Biblical criticism

Biblical criticism is the umbrella term for the scholarly methods used to study the Bible’s text, composition, and historical background. It divides into two broad kinds: textual, or “lower,” criticism, which compares manuscripts to recover the most reliable wording of the text, and higher criticism, which asks questions of authorship, sources, dating, and how a book reached its final form. Reformed theology has treated the two very differently: textual criticism is a largely settled, technical discipline, while higher criticism grew out of Enlightenment rationalism and has often carried with it a denial of Scripture’s divine origin.¹

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession does not use the term “biblical criticism,” a nineteenth- and twentieth-century academic label coined long after the confession was drafted. It does state the doctrinal ground on which later Reformed engagement with the historical-critical method stands: Scripture is “the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience,”² and its authority “is to be believed” and obeyed “not because of the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself).”³ Where a critical method’s own working assumptions require setting that authority aside before the text can be examined, the confession’s own doctrine of Scripture is the standard by which Reformed theology judges the method, not the reverse.

Biblical Basis

Scripture presents itself as more than a human literary artifact open to purely naturalistic explanation: “All Scripture is breathed out by God” (2 Tim. 3:16), and “no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:20-21). A method that begins by setting aside the text’s claim to divine authorship is making an assumption of its own, not avoiding one.

Historical Development

Enlightenment origins

Higher criticism’s rise is bound up with the wider Enlightenment turn in theology. Craig Carter traces the “liberal project” that reshaped nineteenth-century Christian thought to two sources: “historical criticism of the Bible stemming from Spinoza and… revisionist theology stemming from Schleiermacher.”⁴ Herman Bavinck locates the same period as the point at which rationalist philosophy, unable to withstand Kant’s critique of its own foundations, turned inward: Schleiermacher “attempted to save faith and the doctrine of faith by restricting them to feelings… specifically the ‘feeling of absolute dependence.’”¹ The result, on Bavinck’s account, was that “Holy Scripture is robbed of its divine authority by historical criticism,” with a corresponding loss of vitality in religious life more broadly.¹

Pentateuchal source criticism

The Old Testament front of this development is Julius Wellhausen’s source- critical reconstruction of the Pentateuch, commonly labeled the “Documentary Hypothesis” or JEDP theory: the proposal that Genesis through Deuteronomy was compiled from four older, identifiable written sources rather than substantially authored by Moses. John Oswalt notes that Wellhausen’s arrangement of these sources “largely reigned supreme” until source-critical scholarship itself began to fracture along competing lines in the 1970s and 1980s.⁵ Among the rival proposals Oswalt engages is Frank Cross’s suggestion that Israel’s prose historical narrative arose from the rewriting of an earlier oral epic poem, on the model of how Homer’s epics were later put into prose; Oswalt argues the comparative evidence offered for this transition, and for Martin Noth’s proposed “amphictyonic league” as its preserving institution, does not hold up.⁵

The quest for the historical Jesus

The New Testament analogue to Pentateuchal source criticism is the “quest for the historical Jesus,” which applies historical-critical method to the Gospels to reconstruct a Jesus distinct from the Gospels’ own portrait. Michael Kruger cites J. D. Crossan, a founding member of the Jesus Seminar, conceding that the “stunning diversity” of conclusions reached by historical Jesus research is “an academic embarrassment,” suspecting that the whole enterprise is often “a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.”⁶ Kruger argues from this that resting the New Testament canon’s authority on the conclusions of the historical-critical method places it on “a tendentious foundation.”⁶

Opposing Views

Historical-critical scholarship in its mainstream, academic form generally proceeds from a naturalistic starting point, treating the Bible as a human document to be explained, in the first instance, by the same literary and historical methods used on any other ancient text, prior to and apart from any claim about divine authorship. Bavinck states the Reformed objection to this starting point directly: “Our acceptance of any revelation is determined by our worldview; what is decisive here is not historical criticism but self-criticism, not science but faith.”⁷ On this view, Reformed theology does not object to asking those historical questions (authorship, date, sources, composition). It objects to the worldview a critic brings to answering them.

Reformed and evangelical engagement with these same historical questions does not reject them wholesale, but denies the naturalistic starting point is neutral or required. Carter connects the nineteenth- century “triumph of the historical-critical method in Germany” to what he calls “two great heresies in twentieth-century theology”: treating the Law as a decline from the “higher ethical religion of the Prophets,” and a general downgrading of the Old Testament, which he links to a factor that “weakened the church’s resistance to Nazism and antisemitism.”⁸ Textual, or lower, criticism is not part of this dispute in the same way; Reformed scholarship treats it as a distinct, largely uncontroversial discipline for recovering the wording of a text whose divine authorship is not itself in question.

Objections and Responses

Objection: Pentateuchal source criticism shows Genesis through Deuteronomy developed the way other ancient epic literature did, from oral tradition into written prose, rather than from Mosaic authorship. Oswalt’s engagement with Frank Cross and John Van Seters argues no clear ancient parallel for this proposed transition exists; the Russian and Spanish examples Cross offers are not given as proof but only as evidence the shift is possible in principle, and the mechanism Martin Noth proposed for preserving such material, a shrine-centered “amphictyonic league,” “has been shown from several different points of view to lack solid grounds for comparison.”⁵

Objection: modern critical scholarship can responsibly reconstruct an earlier, more original form of a biblical book than the text as it has come down. Craig Carter, introducing his own reading of Isaiah 40-48, opens with a passage from Oswald T. Allis warning that dividing Isaiah’s authorship inevitably reduces the prophet before the exile to “a man of his age,” severed from Isaiah’s own predictive, messianic material; on Allis’s argument, this kind of critical reconstruction does not merely revise a historical detail but “must also destroy the entire fabric of Messianic prophecy.”⁹

Objection: resting the New Testament’s authority on the historical- critical reconstruction of Jesus and the Gospels gives that authority a firmer, more defensible foundation than simply receiving the text as given. Kruger’s citation of Crossan’s own concession, that historical Jesus research produces “stunning diversity” amounting to “an academic embarrassment,” is offered as evidence the opposite is true: a reconstruction this unstable cannot bear the doctrinal weight sometimes placed on it, which is why Kruger locates the New Testament’s authority elsewhere than in the conclusions of that method.⁶

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 1, “Dogmatic Theology as a Science.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1, text as reproduced by CCEL, ccel.org/creeds/bcf/bcfc01.htm. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 4, text as reproduced by CCEL, ccel.org/creeds/bcf/bcfc01.htm. ↩
Craig A. Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9. ↩
John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?, Ancient Context, Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), chap. 10, “Conclusions.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 2, “Tracing the Origins.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Bavinck, chap. 4, “Revelation.” ↩
Craig A. Carter, “God as the One Who Alone Is to Be Worshiped (Isa. 41-48),” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition, chap. 6. ↩
Oswald T. Allis, quoted in Craig A. Carter, “Interpreting Isaiah 40-48 Theologically,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition, chap. 3. ↩