Yesterday in this series celebrating the strengths of different traditions and movements within Christianity, I looked at Evangelicalism. One of the aspects I love about that tradition is its commitment to the Scriptures, even if I do not accept their assumptions about them. Today I’m going to turn to a movement, or series of movements, that share Evangelicalism’s commitment to studying the Bible, but turn its assumptions on their head: Today I’ll be looking at why I am critical.
Taking a critical eye to the Scriptures is nothing new. From at least the turn of the third century, Church Fathers applied the best critical methodologies available to them to the biblical text, including grammatical analysis, comparison of textual variants and translations, and placing texts in their historical context. As an example, long before Darwin’s theory of evolution, important Church Fathers understood that the six-day creation scheme in Genesis was a literary formula that had little to say about what ‘really happened.’ The Ancient world even had two major critical schools that debated over methodology. This kind of ‘meta’ discourse around interpretation shows just how advanced a field of study Christian hermeneutics was in the late Roman Empire.
But with a combination of attrition, from the fall of the Western Empire in the fifth century and the Islamic conquest of Eastern intellectual hubs like Antioch and Alexandria in the seventh, and a shift in theological priorities, critical reading of the Scriptures went largely dormant for a thousand years. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that this kind of engagement with the text was reborn. The question that got it all started again was how Moses could be said to have written the Pentateuch (as tradition maintained), when Deuteronomy describes his death. But this opened the floodgates to all kinds of questions, and the more scholars examined, the more questions were raised: Why are there two versions of several stories in Genesis that differ in important details? Why is the Pentateuch filled with explanatory notes apparently from a much later time? Why do adjacent passages often have dramatically different vocabulary and grammar? Why are there contradictions within the Old Testament about things like worship outside Jerusalem, or marriage outside the community of faith? Why does the Gospel of John have a timeline of Jesus’ last days that is irreconcilable with that of Matthew, Mark, and Luke? And, with the rise of archaeology, why does the Genesis 1 creation story mirror that in the Babylonian Enuma Elish? And why do flood narratives recur across the region? What emerged from the study of these questions was a series of related disciplines exploring the relationship between the Bible and things like grammar, rhetoric, history, archaeology, anthropology, and comparative mythology. Since the second half of the twentieth century, such critical fields have been joined by voices critiquing the Scriptures from the perspective of people who have been historically left out of biblical interpretation or who have been marginalized by (traditional interpretations of) the Bible.
What all of these have in common is a shared understanding that that Bible itself is a historical text — or better, a library that has its own history, of texts, each with their own histories. We cannot therefore read Judges with the same set of assumptions as we read the Psalms; we cannot read Leviticus in the same way we read the Gospels. Treating these diverse texts as though they’re all doing the same thing and are authoritative in the same way does them — and us — a great disservice. In the same way, reading the Scriptures without intentionally engaging with how they’ve been leveraged against women, or to support colonialism or the slave trade, leaves a big hole in our awareness and practice.
I like to think of a faithful reading of the Scriptures as getting to know someone in a romantic relationship. As much as it may be exciting to think of a new love interest as beautiful and perfect in every way, it’s not realistic. And if you expect the fresh bloom of an exciting new connection to last forever as it is, you’re bound to be disappointed. It’s in really getting to know a person as they are that we can truly love them. I think the Bible works the same way. The biblical texts can never live up to the standards fundamentalism insists for them, not because of any failing on their part, but because they’re written in finite human languages, by finite human minds and hearts, and must also be interpreted by finite human minds and hearts. The texts we have, with their internal disagreements, thematic evolution over time, use of genres and forms known to their original audiences, and differing levels of authority, are far more interesting and compelling than any bland, flattened Bible forced to adhere to impossible standards of coherence and clarity. And this is the reason why I am critical. I am critical simply because I love the Scriptures. And because I love them, I want to know them as they really are, not some perfect fantasy version of them they can never live up to.
Matthew Root 