A careful analysis of the issues involved in biblical criticism is indispensable for evangelicals who champion Scripture alone as the supreme and final authority in faith and life. Such an analysis will reveal that biblical criticism is often negatively affected by unexamined philosophical presuppositions that are brought to the text by the critic. One such presupposition is antisupernaturalism, the a priori assumption that all events must have a purely natural explanation, which is a philosophy clearly inimical to the theistic worldview presupposed by the Bible. One’s philosophical presuppositions set a line of demarcation for the way one approaches biblical criticism. Positive higher criticism begins with a supernaturalistic presupposition and seeks to discover truth as revealed in the Bible. Negative criticism assumes a naturalistic worldview and seeks to determine truth, including determining whether the canonical books of the Bible are divinely revealed truth in the first place. 1 Antisupernaturalistic presuppositions that gained increasing favor in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries eventually helped to pave the way for the negative views of the Bible that have been enshrined in liberal scholarship for the last 150 years. This paper will briefly trace the development of these presuppositions, show their influence on the Documentary Hypothesis popularized by Julius Wellhausen, then sketch some of the contemporary developments in biblical criticism.
Several preliminary observations should be made about methods of biblical criticism. First, higher criticism, which deals with the source of the text, should be distinguished from lower criticism which deals with the text itself. 2 Also, the types of historical higher criticism should be distinguished. Commentator John Sailhamer notes that literary criticism “attempts to establish criteria of unity or disunity within a text in order to determine the ‘original’ shape of a biblical text.” 3 Source criticism, closely related to literary criticism, seeks “the reconstruction of a complete document from the various literary strands or fragments in the present canonical text. Once isolated, these earlier documents become the focus of exegesis and theology.” 4 Fo rm criticism “attempts to reconstruct the archetypical literary patterns that lie behind the present biblical texts.” 5 The Wellhausian hypothesis discussed below is based upon form criticism, a method which was developed and used by the twentieth-century existentialist Rudolf Bultmann in his attempt to “demythologize” the Bible. Traditioncriticism attempts to uncover the traditions that were passed down orally before being committed to written form. R edaction criticism “seeks to distinguish the various editions that a single text or a single composition may have experienced.” 6 Finally, recent attention has been given to compositional criticism, “the attempt to describe the semantics of the arrangement of source material in the biblical texts” with a goal towards describing “the compositional strategy of an entire book or text.” 7 Sailhamer observes: “One of the advantages of compositional criticism is that its holistic approach allows the biblical exegete to view the Bible much the same way as it was viewed before the rise of historical criticism and thus to address anew and afresh many classical problems in dogmatics and systematic theology.” 8
As authors Norman Geisler and William Nix note, until the Reformation the Church had been generally committed to the canonical Scriptures as the inerrant, infallible, inspired word of God, though this commitment did not go without occasional challenge . 9 In the sixteenth century, however, two movements, one religious and the other intellectual, helped to initiate an academic climate which led ultimately to the zenith of man’s exaltation of reason over revelation in the nineteenth century. Philosopher Richard Popkin explains: “The intellectual crisis brought on by the Reformation coincided in time with the rediscovery and revival of the arguments of the ancient Greek sceptics. In the sixteenth century, with the discovery of Sextus’s writings, there is a revival of interest and concern with ancient scepticism, and with the application of its views to the problems of the day.” 10 The breakup of Rome’s ecclesiastical authority coupled with the revival of academic skepticism helped to produce a more favorable climate for biblical criticism, like the rejection of Mosaic Pentateuchal authorship by Andreas Rudolf Bodenstein, a contemporary of Martin Luther. Luther himself was suspicious of certain elements within the Bible because they did not seem consistent with his Christology or his radical emphasis on grace. 11
Between the Reformation and the flowering of liberalism in the nineteenth century, the most important theological movement was Pietism, a philosophy of life which stressed an intensely personal Christianity. 12 Harold O. J. Brown explains that while the original Pietists were orthodox in their doctrine, they “made religion so much a personal matter that questions about doctrine often degenerated into mere questions of personal opinion.” 13 Other non-theistic philosophies followed, such as deism, materialism, naturalism, skepticism, agnosticism, romanticism, and idealism. Ironically, though seeking to provide a philosophical defense of Christianity , the deists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries helped to open the door for divergent views about the inspiration and authority of Scripture through their excessive reliance upon natural theology. 14
