CARSON, D. A. and WOODBRIDGE, John D., Eds. (2005) - Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon. Eugene, Oregon Wipf
CARSON, D. A. and WOODBRIDGE, John D., Eds. (2005) - Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon. Eugene, Oregon Wipf
CARSON, D. A. and WOODBRIDGE, John D., Eds. (2005) - Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon. Eugene, Oregon Wipf
AUTHORITY,
And
CANON
edited by
D. A. Carson
And
John D. Woodbridge
Contents
Preface
Abbreviations for the Books of the Bible
Transliterations
CHAPTER ONE
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE DOCTRINE OF SCRIPTURE
D. A. Carson
This essay attempts to classify and evaluate some of the more important issues raised in
the past two or three decades regarding the doctrine of Scripture, including re-writing its
history, the phenomena of the Bible, debates over terminology and the concursive
theory, “proposition” and “literary genre,” the new hermeneutic, and the waning
authority of Scripture in the churches.
CHAPTER TWO
THE SEMANTICS OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE: TRUTH AND SCRIPTURE’S
DIVERSE LITERARY FORMS
Kevin J. Vanhoozer
Examining how Scripture’s literary forms affect biblical authority, meaning, and truth,
this chapter suggests that Evangelicals, in their zeal to defend “propositional revelation,”
have overlooked certain important features of biblical literature. The author provides a
model of biblical revelation as “ordinary literature” in order to do justice to the forms as
well as the content of Scripture.
CHAPTER THREE
THE PLACE OF HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION IN NEW TESTAMENT
CRITICISM
Moisés Silva
Believers in the authority of the Bible are disturbed when scholars disagree widely in the
way they reconstruct biblical events. By focusing on two specific problems—the
character of Pharisaism and the conflict between Jewish and Gentile Christianity—this
chapter seeks to identify the reasons for such scholarly disagreement.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE LEGITIMACY AND LIMITS OF HARMONIZATION
Craig L. Blomberg
Harmonization offers neither a panacea nor a cul-de-sac for historians faced with
apparent contradictions between parallel accounts of ancient events. Rather, it provides
one method among many, including, most notably, redaction criticism. Suggested
resolutions of seeming inconsistencies in the Synoptics, Kings—Chronicles, the writings
of Josephus, and the biographies of Alexander the Great illustrate these various
methods.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PROBLEM OF SENSUS PLENIOR
Douglas J. Moo
The doctrine of inerrancy must come to grips with the phenomenon of apparently “new”
meanings that New Testament authors discovered in Old Testament texts. After defining
the problem, a brief historical survey highlights some of the issues, and contemporary
explanations of the phenomenon are analyzed. A broad “canonical” approach is
proposed as the most promising solution.
CHAPTER SIX
THE SPIRIT AND THE SCRIPTURES
John M. Frame
The Holy Spirit inspired the Bible in its “problematic” form so as to better communicate
God’s truth in all its variety and mystery. His internal testimony is to the whole text of
Scripture, and it opens hearts and minds to accept the truth, reinforcing the words
themselves and helping people recognize the cogency of Scripture itself.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SOME MISCONCEPTIONS OF THE IMPACT OF THE “ENLIGHTENMENT” ON
THE DOCTRINE OF SCRIPTURE
John D. Woodbridge
In current debates regarding biblical authority, it has been proposed that the
“Fundamentalist” doctrine of biblical inerrancy originated during the age of the
“Enlightenment.” This chapter argues that many Christians before the “Enlightenment”
believed the Bible is infallible, not for salvation truths alone, but even when it treats
matters of history and the natural world.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE IN KARL BARTH
Geoffrey W. Bromiley
This chapter focuses on biblical authority in the theology and practice of Karl Barth.
Beginning with Barth’s revolutionary return to the Bible during World War I, it
documents his view of the Bible as norm in his early statements and the Church
Dogmatics and then presents his use of Scripture in his preaching, theology, and
counseling. It concludes by assessing the weaknesses and merits of his position.
CHAPTER NINE
THE BIBLICAL CANON
David G. Dunbar
The second half of the twentieth century has seen a renewal of interest in the formation
of the Old and New Testament canons, both from historical and theological
perspectives. This chapter contends that the idea of a canon is the outgrowth of salvation
history and arises when God’s people regard the process of revelation as complete or, at
least, in abeyance.
=ּבb
=בḇ
=ּגg
=גg̱
=ּדd
=דḏ
=הh
=וw
=זz
=חḥ
=טṭ
=יy
=ּכk
=כ ְךḵ
=לl
=מ םm
=נ ןn
=סs
̔ =ע
=ּפp
=פ ףp̱
=צ ץṣ
=קq
=רr
=ׂשś
=ׁשš
=ּתt
=תṯ
) =ָ (הâ (h)
=ָ יê
=ָ יî
=ֹוô
=ּוû
ָ= ā
ָ= ē
ֹ ō
=
ָ= a
ָ= e
ָ= i
ָ= o
ָ= u
ָ=
a
ָ=
e
ָ=
e
(if vocal)
ָ=
o
Greek
α=a
β=b
γ=g
δ=d
ε=e
ζ=z
η=ē
θ = th
ι=i
κ=k
λ=l
μ=m
ν=n
ξ=x
ο=o
π=p
ρ=r
σ, ς = s
τ=t
υ=y
φ = ph
χ = ch
ψ = ps
ω=ō
αυ = au
ευ = eu
ηυ = ēu
ου = ou
υι = ui
γγ = ng
γκ = nk
γξ = nx
γχ = nch
ᾳ=ā
ῃ=ē
ῳ=ō
̔=h
ῥ = rh
CHAPTER ONE
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE DOCTRINE OF
SCRIPTURE
D. A. Carson
D. A. Carson is Professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield,
Illinois. He is a graduate of McGill University (B.Sc.), Central Baptist Seminary in Toronto (M.Div.),
and Cambridge University (Ph.D.), and he has studied at Regent College and in Germany. He has
served both as a church planter and as a pastor, and he lectures frequently in Canada, the United States,
and the United Kingdom. Before moving to Trinity, he taught at Northwest Baptist Theological College
and Seminary in Vancouver. He is editor of the Trinity Journal and the author or editor of fifteen
books, including Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility, From Sabbath to Lord’s Day, the
Matthew commentary in EBC, and Greek Accents: A Student’s Manual—and of many articles. He
holds membership in Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, the Society of Biblical Literature, the
Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, the Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical Research, the Institute for
Biblical Research, and the Evangelical Theological Society.
CHAPTER ONE
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE DOCTRINE OF SCRIPTURE
The pattern of Christian thought that emerged from the Reformation is often summed up under the
three phrases: sola gratia, sola fides, and sola Scriptura. When I was a boy, I sometimes wondered
how logic could be p̄reserved if there were three statements each claiming that something or other was
“sola”; but in due course I learned that grace is the sole ground of salvation, faith is the sole means of
salvation, and the Scriptures are the sole ultimate authority for faith and life—all set in the context of
the polemics of the Reformation period.
Precisely because the Reformers’ theological formulations were shaped by the controversies of
their age, it is clear that the “faith and life” formula was meant to be an all-embracing rubric, not a
limiting one. They claimed that the deposit of truth lies in the Bible, not in the church or in the
magisterium of the church. Their concern, in other words, was to spell out the locus of authority in
order to rebut their Roman Catholic opponents, not to restrict the range of the Bible’s authority to
religious life and thought, away from history and the natural world. The modern disjunction would
have seemed strange to them.
This side of the Enlightenment, debate over the Scriptures soon moved on to broader matters.
Although the history of these debates has been chronicled many times, a great deal of detailed work
still needs to be done. But perhaps the most difficult period to comprehend, in some ways, is the most
recent. We do not yet have the advantage of distance; and the twists in the debate are many and
intricate. Not a few of the issues raised are so fresh or are so much a part of modern scholarly thought
that evenhanded and disinterested evaluation is extraordinarily difficult.
The essays printed in this volume and in the companion volume have been written in order to
address the most important of these issues. We have written as Evangelicals; and so far as the doctrine
of Scripture is concerned, we believe we stand within the central tradition of the church and in line with
the teaching of the Scriptures themselves. This ancient tradition is worth defending, examining, and
rearticulating as theological fashions raise new questions. The present essay attempts to scan rather
rapidly some of these recent developments, in the hope that a bird’s-eye view will provide these
volumes with breadth and unity that might otherwise be lacking. The aim is not to deal with
denominational bodies (e.g., the Missouri Synod or the Southern Baptist Convention) or particular
publications that have agonized over the issue (e.g., Churchman) but to focus on theological,
philosophical, and historical matters that in the modern debate impinge directly on how we view the
Bible.
The resurgence of interest in the doctrine of Scripture can be traced to many factors; but four
deserve brief mention. The first is the growing strength of Evangelicals. It is no longer possible to
ignore them. Their churches are growing, their seminaries are bulging, their books keep pouring off the
presses. In any large movement, of course, much of the momentum is kept up at the purely popular
level; but Evangelicalism can no longer be responsibly dismissed as an academic wasteland. While
nonconservative seminaries are lowering academic standards, multiplying D.Min. tracks, and reducing
Greek and Hebrew requirements in order to avoid disastrous collapse of student enrollment, seminaries
within Evangelicalism continue to blossom. At some Ivy League seminaries, only thirty percent of the
students take any Greek; most evangelical institutions require at least one year of Greek as a
prerequisite for entrance and insist on a minimum of one year of Greek beyond that. One of the results
is that a disproportionate number of current doctoral candidates both in America and in Britain spring
from conservative backgrounds; they are more likely to have the linguistic competence for advanced
training. The rising tide of interest in the doctrine of Scripture in nonconservative circles is not a
reaction against conservatives who are becoming even more conservative than the heritage from which
they have emerged (as some have suggested).5 Rather, it is at least partly a reaction to the increasing
visibility of conservatives.
The second factor is scarcely less important: Evangelicalism is becoming somewhat fragmented.
