Is the Bible Believable Stuff?

Eta Linnemann | Friday, November 09, 2001
Copyright © 2001, Eta Linnemann

Retired) Professor of Theology/Religious Education, Pedagogic Academy, Braunschweig Honorary Professor, New Testament, Philipps University, Marburg

Edited transcript of a lecture given Thursday, November 8, 2001, 7:00 p.m. 1100 Social Sciences, University of California, Davis as part of the Faith and Reason series sponsored by Grace Alive! and Grace Valley Christian Center

Is the Bible believable stuff? Some people say, “Oh, it is impossible to believe the Bible. Doesn’t it speak about miracles, people rising from the dead, angels, and God talking to people? Isn’t it just a collection of poetry, old traditions, stories, and fairy tales?’ But others say, “Of course the Bible is believable. It is the revelation of the eternal God.’

Is the Bible believable stuff? Bible believers say “Yes’ while Bible critics say “No.’ Shouldn’t everyone be entitled to his or her own opinion? No, it is not that simple. Those who believe in the Bible will not allow this issue to be treated lightly, for, if the Bible is the revelation of God, then whether we believe it or not is not just an issue of our private ideas.

The Bible is relevant for heaven and earth. But Bible critics will not accept that statement. They adhere to historical-critical theology, which claims to be the scientific, and therefore the only true, theology. So we must ask: Is historical-critical theology scientific and true, as it claims to be?

To examine the validity of this claim, we have to answer three questions: How did Bible criticism come into being? How does Bible criticism function? What is at stake with Bible criticism?

I. How Bible Criticism Came into Being

Humanism

Certain theologians, especially during the last century, have honored philosophers as if they were teachers of Christianity and as if human philosophies were revelations given to us from God. They did not heed the warning of Colossians 2:2-4, 8-9 which speaks of Christ, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.’ Paul says, “I tell you this that no one may deceive you by fine sounding arguments. . . . See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than Christ.’ So Bible criticism came into being as the theologians ignored this portion of God’s word and incorporated the teachings of the philosophers into their theology. Because these people were theologians, what they taught was accepted as if it were God’s revelation. Thus, their criticism of God’s word came to be respected as being on the same level as God’s revelation in the Scriptures.

What are some of the philosophies that the theologians incorporated into their theology? The first is humanism. We cannot understand modern thought unless we see that humanism is at the base of it. During the age of humanism (1500-1600 A.D.), only a few intellectuals ascribed to it, but now humanism has permeated every aspect of our thought.

Humanism is the philosophy that puts man in the center of everything. Humanists do not give God his rightful place; rather, they exalt the culture of man-his religion, philosophy, politics, technology, science, art, and literature. To humanists, religion is considered just another part of human culture; thus, all religions are to share this section of culture reserved for religion. This puts all religions on the same level. The humanist says there is one truth, but it is expressed in different ways. So to a humanist, truth can be found not only in Christianity, but also in other religions. This idea extends to the writings of these religions as well. Humanists will say, “How can the Bible be exclusively the word of God? Aren’t the scriptures of other religions considered holy also?’ Such people refuse to consider the word of God as absolute.

But that is human thinking. Humanism puts man in the middle of the universe and says that this is his rightful place, even though humanists themselves are just beings created by God. The problem is that humanism produces only human ideas and does not show reality as it is. Humanism has spread through the centuries and now permeates every aspect of our thought life.

 

The Enlightenment

 

The philosophy of humanism was followed by that of the Enlightenment. The first figure of Enlightenment philosophy was Francis Bacon (1561-1626). He can also be counted among Renaissance thinkers, according to his dates, but when we look at his thought, he is rightfully placed with Enlightenment philosophers.

Bacon was an empiricist. In fact, all these philosophers gave forth definition, which means they would negate a statement with the full conviction that things are just like that. So Francis Bacon put forth the definition that truth can only be found in an inductive way. His conclusion was not a result of science, found out by induction; it was just human dogma. So when he said truth can only be found in an inductive way, he put the word of God, the source of all truth, beyond truth.