Materialist Francis Bacon (1561-1626) prepared the stage for modern biblical criticism, claiming “that all truth is discovered by induction and known pragmatically.” 15 Another materialist, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1672), “was one of the first modern writers to engage in explicit higher criticism of Scripture.” 16Additionally, Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) employed the philosophical presuppositions of mathematical deduction and blatant antisupernaturalism, which “caused him to define miracles out of existence because they are based on violations of the inviolable laws of nature.” 17 In 1678, Richard Simon, a French priest, published a series of books wherein he applied a strict, rationalistic, and critical approach to studying the Bible, thereby giving birth to the historical-critical method. 18By the late seventeenth century, therefore, all the basic elements of higher critical thought are found in these philosophers who limited the authority of the Bible to purely religious matters. 19
The two eighteenth-century philosophers that had the greatest impact on man’s view of Scripture were David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Hume’s impact lay primarily in his rejection of miracles and his overall skepticism, by which he concluded that the only verifiable types of knowledge were “assertions that involve abstract reasoning – such as mathematics, logic, and statements that are true by definition – or assertions that correspond to empirical data.” 20 Hume’s insistence on the empirical testing of divine revelation “became a chief inspiration for twentieth-century logical positivism and linguistic analysis.” 21 For instance, A. J. Ayer claimed that as an outgrowth of Hume’s skepticism, “all statements of any sort concerning God are nonsense, since they cannot be true by definition or by empirical verification.” 22
Additionally, the epistemology of Kant had a tremendous impact on biblical studies. While Kant agreed with Hume that knowledge begins in the senses, he argued that the mind supplied the categories by which knowledge actually became possible. 23 So while Kant created a synthesis between the empiricists and the rationalists, his “solution” resulted in agnosticism. As Geisler explains: “If one cannot know anything until after it is structured by the a priori forms of sensation (time and space) and the categories of understanding (such as unity and causality), then there is no way to get outside one’s own being and know what it really was before he so formed it. That is, one can know what something is to-him but never what it is in-itself .” 24 Because the mind only knows the appearance of reality, not its actuality, Kant’s epistemology had devastating consequences for metaphysics . Even though Kant advocated living as though God existed, he argued that man could not think that God exists. Thus, the objectivity of divine revelation was rejected. 25
The cold rationalism of the late eighteenth century was answered in the nineteenth by a renewed emphasis on feelings. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was the most important theologian of so-called Romanticism, a highly experiential philosophy that “contended that religion should be based on intuition or feeling. . . which is independent of all dogma.” 26 Religion being nothing more or less than an expression of personal dependence, Schleiermacher had no need for historic doctrines known only by special revelation such as the virgin birth, the Trinity, and the return of Christ.27
Another nineteenth-century philosophy that further eroded confidence in divine propositional revelation was the Idealism of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), who contended that “the [Absolute] Spirit enables man to take religion seriously without taking the facts of revelation too literally.” 28 Taking direct aim at propositional revelation, Hegel claimed “that Bible verses themselves do not yield theological knowledge.” 29 Hegel’s followers included notable Bible critics Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), D.F. Strauss (1808-1874), and F.C. Baur (1792-1860). 30 It was Strauss, in his two-volume series The Life of Jesus (1835-36) , who “applied the principles of Hegelian philosophy to a critical analysis of the Gospels.” 31 Arriving at conclusions that anticipate the twentieth-century existentialism of Bultmann, Strauss contended that Christianity was essentially a myth, but that a remnant of spiritual truth could be retained even if the historical reality of the gospels could never be penetrated. 32
Finally, though evolutionary thought traces its roots to the ancient Greeks, the nineteenth century witnessed the arrival of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. While Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) was not a philosophical work per se, his theory of evolution provided the alleged mechanism by which evolution could be explained. The natural selection hypothesis not only revolutionized the biological world, but also provided “scientific” legitimacy to the evolutionary-based Documentary Hypothesis. Darwin’s theory had devastating consequences for theism, as its naturalistic explanation for the origin of life directly contradicted the supernaturalistic origin asserted by Genesis. Consequently, as noted by Geisler and Nix , the widespread acceptance of evolutionary theory had a profound impact upon the field of biblical criticism: “Before 1860 the concern was with specific problems of special revelation; after that time it centered on the serious question of whether there was any revelation at all.” 33
