Clarifying my thinking
13th May
The latent tension between Biblical Criticism and Fundamentalism in preaching, and models that bridge the gap and promote unity.
In this reflection on the history of Biblical Criticism and the hazards it presents to the preacher, I’m not aiming to give a comprehensive overview of the movement of Higher Criticism and the reaction to it.
By concentrating on two particularly explosive areas, our understanding of Genesis and of Jesus, I hope to show how even when modern Biblical scholarship has moved on to fresh areas of interest, the history of Biblical Criticism can still present a minefield for the unsuspecting, theologically aware preacher. By pointing to the writings of Michael Green an evangelical, and Jeffrey John, a liberal anglo-catholic, I aim to introduce readers to master classes in resolving the tensions between Biblical Criticism and Fundamentalism when preaching on the gospels.
The historical background of the fault lines in Christianity.
The Protestant Reformation was closely related to the Age of Enlightenment and provided a fertile environment for what has been called Higher Criticism to be applied to Biblical texts. From about 1600 onwards, scholars speculated about what they believed to be the original source documents of scripture and traced their redaction and merging into the biblical text. It was hoped this would aid in reconstructing history to facilitate a better understanding of the context of the texts and thus enhance the comprehension of their meaning and nature.
The origins of this new approach to scripture can be traced back to Jean Astruc 1684-1766, who was something of a polymath in the style of earlier Renaissance multidisciplinary scholars. Astruc formulated theories about the literary origins of the book of Genesis, pioneering the origins of what later became known as the documentary hypothesis.
The documentary hypothesis proposes different originating sources for the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), and scholars have used these differing sources to reconstruct the history of the world of the Old Testament.
These are:
1 the Jahwist source (J) using “YHWH" to designate God and attributing human emotions and characteristics to the deity. “J” is said to have emanated from the kingdom of Judah around 950 BC
2 The Elohist source (E), which names God “Elohim”is believed to have originated in the kingdom of Israel about 850 BC.
3 The Deuteronomic source (D), characterised by a law codes is thought to date circa. 721–621 BC.
The Priestly source (P), contains genealogies, founding stories of places of worship and sacrificial legal codes and is thought to have been written c. 550 BC.
So far, there doesn’t seem to be much here to trigger people, but here’s where things can start to get heated by textual analysis.
The documentary hypothesis proposes different sources for the two creation stories at the start of Genesis, ascribing the first to the Priestly source (P) and the second (the creation of Adam and Eve in chapter 2) to the Jahwist source (J).
Drawing attention to the two different creation narratives introduces a tension for those who insist on reading Genesis as literal history.
Ascribing different dates and origins to the two creation narratives and drawing attention to their differences is problematic for fundamentalists because scripture can no longer be read as infallible, literal historical truth. For a fundamentalist, viewing creation narratives as theologically informative parables downgrades the authority of scripture.
A preacher who makes even a passing reference to “the creation narratives in Genesis” thus implying the Genesis narrative is a theologically informative parable, can become the target of visceral opposition.
Another polymath of multidisciplinary scholarship whose work is informative in understanding the tensions between biblical scholarship and fundamentalism is Albert Schweitzer (1875 – 1965), who comes at the opposite end of the historical period of High Criticism to Jean Astruc. Schweitzer, a Nobel Prize winner, was a musicologist and organist, a humanitarian missionary physician and a philosopher.
In his best-known book, “The Quest for the Historical Jesus.” Schweitzer surveyed and critiqued the scholarly historical-critical movement of that name that aimed to strip away the layers of interpretation about who Jesus really was, and hoped that, having peeled back all the misconceptions, they would reveal the real historical person of Jesus.
Of course. The presumption behind this endeavour was that the Biblical Jesus was very different to the historical Jesus, which clearly expresses what a low view of scripture the movement of Higher Criticism had descended to. Today with the benefit of hindsight, it doesn’t take a Nobel prize winner such as Schweitzer to spot that this audacious assumption is anathema to a fundamentalist, and to be fair to the counter movement of fundamentalism that sprang up from Princeton in the USA, some liberal scholars within liberal Protestantism had adopted a materialist world view that denied the historicity of supernatural intervention and was outisde the norm of historic mainstream Christain orthodoxy.
