On Biblical Criticism and Biblical Authority

On Biblical Criticism and Biblical Authority

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

April, 2017

Recently the members of the Admin Board of the church I serve as pastor spoke with all of the church's people about me, my ministry among them, and my pending resignation, currently set to become effective at the end of May. They reported to me what people said, and I am in the process of discerning whether or not to withdraw my resignation. In particular, the Board passed on to me some things that people told them were strengths that I have and also concerns or questions some of them have about me and my ministry. I am not going to respond to all of those things that they said were questions or concerns. I find some of those comments to be valid and, frankly, some of them to be misunderstandings or things I just disagree with. Two of them, however, are I think so foundational for my faith and my ministry that I need to explain my convictions concerning them more fully and clearly than perhaps I have done in the past. The notes the Board gave me say that someone, or perhaps more than one person, wants more “consideration in biblical criticism” and said that I “question the Bible’s authority.” Biblical criticism and biblical authority are of course issues of great importance to any Christians. For a fuller exposition of my views on biblical criticism and biblical authority read Part One, Approaching the Bible, of my book Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians. Read especially Stops 1 and 11 of that first Part of the book. Here I will give a somewhat condensed overview of some of the issues in that book and my view of the Bible and it’s authority. At the end of this piece I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs from that book. I know that my views on this foundational Christian issue differ in some significant ways from the views some of the people of the church hold. Nonetheless, my views are solidly grounded in the best contemporary biblical scholarship. I have come to those views through years of studying the Bible, preaching from it, and writing about it. The question of biblical authority is so foundational for any Christian faith that if my church and I are to continue our life together as pastor and parish, people need to know where I stand and must be fully willing to have me as their pastor knowing that I view the Bible differently than at least some of them do. So here, in relative brevity, are my views on the nature of the Bible, of biblical criticism, and of the Bible’s authority for us Christians.

The Bible is of course vitally important to us Christians, but why is that so? The Bible is of central importance for Christianity because it is our book unlike any other book is our book. It contains the foundational stories of our faith. It is the book to which Christians have looked for many, many centuries for information about God and about Jesus, for moral teaching, for comfort and consolation, and (unfortunately to a lesser extent) for challenge. It is the book without which Christianity could not exist because it is the only book that gives us those foundational stories and information. Christianity is inconceivable without it. I rarely if ever preach on anything other than passages from the Bible. The Bible can be and sometimes is inspiring. Christians have found connection with God through it for a very long time. It is the one book we cannot do without.

All that being said and truly meant, there are significant questions around what the Bible actually is, where it came from, and how it is authoritative (or not) for Christian people. Here is what I understand to be the traditional answers to those questions. Those answers surely are what at least some of you believe about the Bible. It is, after all, what the church universal has taught for a very long time. This view of the Bible says that the Bible has authority because of its source, because of where it came from or even who its author is. Christians traditionally believe that the Bible has authority because it comes more or less directly from God. Most Christians view the Bible as something more than human. Yes, they say, it has human authors; but those authors were working directly under the inspiration of God the Holy Spirit. The Bible, most Christians believe, is divinely inspired in the inception of everything in it.

Belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible comes in two basic forms. Along with Marcus Borg I have called those two forms the hard and soft versions of divine inspiration. The hard version of divine inspiration of the Bible holds, in effect, that God wrote the Bible. Yes, God had human scribes who wrote down what God inspired them to write down. Yet in this view, because the words of the Bible come directly from God, when we say the Bible is the word of God we mean essentially that the Bible is the words of God. The hard view of divine inspiration of the Bible is essentially the same as the orthodox Muslim view of the Koran. The words are God’s. God gave them to humans (or in the case of the Koran to one human) to write down and pass on to the people. Because in this view God wrote the Bible, the Bible has and can have nothing in it that is not literally true; and it can contain no contradictions.

The soft view of divine inspiration of the Bible also asserts that the Bible has authority because it comes from God, although in this view it comes somewhat less directly from God than the hard view insists that it does. The soft view of divine inspiration says that the human authors of the Bible’s various parts worked under divine inspiration; but they were human, and because they were human some error found its way into the texts that they wrote. For this view, the things in the Bible that are accurate come from God, the things in the Bible that are inaccurate come from the book’s human authors. Thus for the soft view the Bible does contain some errors and some contradictions, something the hard view must and does deny. I do not accept either version of belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible. I believe it to be a fully human creation. I am convinced that both versions of divine inspiration present insurmountable problems that make accepting either of them impossible.

