief in the real and abiding essence of the Gospel. Such an assurance makes little appeal to the simpler believers whom we have already mentioned, and from another point of view it makes little appeal to people of more sophisticated mind whose training has been in other fields than the theological.

The following remarks will be confined to the realm of New Testament criticism, partly because of its cruciality, partly because of the writer’s private interests, and partly because readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY have recently had the opportunity of digesting some thoughts about Old Testament criticism in an article by Cyrus H. Gordon (“Higher Critics and Forbidden Fruit,” Nov. 23, 1959, issue). Fortunately the sense of “commitment” to JEDP, of which Dr. Gordon speaks, is less widely found today—at least in those lands with which I am most familiar. A number of scholars who recognize that Wellhausen’s account of the development of Israel’s religion is untenable continue for practical purposes to make use of the fourfold documentary analysis associated with his name (although the fourfold analysis, as distinct from its chronological arrangement, is much older than Wellhausen). One of these scholars—the most eminent in the Old Testament field in England today—has described the literary aspect of Wellhausen’s view as “only a working hypothesis, which can be abandoned with alacrity when a more satisfying view is found, but which cannot with profit be abandoned until then” (H. H. Rowley, The Growth of the Old Testament, p. 46). That is the right way to treat any critical hypothesis, quite apart from the particular merits or demerits of this particular hypothesis. To be “committed” to any critical method or theory in that “deepest sense” in which Dr. Gordon uses the word is to mistake the means for the end, to think more highly of the scaffolding than of the building, to give the handmaid the honor that belongs to the mistress.

When we turn to the New Testament, two things must be emphasized at the outset. In the first place, the men who originally proclaimed the Christian message were eyewitnesses who maintained that the substance of their message was not only something that they believed and commended to the belief of others, but also something they had seen and heard. In the second place, they invited the closest scrutiny of their claims, because (as Paul said to the younger Agrippa) the events to which they attached saving significance had not been “done in a corner” (Acts 26:26). Nor did they suggest that the faith which they demanded involved a suspension of the critical faculty; on the contrary, they held that it produced a sharpening of the critical faculty; it is the man of faith, the “spiritual man,” who (according to Paul) is best able to pass judgment on all things (1 Cor. 2:15).

The New Testament affords no support to the widely entertained view that there is an essential tension between criticism and faith. We, for our part, are all too acutely aware of such a tension, but the New Testament encourages us to believe that the tension will disappear when our faith is more fully instructed and our criticism more wisely guided. There is something unsatisfactory in the situation of a theological professor (for example) who adopts a basically different attitude to the Bible when he preaches in church on Sunday morning from that which he adopts when he lectures in the classroom on Monday morning. That two quite different techniques are called for in the two places is obvious; but the wholly committed preacher who presents the Jesus of the Gospels to a Sunday congregation as the one and only Saviour cannot lecture on the Gospels to his students on Monday as if Jesus were of no more personal concern to himself or his hearers than Julius Caesar. Those who desire to know Christ “after the flesh,” to regard him “from a human point of view” (as the RSV puts it), objectively and dispassionately, will find disappointingly little material for their purpose in the New Tstament, for the New Testament writers were not concerned to give such a detached portrayal of Christ. And the Christ with whom the New Testament critic and exegete finds himself confronted is the Christ who is presented in these writings from faith to faith, and not until he sees Christ from the standpoint of faith will he begin to understand what the New Testament is about.

But when that happens, he will find that his faith imposes no inhibitions on his critical study of these writings. On the contrary, convinced as he is that all truth is God’s truth, and that “we cannot do anything against the truth, but only for the truth” (2 Cor. 13:8), he can joyfully press the most rigorous critical investigations to their logical conclusion. The very fact of his basic sympathy with the New Testament writers enables him to do this the more effectively.