At the opposite. End of the historical period of High Criticism, Schweitzer’s “The Quest for the Historical Jesus.” (published In 1906 in German and 1910 in English). Surveyed the attempts to discover the real historical Jesus that the movement claimed had been hidden rather than revealed by scripture. Schweitzer famously remarked that “The Quest’s” scholarly endeavour was like staring down the long well of history and seeing reflected in the water at the bottom of the well, “a pale-faced Galileean.” In other words, Schweitzer was saying that in its effort to recover the true historical Jesus, all “The Quest” had achieved was the remarkable home goal of painting a “scholarly” picture of Jesus in the image of a nineteenth-century German theologian.
We all have an unconscious bias towards reimagining Jesus as a reflection of ourselves, and Schweitzer’s penetrating observation would have been a remarkable achievement had he not then continued his book by doing precisely the same thing as the earlier “Quest” writers by asserting that Jesus had gone to the cross expecting to force the Father’s hand to intervene and accelerate the eschatological consummation of the kingdom of God. Schweitzer went on to argue that Jesus final words from the cross, “My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken me?” were a horrified realisation that the Father was not going to act and that he died broken and disillusioned by the lack of intervention. This implies Jesus intended to force the Father’s hand by going to the cross rather than willingly carrying the sins of the world as an atoning sacrifice.
And so, one more German theologian (Schweitzer himself) tried to uncover the historical Jesus only to reimagine him as a reflection of himself and his own theories.
So, the movement of Higher Criticism continued on a trajectory even further away from historic Christian orthodoxy.
It is no surprise that there was an equal and opposite reaction in the other direction that travelled to an equally unhelpful opposite extreme.
Distance travelled between Jean Astruc's contribution (and how it was developed by those who followed in his wake) and Albert Schweitzer (arguably the first and last great towering polymaths of Higher Criticism) is huge demonstrating Higher Criticism had become wedded to a worldview limited to secular materialism.
In response to modernism, liberalism and biblical criticism, a series of pamphelts were published Between 1910 and 1916, funded and commissioned by Lyman Stewart, named “The Fundamentals.” Stewart was a devout Presbyterian dispensationalist. These leaflets were characterised by their polemical tone and had in their sights anything that wasn’t conservative evangelical Protestantism. Higher Criticism and the Liberal Protestantism that flowed from it. It is said that over three million volumes were distributed through the English-speaking world.
The essays included titles and authors such as:
“Decadence of Darwinism” - Henry H. Beach.
“The Early Narratives of Genesis - James Orr”
“Inspiration of the Bible—Definition, Extent, and Proof - James M. Gray”
“The Bible and Modern Criticism” - F. Bettex.
At about the same time, Princeton Theological Seminary became the primary focus of academic resistance to Liberal Protestantism.
These titles, selected from many, give some indication of what was to become the primary focus of Fundamentalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Much of what the movement stood for was reasonable, even if the writing was characterised by being triggered and reactionary.
Defending the virgin birth and the deity of Jesus Christ, substitutionary atonement, the physical return of Jesus, and the historical reality of the miracles is all the stuff of mainstream historical Christian orthodoxy, and I’m not going to focus on the defence of these core beliefs.
But the primary doctrine of Fundamentalism that resonates today is the claim that the Bible is infallible and inerrant.
On occasion, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and infallibility still resonates in the life of mainstream churches.
The obvious area of resonance is the creation narratives of Genesis and the conflict between the belief in an inerrant, infallible scripture and an Enlightenment worldview. Whilst mosy Christains can hold these two polarities in tension, for a Fundamentalist this is a triggering conflict.
Fundamentalists argue for the “Plain meaning.’ (meaning,) a flat literal reading of the text that allows for no admission of metaphor or imagery in the meaning of scripture.