I’ll start with the hard version. Like I said, the hard version of divine inspiration of the Bible must believe that there are no errors and no contradictions in the Bible. Yet the Bible is undeniably full of assertions that are not correct, and it is full of contradictions. I’ll give just a few examples. Did God create the world in seven days as in Genesis 1 or in one day as in Genesis 2? Did God tell Noah to take one pair of every kind of animal into the ark as at Genesis 6:19, or did God tell Noah to take one pair of every unclean animal into the ark but to take seven pairs of every clean animal into the ark as at Genesis 7:2? It can’t be both. There must be some explanation of this contradiction, and that explanation can’t be divine inspiration. The book of Joshua says that Joshua stopped the movement of the sun across the sky so that he would have a longer day to fight his enemies. We know that’s impossible even though the author of the book of Joshua didn’t. The sun doesn’t move across the sky as it appears to, rather the earth rotates on its axis giving the impression that the sun moves across the sky. If the earth were suddenly to stop rotating inertia would cause everything on it to go flying off into outer space. So no, Joshua did not stop the sun from moving across the sky. Some human author, and not God, said that he did. Did God really tell King Saul to kill every living thing, men, women, children, and animals, among the Amalekites, then take the kingship of Israel away from him when he didn’t do it? The God I know and love would never do that. It just didn’t happen the way the Bible says it did. Does God reward righteousness with material blessings and punish unrighteousness with curses in this life as Deuteronomy insists? Or does suffering happen even to righteous people as it does in Job? It can’t be both. There are contradictions in the New Testament too. Were the circumstances of Jesus’ birth so remarkable that any Gospel must begin with them, as in Matthew and Luke, or were those circumstances so ordinary and unremarkable as not to be worth mentioning, as in Mark and every other New Testament book except Matthew and Luke? Was Jesus born in a house where Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem as in Matthew? Or was he born in a stable in Bethlehem where Mary and Joseph did not live but to which they had traveled as in Luke? It can’t be both. On the cross did Jesus say “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” as in Mark? Or did he say “It is finished” as in John? Those two different accounts of Jesus’ last words present radically different visions of who Jesus is and what he is about, but they’re both in the New Testament. Both visions may be important and express Christological truth, but the words are clearly different. These things in the Bible along with a great many others make belief in the hard version of divine inspiration simply impossible for me to accept. I do not accept it, and I never have.

What about the soft version of belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible? For that version it is easy to ascribe what appear to us to be errors and contradictions to the human authors of the Bible not to God. The soft version of divine inspiration, however, presents this insurmountable problem: If some things in the Bible are true and come from God, and other things in the Bible are false and come from humans, we must have some criterion for distinguishing between the true, divine statements and the false, human ones. How do we know what is true and comes from God and what is false and comes from a human author? It is easy to come up with criteria for making that distinction. For example, anything that is scientifically impossible, like Joshua making the sun stand still in the sky, must come from a human author, one who lived in a pre-scientific world and did not know the scientific truths that we know.

That’s one’s pretty easy, but what about more profound things about which we must make a decision, things like the nature of God and what God wants from God’s people? There are lots of criteria we could adopt for making that distinction. We could adopt the criterion of love. Anything in the Bible that speaks of God’s love for creation is divinely inspired and comes from God, and anything that speaks of hatred and condemnation of God’s people is human error. Or we could adopt the criterion of the law. Anything that is consistent with Torah law is divinely inspired and comes from God, while anything that contradicts Torah law is human error. Some Jewish people apply that criterion to their understanding of the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament. We could use the criterion of judgment when discerning the nature of God. Anything in the Bible that depicts God as a God of judgment and punishment is divinely inspired and anything that contradicts that understanding of God is human error. Or we could flip that one around and say that anything in the Bible that speaks of God as a God of grace and forgiveness is divinely inspired and anything that contradicts that understanding is human error. Or we could adopt a criterion of works righteousness. Under this criterion anything in the Bible that says we are saved by what we do or what we believe is divinely inspired, and anything that contradicts that notion is human error. Or we could flip that one around and say that anything in the Bible that speaks of salvation through God’s unmerited grace is divinely inspired and anything that contradicts that notion is human error. All of these standards and a great many others could be used as criteria for deciding what in the Bible is divinely inspired and what is human error. It’s easy to find Bible verses to support all of them.

Because under the soft view of biblical inspiration we must adopt some criterion for making the distinction between divine truth and human error, the question arises of how we are to determine which criterion to use. Which criterion out of all the possibilities the Bible gives us is the correct one? There simply is no answer to that question beyond personal preference. We may experience some parts of the Bible as divinely inspired, and many Christians do; but our personal experience of divine inspiration cannot be projected onto the Bible as establishing some kind of objective divine inspiration. There simply is no objective standard for choosing a criterion for distinguishing between divine truth and human error in the Bible. Because there is no such criterion for making that distinction, the soft version of biblical inspiration is no more acceptable to me than is the hard version. I do not accept it any more than I accept the hard version of divine inspiration.

