Biblical Views: Critical Biblical Scholarship—What’s the Use?

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I was surprised to learn recently that the mainstream of contemporary Christian philosophy has little use for critical Biblical scholarship. Alvin Plantinga, probably the most eminent member of the guild of Christian philosophers, writes: There is no compelling or even reasonably decent argument for supposing that the procedures and assumptions of [historical Biblical criticism] are to be preferred to those of traditional Biblical commentary.1 He believes that interpreting the Bible by means of historical Biblical criticism is like “trying to mow your lawn with a nail scissors or paint your house with a toothbrush; it might be an interesting […]

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Endnotes

Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), p. 412.

Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, p. 417.

Plantinga, “When Faith and Reason Clash,” in Robert T. Pennock, ed., Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives (Boston: MIT Press, 2001), p. 119.

Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (New York: Collier and Son, 1901), p. 65 (originally published in 1605).

John Calvin, Institutes; quoted in Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, p. 268.

Roland H. Bainton, “The Bible in the Reformation,” in S.L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1963), p. 16.

Quoted in Kenton L. Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), p. 256. In his Commentary on Genesis, Calvin argues that because of its duty to teach the uneducated, Scripture conforms to “the capacity of the vulgar” and “insists on the rudiments suitable to children” (comments at Genesis 2:8 and 3:1). He regards the sciences (like astronomy) as useful and correct, but “generally unknown [to] the uneducated” (comment at Genesis 1:16).

Quoted in Bainton, “Bible in the Reformation,” p. 13. Luther is here referring to Matthew 27:9, which confuses the prophet Jeremiah with the prophet Zechariah.

Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words.