Of course we cannot reach God’s revelation in an inductive way, going from our experiences to the common laws, from the singular to the general. Bacon was the first who saw a division between thinking and believing. He said we cannot think our faith; it is just an assertion. This was just a human idea, but it was effective, and when he brought it forth with conviction, other people adopted it as well. It is from Bacon that we get the expression sacrificium intellectus.

After Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, a materialist, came along, stating that the whole world is matter; thus, what is not matter does not exist. Hobbes said there is no concept that does not start completely or partly with our five senses. He also said faith is no real relationship with God. Notice, Hobbes was an unbeliever, yet he was making an assertion about faith! How could he have this knowledge? He also said miracles could not be seen as facts but must be interpreted as parables. This was the beginning of demythologization. He also said the Bible does not give us knowledge of God. This “wise and intelligent’ human being dared to say that the true revelation of God does not give us knowledge of God! This denial of revelation had no other authority than human intellect.

Human intellect does not create itself. The whole of a human being is created by God; yet, in Hobbes, this intellect was standing up and saying there is no revelation of God. This is a denial of God! But people accepted this idea as if it were just the most normal thing in the world, even though it is really blasphemy. Had the philosophers alone put forth such ideas, most likely they would have been forgotten long ago. But because the theologians took them over, these ideas are still with us today.

Then Rene Descartes appeared. He was a rationalist, not an empiricist or materialist. He did not trust knowledge gained through the five senses. Instead, he thought we need another basis for knowledge, because what we gain through our senses is not always reliable. However, when Descartes looked for another basis, he encountered difficulty, so finally he thought, “I am doubting; thus, I must be thinking. And as I am thinking, therefore, I am.” Thus, doubt became a basic principle of knowledge.

The next philosopher was Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), who was also a rationalist. Similar to Bacon, who said truth can only be found inductively, Spinoza said truth can be found only in a mathematical way. He said the Bible is not the word of God, but in the Bible we can find God’s word. So what higher criticism now teaches, and what Karl Barth popularized, had already been stated by Spinoza. As a historical-critical theologian, this is what I taught my students. I would tell them that what we have between the covers of the Bible is not the word of God, but a portion of it might become the word of God for us when we read it.

The next philosopher, David Hume, was also an empiricist. Hume laid the foundation for positivism. He did not deny that miracles are possible, but he denied their credibility. He said that any intelligent man could not believe in miracles. Later, Rudolf Bultmann stated that modern man, who can use a light switch and other technical things, is not able to believe in miracles. Where did Bultmann get such an idea? Certainly, there has never been empirical research about what modern man can or cannot believe. I am sure Bultmann was influenced by Hume.

Immanuel Kant, an agnostic, tried to solve the philosophical problem by uniting empiricism and rationalism. He succeeded in doing so in the philosophical construction, but to achieve this he had to pay the high price of stating that the thing in itself cannot be recognized and, consequently, neither knowledge nor experience of God is possible. The whole system of Kant was put into one sentence by Johann Wolfgang Goethe: “Zum Jenseits ist der Ausblick uns verrammelt; ein Tor, wer dorthin seine Augen Blinzelnd richtet.’ I have tried to put it into American English: “Onto the beyond, the outlook is obstructed; one is a fool, who still tries to lift his squinted eye to it.’

All of these philosophical streams joined together to become the basis for higher criticism. We could trace them in part to different theologians, even as we realize their influence on historical critical theology as a whole.

This philosophy-influenced theology resulted in the belief that thinking and believing are separate. These philosophers said, “Yes, one can believe, but that has nothing to do with serious thought.’ They adopted a monistic worldview, even though the biblical worldview discerns the visible and invisible world, and the invisible world surrounds and permeates throughout the visible world. Think of Acts 17:28. In monism there is only the one visible world.