My approach to the Bible is in the first place (though not in the only place) scholarly and critical. I am not only a seminary trained pastor. I am a professionally trained historian, albeit not in biblical studies. Having scholarly training myself, I cannot and will not reject or ignore the findings of modern biblical scholarship. So let me give a brief explanation of what modern biblical scholarship is. That study is “critical,” and the first thing to understand about “critical” here is that “critical” doesn’t necessarily mean “being critical of” in the sense of disliking or finding to be wanting in some respect. Rather, it means approaching the texts of the Bible with all of the analytical skills and methods available to us. It means beginning with the proposition that before it is anything else the Bible is a collection of ancient documents. It means approaching the Bible first of all with the mind rather than the heart. It means asking all of the important questions that arise about any ancient text as well as those that the biblical texts themselves present to us. It means approaching the Bible with no a priori assumptions about what it is or what it says. It gives the biblical texts no status different from the status of any ancient text. It does not assume that the Bible is divinely inspired or that it is in any way exempt from critical scholarly study because of something about its origin or for any other reason.

Modern biblical criticism in this sense is an immensely complex field of study. It is complex in large part because of the antiquity of the biblical texts and because those texts are themselves quite complex. Critical study of the Bible begins with the biblical texts as we have them, but even determining what those texts actually are is a complicated matter. We all read the Bible in translation. Biblical scholars may use the same translations the rest of us use; but they also want to know just what ancient manuscripts of the various biblical texts exist, and they want to know what the original language of those manuscripts, primarily ancient Hebrew and a language called koine Greek, actually says. So biblical criticism starts with a study of ancient languages and of the most ancient copies of the texts that still exist. That study reveals, among other things, that there are significant linguistic issues in reading the texts in their original language, especially with the Hebrew texts of the Christian Old Testament. Any decent English translation of those texts will include translators notes that either give alternative translations or that say that the meaning of the Hebrew is uncertain. Biblical Hebrew had been a dead language for over two thousand years before modern Israel resurrected Hebrew as a spoken language, so it is not surprising that there are words and expressions the meaning of which has been lost. Biblical criticism discovers that truth and lives with it even if typical churchgoers want a certainty about the texts that the scholarship cannot provide. It also turns out that no original manuscripts of any of the biblical texts exist. The oldest ones we have date from at least a few centuries after the texts contained in them were originally written. Biblical criticism says that the best we can do is live with those manuscripts which, old as they may be, are not as old as the texts in question.

Biblical criticism then wants to know what the texts themselves tell us about themselves. When were they written? Who wrote them? Why did someone write them at all? Biblical scholars read the texts very, very closely and carefully. They make (or at least they should make) no assumptions about what is in them or what they say. They notice a great many things about the texts. They note the language used and note when it changes within a text. They note changes in theological perspective within a text or between texts. They look for what historical events that historians can discover from other sources are mentioned or reflected in the texts. No respectable scholar will overlook or ignore anything in a biblical text just because it does not fit with some preconceived idea of what a text says. Scholars love digging into apparent contradictions within a biblical text to try to discover why a particular contradiction is in the text in the first place. They use what they find to try to reconstruct the editorial history of a text, and some of the biblical texts have very complex editorial histories indeed.

Biblical scholars know that all of the texts of the Bible were written a very long time ago in cultures very different from ours. So critical study of the Bible extends beyond the Bible itself to a study of the worlds in and for which the biblical texts were written. Scholars ask question like: What were the significant historical events of the world that produced a text? What were the cultural assumptions of that world? How did the people of that world understand the universe, human nature, and a great many other things? If those things are different from how the modern world sees the same things (and they are), what do those differences mean for how we are to understand a biblical text? Scholars want to know the social, economic, and political issues of the world that produced a biblical text and how those issues are treated in the text. All of this information informs how we are to understand and use any ancient text including the texts of the Bible.

It is of course easy enough to read the Bible with none of the knowledge about it that modern biblical criticism has produced. That’s how most Christians have read it throughout Christian history, but here’s the thing. Once you know some of what modern biblical criticism has discovered about the biblical texts it’s impossible to ignore it. Once you know, for example, that the ancient world conveyed profound truth less by writing essays about it than by telling stories that point to it, you can’t read most of the Bible’s stories as though what they were doing was merely reporting facts. Once you know that the book of Genesis is a relatively late editing together of several more ancient sources you can’t read Genesis without thinking about how the book was created and why the editor of the book as we have it did what he did with those sources. Once you know that Mark is the oldest of the four Gospels and that the authors of both Matthew and Luke used it as one of their sources, who want to know how Matthew and Luke used Mark, what they did to Mark’s accounts, and what other sources they may have had. Once you know that we don’t know who wrote any of the Gospels you struggle with naming their authors Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because you know that those names were attached to those Gospels only long after the Gospels were written. Once you know that history in the ancient world wasn’t done like history is in the modern world, that is, it was done in large part for reasons other than to report factual truth, you can’t read the book of Acts or any other book of the Bible as though it were merely a recitation of historical fact. Once you know that all of the Gospels were written several decades at least after the death of Jesus you can’t help but want to know what those later accounts did with the story of Jesus and why they did it.