Never a truly monolithic movement, Evangelicalism long enjoyed a fair measure of agreement over
certain central teachings; but in its contemporary guise it is pulling itself apart on several different
doctrinal fronts—and one of these is the doctrine of Scripture. Some of this fragmentation is the
predictable but tragic fruit of remarkable numerical growth. Whatever the reason, some of the strongest
attacks on the Evangelicals’ traditional understanding of Scripture—even some of the least temperate
criticisms—have been penned by those who today are viewed as Evangelicals—though it is by no
means certain that the Evangelicals of forty years ago, were they somehow to reappear on the scene,
would recognize them as fellow travellers. Perhaps it should be mentioned that this fragmentation of
Evangelicals’ views on Scripture is not restricted to North America—as, for instance, a comparison of
the papers of the Keele and Nottingham conferences quickly proves with reference to England (with
similar evidence available for other places).
It is astonishing how much of the literature written by mainline Evangelicals on the doctrine of
Scripture has been penned in response to one or both of these first two trends. Conservatives have often
been accused of fixating on Scripture; but careful perusal of the treatments of the last fifteen years
shows that, if anything, the reverse is true: nonconservatives have taken up the theme, and
conservatives have responded. That may not say much for the creativity of conservatives; but it does
exonerate them from the charge of endlessly banging the drum. The creation of the ICBI (International
Council on Biblical Inerrancy) was prompted by apologetic concerns; and only a few of the authors
who have published under its aegis have attempted new and more profound analysis of the nature of
Scripture. The majority have simply aimed to restate the traditional positions and delineate the
weaknesses of their opponents. Like the works of the nonconservatives, the essays of those who have
contributed to ICBI have varied from the average and the shallow to the acute and the insightful.7 As an
instance of the latter, it would be a great help to clarity of thought if no one would comment on the
appropriateness or otherwise of the term “inerrancy” without reading the essay of Paul Feinberg that
deals with this subject.
ICBI is perhaps simultaneously too encompassing and too unrepresentative in its membership.
Because it is too encompassing, it has sometimes published essays of doubtful worth along with far
better pieces; but this policy, though it has encouraged the involvement of many, has set the
organization up for caricature that is not itself entirely fair. Owing to the prominence of the
organization, some have failed to recognize that many Evangelicals in America and abroad have
contributed to the debate without any organizational connection to ICBI; in that sense, ICBI is
somewhat unrepresentative.
In any case, it would be quite mistaken to suppose that conservatives on the doctrine of Scripture
are an embattled few who can manage nothing more credible than throwing a few defensive javelins
into the crowd, hurled from the safety of a stony rampart called “orthodoxy.” In addition to the
magnum opus of Henry, there is a plethora of studies prepared by Evangelicals—philosophical,
exegetical, hermeneutical, historical, critical—that do not address directly the question of the
truthfulness of Scripture, but operate within the framework of that “functional nonnegotiable”11 and, by
demonstrating a certain coherence and maturity, contribute to the same end.
The fragmentation of Evangelicalism, therefore, has produced mixed fruit. On one end of the
spectrum, it has weakened its distinctiveness; on the other end, it has flirted with obscurantism. Yet
there still remains a considerable strength; and part of the resurgence of interest in the doctrine of
Scripture reflects the self-examination of the movement as it struggles with its own identity. But of this
I shall say more in a few moments.
The third factor that has helped to raise again the subject of Scripture is the crisis of authority that
stamps so much of modern, Western Christianity—especially in academic circles. Children of the
Enlightenment, like moths to a light we are drawn to the incandescence of the autonomy of reason. But
having destroyed all the pretensions of external authority, we have discovered, somewhat aghast, that
reason is corruptible, that one human mind does not often agree in great detail with another human
mind, that reason by itself is a rather stumbling criterion of truth, beset as it is by a smorgasbord of
values, theories, and predispositions shaped in remarkable independence of reason.
In the ensuing vacuum, there has arisen a muted hunger for authority. Finding all the gods dead,
some people have manufactured their own: faddish gurus, unrestrained hedonism, and the pious pursuit
of self-fulfillment are among the current contenders. But many wonder if the authority of Scripture
should not be looked at again. Nor is this a concern of conservatives alone. The crisis of authority
infects every stratum of our society; and, therefore, many people—unable to bear the sight of the
epistemological abyss, yet unwilling to call in question the proposition that the human race is the final
measure of all things—have come to affirm the authority of Scripture, though in some attenuated sense.
The nature of such attenuation is a recurring theme in this essay; but for now it is enough to point out
that the search for meaningful authority has contributed to the renascence of interest in the doctrine of
Scripture.
The fourth factor contributing to this renascence is the theological revolution that has taken place
and is taking place in the Roman Catholic Church. Pope John XXIII and Vatican II have had a
profound influence on academic Roman Catholic theology, confirming and accelerating the more
“liberal” wing of the church in its adoption of a position on Scripture that is almost indistinguishable
from that of “liberal” Protestantism. By and large, this trend has not been as uncontrolled in
Catholicism as in Protestantism, owing in part to the constraints of Catholicism’s theology of tradition;
but the changes are so far-reaching that to compare the academic publications of the Roman Catholic
Church of forty or fifty years ago with those of the past two decades is to enter two entirely different
worlds. The dramatic change is attested even by the successive drafts at Vatican II. The first draft
schema, reflecting the longstanding tradition of the church, dealt with inerrancy as follows:
Since divine inspiration extends to all things [in the Bible], it follows directly and necessarily that the entire
Sacred Scripture is absolutely immune from error. By the ancient and constant faith of the Church we are
taught that it is absolutely wrong to concede that a sacred writer has erred, since divine inspiration by its
very nature excludes and rejects every error in every field, religious or profane. This necessarily follows
because God, the supreme truth, can be the author of no error whatever.
The changes are dramatic. First, the Bible is now restricted to truth “for the sake of our salvation,” and,
second—and more importantly—the expression “that truth which God willed to be put down in the
sacred writings” not only comes short of making God’s truth at least as extensive as the writings but
also thereby leaves it entirely open to each reader (or to the church) to decide which parts of the sacred
writings embody God’s truth. Everyone from a Fundamentalist to a “Christian atheist” could assent to
this formulation—which is another way of saying that this final draft masks massive disagreement in
the Roman Catholic Church. Creedally speaking, its fine phrases are worth less than the ink that
enables us to read them.
This revolution is evident not only in the content of much Roman Catholic scholarship but now also
in the self-conscious defense of these developments.14 Roman Catholic scholars who adopt a
conservative stance on the Scriptures continue to publish their findings; but by and large they have
neither advanced a well-thought-out defense of their position nor devised a mature critique of their
more liberal colleagues. The few explicit attempts to accomplish the latter are too personal and
insufficiently knowledgeable to carry much weight in the academic marketplace.16
Whatever the factors that have contributed to bringing about renewed discussion of the nature of
Scripture, this essay attempts to chart come of the most important of the recent developments. The
eight sections in the rest of this paper do not attempt to be comprehensive; rather, the focus is on those
issues that seem to have the greatest bearing on the traditional view of the authority and truthfulness of
Scripture held by the church across the centuries. Among other things, this means that a
disproportionate amount of space is devoted to positions that are nearest to but somewhat divergent
from the traditional view. Moreover, issues discussed at length in one of the other articles in these two
volumes are usually accorded only brief discussion in this essay, along with a note drawing attention to
the more extensive treatment.
I. REVISIONIST HISTORIOGRAPHY
A. SUMMARY OF RECENT HISTORIOGRAPHY
As late as 1975, Martin E. Marty, in an essay largely devoted to tracing the differences between
Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, could nevertheless insist that so far as the doctrine of the
inerrancy of Scripture is concerned there was no difference between the two groups.19 That may have
been a slight exaggeration, for even in 1975 there were a few scholars who called themselves
Evangelicals but who expressed their displeasure with any notion of “inerrancy” as traditionally
understood. But Marty’s assessment highlights a point of some importance: until fairly recently, the
infallibility or inerrancy of Scripture was one of the self-identifying flags of Evangelicalism,
recognized by friend and foe alike. In debates with nonconservatives, both sides agreed that the
conservatives were in line with the historic tradition of the church. Nonconservatives simply argued
that such a position was no longer tenable in any intellectually respectable climate; and conservatives
sought to show that the position was not only defensible but one without which the heart of the gospel
too easily slipped from one’s grasp. Of course, there have been a few exceptions to this understanding.
In his debates with Warfield, for instance, Charles Briggs sought to show that the position he held was
in line with Reformation teaching; but his argument was not taken up and developed by others. Karl
Barth likewise insisted that his understanding of Scripture was but a modern restatement of historic and
especially Reformation Christianity; but although in his strong defense of the Bible’s authority there is
considerable justification for his claim, nevertheless there are nuances in his position that remove him
somewhat from the heritage to which he lays claim.21 By and large, then, conservatives and
nonconservatives alike have in the past agreed that the witness of history has favored the conservatives.
That consensus is rapidly dissipating. A new generation of historians is arguing that the modern
conservative position on Scripture is something of an aberration that owes its impetus in part to
scholastic theology of the post-Reformation period and in part to the Princetonians, especially Charles
Hodge and Benjamin B. Warfield. Probably the best known work to espouse this view is that of Jack
Rogers and Donald McKim. They seek to establish this thesis by a comprehensive outline of the way
the Bible was described and treated throughout (largely Western) church history. Their conclusion is
that the historic position of the church defends the Bible’s authority in the areas of faith and practice
(understood in a restrictive sense), not its reliable truthfulness in every area on which it chooses to
speak.
Initial response was largely affirming; but it was not long before major weaknesses came to light.
