Daniel Kirk on Bible and History

Daniel Kirk, a New Testament Professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, offers a good series of posts on the Bible and history (Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3 his excellent blog “Storied Theology.”  Here’s a long quote:

For me, the question of “inerrancy” versus not, or the question of how “historical” the Gospels are, or the question of whether or not we should harmonize different passages pushes in this direction: When we push for inerrancy, harmonizations, and historicity, we show that we have a fundamentally different desire for what these texts might give us than the biblical writers themselves had when they composed them.

If the purpose of the Gospels was to give us the historically identifiable account of the anointing of Jesus, then Luke would not have changed the location, host, time frame, and body part on which Jesus was anointed. If the purpose of a Gospel is to give a full, historical account, then Matthew would not go around introducing second things such as a second Gerasene demoniac or second donkey that Jesus simultaneously rode into Jerusalem with the other.

The point is that at various points both Matthew and Luke have decided to tell versions of the story that are in ways major or minor different from the story of Mark–and that in trying to smash them all back together into a coherent unity we show that our own desire for the text is antithetical to the impulse that gave us the texts we actually have.

What the Gospel writers have separated, let no man put together.

And this begins to form my response . . . about where my view ever moves from the messy details to the “high” acknowledgment that this is God’s word for the church, not just a human doing. My response to that is that it is precisely these humans doings that are God’s word to the church. God’s word to the church is Matthew’s post-Torah Jewish Christianity, and Mark’s apocalyptic and surprising messiah, and Luke’s seamless-salvation-history-Davidic-King, and even John’s pre-existent heavenly but now incarnate Son of God.

Honoring them as the word of God means receiving them not only as they are actually given to us, but trusting that God gave us the kind of books he wanted us to have in order to find the salvation that God has on offer in Christ. In other words, it’s precisely by not turning these into history books that I honor them as the word that God has given to guide us into the life that is only found in Jesus the Son.

He continues in a subsequent post:

I would like to put the shoe on the other foot. Why must God be accountable to our modern, rationalistic demands about how the Bible must fit together in order to be trustworthy? Why must the Bible be devoid of human labor, research, and even historical creativity, in order to be worthy of God’s voice to speak through it?

What I am saying is that we trust that the Bible we have is the Bible God wanted us to have, and that we investigate this Bible to learn how it is, in fact, that God has chosen to speak to us. I trust that this Bible we actually have is the Bible God wanted us to have. To respond to this by saying, “If this is what the Bible is then we shouldn’t listen to it” is to say that God must fit certain criteria, established by us, independent of the actual contents of the Bible [!] in order to be worthy of our ear.

It will never do to say that God must speak in x manner in order to be worthy of our ear. It will only do to say, This is actually how God has spoken, therefore if we would hear God’s voice we must accept this mode of divine speech. All this is to say that, as pious as it sounds to demand that “Bible as word of God” dictate our posture toward the text, I will not allow that confession to tell me that the Bible must be something that the data demands be recognized as something else.

But secondly, the reason why it is important that pastors and theologians adopt this stance and not attempt to force the Bible into a preconceived mold is that it is disastrous for the faith of those who then go on to get an education in religious and/or biblical studies.

A professor friend of mine used to say, “A liberal is a fundamentalist who got an education.” What he meant by that is linked to what I said in my first point. Both fundamentalism and liberalism look at the world, and at the Bible, and make the same demands. This includes the demand for historical accuracy, the ability to be harmonized, and all the rest.

Once a thusly educated fundamentalist leaves the friendly confines and starts wrestling with the data in some other venue (such as an undergraduate or seminary New Testament Intro course), they discover that by those standards the Bible simply doesn’t measure up.

The problem is not that I’m saying that “the Bible doesn’t measure up to the historical standard,” the problem comes in when we affirm that in order to be truly apprehended as the word of God the Bible must live up to this preconceived historical standard. It’s that demand, made to my right and my left, that will cause people’s faith in the God of the Bible to be shaken when they wrestle with the tensions, not the reality of the data itself.

Allowing the data of the Bible to set our expectations about the kind of history we find there is essential–both for duly honoring the God who gave us this particular Bible and for speaking of scripture in such a way that followers of Jesus can maintain their faith even when they discover that the Bible does not live up to one set of preconceived expectations.