First Friday after Pentecost
Lectionary Texts:
2 Corinthians 2:14-3:6
Mark 2:18-20
Our new dog Roxie is here. So far she is great. Thanks to the two of you who texted your support, both for the name Roxie.
When I was going through Divinity School and Graduate School back in the late 60's and early 70's, Biblical Studies was entirely historical-critical method. Historical-critical (H-C) method is too complex to explain briefly in a blog. But he are some essentials. The Bible is studied in the same ways a scholar would study any other ancient literature, e.g. Homer's Odyssey, Plato's Republic, Herodotus's History of the Persian Wars. What were the writer's sources? How reliable are the sources? How reliable is the writer? How many decades or centuries are the earliest manuscripts from the actual writing. Does the author tell of mythological events? Doe the author tell miracle stories?
The H-C scholar works within historical scientific rational thinking. Only those things which can be demonstrated scientifically can be accepted as historical. Divine intervention of any sort defies the ability of the historian to measure or quantify. Some H-C scholars, including Christian ones, say that miracles, or perhaps some miracles, may or may not have happened. We can't say. Miracles lie beyond the historians realm of examination. Others, non-believers, simply say that miracles didn't happen, can't happen, and won't happen. Jesus lived as a man on earth, was crucified and died. He was not resurrected. The miracle stories are made up.
Moreover, when there is a long period between the writing of a story and the earliest extant manuscript, we can not trust that the story was passed down accurately, much less whether the story was something that actually happened. We need other corroborating evidence. Are there other accounts of the same event? Is there corroborating archaeological evidence. The narrative account, be it Biblical or non-Biblical is not to be trusted without other evidence. In archaeology this view is sometimes called minimalism. For example, ancient Egyptian literature never mentions Hebrews being in Egypt; therefore, they were never there. The Exodus never happened. This is the view of many non-believer Biblical Scholars. Professor Bart Ehrman of UNC, for example, holds this view. Believing Christian and Jewish Biblical scholars find the book of Exodus in most basic aspects credible. Moses was a real person. There was a real Exodus.
A problem with H-C, particularly for
Christians, is that it tends to reduce history to very little, and
nothing other than history to of any importance.
By the early 1980's more and more scholars were finding this kind of reductionism to be of little value. Other methods began to gain more following. Literary criticism became much more nuanced and much more useful in understanding the Bible. In the 1970's Brevard Childs of Yale established canonical criticism. Ridiculed then, it is more and more accepted now. Lectio Divina and other ways of reading scripture than staight historical analysis became more important.
The gulf between Divinity Schools and Departments of Religion, especially those in state universities, began to widen. The churches have been mostly removed from these scholarly controversies. They shouldn't be.
Let me say that I'm still very much a historical-critical scholar. You can certainly see that in our Acts study. But I'm learning more and more from other methods that tend to add to the core of faith rather than diminish it.
The most basic question in all this is, "Does God act directly in history." I believe God does. We'll have much more on this in subsequent blogs.
O God who acts,
We are grateful for your actions and you love in history and in our present day lives. Help is to study you more deeply and follow you more faithfully. In the name of Jesus, who rose from the dead.
Faithfully,
Christian
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