One would think that theologians, of all people, would seek to retain the biblical worldview, but they did not. Each one had difficulties with the Bible because on nearly every page in the Bible we find God as a speaking and acting subject, and the monistic view does not endure such a God. So when monists look at the Bible, they have to explain away what is written in it. Then, of course, they also teach their students that what is in the Bible could never have taken place as written.

II. How Does Bible Criticism Function?

From Intuition to Tradition: How the history of Israel was turned upside down

We shall give several examples of how Bible criticism functions, two from the Old Testament and two from the New.

In 1753, Jean Astrue made use of Spinoza’s claim that the five books of Moses had different sources, and he divided the sources according to the names of God used in each book. He called one source Elohist, from the word Elohim, and another Yahwist, from the word Yahweh. Later, other theologians came along and named additional sources: the priest codex and the deuteronomist.

Finally the whole documentary hypothesis emerged. In 1834 a professor of Old Testament named Reuss came up with an idea, which he shared with his students, that the prophets are older than the Law and the psalms are younger than both. In our Bible, we find the law first, then the psalms, and then the prophets, but Reuss turned everything around. One of his disciples wanted to take this idea further, but Reuss told him to be careful, because what he was proposing would turn the history of Israel upside down. Thus, Reuss just mentioned his ideas in some lexical articles. Graf, who shared these ideas, was also careful to never openly air these ideas. However, he used them as background in his book on the historical books of the Bible, treating them as if they were fact.

Then the famous theologian Wellhausen came, took over this idea, and wrote the history of Israel in the upside-down manner of Reuss and Graf. Even now there are newer reference books about the history of Israel, but it is still upside down. For example, one consequence to these ideas is that modern theological students are taught that David did not write any of the psalms. When I was a student, before I took the class on Old Testament introduction, I attended a lecture on the psalms and became really fond of them. Looking in my Bible, I found about seventy psalms that were attributed to David. (GVCC) But then I was told that all the psalms were exilic and post-exilic. Can you imagine what this did to my faith, when I was not supposed to believe what was directly printed in my Bible? But at this time, I did not realize that this idea was based merely on the intuition of a professor.

The “discovery’ of the three books of Isaiah

The second example of biblical criticism from the Old Testament was the “discovery of the three books of Isaiah.” Here is what I call the “salami tactic’ of Bible critics. Suppose your mother has a salami in the refrigerator, and you would like to have some. Of course, you must be careful and just take a small piece of it so that she will not notice. And the next day, you think, “That was such wonderful salami; I think I’ll have another slice.’ And you think that no one will see it, because it is just a small slice. But as you go on like that, in the end the whole salami is finished.

That is the salami tactic, and it is exactly what the historical-critical theologians used on the book of Isaiah. In 1780 a theologian named Koppe raised the question about the authenticity of Isaiah 50. Some theologians agreed with him, while others did not, but no one made much ado about it, because that was only one of sixty-six chapters. But nine years later another theologian named Doederlein denied the authority of Isaiah 40-66, saying there was no real difference between Isaiah 50 and Isaiah 40-66. A Bible-believing person might think, “Then there is not the slightest reason to think that Isaiah did not write Isaiah 50.’ But that is not the way these theologians think. So Doederlein asserted that Isaiah 40-66 could not have been written by the prophet.

Then more theologians came and picked out several chapters from Isaiah 1-39 that they said could not be written by Isaiah because they were so similar to chapters 40 to 66. In the end, these theologians took out one third of these chapters, saying they were not genuine. And in 1892 the famous Old Testament theologian Duhm divided Isaiah 40-66 into different books. He called chapters 40-55 Deutero-Isaiah, claiming they were written by another prophet named Isaiah, who would be the second- or deutero-Isaiah. Then he said chapters 56-66 were written by a third Isaiah. So these theologians reduced the book of Isaiah to a collection of different prophetic writings from different authors. That is how historical critical theology views the book of Isaiah.