Jean Astruc (1684-1766), credited with giving birth to Pentateuchal source-criticism proper, “introduced the fact of the divergent use of divine names in Genesis and Exodus as a ‘criterion’ for literary-critical analysis of the Pentateuch.” 34 Though Astruc was attempting a rigorous defense of Mosaic authorship, his resolution to the alleged chronological confusion in Genesis led him to arbitrarily reorganize the text on the basis of the use of Elohim and Jehovah . 35 All passages in which God was referred to as Elohim were placed in one column, while all passages which refer to God as Jehovah were placed in another. Further, passages with repetitive material were placed in a third column and “non-Israelite” material placed in a fourth. The material segregated into these four columns allegedly represented the original documentary sources from which Moses compiled the final form of Genesis. 36Following Astruc, J. G. Eichhorn (1752-1827) suggested “that the means for differentiating between the underlying sources should include diversities of literary style and considerations of words or phrases peculiar to one or the other of the documents previously isolated.” 37 Further developing the multiple-source theory were J. S. Vater and a Scottish Roman Catholic priest named Geddes, both of whom assigned late dates to the final form of the Pentateuch. 38 The work of Vater and W. M. L. DeWette introduced a new epoch in biblical criticism as the Pentateuch was radically fragmented with differing dates assigned to the various groups of fragments.39 The various source theories being developed did not pass without challenge, however, as many students of the Bible, including Old Testament scholar E. W. Hengstenberg (1802-1869), devoted themselves to withstanding the advances of liberalism. 40
The divine-name criterion popularized by Astruc formed the literary basis of the so-called Documentary Hypothesis of Karl Heinrich Graf (1815-1869) and Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), which was developed in the nineteenth-century climate of theological liberalism. Having accepted the antisupernaturalistic presuppositions that had been developing for two centuries in European philosophy, liberalism embraced “a basic shift to the view that the Bible merely contains the Word of God instead of actually being the Word of God.” 41 The Graf-Wellhausen form-criticism hypothesis, borrowing from the Darwinian evolutionary model, rejected Mosaic authorship and asserted a theological development of the Old Testament from simple documents (JEDP) to the complex whole of the Pentateuch. 42 Favoring Hegelian principles of causation and evolution, Wellhausen postulated that Israel’s monotheism was not achieved until the times of the prophets in the eighth century B.C. 43
The basic elements of the Wellhausen-Graf hypothesis, published in Wellhausen’s The Composition of the Hexateuch (1877) and Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (1878) are as follows: (1) Moses did not write the Pentateuch; (2) the Pentateuch was written by several authors over a long period; (3) redactors used four basic document sources: (a) Jehovistic (J), authored in ninth-century B.C.; (b) Elohistic (E), eighth-century B.C.; (c) Deuteronomic (D), seventh-century B.C.; (d) Priestly (P), fifth-century B.C.; (4) the Pentateuch in its final form does not represent accurate patriarchal history but rather the institutions and forms of the Hebrew religion as it is found in its fifth-century B.C. context. R. K. Harrison comments on academia’s acceptance of the Wellhausian hypothesis: “So attractive was the evolutionary concept in literary criticism, as also in biological science, that the source theory of Pentateuchal origins began to prevail over all opposition, however notable or vocal, and was soon entrenched as the only respectable view of the composition of the Pentateuch.” 44
This trend, however, was embraced by liberals mostly as a presupposed ideology that tended to ignore the important findings coming from the growing science of biblical archaeology. Gleason Archer writes that the most basic fallacy of the JEDP theory, that Israel waited until many centuries after the formation of their commonwealth before committing the Torah to written form, was in direct contradiction to the archaeological evidence that was being unearthed at the time. 45Speaking to that exact point , Harrison notes how Wellhausen and his followers completely ignored the discovery of the Tell el-Amarna tablets, a finding which helped debunk the myth held by JEDP theorists that “since writing was only utilized about the time of David, Moses could not possibly have written the Pentateuch even if he had wanted to.” 46 Biblical archaeology continued to uncover evidence that the authors of the Old Testament recorded factual history , a view contrary to the presupposed ideology of the source-critics. The work of archaeologist W.F. Albright (1891-1971) pointed to the confirmation of the substantial historicity of the patriarchal period, 47 a testimony duly noted and utilized in opposition to the JEDP theory by scholars such as Franz Delitzsch (1813-1890), A.H. Sayce (1845-1933), and James Orr (1844-1913). Sayce even abandoned his earlier support for German liberalism as he brought the findings of archaeology to bear upon Old Testament problems. 48 Carl F. Henry points out that so influential were the findings of archaeology that “New Testament critic John A. T. Robinson conceded in Redating the New Testament (1906) that the late critical dating of New Testament books is wholly unpersuasive.” 49 More recently, the discovery of the Ebla tablets in 1974 has lent credible evidence to support the belief in original monotheism, as revealed in the Pentateuch, over and against the evolutionary model embraced by JEDP proponents. 50
