{"id":713,"date":"2008-12-22T09:47:32","date_gmt":"2008-12-22T16:47:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=713"},"modified":"2008-12-22T09:47:32","modified_gmt":"2008-12-22T16:47:32","slug":"noll-on-evangelicals-and-biblical-criticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2008\/12\/22\/noll-on-evangelicals-and-biblical-criticism\/","title":{"rendered":"Noll on Evangelicals and Biblical Criticism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Noll’s<\/a> book Between Faith and Criticism: \u00a0Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America<\/a>, is must-reading for anyone who wants to engage as an evangelical with historical and critical methods in Biblical studies. \u00a0Noll sketches the history of evangelical interaction with Biblical criticism and points towards a way forward (a “third way”?) for evangelical scholarship. \u00a0Noll shows that Protestant evangelicals historically tried to develop theological frameworks, such as B.B. Warfield’s notion of “concursus,” that would allow them to interact with the broader world of scholarship. \u00a0Here is a somewhat lengthy passage in which Noll splendidly makes his point:<\/p>\n

Since the fundamentalist-modernist controversies, however, evangelicals have usually lacked this kind of theological anchorage. \u00a0Evangelical voices on both sides of the Atlantic have increasingly drawn attention to the striking absence of a secure theological framework for the study of scripture. \u00a0So Englishman David Wright: \u00a0‘One of our most urgent unfinished tasks is the elaboration of a satisfactory doctrine of Scripture for an era of biblical criticism. . . . In particular, we have to work out what it means to be faithful at one and the same time both <\/em>to the doctrinal approach to Scritpure as the Word of God and<\/em> to the historical treatment of Scripture as the words of men.<\/p>\n

An even more striking appeal along the same lines has come from Bernard Ramm, one of the leaders with E.J. Carnell and Carl Henry in the postwar renewal of evangelical thought. \u00a0Ramm’s 1983 book, After Fundamentalism, called upon his fellow evangelicals to learn from Karl Barth how to be both genuinely Christian and genuinely honest about the ‘humanity’ of Scripture. \u00a0Ramm was especially distressed at the ‘obscurantism’ which he felt had beset evangelical efforts to incorporate modern Western learning into the study of Scritpure. \u00a0Here was the primary problem, as Ramm saw it, complete with his own italics and an unflattering comparison to Barth:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

there is no genuine, valid working hypothesis for most evangelicals to interact with the humanity of Scripture in general and biblical criticism in particular. <\/em>\u00a0\u00a0There are only ad hoc or desultory attempts to resolve particular problems. \u00a0Barth’s method of coming to terms with the humanity of the Scriptures and biblical criticism is at least a clearly stated program. . . . To date, evangelicals have not announced such a clear working program. \u00a0If Barth’s paradigm does not please them, they are still under obligation to propose a program that does enable an evangelical to live creatively with evangelical theology and bibilical criticism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The historical record, both evangelical and more broadly Christian, suggests two things about Ramm’s appeal. \u00a0First, Christians certainly have often done what he proposed. \u00a0Whether it was Augustine and Platonism, Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, Luther and nominalism, Wesley and eighteenth-century sentimentalism, or Jonathan Edwards and Newtonianism, the history of the church is filled with orthodox thinkers who have baptized (and transformed) apparently alien world views for the use of the church. \u00a0But history also reveals that the synthesis of any one era does not remain intellectually or spiritually satisfying indefinitely, at least without periodic readjustments requiring nearly as much creativity as the original formulation. \u00a0Ramm’s appeal, therefore, does not seek the impossible or the unorthodox, but it does call for the exercise of creative theological energy on a very broad scale.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Noll’s book Between Faith and Criticism: \u00a0Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America, is must-reading for anyone who wants to engage as an evangelical with historical and critical methods in Biblical studies. \u00a0Noll sketches the history of evangelical interaction with Biblical criticism and points towards a way forward (a “third way”?) for evangelical scholarship. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[31,19,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biblical-studies","category-historical-theology","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-bv","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}