The invention of the synoptic problem

What about the New Testament? That is my own area of specialty, especially the so-called synoptic problem. Some theologians say there is a problem because there are differences as well as similarities between the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and different theologians have different hypotheses of how these gospels came to pass.

The first one to mention the synoptic problem was the philosopher Celsus, who opposed Christianity in the second century. In the eighteenth century Lessing re-invented the synoptic problem with nearly the same theory that Celsus had propounded. Celsus said that one Mark gospel had three different revisions, which we know of as the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Lessing spoke of different translations, and spoke of an Aramaic proto-gospel, the gospel of Nazareth. Although Origen refuted Celsus’ theory, Lessing was praised as the one who started the scientific research on the synoptic gospels. Notice the difference of the ages. Lessing wrote these ideas in 1778, but it was not published in his lifetime, perhaps because he did not dare to. Thus, it was published posthumously in 1784.

After Lessing there was a longer period during which different theologians aired their hypotheses of how the gospels came into being. One, C.H. Weisse, invented the “two-source” hypothesis in 1838, the same year when others came back to the Mark priority, without the two-source theory. According to Weisse’s theory, Mark was one source for Matthew and Luke and then there was another source, Q, which stands for Quelle (German for source).

Q was an invention of Schleiermacher, who had read a sentence of Papias, a writer from the first apostolic generation, that said Matthew had written the logia in a Hebrew dialect. This sentence from Papias gave Schleiermacher the idea that Matthew had not written the entire gospel, but only the words of the Lord, which, in turn, became the source of the gospel of Matthew. But Schleiermacher made a great hermeneutic error because the same Papias also spoke about the gospel of Mark a few sentences earlier, naming the whole content of this gospel the logia kuriou, “the words of the Lord,’ referring to the things either said or preached by Christ. In the same way he then spoke of the logia in connection with Matthew. If Schleiermacher had interpreted it correctly, he would have known that the logia, or words of the Lord, are taken as part for the full gospel.

This error of Schleiermacher’s was taken over by Weisse. Schleiermacher clearly stated that Q was only the source for Matthew; but Weisse said that if Schleiermacher, who had been dead for four years, were still alive, he would agree that Q was also the source for Luke. So the two-source theory is partly founded on a hermeneutic error. But the next is worse. Weisse looked for another authority for his hypothesis and found it in the philologian Karl Lachmann. Lachmann did research and came to the conclusion that Mark was not the source for Matthew and Luke. But Weisse said the opposite, claiming that Lachmann gave proof that Mark was the source for Matthew and Luke. So, the world-famous, two-source theory is founded on a hermeneutic error and on a lie. That is how accurate the “scientific’ historical-critical theology is!

If we compare the gospels verse by verse to find identical or parallel verses, we find very few. Additionally, it is meaningless to compare words because there are so many words like “and’ and articles. Such comparisons do not point to a special author.

The assertion of the pseudepigraphs

According to Bible critics, if only a portion of the New Testament writings are thought to be from the supposed author, the rest are considered to be pseudepigraphs. For example, the New Testament consists of twenty-seven books, but they would say that perhaps ten of the books are not written by the person who is plainly mentioned as the author in the Bible. So we have thirteen letters of Paul, but they would say that six of them are not written by him. Yes, in your New Testament you will find the words, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God . . . to the holy and faithful brothers in Christ at Colosse,’ but these theologians would say, “Oh, no, this letter is not from Paul.’ Not only do they claim that Paul did not write six of the letters attributed to him, but also that the two letters of Peter were not written by Peter, the letter of James was not written by James, and the letter of Jude was not written by Jude.