Owing not least to the detailed rebuttal by John D. Woodbridge, rising numbers of scholars have
pointed out the fatal flaws. While Rogers and McKim accuse conservatives of reading Warfield into
Calvin and the Fathers, it soon becomes apparent that they read Barth and Berkouwer into Calvin and
the Fathers. Misunderstanding some of their sources and quoting others with prejudicial selectivity,
they finally succumb to a certain “ahistoricism” that neglects the church’s sustained attempt to guard
the form of the message as well as the message itself.24
The work of Rogers and McKim is based in one small part on an influential book by Ernest
Sandeen, who argues that belief in “the inerrancy of the Scriptures in the original documents” was
innovatively raised to the level of creedal standard by Benjamin Warfield and Archibald Alexander in
an 1881 essay on “Inspiration.” This part of Sandeen’s examination of Fundamentalism’s roots was
woven into the larger pattern spun by Rogers and McKim. One of the benefits of their work has been a
renewed interest in this and related historical questions. As a result, major essays have been written to
show, inter alia, that primary sources (letters, magazine articles, books, and manuscripts) of the
nineteenth century amply attest that the view articulated by Warfield and Hodge was popular long
before 1881, that the magisterial reformers were consistent in their defense of an inerrant Scripture, 27
that Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck of the “Old Amsterdam” school cannot legitimately be
taken as forerunners of Barth and Berkouwer, and much more. We anticipate more of these careful
historical treatments in the next few years.
B. RENNIE’S PROPOSAL
This much of recent revisionist historiography and the responses it has called forth is common
knowledge. But subtler influences are at work. In a conference held in June 1981 at the Institute for
Christian Studies in Toronto, Ian Rennie delivered a paper written as a response to Rogers and McKim
but containing several important and innovative proposals. Rennie argues that the view expounded by
Rogers and McKim has conceptual links with “plenary inspiration” as understood in Britain in the
nineteenth century. Plenary inspiration, according to Rennie, was distinguished from verbal inspiration
and was characterized by (1) a willingness to recognize several different modes of inspiration, (2)
insistence nonetheless that all the Bible is inspired, (3) confidence that because all the Bible is
authoritative it will not lead anyone aside from the truth on any subject (though it is peculiarly
authoritative when it deals with the central Christian truths), and (4) greater openness to interpretative
innovation than its competitor. Plenary inspiration could describe the Bible as infallible and without
error. It is the view closest to the relatively unformed doctrine of Scripture held by the church until the
Reformation.
By contrast, the Germanic lands in the sixteenth century began to advance the verbal inspiration
view—a view that held sway in countries heavily influenced by Germany but one that made almost no
impact on the Anglo-American world until the nineteenth century, when it began to be defended by
Alexander Carson, Robert Haldane, J. C. Ryle, and many others. The plenary inspiration theory is
painfully literalistic in its approach, and it becomes characteristic of Christianity in decline and
defensiveness. The plenary view reflects a Christianity that is both orthodox and robust, and it becomes
one of the vehicles of the First and Second Evangelical Awakenings. Historically, it even enabled those
who opposed the slave trade to “break through the literalism that sanctioned slavery, and affirm that in
such issues it was the spirit of love and redemptive freedom that validly reinterpreted texts that
otherwise possessed the death-disseminating quality of the culture-bound.”
There are two rather substantial weaknesses with Rennie’s proposal. The first is the conceptual
inappropriateness of the disjunction he draws. As Rennie characterizes plenary and verbal inspiration,
it appears that the differences between the two viewpoints center around competing hermeneutical
systems and have almost nothing to do with either inspiration or the Bible’s truthfulness. Thus, he
affirms that the verbal inspiration view is quick to say the Bible is without error and is fully
authoritative; but, of course, the plenary inspiration viewpoint would not want to disagree. According
to Rennie, the verbal inspiration view sees the locus of inspiration in the words themselves and tends to
develop formulations in deductivist or Aristotelian fashion. By contrast, the plenary inspiration view
sees the locus of inspiration in the human authors and tends to develop its formulations from the actual
phenomena of Scripture. The irony in this disjunction is that the one passage where inspiration is
overtly brought up in the Bible (surely, therefore, one of the “phenomena” to be embraced) tells the
reader that it is the Scripture itself that is “inspired” (“God-breathed,” 2 Ti 3:16)—not the human
authors. But apart from such distinctions, about which I’ll say more in a later section, the primary
disjunctions Rennie draws between the two viewpoints are hermeneutical and functional: plenary
inspiration is open-minded, aware of the Enlightenment and able to come to terms with it, relevant,
prophetic, against slavery, while verbal inspiration is defensive, incapable of relevantly addressing the
age, strong on literalism and the defense of slavery.
These observations drive us to the second substantial weakness in Rennie’s analysis. His argument,
of course, is essentially a historical one, based on his reading of certain texts; but it is not at all certain
that he has understood those texts correctly. Certainly in the nineteenth century there were some who
preferred to adopt the plenary inspiration viewpoint, and others were happier to label their view verbal
inspiration. On the other hand, there is little evidence that the two labels were set over against each
other. Those who upheld verbal inspiration were also happy to affirm plenary inspiration; and both
sides adopted the plenary inspiration label over against the Unitarians, who opted for a much “lower”
view of the Bible. In other words, all Evangelicals labeled their view “plenary inspiration” when they
were distinguishing their position from the “limited inspiration” of the Unitarians. More telling yet, at
least some of those who disparaged verbal inspiration while affirming plenary inspiration did so
because they mistakenly equated the former with a theory of mechanical dictation—a theory the ablest
defenders of verbal inspiration disavowed—and with such things as verbatim reportage, which
rendered Gospel harmonization principially impossible.34 Similarly, even into the first third of the
twentieth century, a few British Evangelicals so associated the term “inerrancy” with crude literalism,
or with a failure to recognize the progressive nature of revelation, that they therefore avoided
associating themselves with the term—even though, by modern usage, that is what they believed. As
for those who in the early part of the twentieth century adopted the view that the Scriptures contained
many errors on all sorts of incidental matters (e.g., James Orr, James Denney, and Marcus Dods), not
only was their view outside the classic formulations of Scriptural infallibility and plenary inspiration,
but it was supported by surprisingly little exegesis.
It appears, then, that Rennie’s assessment needs some major qualifications. It is true that the verbal
inspiration viewpoint was prominent in Germanic lands, owing in part to the struggles Protestants
found themselves engaged in with Roman Catholics and Socinians; but contra Rennie, it is not true that
this viewpoint was first introduced into Britain through the hyper-Calvinist John Gill in his Body of
Practical Divinity (1770). For instance, forty years earlier Ridgley had argued at some length “that the
inspired writers have given us a true narration of things, and consequently that the words, as well as the
matter, are truly divine.” Indeed, his argument is shaped by the assumption that his view is shared by
the vast majority of his readers. In any case, it is not at all clear that those who held to verbal
inspiration in the nineteenth century were reflections of Christianity in decline. To support this rather
startling thesis, Rennie merely offers the judgment that the opposing view opened up interpretative
possibilities that made antislavery and other social reform movements possible. But a staunch supporter
of verbal inspiration like Edward Kirk (1802–74), the translator of Louis Gaussen’s influential
Theopneustia, was a leader in the American Anti-Slavery Society and a champion of relief for the
poor.38 Rennie’s underlying thesis is, on any reading, too generalizing: Christianity given to thoughtful
doctrinal precision may not be in decline but in faithful consolidation and advance. Very frequently in
the history of the church the attacks of new philosophical and theological positions have proved to be
the occasion for the orthodox to formulate their own positions more carefully. These are the historical
circumstances that under God breed an Athanasius or a Calvin.
Moreover, the heavy weather that the Copernican theory faced from Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist
thinkers alike stemmed from the fact that they thought the Bible flatly contradicted a heliocentric view
of the universe—which, of course, presupposes that they believed the Bible could address such
scientific issues. When Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) sided with Copernicus, he tried to persuade his
critics that the theory of Copernicus could be squared with the Bible, not that the Bible does not
address such questions or that it may be in error over them. In fact, Kepler went so far as to say that he
would willingly abandon whatever parts of the Copernican hypotheses could be shown to be contrary
to Scripture.44 The conclusion Woodbridge documents is inescapable:
Contrary to the interpretations found in the works of Vawter, Rogers and McKim, and Roland Mushat
Frye, the choice that Christians faced until the middle of the seventeenth century was generally this: Should
each passage of an infallible Bible which speaks of the natural world be interpreted literally or should some
interpretive allowance be made for the fact that a number of passages are couched in the language of
appearance? The choice was not between a belief in a completely infallible Bible and a Bible whose
infallibility was limited to faith and practice. Parties from both sides of this debate included “science” and
history within their definition of infallibility, but they interpreted passages which dealt with the natural
world in differing ways. Those persons who did believe the Bible contained errors included, among others,
Socinians, libertines, skeptics, deists, remonstrants like Grotius, and members of smaller radical rationalist
sects.
The Bible was well on its way to being uncoupled from science, at least in many intellectual circles,
by the second half of the seventeenth century; but this uncoupling was normally accompanied by a shift
to a theological position that no longer affirmed the infallibility of Scripture. Therefore, those who now
wish to affirm the Bible’s infallibility in the spheres of “faith and practice” but not in all areas on which
it speaks are doubly removed from the mainstream of historical antecedents. Whatever the merits or
demerits of their theological position, they cannot legitimately appeal to the sustained commitment of
the church in order to bolster that position.
These words are commonly taken to reflect at least two unfortunate shifts: first, an uncritical
dependence on induction in theology, a method taken over directly from Baconianism mediated
through Scottish Common Sense; and, second, a novel view of the Bible that deemphasizes its role as a
guide for life, a source for truths necessary for salvation, and a means of grace, while seeing it as a
“storehouse of facts,” the quarry from which systematic theology is hewn.