So for anyone committed to a fundamentalist “plain meaning” or literal reading of scripture, the idea of metaphor, parable, or worse than all of these Gnesis including a myth (meaning an ahistorical story that conveys a philosophical truth) is unthinkable because this would imply that the Bible is mistaken about the mechanics of the creative process behind the universe.
One of the many flaws with this dogma that scripture has only one “plain meaning” which is strictly literal, is that the writers of scripture were very aware of metaphorical meaning and symbolic imagery, frequently employing it in multi-layered messages.
When we deny that metaphor and symbolism exist in scripture, we lose much of the truth that scripture contains and can’t understand its message or meaning.
So, whilst fundamentalism was an understandable reaction against Higher Criticism’s stripping scripture of authority and content, in denying the use of metaphors and different literary forms by its human authors, fundamentalism strips scripture of revalatory content just as much as Higher Criticism.
Add to this the characteristic of fundamentalists of falling out with each other and dividing into ever more narrow and fanatical sects in a spurious pursuit of doctrinal purity, and a purely literal reading of scripture is clearly a non-starter as a healthy or helpful way to read the Bible. As Jesus said, “By their fruits shall you know them.”
There is nothing that even the most unifying of preachers can do when faced with this insistence on a literal six-day creation required by the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy and infallibility, combined with an insistence on a literal reading.
Having acknowledged that a non-literal reading of the Genesis creation narratives will cause inescapable conflict with fundamentalists, is there an approach to reading the New Testament that can achieve a unifying effect, whilst also retaining the more positive aspects of biblical and historical criticism?
To answer that question, we must first identify the more positive legacy of what was formerly known as higher criticism.
This will be a matter of personal preference. Writing from the stance of a coal face preacher and teacher in a local church who also encourages and informs other preachers, my personal perspective is that the most useful legacies are: An awareness of literary genre, and the importance of understanding the social and historical context of the Biblical text in determining its meaning and application for today.
How do we learn to preach as far as possible, in a unifying way? As a musician, I have the privilege of hearing the sound created by outstanding proponents of the trombone at first hand and the opportunity of recreating and blending with that sound. As preachers and teachers, we learn by hearing good preaching or by reading how good preachers and teachers communicate.
To enable a reading of scripture that combines and positively exploits awareness of historical context and literary genre, I would point preachers towards exponents of the art of preaching and teaching from what might be called the right and left wings of the theological spectrum as role models.
Firstly, to the evangelical and sometimes slightly combative Michael Green, whose writing on the gospel of Mathew draws heavily on historical and cultural contexts illuminated by the art of historical criticism to bring out the full meaning of the text in ways which are both illuminating and supportive of a high view of scripture.
For examples of this see:
Matthew For Today, Michael Green, 1988, Hodder and Stoughton, and The Message of Matthew, Michael Green, IVP 1988.
By way of contrast, I would also recommend Jeffrey John, (whose former pulpit as the Deen of St Albans Catherdral I’ve had the privilege of preaching from) a writer on the Liberal Catholic wing of the Church of England, whose gentle irenic spirit manages to harvest the metaphor and imagery of the gospels in a way that might disarm the most conservative of evangelicals (if not quite a fundamentalist spoiling for a fight).
“THE MEANING IN THE MIRACLES” Canterbury Press, 2001. contains masterclasses in the art of explaining how both the historical truth of Jesus’ miracles and the symbolism and metaphors employed by the gospel writers in telling the story are married creatively together in harmony to amplify and enhance any presentation of the gospel message.
The tension left in the air by the conflict between the Higher Criticism of Liberal Protestantism and the reaction against it from Fundamentalism may always be latent yet present when we preach or write. However, aiming to communicate in ways that utilise the positive legacy of Higher Criticism, embracing metaphor, symbolism and parable whilst maintaining a genuinely theistic worldview can lessen that tension, and may even create an informed shalom among the people of God.
13/05/2026
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