We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

bible_statue

History and Bible: Do They Align?

To begin, it is significant that when Jesus and the authors of the NT referred to their sacred writings as “God-breathed,” they were referring to the writings that had been handed down to them. So too, the text that the Church has always confessed to be “God-breathed” has been the canon she received. Never has the “God-breathed” nature of the text been affixed to oral or written versions of the biblical material that preceded the written text. For this and other reasons, I find that the “God-breathed” status and divine authority of Scripture attaches to its final canonical form. This alone is the text we are called to wrestle with, with the ultimate goal of discerning how any given passage bears witness to the faithful and merciful covenantal God who was definitively revealed in Christ.

This means, among other things, that our estimation of a passage’s “God-breathed” nature and/or its divine authority should not hinge upon anything like historical-critical considerations. While source and redaction criticism may at times shed light on the pre-history of a text that may be relevant to its exegesis, neither these nor any other branch of biblical criticism should ever be allowed to affect our estimation of the final form of a passage. The fact that a portion of Scripture may have had a different meaning before it assumed the form it has within the canon is largely irrelevant to the contemporary theological task of hearing God speak through the final form of Scripture.

Moreover, to affirm that the canonical form of a text is “God breathed” is to affirm that its authority as well as its interpretation for the Church is not contingent upon how it does or does not conform to so-called “objective history” (historisch) – viz. to any particular scholarly reconstruction of “what actually happened.”

I am persuaded that we are called to embrace the faith conviction that each passage is trustworthy for the divine purposes for which it was “breathed.” If one happens to be led by the available evidence to the conviction that a particular passage does not correspond to “what actually happened,” then, in my view, this simply indicates that corresponding to “objective history” must not have been part of the theological purpose that God intended for that passage.

We are failing to read biblical narratives as they were originally intended to be read when we read them through the grid of how they do or do not cohere with “objective history.” For in this case we are importing into our reading of the narrative modern concerns that are alien to the text, rather than allowing the text to communicate its concerns to us. To read Scripture faithfully, we must read it with the assumption that the meaning of the canonical passage is found in the text, not outside of it in the way it relates to (someone’s reconstructed version of) “objective history.”

To be sure, I grant that attempting to demonstrate a correlation between biblical accounts and “objective history” may sometimes be highly significant for apologetic purposes. Most importantly, I am convinced that the intellectual plausibility of the Christian faith hangs, to a significant degree, on our ability to demonstrate the general historical reliability of the Gospel portraits of Jesus, which I, along with Paul Eddy, argue for in The Jesus Legend. But as it concerns the call for Jesus-followers to hear and obey God’s voice through Scripture, it’s my conviction that all that matters is the narrative in its final canonical form.

I should add that, while I believe it is important for apologetic purposes to anchor the Gospel portraits of Jesus in verifiable history, I have become convinced that it is apologetically unwise, to say the least, to leverage the credibility of the Christian faith as a whole on the historical veracity of the biblical narrative as a whole. There is no reason the credibility of the faith should be leveraged on a conservative evaluation of historical evidence for every aspect of the biblical narrative, and, in any event, the conservative perspective is, in some instances, very hard to defend in light of the archeological evidence. The more important point for our present purposes, however, is that there is absolutely no reason to tether the traditional faith-affirmation that all canonical texts are “God-breathed” to a particular way of relating any or all of these texts to a scholarly reconstruction of actual history.

Image by byronv2 via Flickr.

Related Reading

God in Our Image

zen Sutherland via Compfight We came across this piece written by Jonathan Storment earlier this month and we had to share it here. The title of the piece is Everyday Idolatry: My God. He does a great job of outlining the ways that we twist God into whatever we need him to be to prop up…

Why Bart Ehrman Doesn’t Have to Ruin Your Christmas (Or Your Faith) Part 2

This is the second of several videos Greg put together to refute Bart Ehrman’s claims published in the article What Do We Really Know About Jesus? If you missed it, you can catch the first installment here.

When the Bible Becomes an Idol

In John 5, we read about Jesus confronting some religious leaders saying, “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life” (John 5:39-40). These leaders thought they possessed life by…

What To Do With the Violent God of the Old Testament

For eight years Greg has been researching for and writing the book entitled The Crucifixion of the Warrior God. In it he confronts the commonly held idea that the Old Testament depictions of God behaving violently should be held alongside of and equal to the God revealed through Jesus dying on the cross. But if the Old Testament…

5 Ways the Bible Supports Open Theism

Open Theism refers to the belief that God created a world in which possibilities are real. It contrasts with Classical Theism which holds that all the facts of world history are eternally settled, either by God willing them so (as in Calvinism) or simply in God’s knowledge (as in Arminianism). Open Theists believe God created humans and…

When God Endorsed Polygamy

We often find God acting as if he supports things we know, by other means, that he does not. For example, though his ideal was monogamy, it’s clear in the biblical narrative that, once God decided to permit men to acquire multiple wives and concubines, he was not above bearing the sin of his people…