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Biblical Evidence beyond Doctrine:
Dealing with the Content of Scripture
Dennis Bratcher
The careful and analytical study of Scripture is a fairly recent
phenomenon. In fact, Biblical Studies itself as a means to try to
understand the communication of the biblical text on its own terms apart
from the doctrines of the church has only been around for a little over
200 years. (1) For most of its history, the church, as
much as it has revered Scripture, has not given the interpretation of
Scripture a central role. That does not mean that the church has not
taken Scripture to be authoritative or has not used Scripture to inform
Christian doctrine and practice. But throughout most of the history of
the Church, Scripture has shared its role with ecclesiastical
authorities, more often than not subsumed under those authorities. The
role of Scripture was primarily to support the doctrines and dogmas of
the Church that had been developed in the life of the Church in various
historical circumstances quite apart from careful biblical study. It was
not until the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s that a clear emphasis
on Scripture as a basis for the doctrine and practice of the Faith
community began to emerge.
There were four basic periods of approaches to the Bible that we can
identify. Of course, any schematic way of looking at historical
developments is going to be overly simplified. History does not move as
smoothly as our categorical analysis would imply. Yet, these four stages
are helpful as a means to describe the development of modern Bible
study.
The Ancient and Medieval Period (100-1450)
This period extends from the beginning of the Christian Era (after
the NT, around AD 100) to the unfolding of the Renaissance about AD
1450. Here we have to consider the chicken and the egg question: Did the
Bible create and shape the church or did the church create and shape the
Bible?
Of course, on one level, the answer is both. The early church already
had the Old Testament, which by the Christian Era had for the most part
already achieved authoritative status. Yet Christianity did not come to
an understanding of Jesus, his death, and the resurrection and what that
meant for the Kingdom of God in the world by a careful study of
Scripture, which at that time was only the Old Testament. Even when we
read something in the New Testament that sounds like it is developing
Christology or Christian Doctrine from Old Testament Scripture, we have
to remind ourselves that the early church was not using Scripture in
this way (see, for example, Nazareth and the
Branch: Matthew 2:23 and Interpretation of the Old Testament).
Rather, the early church had already discerned a meaning for those
events (most Christians would speak of inspiration here) and was using
the Old Testament to establish continuity between the work of God
throughout the Old Testament and this new revelation of God in Jesus
Christ.
In other words, the NT, for example in the "fulfillment" formulas of
Matthew or in the four-chapter introduction of Luke, most often uses the
Old Testament to reinforce and illustrate the truths that the early
church was already expressing about Jesus. That certainly does not
invalidate the Old Testament, or in a any sense render the Old Testament
subservient to the New Testament, nor does it imply any supercessionist
view of the New Testament. But it does suggest that the early church was
not exegeting the Old Testament for its own meaning. Instead, they were
working from already established doctrine developed mostly quite apart
from the Old Testament Scriptures (the Gospels themselves present a
little different situation).
To put it very simplistically, the early church could use the Old
Testament in this way because of an overarching belief in the unity of
truth and God’s revelation. They believed that the faith and practice of
the community were identical to what was taught in Scripture. Since God
had ordained this Faith community through the revelation of God in
Christ, and since God was directing the community in its faith and
practice, what the community believed and did was God’s will and
therefore true. Since the Bible, Old Testament Scriptures at that point,
were also believed to be given by God to reveal truth, therefore what
the community did and believed must be the same as that taught in
Scripture.
On one level this led to bitter polemic and hostility between early
Christians and Jews, since obviously the Jewish Faith community did not
agree with this assessment of either Scripture or truth. On another
level, the practical result for Christians was that the faith and
practice of the community was not directly related to the understanding
of Scripture, but depended on early church leaders and the needs and
constraints imposed by historical realities (persecutions, the need to
cast the message into the Roman thought world, the growing dominance of
Gentiles and subsequent loss of continuity with the OT traditions, the
dangers of syncretism, the political influence of Rome, etc.).
While some of those leaders, such as Paul, wrote instructions to the
community that eventually became Scripture, the real authority was the
testimony of the apostles that was assumed to be the same as the
testimony of Scripture (see Notes on 2 Timothy 3:16). Therefore
Scripture was interpreted to support the teaching and preaching of the
early church.