Probably too much is being made of this sentence. It is essential to recognize that Hodge makes his
remark in the context of his treatment of the inductive method as applied to theology—and to nothing
else. Hodge develops the thought further to show such principles as the importance of collecting, if
possible, all that the Bible has to say on a subject before proceeding to inductive statements on the
subject, undertaking the collection (like the collection of facts in science) with care, and constantly
revising the induction in the light of fresh information. He does not in this section of his work seek to
establish the nature of the Bible’s truthfulness; his subject is prolegomena, not bibliology. When Hodge
does, in fact, turn to the doctrine of Scripture, he is immensely sophisticated and balanced; but here his
focus is elsewhere. The most that could be deduced from this one passage about Hodge’s doctrine of
Scripture are his beliefs that all the Bible is true, that its content is the stuff of systematic theology, and
that its material is sufficiently interrelated to belong to the same system. It is hard to see how anyone
with a truly high view of Scripture could say much less, even though much more needs to be said
(much of which Hodge himself says elsewhere). Like most analogies, this one between science and
theology is not perfect; for instance, the nature of experimentation in science is rather different from
the trial and error of formulating systematic theology. Certainly there is a place in theology for
experience, a place rather different from anything in the empirical sciences; and the role of the Holy
Spirit must be incorporated into the discussion. These, however, are steps that Hodge himself
undertakes in other sections of his magnum opus. But so far as the narrow subject of induction is
concerned, the analogy is not all that bad. I shall say more about induction in the next section; but
granted what else Hodge writes on Scripture, truth, and method, there is little warrant for reading too
much into this one sentence. For exactly the same reason, the admittedly positivistic nature of
nineteenth-century science cannot legitimately be held to tarnish his sophisticated epistemology.
The last sentence is surely largely true; but the rest of the quotation, by distancing the historian from
the theological matrix where judgments are made, almost sounds as if the historian is able to provide
value-free data, grist for the theological mill turned by colleagues in another department.
In short, while some of the revisionist historians have been much concerned, and rightly so, to
explain more adequately the intellectual roots of Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, they have not
always displayed a critical awareness of the direction from which they themselves are coming.
It is important to understand the nature of this charge. Inerrantists, we are told, do not shape their
doctrine of Scripture by the Scripture itself; or, if they do, they—while constructing their doctrine of
Scripture from a few passages that seem to justify the high view they espouse—ignore the actual
phenomena of Scripture. Worse, once this doctrine is in place, it so distorts their approach to the text
that they become the least “biblical” of all.
The issues involved turn out to be surprisingly complex: but at least the following observations are
relevant:
B. “QUALIFICATIONS” OF INERRANCY
Dunn’s estimate of the way “qualifications” to the doctrine of inerrancy have come about deserves
further reflection. At various points, he raises three such “qualifications”—the contention that precision
is not a determining factor in any estimate of the Scripture’s truth content, the recognition that not all
commandments in the Old Testament are perceived to be equally binding today, and the insistence that
the considerable diversity of interpretations is not injurious to the doctrine—and argues that these
“qualifications” have been wrung out of the conservatives by the phenomena of the Scriptures
themselves. But although there is some merit in his assessment, it is injudiciously cast. Statements
about the truthfulness of Scripture are not dependent upon the accuracy or uniformity with which the
Scripture may be interpreted. There is an immense conceptual difference between the effort to interpret
a certainly truthful text and the effort to interpret a doubtfully truthful text—regardless of the validity
of the interpretative effort. Moreover, the lack of precision in many biblical statements is not the
primary source of a qualification begrudgingly conceded by entrenched conservatives forced to face up
to unavoidable phenomena. Far more important is the fact that the Scriptures themselves, though they
lead the reader to expect the Scriptures to be true, do not lead the reader to expect the Scriptures to be
uniformly precise. Signals as to degree of precision to be expected, like signals as to genre, are often
subtle things; but a difficulty would arise only where all the signals point unambiguously to one degree
of precision when a considerably lower one is present. This question has been discussed in the
companion to this volume. Also, no thoughtful conservative from Irenaeus or Augustine to the present
has found the intricate question of the relationships between the covenants to be a threat to his doctrine
of Scripture, precisely because the Scripture itself teaches that it covers salvation-historical
development: there is before and after, prophecy and fulfillment, type and antitype, as well as mere
command. The truthfulness of Scripture does not necessitate viewing all commands in Scripture on the
same covenantal footing. What is somewhat astonishing is that this should have been perceived as a
weakness in the conservative position.
These oversimplifications are in no small measure the result of defective definitions. Truth is one such
term frequently subjected to reductionism; but as it was discussed in the first of this pair of volumes, I
shall largely leave it aside and make brief mention of three other terms that have become important in
recent discussion. But two remarks about truth seem in order. First, although it is sometimes suggested
that conservatives reduce truth to words and propositions—and thereby ignore the centrality of Christ
as truth incarnate—this failing is rare in conservatives of any stature. It is far more common for the
reductionism to work the other way: the nonconservative of stature is more likely to affirm the
centrality of Christ while ignoring the truth claims of the Scriptures themselves. Second, the diversity
of meanings bound up in the word true and its cognates (and ably expounded by Nicole) does not itself
jeopardize allegiance to a correspondence theory of truth, on which the doctrine of a truthful Scripture
is partly based. For instance, I might say, “My wife is my true friend”—even though I do hold to a
correspondence theory of truth. My sample sentence merely demonstrates that the semantic range of
“true” and its cognates cannot be reduced to usages congenial to the correspondence theory of truth.
Opponents would have to show either that the Hebrew and Greek words for truth never take on the
correspondence meaning, or at least that they never have such force when they refer to Scripture.
A. ACCOMMODATION
The first additional term to consider is accommodation. If the transcendent, personal God is to
communicate with us, His finite and sinful creatures, He must in some measure accommodate Himself
to and condescend to our capacity to receive that revelation. The point has been recognized from the
earliest centuries of the church, and it received considerable attention during the Reformation. In recent
discussion, however, this notion of accommodation as applied to the Scriptures is frequently assumed
to entail error. Thus, Barth writes:
If God was not ashamed of the fallibility of all the human words of the Bible, of their historical and scientific
inaccuracies, their theological contradictions, the uncertainty of their tradition, and, above all, their Judaism,
but adopted and made use of these expressions in all their fallibility, we do not need to be ashamed when He
wills to renew it to us in all its fallibility as witness, and it is mere self-will and disobedience to try to find
some infallible elements in the Bible.
Similarly, in his latest book, Clark Pinnock attempts to relate the possibility of error to the principle of
accommodation:
What we all have to deal with is a Bible with apparent errors in it whose exact status we cannot precisely
know. Whether in his inspiration or in his providence, God has permitted them to exist.… What God aims to
do through inspiration is to stir up faith in the gospel through the word of Scripture, which remains a human
text beset by normal weaknesses.
There are numerous other examples of the same approach, often accompanied by the assumption that
this is the view of accommodation that has prevailed throughout much of church history.
The first thing that must be said by way of response is that some of these treatments are not very
consistent. In the same context as the last quotation, for instance, Pinnock writes: “The Bible does not
attempt to give the impression that it is flawless in historical or scientific ways. God uses writers with
weaknesses and still teaches the truth of revelation through them.” But here there is a shift from error in
certain spheres of thought (history and science) to error caused by the humanity of Scripture. One
begins to suspect that the latter argument is being used to restrict the Bible’s authority to purely
religious matters, not to whatever subject it chooses to address. But the argument is more dangerous
than Pinnock seems to think; for if the potential for error is grounded in Scripture’s humanity, by what
argument should that error be restricted to the fields of history and science? Why does not human
fallibility also entail error in the religious and theological spheres? Or conversely, if someone wishes to
argue that God has preserved the human authors from error in religion and theology, what prevents
God from doing so in other areas of thought?
Second, this approach to accommodation is certainly far removed from the understanding of
accommodation worked out both in the early church and in the Reformation. The most recent authority
rightly insists:
The Reformers and their scholastic followers all recognized that God in some way must condescend or
accommodate himself to human ways of knowing in order to reveal himself: this accommodatio occurs
specifically in the use of human words and concepts for the communication of the law and the gospel, but it
in no way implies the loss of truth or the lessening of scriptural authority. The accommodatio or
condescensio refers to the manner or mode of revelation, the gift of wisdom of infinite God in finite form,
not to the quality of the revelation or to the matter revealed. A parallel idea occurs in the scholastic
protestant distinction between theologia archetype and theologia ectype. Note that the sense of
accommodatio which implies not only a divine condescension but also a use of time-bound and even
erroneous statements as a medium for revelation arose in the eighteenth century in the thought of Semler and
his contemporaries and has no relation either to the position of the Reformers or to that of the protestant
scholastics, either Lutheran or Reformed.
Third, the argument that error is essentially human (“nothing is more human than to err,” writes
Vawter) is extremely problematic and cries out for further analysis. Error, of course, is distinguishable
from sin and can be the result of nothing more than finitude; but much human error results from the
play of sin on human finitude. The question is whether it is error that is essential to humanness, or
finitude. If the latter, it is difficult to see why Scripture would be any less “human” if God so
superintended its writing that no error was committed. Human beings are always finite; but it does not
follow they are always in error. Error does not seem to be essential to humanness. But if someone
wishes to controvert the point, then to be consistent that person must also insist that between the Fall
and the new heaven and the new earth, not only error but sinfulness is essential to humanness. No
writer of Scripture escaped the sinfulness of his fallen nature while composing what came to be
recognized as Holy Writ: does this mean that the humanness of Scripture entails not only error but
sinfulness? And if not, why not? Who wishes to say Scripture is sinful? This is not mere reductio ad
absurdem: rather, it is a way of showing that human beings who in the course of their lives inevitably
err and sin do not necessarily err and sin in any particular circumstance. Their humanness is not
compromised when they fail to err or sin. By the same token, a God who safeguards them from error in
a particular circumstance—namely, the writing of Scripture—has not thereby vitiated their humanness.
Fourth, there is an unavoidable christological connection, raised (perhaps unwittingly) by Vawter
himself:
The Fathers and the Church have always been fond of the analogy by which the Scripture as word of God in
words of men may be compared with Christ the incarnate Word, the divine in human flesh. But if the
incarnate Word disclaimed omniscience (Mk 13:32, etc.), it must seem singularly inappropriate to exploit the
analogy as an argument for an utterly inerrant Scripture.