Most church people don’t know much about the results of modern biblical criticism, but all of those results are readily available to anyone who bothers to look into them. We can pretend that that information doesn’t exist, but when we do we deny the gift of intellect with which God has created us. I do not and will not ignore what I know of the results of critical study of the Bible. I can be gentle about challenging people’s long-held beliefs about the Bible; but I cannot and will not echo those beliefs when I know them to have been supplanted by good biblical criticism, nor will I keep silent about things that I have learned about the Bible.

So what then is the Bible? It is a magnificent collection of ancient texts by human authors that speak of those authors’ experiences of God and their understandings of who God is and what God wants. Those ancient texts have authority for us not because they come in some way from God but because our Christian tradition decided long ago that these texts and no others are foundational for our faith. Our tradition says these are the texts that are appropriate for use in worship, personal devotion, and study. Our tradition says these texts are foundational for our faith. It does not say, or at least it does not need to say, that these texts come from God in some way different from how any other texts were written. It does not say, or at least it does not need to say, either that there are no errors in these texts or that they contain no contradictions. It says these are our texts. It does not have to say that they are infallible nor that their authority arises from some origin in God that they supposedly have. They are our texts because we have decided that they are our texts and because they have proven their value in the faith and lives of countless people over countless generations.

So how then are we to understand and use the Bible? For me (and for many people today) the Bible is a human product. It is a product of human history. It was written by human beings who lived in particular historical and cultural circumstances. They had particular mindsets and understandings of the nature of reality and of human beings that were determined by their culture just as ours are determined by our culture. They wrote of their experiences of God. They wrote using the literary and cultural norms of their times, norms that were quite different from ours. They expressed their experience of God. They conveyed their beliefs about God to us. Yet the fact that we have made their writings part of the Bible, part of our sacred scripture, does not in itself make them true. Because we have made their writings part of our sacred scripture we must take them seriously. We must not dismiss or contradict them lightly, but neither must we accept them as true simply because they are in the Bible. Our call is not simply to repeat them as if the mere fact that they are in the Bible makes them true. It doesn’t. Our call is to understand them, to discern what is true in them for us, and to live into those truths.

So let me close by giving you the last two paragraphs of Stop 11 of Liberating the Bible, a stop with the title “Inspired?” I think they express my take on the Bible rather well. Don’t worry about my use of the word myth. I mean by it only a story about God and God’s relationship to creation. In Liberating the Bible I wrote:

So in the final analysis what is the Bible? It is a collection of ancient writings that originated not with God but with human beings living in specific historical-cultural-linguistic worlds. Those human beings (unfortunately all of the men as far as we know) wrote of their understandings of God, their experiences of God’s will for them and for all creation. Some of what they wrote still functions as true myth for us. Some of what they wrote speaks powerfully of God to us, and some of it doesn’t. That some of it doesn’t isn’t surprising, nor is it a cause for concern. The people who wrote the various parts of the Bible lived in a world very different from ours. They were pre-modern people, we are post-modern people; and that makes a huge difference. They were pre-scientific people, we are children of the scientific revolution; and that makes a huge difference too. The more surprising thing is that these ancient writings still so often speak mythic truth to us, not that some of these writings don’t.

So let me suggest one more thing about the Bible and what it is for us as we end this first Part of our tour. Let me suggest that you think of the Bible as invitation. The Bible doesn’t dictate truth to us. Rather, the ancient authors say here are the experiences and understandings of some of your ancient forbears in the faith. Generation after generation of faithful Jewish and Christian people have found meaning, hope, comfort, and challenge in these pages. So come on in. Learn what we have to say. Do the difficult work of really understanding our ancient texts on their own terms. Then do your own discernment. We did ours, now you do yours. We hope that what you read here will light your path to God, but we cannot relieve you of your duty to discern God’s truth for you and your world. We don’t all say the same thing. We didn’t all understand God the same way. We didn’t understand the universe and human nature the way you do. But come on in. Learn from us. There is great wisdom here. Learn from us, but don’t just parrot back what we had to say. We invite you not to rote responses and easy answers. We invite you to the hard but sacred work of study and discernment. May God be with you in that work. Amen.