This led to a dogmatic approach to Scripture, in which the Bible was
used primarily as the source of proof texts for doctrines. Especially in
the Christological controversies of the second and third centuries, the
Bible played very little role in helping the church establish doctrine,
with philosophy and logic used as the primary tools to construct and
defend doctrine.
Yet, even though Scripture was not a primary authority to inform
doctrine, because of the equation of Scripture with the faith and
practice of the church, it achieved the status of authority on all
matters. Because of the idealist Platonic and Neo-Platonic philosophical
views that dominated the early church, following Augustine in the fifth
century, the Bible, since it came from God, came to represent that
external authority from the ideal plane uncontaminated by human
fallibility. In effect, it was viewed as directly revealing the mind of
God. In this role, the Bible could be appealed to as the source of truth
about everything. Reality was understood to be fixed and unchangeable,
determined directly by the decree of God, so the Bible was seen as
describing that ultimate reality. It was from this perspective that the
Bible, seen as a repository of absolute truth about everything, could be
used as late as the 16th century to force Galileo to recant his
Copernican theories of planetary motion.
Of course, early Christians understood that the Bible had to be
interpreted to be used in the church. And yet that interpretation was
not for the purpose of discerning what the Bible said or meant. Rather
the technique of allegory was used, in which hidden meanings could be
found in the biblical stories that illustrated the doctrines of the
church. A recent example of this use of Scripture can be seen in the
American Holiness Movement in which various OT narratives were treated
as allegories for the doctrine of entire sanctification. The most
notable and widely used example was the conquest of the land in Joshua,
in which the exodus stood for salvation and the crossing of the Jordan
into "Beulah land" stood for sanctification.
So, even though the Bible was presented as the source of truth about
everything, the practice of interpretation used the Bible to support
already establish "truths" developed form within the community of Faith.
Scripture served the dogma of the Church.
This is not to say that there was no movement toward what we consider
critical study of Scripture. There were some meager beginnings. There
were isolated instances of those who tried to deal with what they saw as
problems in the biblical text that challenged some of the dogma. But as
Greek and Roman culture gradually declined after the Fall of Rome in the
fifth century, and the world collapsed into the Dark Ages, dogma
triumphed.
The Renaissance and Reformation (1450-1700)
The Renaissance, as we all learned in high school and college, was a
"renewal" of culture and learning after the long night of the medieval
period. There was a renewed sense of history, leading to new interest in
antiquity, classic Greek and Roman culture, and classical languages. In
the best sense of the term this was a development of humanist
perspectives, an emphasis on the dignity and worth of humanity (see
Humanism in Scripture and Culture). Along with this came the rise of
scientific curiosity, an interest in how the world worked beyond just
saying that God made it work. This is the beginning of scientific
investigation. With the work of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler there
was established a thirst for understanding the origins of things, the
development of history, and a sense that these things can only be
investigated by us being objective, that is, but not allowing the dogmas
of the church to dictate the results.
So, based on his observations, Galileo promoted the idea that the
earth was not the center of the solar system but rather moved around the
sun. The major paradigm shift that began to occur was in how they saw
the world. While they still understood reality to be fixed and
unchangeable, it was now conceptualized in terms of natural law rather
than the direct decrees of God.
Along with this interest in the physical world, humanism also led to
an interest in history and historical documents. Some began to examine
ancient documents as to their authenticity and validity. A crucial point
came with the work of Lorenzo Valla in 1440. A student of (Catholic)
canon law, he researched the Donation of Constantine, a document
supposedly dating to the fourth century that gave large parcels of land
to the Church in the name of the Roman Emperor Constantine. Valla
demonstrated conclusively that the document was a forgery, which
seriously undermined the Church’s claim to authority in terms of
documents. While the implications of this would not work out until much
later, it established the idea that what the Church declared to be true,
even in terms of historical documents, may not in fact be valid.