How do Bible critics come to this conclusion? For example, with the pastoral letters, they will come up with a list of characteristic terms illustrating the theology of the pastorals. They say these words separate the pastorals from the “genuine’ Pauline writings. But when we examine these lists, we notice that if these terms were characteristic only of the pastorals, then they would occur only or mostly in the pastorals. Yet we find most of them in all the other Pauline letters also. How, then, can someone say these are characteristic only of the pastorals? Furthermore, suppose we sort out the words that meet the condition of being characteristic of the Pastorals. We would come up with a very short list, even when we consider that the pastoral letters have hundreds of words (First Timothy has a vocabulary of 538 words, Second Timothy of 457, and Titus of 305). When we compare them, we come up with twenty-four words, and then see in reality that we may have just eight or nine. So scientific is the so-said scientific theology!

Or suppose critics present us with a list and say they are theological terms typical for Paul that are not found in the pastorals. This “list’ may just be a mini-list of five or six words and a certain expression. We may agree, saying, “Oh, yes, that’s indeed typical for Paul.’ But when we look up the distribution, we may notice that, yes, a word is used eight times in Romans, but it doesn’t show up in Galatians, Philippians, and 1 Corinthians. How, then, can the pastorals be singled out when the long letter of 1 Corinthians doesn’t have it, yet is considered genuine? So they are taking double measure. They don’t say Philemon or 1 Thessalonians can’t be original because they don’t have these words. But they say the pastorals cannot be original because these words are lacking. So scientific is the so-said scientific-theology!

The same is true of the word list for 2 Peter. The critics say that 2 Peter cannot be written by Peter because it contains a number of words and expressions which belong to the Hellenistic philosophy of the second century, and Peter, of course, belongs to the first century. They state that only a Hellenistic Jewish writer or Christian writer of the second century could have written 2 Peter. But if we go and look up statistics of the words, we find that they are all in the Septuagint, and although some are only mentioned once in the New Testament, several are mentioned many times in the New Testament.

III. What Is at Stake with Bible Criticism?

What, then, is at stake with Bible criticism? Simply put, Bible criticism and the Bible have a different Jesus. In fact, we could say that Bible criticism, or the historical-critical theology, is nothing but heresy.

The Jesus of the Bible is God’s Son, but the Jesus of the Bible critics is only named God’s Son. In other words, Bible critics would say that the early church merely painted the title on Jesus. The Jesus of the Bible is the Creator who became man; the Jesus of the Bible critics was only a man, though somehow special. The Jesus of the Bible is the one concerning whom the prophets spoke. He is the son of Abraham and the son of David, as well as their Lord. He is the Messiah, the Christ, born of the virgin Mary. The critics quote Galatians 4:4, saying their Jesus is born of a woman and born under the law. But they do not mention the first part, where it says Jesus is the Son, sent by God! Critics also say that Paul does not mention the virgin birth of Christ. This is true, but he speaks of Jesus as the second Adam, and if Jesus hadn’t been born of the virgin, he never could be the second Adam; he would just be another offspring of the first Adam. And he was tempted as we are, but without sin. Again, that would not be possible without the virgin birth. But the Jesus of the critics is just an ordinary man. Additionally, the Jesus of the Bible was born in Bethlehem, while the Jesus of the critics was born in Nazareth. The Jesus of the Bible did all the miracles and said everything that the gospels report. The Jesus of the critics provided only some psycho-somatic healings and said only a small percentage of what is in the Bible; all the rest was made up by the early church. The Jesus of the Bible prophesied his suffering, died on the cross for our sins, and was raised on the third day. The Jesus of the critics took into account the consequences of what he said and died as a result. Their Jesus lives in the faith of the disciples and in the word (kerygma); so as long as he is preached, he is alive. But the Jesus of the Bible ascended into heaven; he is sitting at the right hand of God the Father and will come to judge the living and the dead.

We must decide what Jesus we will believe in. But we must know that the Bible says that he who has the Son has life, but he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. When we choose the Jesus of the Bible critics, we lose connection with the Jesus who gives us eternal life. We must take a stand on theology. Do we want a theology that follows Jesus and is built on the foundation of prophets and apostles, or a theology that follows philosophers and poets and is built on the hypothesis of so-said science? These are our choices, and I pray that we all will choose the only true God, the Jesus of the Bible.