The logic, of course, is faulty: to be a valid argument, Vawter would have had to conclude with the
words: “… it must seem singularly inappropriate to exploit the analogy as an argument for an utterly
omniscient Scripture.” I’m not sure what “omniscient Scripture” would mean: presumably a Scripture
that “knows” or “tells” or “records” absolutely everything. But no one claims that. However, if the
Scripture/Christ analogy holds, Vawter’s argument can be made to stand on its head. If error is the
inevitable result of lack of omniscience, and if lack of omniscience is characteristic of all humanness
(including that of Jesus, according to the biblical passage to which Vawter refers), then there are errors
not only in Scripture but in Jesus’ teaching as well.
Calvin understood the problem and, therefore, appealed to accommodation not only in his treatment
of Scripture but as a function of God’s gracious self-disclosure to us in many forms: in the use of
language, in the use of anthropomorphism, in the doctrine of Scripture—and in the Incarnation itself.
But it was precisely that breadth of view that enabled him to see that whatever accommodation entails
it cannot entail sin or error: the costs are too high right across the spectrum of Christian theology.
B. INSPIRATION
A second term that is currently undergoing creative redefinition is inspiration. Most of the major
proposals over the past fifty years or so for an appropriate meaning of the term are reasonably well
known and need not be canvassed here. More recently, William J. Abraham has put forward another
suggestion with some novel features. He argues that during much of the church’s history Christians
believed the Bible was simply dictated by God. Advances in knowledge made so simple a view no
longer tenable; and it was in that context that Warfield and others articulated their “concursive” theory
of inspiration—i.e., that God in his sovereignty so supervised and controlled the human writers of
Scripture that although what they wrote was genuinely their own, and in their own idiom, it was
nevertheless the very word of God, right down to the individual words. The trouble with this view,
Abraham argues, is that, for all intents and purposes, it remains indistinguishable from the older
dictation theory. There are too many difficulties and contradictions in the Bible for the theory to be
tenable (although he declines to enumerate any of these). What we must do is recognize that all talk
about God is analogical talk; and, therefore, what we mean when we say “God inspires someone” must
be determined by analogy to what we mean when we say something like “A teacher inspires his pupil.”
This does not mean that the pupil quotes the teacher verbatim, or even that the pupil remains entirely
faithful to all that the teacher holds true. Some of what the pupil passes on will be accidental distortion
of what the teacher taught; some may even be self-conscious revision of it; and some distortion may
occur because of the pupil’s limited capacity. But if the teacher is very “inspiring,” the pupil will
faithfully pass on the heart of what the teacher taught. So it is in the relationship between God and the
writers of Scripture: He inspires them as a teacher does his pupils. But to claim “verbal inspiration” or
inerrancy or infallibility in any strict sense would be a denial of the insights gained from an analogical
approach to the way we talk about God.
Abraham’s view has received adequate critique elsewhere; but a few comments may be in order.
First, one cannot help noting that while other historians accuse Warfield of tightening up the doctrine
of Scripture (see the first section of this paper), Abraham charges him with loosening it—but not
enough. The charge depends on the antecedent judgment that writers before Warfield, in particular
Gaussen,92 held to a dictation view of inspiration. Certainly such writers occasionally use the word
“dictation,” but it has been shown repeatedly that many older writers use “dictation” language to refer
to the results of inspiration, not its mode—i.e., the result was nothing less than the very words of God.
As for the mode, Gaussen himself forcefully insists that the human authors of Scripture are not merely
“the pens, hands, and secretaries of the Holy Ghost,” for in much of Scripture we can easily discern
“the individual character of the person who writes.” Warfield does not seem so innovative after all.
Second, Abraham attempts to formulate an entire doctrine of Scripture on the basis of his treatment
of inspiration. What he never undertakes, however, is a close study of the wide-ranging ways in which
Scripture speaks of itself, claims to be truthful, identifies the words of man with the words of God, and
so forth—the kind of material that Grudem has put together. More important yet, in the one passage in
the New Testament that is closest to using our word “inspiration” (2 Ti 3:16), it is not the human author
who is “inspired” but the text: the Scripture itself is theopneustos. At a blow, the analogy of a teacher
inspiring his pupils falls to the ground—a point the much-maligned Warfield treated with some rigor
almost a century ago.
What strikes the evangelical reader who contemplates Abraham’s proposals is the degree of
arbitrariness intrinsic to the selection of the model. The same is true about other recent proposals. The
“biblical theology” movement, for instance, has often suggested that God has revealed Himself through
a sequence of revelatory events, to which Scripture is added as the result of the Spirit’s inspiring human
minds to bear witness to the revelation. The revelatory pattern as a whole is the act of God; but because
the human witness may be faulty, individual steps along the line of that revelatory pattern may have to
be dismissed; and, in any case, there is certainly no identification of God’s words with man’s words.
These and many other proposals, as insightful as they are at some points, are strikingly arbitrary in that
they select some model or other without dealing effectively with the Bible’s account of its own nature.
C. INERRANCY
A third term that has elicited some discussion is inerrancy. Besides the fact that it is essentially a
negative term, many have charged that the use of the term in the modern debate is not only innovative
(Why move from, say, “infallibility”?) but also logically inadequate. Marshall, for instance, comments
that many propositions about alleged historical phenomena can be meaningfully judged to be inerrant
(i.e., true); but many statements in Scripture cannot be so treated. If Jesus says, “Take away the stone”
(Jn 11:39), His command is neither true nor false: the categories are inappropriate. What may be true or
false is the biblical proposition that Jesus actually uttered this command, not the command itself. The
same is true of much of the advice of Job’s comforters, of fictional narratives like Jotham’s fable or
Jesus’ parables, and of much more. As a result, Marshall prefers to adopt the language of “infallibility,”
understood to mean something like “entirely trustworthy for the purposes for which it is given.”
In one sense there is wisdom here: if Evangelicals use words as frequently misunderstood and as
easily mocked as this one, they may be erecting unnecessary barriers to others who are trying to
understand their position. Certainly it is easy enough to articulate a comprehensive doctrine of
Scripture without using that particular word, even though “inerrant” and especially the longer “without
error” have a notable pedigree.
On the other hand, it rather misses the point to say that “inerrant” is a term inappropriate to
commands and parables. Inerrancy does not mean that every conceivable sequence of linguistic data in
the Bible must be susceptible to the term “inerrant,” only that no errant assertion occurs. In any case,
even if “inerrancy” were inappropriate at the merely lexical level, any one-word summary of a complex
doctrine must be understood as a construct. This is true even of a word like “God”: what a writer who
uses this term means cannot be established from a lexicon. Once again, Feinberg’s essay on the
meaning of inerrancy comes to mind. More important, it is arguable that those who today defend the
use of the term “inerrancy” mean no more and no less than did most of those who used the term
“infallibility” forty years ago. One of the factors that has prompted the switch has been the progressive
qualification of “infallibility”: Marshall wants it to mean “entirely trustworthy for the purposes for
which it is given.” That qualification may be entirely laudable, if the “purposes” are discovered
inductively and not arbitrarily narrowed to salvific matters, as if to imply that the Bible is not
trustworthy when it treats of history or the external world. After all, one might suggest that the purpose
of Scripture is to bring glory to God, or to explain truthfully God’s nature and plan of redemption to a
fallen race in order to bring many sons to glory: under such definitions of “purpose” the
comprehensiveness of Scripture’s truth claims cannot be so easily circumvented. In short, conservatives
may in some measure be innovative in stressing one word above another as that which most accurately
characterizes their views; but it is not at all clear that by so doing they have succumbed to doctrinal
innovation insensitive to normal linguistic usage.
The criticism is in certain respects telling, as we shall see; but it also muddies the central issues a
little. In the first place, the biblical passages to which references are made are not all of a piece, and in
any case they do not prove what the reviewer thinks they do. For instance, Isaiah 55:8–9 does not
affirm that because God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts they cannot be “reduced” to human
language. The context shows that God’s thoughts are “higher” than ours in the moral realm, and
therefore our response must be repentance, not some kind of awareness of the ineffable. Psalm 71:15
and similar passages make it clear that the psalmist recognizes the limitations on his knowledge; but
equally they show that the psalmist can utter in human language what he does know of God’s ways.
Passages such as Psalm 119:18 and 1 Corinthians 2:8–9 presuppose that the epistemological cruxes to
understanding the Word of God go beyond mere analysis of language (about which a little more will be
said in the next section); but they do not suggest that there is a fundamental disjunction between
Scripture and truth. Second, the reviewer does not attempt interaction with the voluminous biblical
evidence Grudem adduces to show that the Scriptures themselves develop the view that what Scripture
says, God says. And third, the review moves unexpectedly from a possible distinction between the
message or the truth of Scripture and its words to a distinction between the human witness and the
divine revelation—a change in categories that prematurely closes the discussion.
Nevertheless, the reviewer has raised some important points. Certainly there is a formal distinction
between, say, Grudem and Bromiley. But the reviewer’s own suggestion is a trifle disconcerting:
We need to ask seriously whether words contain their meaning. Infallibility and inerrancy pertain to the
revelatory meaning of the biblical words, but is this meaning endemic to the words themselves? Or is it
given by the Holy Spirit to the eyes of faith when the words are seen in their integral relationship to God’s
self-revelation in Jesus Christ?
The difficulty is that the infallible meaning is not only removed from the words but from the realm of
the text: it is “given” by the Holy Spirit to the eyes of faith. Apart from the fact that the work of the
Holy Spirit is crucial to all human knowing of things divine (see the essay by Frame in this volume),
the kind of transfer of the locus of authority envisaged by our reviewer cannot be made to square with
the biblical evidence amassed in the Grudem essay. But may it not be that the apparent discrepancy
between a Grudem and a Bromiley is merely formal? The one reflects the fact that the Bible itself treats
its words as God’s words; the other reflects the linguistic stance that treats words as concatenations of
phonemes or orthographical conventions that are mere vehicles for meaning. The one treats words in a
“popular” or “ordinary” way and is delighted to find that these very human words of Scripture are also
God’s words; the other treats words in the framework of modern theoretical linguistics and therefore
sees a certain disjunction between naked words and meaning. But our reviewer goes beyond both of
these complementary positions to a new stance that locates meaning only in the Spirit-illumined
knower.