In the 15th century Erasamus of Rotterdam, a linguist, began to use
the developing methods of historical inquiry on the biblical texts. He
was not working to interpret the Bible, but to examine the physical
writing of the Bible (see Sacred Words or
Words about the Sacred?). In his critical editions of the NT, he
succeeded in divorcing theological study (dogma) from grammatical and
linguistic study. He used reason to understand the literal sense of the
text apart from the dogmas imposed on it by the Church.
Many of these influences from the Renaissance would take many years
to work out in biblical studies. In Religion, perhaps more than any
other area, change comes slowly. But there were seeds sown in both ways
of viewing the world and how religious authority was understood that
would soon bear fruit.
We cannot pursue this in detail here, but we can note that the
Reformation of the 16th century was partly a product of the Renaissance.
One of the corner stones of the Reformation was the idea of sola
scriptura. Some today use this idea to mean we should use nothing
but the Bible and never do any biblical exegesis or use biblical study
tools. But that is never what this concept meant. Sola Scriptura
is about authority, the rejection of the dogmas and doctrines of the
church as the final determiner of what Scripture means. It is an
affirmation that Scripture should take precedence over tradition, that
the Bible should be the source of developing doctrine, not doctrine used
to interpret the Bible.
Martin Luther rejected the allegorical approach to biblical
interpretation. Instead, he advocated the plain literal reading of the
biblical text. However, he did not mean what some want to mean by that
today, in which they advocate a "plain sense" reading in which the Bible
means whatever they think it means (see The
Problem with "Plain Sense" Reading of Scripture ). Rather, Luther
contended that the Bible should be read for its own meaning not as proof
texts for doctrines, or as allegories with hidden meanings that had no
connection to the sense of the text.
As good as those intentions were, Luther still subsumed the Bible
under the goals of the Reformation. He placed different values on
different parts of the Bible (he wanted James removed from the canon
because it did not seem to support salvation by faith alone), subsumed
the OT under the NT (OT=law, NT=Gospel), and adopted a thoroughly
Christological approach to the OT with the dictum "what manifests
Christ." These are ways of dealing with the Bible that still thrive
today.
But for the first time in Luther, attention was drawn to the fact
that there are material differences in the Bible, differences that
cannot be reconciled by appealing to allegory and cannot be ignored just
because they do not accord with certain doctrine. That was part of his
argument against the abuses of the established church, practices that
were supported by appeals to a dogmatic view of Scripture. In appealing
to the "plain sense" of Scripture beyond dogma, Luther allowed the
multiplicity of views and ways of thinking in the Bible to be seen
clearly, if not totally understood.
The Reformation also fostered an attitude of hostility to traditional
and doctrinaire ways of dealing with Scripture. Although Luther’s
reforms were aimed at the church’s traditions, canon law, it also laid
the groundwork for challenges to traditional ways of viewing the Bible.
We do not need to trace the history of the development much further
here. But we can note that following the Reformation, new attitudes
developed toward Scripture. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the
first critical approaches to Scripture that tried to deal seriously with
the Bible text on its own terms emerged. There were tremendous advances
in text criticism, with linguists discovering the many variant readings
in manuscripts as well as errors of copying. Richard Simon, a Catholic
linguist defending against Protestant views, in 1678 concluded that the
biblical text was so full of errors and so unreliably transmitted that
only the Church could determine its true meaning. Of course, his case
was seriously overstated. But it did underscore not only the need for
textual criticism, but the fact that canon law, the doctrines and dogmas
of the Church, did not rest on a biblical basis.
The Rise of Critical Study (1700-1970)
The date of 1700 is usually seen as the beginning of the
Enlightenment or the rise of rationalism, since John Locke, the English
Rationalist, published his influential work in 1695. There were several
factors that were influential in the era. The work of Hobbes, Locke,
Descartes, and Spinoza all emphasized a rationalist approach to truth.
The Age of Reason emerged as a movement that used reason to examine
previously unquestioned doctrines and traditions, as well as social
customs and ways of viewing the world. In this era scientific
investigation came into its own. The idea still prevailed that reality
was fixed and unchangeable and governed by "natural laws." However, to
this was added the idea that with enough knowledge, human beings could
master the natural world. Armed with this idea, modern scientific
investigation emerged in fill force.