For example, he examines the four Gospels with their presentation of Christ. They are anonymous documents, although the traditional ascription of authorship in respect of all four will not be dismissed out of hand. One of them makes a direct claim to be based on eyewitness evidence, and a good case can be made out for tracing the testimony of eyewitnesses in some parts at least of the others. Their interdependence at a number of points, and their independence at others, combine to present him with a problem in literary relationships that calls for a solution in accordance with the relevant evidence. Some discussion of this very matter has appeared in recent months in CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Let me say in this regard that there is no a priori reason for holding one Gospel to be earlier and another later, for holding one to be a source of another and the latter to be dependent on the former. Nor can such questions be decided on statistical grounds alone. If Gospel A reproduces x per cent of the substance of Gospel B, it must be equally true that Gospel B reproduces y per cent of Gospel A. And the area of common agreement may result not from direct dependence one way or the other but from their dependence on a common source. Which direction the true solution lies has to be determined by the exercise of critical judgment after all the relevant data have been marshalled. And the wise critic will regard Q, L, M et hoc genus omne as working hypotheses, not as objects of faith; unlike the persons satirized many years ago by Ronald Knox, he will remember that the real documents are the four Gospels and will not be tempted to “trust the watchfulness of Blessed Q.” But in so far as the literary criticism of the Gospels enables him to envisage something of the way in which the story of Jesus was transmitted in the years preceding A.D. 60, it plays a useful part.

CONTEMPORARY FORM CRITICISM

Nowadays, however, it is not literary criticism but form criticism that seems to hold more promise of fruitful results. It must be pointed out that there is nothing necessarily subversive about form criticism in itself; if in some scholars’ hands it has appeared to lead to very skeptical conclusions, it will be found that these conclusions owe much more to the presuppositions of certain form critics than to the essential methods of form criticism. The outstanding service which form criticism has rendered is its demonstration that, no matter how we classify our Gospel material in order to subject it to critical scrutiny, no matter how far back into the oral period we press our research, the Jesus whom we meet is always the Sent One of God.

That the oral gospel preceded the written Gospels calls for no proof. And it is not only by the methods of form criticism that we can discern what that oral gospel was. Sufficient traces of it have been left in the New Testament Epistles and in the speeches of Acts to give us a rather clear impression of its main thrust. From the beginning, the story of Jesus was told as the consummating act in the history of God’s salvation. When Bible history, the history of salvation, is said to be different from other history, that is not to say that the things recorded in the history of salvation did not really happen, but that they cannot be fully verified by the ordinary canons of historical study. That Jesus of Nazareth was crucified under Pontius Pilate is a statement which the historian can verify by his customary methods; that he died for his people’s sins (as the apostolic preaching affirms) in the last resort can be verified only by those who have received forgiveness of sins through faith in him. That the tomb in which his crucified body was placed was empty on the third day thereafter is something which could have been verified at the time by anyone who cared to examine it; that he was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father is something which was verified in the experience of those to whom he manifested himself alive after his passion, and something which is still verified in the experience of those who know the spiritual power which comes through their sharing in his resurrection life. The apostolic preaching, the kerygma, which forms the kernel of the New Testament account of Christ, affirms both the things which the historian can verify and those which, as historian, he cannot verify. It proclaims events and interpretation together, but the event is real event and the interpretation is true interpretation.

While the form in which much of the Gospel material has been preserved may be explained in terms of a life-setting in the primitive Church, the material itself demands a life setting in the Palestinian ministry of Jesus. This is becoming increasingly clear with the widening frontiers of knowledge. The late C. C. Torrey’s exaggerated advocacy of original Aramaic Gospels should not blind us to the Aramaic substratum beneath all four Greek Gospels and their posited sources. The discoveries at Qumran promise background for our Gospels to an extent not dreamed of, with the result that features of the Gospels take on fresh significance.

The believing scholar should lead the quest for fuller understanding of the fundamental documents of our faith; he is the last man to be uneasy lest inconvenient facts should come to light. Where God’s revelation is in view, no facts are inconvenient.

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

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