In the United States, some of the primary defenders of the traditional view of inspiration came from the Princeton school of theologians, led by Charles Hodge (1797-1878), and Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield (1851-1921). Neo-evangelical authors Jack Rogers and Donald McKim note how Warfield, using an apologetic fundamentally inimical to the Documentary Hypothesis, found himself in constant opposition to the higher critics because he “predicated the authority of the Bible on his ability to prove the traditional apostolic authorship or sanction for each of the books.” 51 Warfield’s primary nemesis was Charles Augustus Briggs, a Presbyterian who attempted to introduce his denomination to the views of German higher criticism. On January 20, 1891, in an address given at Union Theological Seminary, Briggs took issue with, among other things, the traditional belief that “the authenticity of the Bible was founded upon the belief that holy men of old had written the various books of Holy Writ.” 52 This assertion by Briggs, an obvious and direct hit on Warfield’s biblical apologetic, inflamed a controversy over inspiration and authority which led ultimately to the separation of fundamentalists from Princeton Seminary in 1929 under the leadership of J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937).
In the twentieth century, in a renewed effort at “discovering the historical Jesus,” scholars have focused much attention on the gospel narratives. These efforts have been realized in large part through the continued development of form criticism, perhaps best typified in the work of German theologian Rudolf Bultmann (1893-1976). F. David Farnell explains that form criticism dichotomizes historical facts from their interpretive value: “Such a distinction allows for something to be interpretively ‘true’ (history as significance) but not ‘true’ in the sense of being objectively verifiable (history as fact). For Bultmann, no continuity exists between the Jesus of history…and the Christ of faith.” 53 Theologian Paul Tillich agrees, claiming that knowledge of the historical Jesus, as vulnerable as that knowledge is to academic skepticism, cannot serve as an epistemological foundation to explain “the immediate awareness of those who find themselves transformed into the state of faith,” in which “the New Being has conquered the old being.” 54 In other words, the reality of subjective Christian experience is in no way epistemically dependent upon the objective truth of the historical facts allegedly reported in the gospel accounts of the life of Jesus. Faith, therefore, is not dependent upon fact.
Bultmann was committed to “demythologizing” the Bible, or extracting from the pre-scientific form of the New Testament writings an existentialist interpretation that did not tie faith to fact. 55 For instance, to Bultmann, the resurrection of Christ was merely a subjective event which took place in the hearts of the disciples. And as a mere event of faith, consequently, it is not subject to historical verification. 56 Geisler notes, however, that Bultmannianism is diametrically opposed to evangelical theology: “Evangelicals believe that God’s great redemptive acts are spatio-temporal. We believe that the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ are events of space and time. . . . Hence, Evangelicals cannot look at historical or scientific affirmations in Scripture as purely symbolical or mythical.” 57
One of the most strident contemporary critics of the Bultmannian school is Eta Linnemann, an ex-Bultmannian scholar who has come to reject its radical antisupernaturalistic presuppositions. Linnemann converted from liberal to evangelical Christianity in 1977 and has since written several books and articles defending the historicity of the Bible against the radical form critics. 58 She has given particular attention to denying the literary interdependence of the gospels, a theory basically granted as fact among liberals committed to an antisupernatural approach to biblical criticism. Robert W. Yarbrough observes that the reaction to her post-conversion blast against the Bultmannian school was met in the circles of German liberalism primarily with condescension and scorn. And though her scholarship was more favorably received by American evangelicals, some have faulted her for an allegedly over-simplified and non-objective approach to biblical criticism. 59 While Yarborough grants that Linnemann’s theory of gospel non-interdependence may ultimately be unprovable and that her work is sometimes lacking a scholarly tone, he praises her sharp analysis of the current climate of biblical criticism and considers her work an important contribution to biblical scholarship. 60
Judicially employed, biblical criticism can yield a wealth of knowledge about the text and its sources. One must be on guard, however, against unexamined philosophical presuppositions that cast an eye of suspicion on the biblical text for the simple reason that it claims a supernatural origin and records supernatural events. Such a priori philosophical commitments are metaphysically and epistemologically unwarranted and inevitably undermine the authority and integrity of divine revelation, as evidenced in the development of radical higher criticism. The evangelical scholar seeking to champion the supreme authority of the word of God must not only be wary of the fruits of such criticism, but also be aware of and prepared to answer its antisupernaturalistic bias.