The question, then, at least in part, is whether admittedly human words, when so superintended by
God Himself, can convey divine truth—not exhaustively, of course, but truly. I think they can, and I
find insuperable difficulties with any other position—though this is not the place to defend that view.
But there is a second question, namely, whether the “propositions” the words make up convey meaning
or merely serve as meaning’s vehicle. What quickly becomes obvious is that “proposition” is given
various definitions that feed back and affect one’s use of “propositional revelation” and even of “verbal
inspiration.”
It is here that Vanhoozer is a reliable guide and makes significant advances in resolving these
perplexing issues. He forces us to think through these slippery categories, and he points to ways in
which we may preserve the substance of “propositional, verbal revelation” (i.e., the emphasis on
verbal, cognitive communication with authority vested in the text itself) while simultaneously
appreciating the ordinariness of the language of Scripture, the diversity of its literary forms, and
therefore what it means to speak of Scripture’s truthfulness.
A. DIFFERENT FRAMEWORKS
Achtemeier introduces one of these when he argues that conservatives have paid too little attention
to the vastly different frameworks out of which interpreters in different generations approach the text:
If Scripture is in fact free from error in the form in which it purveys divine truth, it must be free from such
error not only for the time for which it was written but also for future times in which it will be read.
Scripture therefore must be recognizably as free from error to the medieval scientist searching for the way to
transmute base metal into gold as it must be free from error to the modern physicist seeking a field theory of
physical forces, despite the widely differing presuppositions each brings to Scripture about the nature of the
physical world. If truth is one, and the Bible as truth must exclude error, on whose presuppositions is that
truth to be explained, the alchemist’s or the modern physicist’s?… The fact that this problem is seldom if
ever addressed by conservatives points to a naive absolutizing of our current level of scientific theory and
knowledge on the part of conservatives.… It is as though conservatives assumed that to our time and our
time alone the final, unchanging truth of the universe had been revealed.… The need for apologetics for a
particular world view and the idea of truth as unchangeable from age to age make the task of conservative
apologetics for Scriptural inerrancy a uniquely unprofitable one.
The telltale impact of the new hermeneutic is self-evident in this paragraph: a fundamental
confusion of meaning and truth. It is possible to raise hermeneutical questions without raising truth
questions—but not in the eyes of the strongest proponents of the new hermeneutic, who hold that
where a different hermeneutic operates there must also be a different theory of truth. Achtemeier does
not here discuss whether or not the biblical text is thoroughly truthful; rather, he discusses whether or
not the biblical text can possibly be perceived to be perfectly truthful by people living under different
intellectual paradigms. If Achtemeier’s argument were pushed hard, however, it would have a painful
sting in its tail. Because each human being is different from every other human being, therefore, to
some extent, each of us operates under antecedent knowledge and bias that are different from those of
every other human being; and this suggests that the notion of objective truth disappears forever. If that
is so, one cannot help but wonder why Achtemeier should bother to try to convince others of the
soundness, the rightness, the truthfulness of his views. That the problem is endemic to the discussion
may be exemplified by a recent review of a book by Rudolf Schnackenburg, in which the reviewer tells
us that the commentary in question
… remains a victim of … the penchant to oppose a univocal concept of history to the category of literature.
And the very emphasis to seek the “original intention” of the writer or editors, frequently called the
“intentional fallacy,” artificially restricts literary criticism and implicitly denies the existence of a literary
universe in which texts have meanings that authors may never have dreamed of. This is as assured an
assertion as the law of acoustics affirming the existence of overtones independently of a composer’s
intentions.
Joseph Cahill skirts rather quickly around the distinction many make between “meaning” and
“significance.” Moreover, he slightly distorts the “intentional fallacy,” which historically has not
sought to deny intent to the author of a text but, instead, warns against all interpretative procedures that
seek to determine the author’s intention independently of the text. In other words, one must adopt as a
basic operating principle that the author’s intention is expressed in the text. Some authors may produce
texts designed to be evocative, to have a certain narrative world of their own; and others may produce
texts designed to convey certain information or opinions—very much like Cahill’s review. What is
quite certain, however, is that Cahill reflects a sizable and growing body of opinion that understands
the discipline of history itself to be less concerned with what actually took place at some point in time
and space than with the creation of a theory about what took place, based on fragmentary evidence and
controlled by the historian’s biases. Exactly the same assessment is now commonly made of the
discipline of exegesis.
B. POSITIVISM OR SUBJECTIVITY
Some of these developments are nothing more than a healthy reaction to the positivism of von
Ranke. But proponents of the new history and of the new hermeneutic sometimes offer us an unhelpful
disjunction: either suffer the epistemological bankruptcy of wishful historical positivism or admit the
unqualified subjectivity of the historical enterprise.
Passmore offers important insight on this matter. He admits that history is not a science the way
many branches of physics are a science—controllable under the rigorous terms of repeatable
experiments and quantifiable to many decimal places of precision. But history is as objective a
“science” as, say, geology and many other “natural” sciences. Passmore examines eight criteria for
objectivity and argues compellingly that if they are applied rigorously they exclude geology as swiftly
as history; and if the criteria are softened a little to allow geology into the academy of the sciences,
history slips in as well. For instance, his “criterion six” reads as follows: “An inquiry is objective only
if it does not select from within its material.” “Criterion eight” reads: “In objective inquiries,
conclusions are reached which are universally acceptable.” A moment’s reflection reveals how many of
the natural sciences will suffer as much difficulty under a tight understanding of such criteria as will
history.
Exactly the same point may be made with respect to exegesis, that is, with respect to the
understanding of Scripture. The new hermeneutic has helpfully warned us of our finiteness, our
ignorance, our biases, the influence of our individual world views. Its more sophisticated exponents
have also insisted on the process of “distanciation” in the interpretative enterprise; and distanciation
presupposes an ultimate distinction between the knower (subject) and the text (object). The interpreter
must self-consciously distance self and its world view, its “horizon of understanding,” from the world
view or “horizon of understanding” of the text. Only then can progress be made toward bringing the
interpreter’s horizon of understanding in line with that of the text, toward fusing the two horizons.
When such fusion takes place, even if it is not perfect (let alone exhaustive), it allows the objective
meaning of the text to be understood by the knower. This interpreter’s understanding may not capture
the meaning of the text exhaustively; but there is no compelling reason why it cannot approach
asymptotically toward the ideal of capturing it truly. This is assumed by most scholars when they try to
convince their colleagues and others of the rightness of their exegetical conclusions; and ironically, it is
also assumed by the proponents of uncontrolled polyvalence in meaning when they write articles of
considerable learning in order to persuade their readers. If it is true that there is no direct access to
pristine, empirical reality, it is equally true that the person who argues there is therefore no real world
out there, but that every “world” depends on value-laden constructions of reality, has opted for a self-
defeating position; for we cannot espouse both value-ladenness and ontological relativity, because in
that case it becomes impossible to talk meaningfully about conceptual relativity.
The issue has come to practical expression in the contemporary debate over “contextualization.”
When books and articles offer “a feminist reading” or “a Black reading” or “an African reading” or “a
liberation theology reading” of this or that text, there can be no initial, principial objection; for, after
all, some of us are busy giving unwitting White, Black, Protestant, Reformed or Arminian, conservative
or nonconservative readings. If the readings from a different perspective challenge us to come to grips
with our own biases, if they call in question the depth of our commitment to distanciation and thereby
teach us humility, they perform an invaluable service. But it cannot follow that every reading is equally
valuable or valid, for some of the interpretations are mutually exclusive. The tragedy is that many
modern “readings” of Scripture go beyond inadvertent bias to a self-conscious adoption of a grid
fundamentally at odds with the text—all in the name of the polyvalence of the text and under the
authority of the new hermeneutic. The relationship between the meaning that pops into my head under
the stimulus of the text and the meaning held by the writer becomes a matter of complete indifference.
Utterly ignored is the crucial role that distanciation must play. By such hermeneutical irresponsibility
the text can be made to authorize literally anything. As I have discussed contextualization theory at
some length elsewhere, however, I do not propose to pursue it again here.
The “scriptural standards” to which Kraft refers are not what the Bible as a whole says but a range of
disparate theologies each based on separate parts of the Bible, a range that sets the limits and nature of
the allowable diversity. Kraft here heavily depends on the work of von Allmen, extensively discussed
elsewhere. Appeals to a “supra-cultural core” in order to preserve at least some unity in Christianity are
far more problematic than is commonly recognized.137 It is not clear how or why God’s macrosalvific
purposes should escape the vicissitudes of paradigm shifts or cultural expression: even as simple a
statement as “Jesus is Lord” means something quite different when transposed to a Buddhist context.
Finite human beings have no culture-free access to truth, nor can they express it in culture-free ways.
Our only hope—and it is adequate—is in every instance so to work through problems of distanciation
and the fusion of horizons of understanding that the meaning of the text is truly grasped. But if that is
so for what I have called the macrosalvific truths, it is difficult to see why it should not be so for
incidental details.139
Brown is only slightly oversimplifying the issue when he writes:
Prior to Bauer, the prevailing view was that Christianity, whether it was true or false, was at least a relatively
well-defined and fixed body of doctrine; after Bauer, it was more often assumed that doctrine was constantly
in the process of development and that “historic Christian orthodoxy,” far from having been a constant for
close to two thousand years, was only the theological fashion of a particular age.
The related issues are so complex that four essays in this pair of volumes have been devoted to them:
Moisés Silva has written two of them, one dealing with the text form of the Old Testament as it is
quoted by the New and the other with the place of historical reconstruction in biblical exegesis; 142
Douglas Moo has discussed the way the New Testament actually cites the Old, and he ties his
discussion to modern debates over sensus plenior; and a fourth essay has attempted to point a way
toward a recognition of the genuine unity in the New Testament when it is interpreted within a certain
salvation-historical framework.144
Such innercanonical questions inevitably raise again the question of the nature of the canon: what
justification is there for treating these books and not others as the authoritative Word of God? None,
some would reply. Others, impressed by the canon criticism of Sanders146 or of Childs or convinced by
traditional Roman Catholic arguments, adopt the general framework of the canon largely on the basis
of the established tradition of the church. These issues, too, are extremely complex, and only
infrequently discussed with knowledge and care by conservatives; and, therefore, David Dunbar’s well-
researched essay will prove particularly welcome to many.148
D. EPISTEMOLOGICAL QUESTIONS
At the deepest level, however, the questions raised by the new hermeneutic are epistemological.