As this view moved into religion there emerged several rationalistic
approaches to the Faith. Probably the most influential of these for the
fledging United States was Deism, which was basically a rationalist
critique of Christianity that eliminated any non-natural explanations
for the human condition.
In terms of biblical study, rationalism meant that the focus moved
away from the close relation between Church dogma and development of
doctrine to an emphasis on the historical background of Scripture, the
role that human beings played on a social and cultural level. For the
first time, Johann Semler in the late 18th century noted that the word
of God, which was an issue of faith, is not identical to the Bible,
which is an issue of historical and rational investigation. This marked
the beginning of the division of biblical studies into doctrinal and
historical approaches.
By the early 19th century, the "scientific method" dominated biblical
studies. A very strict "historical positivism" prevailed in biblical
studies in which a rigid cause-effect model was applied to Scripture.
Everything in Scripture needed to be explained by a prior cause within
history, which was assumed could be accessed by investigation and
reason. If it could not be, then doubts were raised about the historical
status of the account, and thus its validity.
On some levels this was a positive move for biblical studies. It
allowed questions to be asked of Scripture that could not be asked under
previous approaches, even following the Reformation. Questions of
origin, source of writings, dates, locations, as well as the
authenticity and integrity of the biblical texts were all investigated.
On another level, the negative effects were a neglect of the Bible as a
document of Faith produced by and intended for a Faith community. With
almost all of the emphasis on historical concerns, the issues of
theology and meaning often were neglected for the sake of dealing with
issues that could be handled by reason alone.
However, at the same time, there began a shift away from a
preoccupation with purely historical studies. World War I shook
confidence in human ability to control the world. With the efforts of
several Neo-orthodox theologians such as Barth and Bultmann from one
direction and others working with literature such as Gunkel, there
emerged a focus on the theological communication of the Bible apart from
its historical background. The Neo-Orthodox theologians and the literary
critics both noted that the biblical text was intimately connected to a
community of Faith, and it should be that community of Faith’s
confession that receive the most attention.
As a reaction to the purely rationalistic approaches, this new
emphasis on theology focused on the belief of the community of Faith and
rejected concern with historical issues. For some, the historical issues
were irrelevant, even to the point of contending that whether or not the
historical event happened at all was immaterial, as long as the
Community of Faith was transformed by an "existential" encounter with
God. In an attempt to recover the theological focus of the Bible, this
perspective tended to abandon the historical grounding of the biblical
witness.
As might be expected there was a reaction from many in the church to
this perceived neglect of the Faith in favor of historical fact on the
one hand and what many perceived as moving the Bible too far away from
historical fact into myth on the other. However, the reaction was not
necessarily a positive move either. Some of the rationalists (and
certainly not all biblical scholars who were working historically were
rationalists!) had concluded that scientific historical investigation
could not directly support the Faith claims of the Church, and that in
fact some aspects of Scripture denied some of those claims.
Unfortunately for Christians who saw all of those claims as essential to
the Faith, they were right in some areas (see
History and Theology in Joshua and Judges).
Yet without recognizing that genuine Faith claims cannot be measured
by scientific proofs any more than God can be proven by scientific
investigation, some Christians tried to fight a "battle for the Bible,"
as it would later be called, by adopting the assumptions and techniques
of the rationalists. To counter the Neo-Orthodox theologians and
biblical scholars who were moving away from a totally historical
approach to Scripture, many Christians focused on defending the absolute
historicity of the Bible. Because the rationalists were using historical
approaches to prove their case, oddly enough some Christians began using
the same methods and the same evidence to reach radically different
conclusions. But they did so by using evidence selectively, ignoring
contrary evidence, or simply making assumptions without evidence and
presenting it as evidentiary fact.
By the 1920s the Fundamentalist movement had coalesced around
concerns about the absolute inerrancy of Scripture concerning
everything, but especially about the absolute historical accuracy of the
bible in all details (see The Modern Inerrancy
Debate). In many ways, that was a return to the medieval approach in
which prior doctrine was the governing factor in biblical
interpretation, using Scripture to support that doctrine. Sadly, this
approach to biblical interpretation still prevails today in some
segments of the church.