1: Norman L. Geisler, “Bible Criticism,” in Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999), 88.
2: Geisler, “Bible Criticism,” 86.
3: John H. Sailhamer, Introduction to Old Testament Theology: A Canonical Approach (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 88.
4: Ibid., 90-91.
5: Ibid., 91.
6: Ibid., 99.
7: Ibid., 272.
8: Ibid.
9: Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, rev. and exp. (Chicago: Moody Press, 1986), 99-111.
10: Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, rev.ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), xii.
11: Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture: Theology and Historical-Critical Method from Spinoza to Kaseman (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 15-19.
12: Harold O. J. Brown, Heresies: Heresy and Orthodoxy in the History of the Church (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1988), 361-63.
13: Brown, 385.
14: Geisler and Nix, 136.
15: Ibid.
16: Ibid., 137.
17: Ibid., 138.
18: Geisler, “Bible Criticism,” 86.
19: Geisler and Nix, 138.
20: Gary R. Habermas, “Skepticism: Hume,” in Biblical Errancy: An Analysis of its Philosophical Roots, Norman L. Geisler, ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1981), 32.
21: Ibid., 35.
22: Ibid., 37.
23: Norman L. Geisler, Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1976), 16.
24: Ibid.
25: Geisler and Nix, 141.
26: Ibid., 142-3.
27: Ibid., 143.
28: Ibid., 144.
29: Winfried Corduan, “Transcendentalism: Hegel,” in Errancy, 97.
30: Ibid., 90-3.
31: Ibid., 92.
32: Ibid.
33: Geisler and Nix, 133.
34: R. K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969), 11-12.
35: Ibid., 12.
36: Ibid.
37: Ibid., 14.
38: Ibid., 14-15.
39: Samuel Fallows, ed., “Pentateuch,” in The Popular and Critical Bible Encyclopedia and Scriptural Dictionary , vol. 3, (Chicago: Howard-Severance, 1910), 1304.
40: Harrison, Introduction, 17.
41: Geisler and Nix, 146.
42: F. David Farnell, “Philosophical and Theological Bent of Historical Criticism,” in The Jesus Crisis: The Inroads of Historical Criticism into Evangelical Scholarship, ed. Robert L. Thomas and F. David Farnell (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 1998), 110.
43: Harrison, Introduction, 22.
44: R. K. Harrison, “Historical and Literary Criticism of the Old Testament,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, vol. 1, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979), 240.
45: Gleason L. Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), 51-2.
46: Harrison, Introduction, 509.
47: Geisler, “Albright, William F.,” in BECA, 14.
48: Harrison, Introduction, 29.
49: Carl F. Henry, “The Authority of the Bible,” in The Origin of the Bible, ed. Philip Wesley Comfort (Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, 1992), 17.
50: Geisler, “Ebla Tablets,” in BECA, 208.
51: Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 334.
52: Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976), 189.
53: Farnell, “Form Criticism and Tradition Criticism,” 187.
54: Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology , vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 113-14; quoted in The Christian Theology Reader, Alister E. McGrath, ed., reprint, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 71-2.
55: Rudolf Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” in H. W. Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth (London: SPCK, 1953), 1-16; quoted in McGrath, 71-2.
56: Geisler, “Myth and Miracles,” in BECA, 479.
57: Norman L. Geisler, “Inductivism, Materialism, and Rationalism: Bacon, Hobbes, and Spinoza,” in Biblical Errancy, 21.
58: See Eta Linnemann, Historical Criticism of the Bible: Methodology or Ideology, trans. Robert W. Yarbrough (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990); and Eta Linnemann, Is There a Synoptic Problem? trans. Robert W. Yarbrough (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992).
59: Robert W. Yarbrough, “Eta Linnemann: Friend or Foe of Scholarship,” in Jesus Crisis, 166.
60: Ibid., 180.