Some recent Reformed thought has unwittingly played into the hands of the more radical exponents of
the new hermeneutic by dismissing both evidentialism and classical foundationalism and seeking to
build a system on the view that belief in God is itself foundational, properly basic. If so, it is argued,
Reformed epistemology and our belief in God enable us to escape the weaknesses of foundationalism
and to stand above the mere amassing of bits of evidence. This line of approach is then sometimes
projected back onto Calvin himself.
Quite apart from whether or not Calvin can be claimed in support for this view, it seems open to the
criticisms of van Hook,150 who, arguing primarily against Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga,
convincingly demonstrates that this new “Reformed epistemology” may justify the rationality of belief
in God, but it is wholly inadequate to justify any God-talk as knowledge. Van Hook, therefore, suggests
we should follow the proposals of Rorty: redefine knowledge, defining it not epistemologically but
sociologically—knowledge is “what our peers let us get away with saying.” That means that whether
any particular datum is to be considered knowledge very largely depends on the locus of the “peers”: a
different set of peers may generate a different assessment as to whether or not the datum is to be
classified as knowledge.153 The parallels to the subjective and relative interpretations generated by a
skeptical handling of the new hermeneutic are obvious.
Perhaps part of the problem is that we have been so frightened by the extreme claims of
philosophically naive evidentialists that some of us have been catapulted into a reactionary insistence
that evidences are useless. One inevitable result is the depreciation of such evidence as exists, the
establishment of an unbridgeable gulf between hard data and theological truth-claims. Another part of
the problem may be that much conservative writing has a wholly inadequate treatment of the work of
the Holy Spirit.
Be that as it may, two essays in this pair of volumes have attempted to take steps to alleviate the
need. Paul Helm argues for a modified fideism to justify belief in the Bible as the authoritative Word of
God, and John Frame156 discusses the role of the Holy Spirit both in the creation of the written Word
and in bringing people to place their confidence in it. These are seminal essays in an area where a great
deal more work needs to be done.
Worse, even some of us who would never dream of formally disentangling some parts of the Bible
from the rest and declaring them less authoritative than other parts can by exegetical ingenuity get the
Scriptures to say just about whatever we want—and this we thunder to the age as if it were a prophetic
word, when it is little more than the message of the age bounced off Holy Scripture. To our shame, we
have hungered to be masters of the Word much more than we have hungered to be mastered by it.
The pervasiveness of the problem erupts in the “Christian” merchant whose faith has no bearing on
the integrity of his or her dealings, or in the way material possessions are assessed. It is reflected in an
accelerating divorce rate in Christian homes and among the clergy themselves—with little sense of
shame and no entailment in their “ministries.” It is seen in its most pathetic garb when considerable
exegetical skill goes into proving, say, that the Bible condemns promiscuous homosexuality but not
homosexuality itself (though careful handling of the evidence overturns the thesis), or that the Bible’s
use of “head” in passages dealing with male/female relationships follows allegedly characteristic Greek
usage and, therefore, means “source” (when close scrutiny of the primary evidence fails to turn up
more than a handful of disputable instances of the meaning “source” in over two thousand
occurrences).164 It finds new lease when popular Evangelicals publicly abandon any mention of “sin”—
allegedly on the ground that the term no longer “communicates”—without recognizing that adjacent
truths (e.g., those dealing with the Fall, the law of God, the nature of transgression, the wrath of God,
and even the gracious atonement itself) undergo telling transformation.
While I fear that Evangelicalism is heading for another severe conflict on the doctrine of Scripture,
and while it is necessary to face these impending debates with humility and courage, what is far more
alarming is the diminishing authority of the Scriptures in the churches. This is taking place not only
among those who depreciate the consistent truthfulness of Scripture but also (if for different reasons)
among those who most vociferously defend it. To some extent we are all part of the problem; and
perhaps we can do most to salvage something of value from the growing fragmentation by pledging
ourselves in repentance and faith to learning and obeying God’s most holy Word. Then we shall also be
reminded that the challenge to preserve and articulate a fully self-consistent and orthodox doctrine of
Scripture cannot be met by intellectual powers alone, but only on our knees and by the power of God.
CHAPTER TWO
THE SEMANTICS OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE: TRUTH
AND SCRIPTURE’S DIVERSE LITERARY FORMS
Kevin J. Vanhoozer
Kevin J. Vanhoozer is the 1985–86 Burney Student in Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge
University and Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, England. He is a graduate of
Westmont College (B.A.), Westminster Theological Seminary (M.Div.), and Cambridge University
(Ph.D.). He is currently working on a book dealing with contemporary hermeneutics and the use of the
Gospel narratives in recent theology. He has contributed articles to Theology and the Trinity Journal.
He is a member of the American Academy of Religion.
CHAPTER TWO
THE SEMANTICS OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE: TRUTH AND
SCRIPTURE’S DIVERSE LITERARY FORMS
… many traditional philosophical perplexities have arisen through a mistake—the mistake of taking as
straightforward statements of fact utterances which are … intended as something quite different.
—J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words
“A proposition is a queer thing!” Here we have in germ the subliming of our whole account of logic. The
tendency to assume a pure intermediary between the propositional signs and the facts. Or even to try to
purify, to sublime, the signs themselves.—For our forms of expression prevent us in all sorts of ways from
seeing that nothing out of the ordinary is involved, by sending us in pursuit of chimeras.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Reading maketh a full man …
—Francis Bacon, Essays
What in Scripture is susceptible to being characterized as true? Is it the biblical words, concepts,
sentences, propositions, beliefs, or images? The so-called Biblical Theology movement’s reading, like
Hamlet’s, focused on words, words, words—until The Semantics of Biblical Language by James Barr
provided a needed corrective to the movement’s penchant for playing fast and loose with the linguistic
phenomena of Scripture. Barr’s book constituted a “trumpet blast against the monstrous regiment of
shoddy linguistics.”2 Barr submitted various illegitimate uses of linguistic evidence in theological
discussion to a searching critique. In particular, Barr rejected the fashionable notion that postulated a
distinction between Hebrew (concrete) and Greek (abstract) thought—a contrast supposedly mirrored
in the etymology and syntax of these languages. While Barr’s linguistic rebuke has been for the most
part heeded, a similar trumpet blast—this time against the tendency to mishandle the literary
phenomena of Scripture—needs to be sounded. The new battleground is no longer biblical words, but
larger units of discourse: sentences, paragraphs, entire books. The crucial questions of meaning and
truth are now located on the textual level—thus the need for a semantics of biblical literature rather
than biblical language.
Barr pointed out the way beyond the lexical trees to the literary forest by observing that the new
content of the Judaeo-Christian tradition was expressed linguistically in sentence form. The distinctive
content with which any biblical theology is concerned is found not in the terminology so much as the
various sentences and forms of discourse in Scripture. Ironically, the “New Biblical Theology” (for
lack of a better epithet) is in danger of repeating the linguistic sins of its forefathers, only this time on
the literary rather than the lexical level.5
The earlier Biblical Theology movement adduced linguistic arguments to support the theologically
significant distinction between Greek and Hebrew thought. According to Barr, the main points of
Greek-Hebrew contrast involved (a) a static versus a dynamic conception of reality, (b) an abstract
versus a concrete mode of thought, and (c) a literature with analytic distinctions versus a literature of
imaginative totality. Interestingly enough, these same contrasts (though temporarily banished by Barr’s
linguistic rebuke) have slipped back into contemporary theological discussion of biblical literature.
What the older Biblical Theology movement could not accomplish with its Greek-Hebrew contrast, the
New Biblical Theology has effected with its distinction between descriptive (informative) and poetic
(religious) texts. Barr states that there are two kinds of writing; one is valued mainly for the information
it gives, the other for its structure, shape, images. Whereas the Biblical Theology movement claimed
that Greek thought imposed an unbiblical philosophy onto scriptural language, the New Biblical
Theology claims that descriptive, informative discourse is uncharacteristic of the biblical literature. Not
lexical, but rather literary arguments are put forward to support this conclusion. Whereas the earlier
Biblical Theology read theology off of Hebrew etymology and syntax, the New Biblical Theology
reads theology off of literary shape or form (e.g., “narrative theology”).
The older and newer forms of Biblical Theology share two important similarities. First, both
movements rely on the dichotomy that exists between the descriptive-abstract-scientific and the poetic-
concrete-imaginative types of thought—a dichotomy reflected both in language and literature. Second,
theologians who use lexical and literary arguments to support this distinction manifest a common
aversion to biblical statements, as well as to the “proof-texting” method. Barr correctly observes:
Modern biblical theology in its fear and dislike of the “proposition” as the basis of religious truth has often
simply adopted in its place the smaller linguistic unit of the word, and has then been forced to overload the
word with meaning in order to relate it to the “inner world of thought.”
Similarly, the New Biblical Theology rejects the proposition as the basic vehicle of religious truth.
Biblical statements are too large for those who insist that words are the building blocks of meaning, and
they are too small for those who insist that the key to meaning is a text’s literary form. In the one case,
the proposition is the sum of its lexical components; in the other, the meaning of a given proposition is
a function of its literary context. In support of the latter contention, John Lyons writes that “the context
of a sentence in a written work must be understood to include the conventions governing the literary
genre of which the work in question is an example.” Rightly or wrongly, biblical propositions are often
caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of lexical and literary semantics.
As a case in point, Barr cites the example of theologians who try to derive a theory about the nature
of time from biblical terminology: “It is the lack of actual statements about what time is like, more than
anything else, that has forced exegetes into trying to get a view of time out of the words themselves.”