With all of the faults and excesses by some, it was during this
period that the foundation of modern critical investigation of the Bible
was laid. By 1900 historians were studying the Pentateuch and the
Gospels to authenticate the sources they used. With the rapid growth of
archaeology, a tremendous amount of knowledge about the ancient world
had been recovered that provided a historical and cultural background in
which to place many of the Bible stories. The discovery of many new
manuscripts of the Bible, as well as advances in knowledge of ancient
languages allowed far more accurate analysis of the biblical text. These
factors invigorated the study of Scripture.
Post-modern (1970 – present)
The date of 1970 is an arbitrary date to mark this shift. I choose it
because in biblical studies it marks the publication of Brevard Childs’
book,
Biblical
Theology in Crisis. In it he critiques the idea prevalent in
some segments of Christianity that the Bible presents a totally coherent
body of doctrine about everything along with a preoccupation with
historical background issues, as well as the loss of biblical authority
in other circles. He took to task both sides of the spectrum for not
dealing honestly with all the biblical evidence, both because of faulty
assumptions and methods of study that prevented seeing the range of
material in the text and because assumptions or prejudices about the
nature of the Bible itself eliminated consideration of some options and
evidence.
It is not that Child’s book precipitated an immediate and radical
change in how biblical studies were done. Rather this book exemplified
and gave voice to the changes that were already under way in biblical
studies. Modernity, the Age of Reason, had a great deal of confidence in
human ability to gain enough knowledge to master our environment. That
attitude carried into biblical studies as both sides of the "battle for
the Bible" assumed that with enough knowledge they could prove the other
position wrong and come to truth. The gradual influence of post-modern
ways of thinking, coming from both the "hard" sciences and the social
sciences, began to erode that confidence. The focus of biblical studies
gradually shifted during the 1970s and 1980s from an almost total
preoccupation with historical background issues behind the text to a
concern with the text itself. The focus was not only on what was
being said but how it was said and what response it
evoked. This allowed a larger place for the community of Faith’s
testimony, while still allowing that testimony to be given in the
historical and cultural particularity of ancient Israel and the Roman
world.
The assumptions of a post-modern perspective have shifted how we view
the world, which in turn impacts how we do biblical studies. We no
longer see reality as fixed and unchangeable. Even modern science has
made this shift in quantum theory that speaks more in terms of rates of
change than it does in describing what is. We see the world now as
dynamic and constantly changing. Social institutions that only a
generation ago were seen to be the expression of the stability of the
world, even as decreed by God (for example, slavery and the subjugation
of people of color by white Europeans and Americans), are now seen as
human creations that can be changed by human beings. One battleground of
this conflict that is being played out in the modern church is the role
of women in ministry.
In terms of Biblical study, this does not mean that we see the Bible
as constantly changing. But it does mean that we have to study the Bible
in terms of the people and the context that produced it, the testimony
they passed on to us about God and ourselves, and then ask what the
message of their testimony is that can be applied to a modern world.
That requires being fluent not only in our own culture but in the world
of the Bible. It means that we can no longer simply assume a meaning for
the biblical test based on what we have always heard that it means. It
suggests that we need to listen to the biblical testimony with new ears,
ready to hear a new word from God rather than a confirmation of the word
we have always heard from the Church, or from our favorite pastor, or
the person with the latest book, or from the most popular person on
Christian television. It means as pastors and leader that we have the
responsibility to study Scripture diligently for the evidence that is
there rather than imposing onto the biblical text what we think it needs
to say, what the Church says that it must say, or what society demands
that it say (or not say!). The Biblical evidence must move beyond
doctrine and opinion if it is to be the living word of God for a new
millennium. That is our task as faithful interpreters of Scripture.
(1.) While this discussion is about Christian
biblical interpretation many of the same points could be made about
interpretation of Scripture within Judaism.
-Dennis Bratcher, Copyright ©
2023, Dennis Bratcher -
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Historical/Cultural Context
Scripture in the Church
Biblical Theology
Old Testament
New Testament
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