Again, the New Biblical Theology supplies a literary counterpart to this very same theological
argument about time. Rather than appealing to biblical words, some theologians have appealed to the
nature of narrative as indicative of the nature of time and human temporal experience.11 If read as
history, the biblical narrative suggests that time is linear and history teleological. If read as myth, the
biblical narrative displays a cyclic view of time, with history subject to infinite repetition. Whole
philosophies of history are thus derived from and attached to literary forms.
To this point we have drawn parallels between the Biblical Theology movement and the New
Biblical Theology. Two significant differences, however, must not be overlooked. Firstly, the New
Biblical Theology does not claim that there are unique, inspired literary forms peculiar to Scripture as
did those earlier scholars who held that the Holy Spirit had transformed certain Greek linguistic
elements so that they could convey new Christian content. For the New Biblical Theology, the biblical
literary forms function as do their secular counterparts. Secondly, unlike the earlier practitioners of
“shoddy linguistics,” the New Biblical Theology is able to draw upon the work of professional literary
critics, some of whom will be considered below.14 For this reason, the theological struggle over the
nature of Scripture will be all the fiercer, because both sides can appeal to their respective literary
champions in order to determine how the Bible should be read.
As opposed to the Biblical Theology movement and the New Biblical Theology, Evangelicals
neither fear nor despise the proposition. Indeed, Evangelicals go so far as to speak of “propositional”
revelation. In a later book, The Bible in the Modern World, Barr challenges the Evangelicals’ view of
revelation by noting that the logical status of biblical sentences and God’s communication to human
beings are two separate questions. Of course the Bible contains propositions, says Barr, but whether or
not they are to be construed as revelation is another matter. Moreover, Barr argues that the real issue is
not about propositional revelation or whether a given sentence is propositional but about the right
function of propositions and what literary category they belong to.
Evangelicals claim that the biblical propositions convey information, but Barr sees this as a
“literary category-mistake”: “Failures to comprehend the literary genre lead to a use of the biblical
assertions with a wrong function.” According to Barr, Evangelicals are not so much believers in
propositional revelation as representatives of a particular way of viewing the genre or function of
propositions (i.e., as descriptive, informative). Barr concludes: “Genre mistakes cause the wrong kind
of truth values to be attached to biblical sentences. Literary embellishments then come to be regarded
as scientifically true assertions, kerygmatic words of grace and promise come to be taken as text-book
doctrine.” This is a typical affirmation of the New Biblical Theology, and Barr is one of its leading
proponents.
Barr’s “J’accuse” is a serious challenge to Evangelicals. In plain English, Barr accuses
Evangelicals of doing interpretive violence to Scripture, holding a doctrine of inerrancy that insists on
reading the biblical narrative as history in order to preserve the truth of every proposition. Barr
identifies the desire for an inerrant Bible to be the “real guiding principle of fundamentalist
interpretation.” In short, Barr argues that Evangelicals are so preoccupied with truth that they do not
allow Scripture to be what it in fact is.
How then can Evangelicals best refute this accusation and best do justice to the biblical statements,
to “propositional” revelation? We have seen that the literary context partly determines the kind of
proposition with which we are dealing. There is a world of difference, for instance, between a historical
and a poetic statement—and between the kinds of truth claims involved in each. This brings us to the
major concern of our essay: how does the diversity of Scripture’s literary forms affect the way we take
biblical propositions and understand scriptural truth?
Yet a third approach to propositional revelation is that of Gordon Clark, who writes that “aside
from imperative sentences and a few exclamations in the Psalms, the Bible is composed of
propositions.” This view of propositions differs from that of Henry and Pinnock by identifying
propositions with certain kinds of sentences, presumably declarative statements in the indicative.
Here then are three disparate views regarding “biblical propositions”: (a) conceptual-verbal
communication in general (Henry, Pinnock), (b) declarative sentences or statements (Clark), and (c)
meaning-content—conveyed by sentences—that is true or false (Nash, Lewis, Obitts). While all three
positions are agreed as to the general thrust of “propositional revelation” (viz., that revelation discloses
truth in a cognitive manner), significant discrepancies remain as to the nature of the biblical
propositions, discrepancies that affect one’s reading of Scripture and subsequent theological method.
The reason for this confusion among Evangelicals about propositions is simply stated: both ordinary
usage and philosophical debate have given “propositions” an ambiguous status. The term has a long
history and a wide semantic range.
Propositions first came to be explicitly studied in Aristotle’s On Interpretation, where they are
distinguished from sentences. After defining a sentence as “significant speech.” Aristotle goes on to say
that “while every sentence has meaning … not all can be called propositions. We call propositions
those only that have truth or falsity in them. A prayer is, for instance, a sentence but neither has truth
nor has falsity.”
After more than two thousand years of discussion, philosophers remain divided over this sentence-
proposition distinction. According to Richard M. Gale, “One of the most heatedly disputed questions in
modern philosophy concerns whether there are propositions.” One wonders about the prudence of
building a doctrine of revelation on such a problematic foundation! Indeed, Bernard Ramm calls
“propositional revelation” an “inept” phrase and an “unhappy” expression.41
In what follows we will distinguish the “ordinary” sense of propositions (i.e., verbal statements)
from the “philosophical” sense of propositions (which remains to be seen). Of the Evangelicals
considered, Clark appears to understand propositions in their ordinary sense, while Nash, Lewis, and
Obitts use the philosophical sense. Henry and Pinnock borrow from each sense for their understanding
of propositions. Three initial questions about propositions must first be discussed before we go on to
consider “propositional” possibilities for hermeneutics and theological method: (1) Are there
propositions in the philosophical sense? (2) If so, what are they and how do they differ from sentences
and statements? (3) How are propositions related to facts, to truth?
1. Two related arguments constitute the basic case for the reality of propositions. First of all,
communication would not be possible except for the ability to share our judgments. Several persons
can have the same belief, for instance, not because their mental acts are identical, but because what is
thought is in each case the same. The second argument notes that what is meant by different sentences
can be the same. “It’s raining,” “Il pleut,” and “Es regnet” all express the same proposition or meaning.
This meaning is “abstract” because it can be rendered by many particular sentences. The apparent
sameness of meaning that sentences may share is the strongest argument for the existence of
propositions.
W. V. Quine, on the other hand, questions the need for propositions, which he terms “intangible
intervening elements” and “shadows of sentences.” For Quine, propositions are a misleading
philosophical fiction: “Once a philosopher, whether through inattention to ambiguity or simply through
an excess of hospitality, has admitted propositions to his ontology, he invariably proceeds to view
propositions rather than sentences as the things that are true or false.”45 Quine contends that there is no
way to tell whether two sentences express the same proposition or meaning—we simply do not have
the appropriate criteria. For the kind of sameness of meaning here relevant is, according to Quine, the
“sameness of objective information, without regard to attitude or to poetic qualities.” But for “real life”
sentences there is no evident rule for extracting the “objective meaning” from stylistic or other
immaterial features of the sentences. Quine’s work testifies that today the existence of propositions is
no longer a foregone conclusion.
2. Assuming for the moment, however, that there are propositions, what are they and how do they
differ from sentences and statements? While sentences may be so many inches long, in bold type, in a
particular language, none of these things is true of propositions, at least in the philosophical sense. Are
propositions, then, semi-Platonic entities, continuously hovering in an autonomous realm until they are
expressed by sentences? Gottlob Frege seemed to think so: he spoke of propositions as belonging to a
“third realm,” a timeless order of nonphysical, nonmental objects. More recently Karl Popper has
espoused a similar trichotomy. Popper speaks of three “worlds”: the world of physical objects, the
world of states of consciousness, and the “third world” (objective contents of thought). Human
language, says Popper, belongs to all three worlds: it consists of physical sounds or symbols, it
expresses a subjective state, and it conveys meaning and information. “Theories, or propositions, or
statements are the most important third-world linguistic entities.” In another vein, E. J. Lemmon
attempts to articulate the nature of propositions, distinguishing them from linguistic entities and spatio-
temporal particulars and likening them to symphonies (as opposed to their performances)!48 Alan R.
White, however, objects to the idea that a proposition has some sort of existence separate from
sentences, for “no hint is provided of how to locate its abode.”
To complicate matters further, we must now consider how “statements” differ from both sentences
and propositions. Lemmon notes that sentences vary in truth content from context to context, whereas
statements are “timelessly” true or false. When I say “I am twenty-seven years old” I make a true
statement, but someone else saying the same thing might make a false statement. The meaning of the
sentence does not change, but the statement made does change depending on the occasion and context
of the sentence. Lemmon concludes that “statements that sentences may be used to make are quite
distinct from the propositions that they may express.” In other words, to determine what the sentence
means (i.e., the proposition) is not necessarily to determine what statement is being made on any
particular occasion.
We now have sentences conveying propositions and making statements. Must we admit the
presence of these “intangible intervening elements” in our everyday speech and writing? White is
unhappy with the equation of propositions and meanings of sentences: “But what a sentence conveys—
or, more correctly, what someone uses the sentence to convey—is not its meaning or its use.” The
proposition conveyed by “It is raining,” for instance, cannot be the meaning of the sentence; the
assertion is about the weather, not about the meaning of “It is raining.” But to continue distinguishing
propositions from other things is not to say what propositions are. At this point, talk of propositions
becomes rather strained. If propositions are identical neither with the words uttered, nor the meaning of
the sentence, nor the statement made, then just what is conveyed by sentences? And if propositions are
so elusive, how can we be sure which propositions are being conveyed by various sentences?
For these and other reasons, many philosophers would just as soon abandon the whole notion of
propositions. They prefer to speak of “what is said, asserted, stated.” White comments: “The
introduction of a special name for what is said in an utterance, e.g., ‘proposition,’ ‘statement,’ or
‘judgment,’ leads us to overlook these indissoluble connections between what is said and the medium
in which it is said.” This is a telling criticism, which, with one blow, reinstates the primacy of the
actual sentences.
3. We are interested in Scripture and truth. It has been said that only propositions can be true or
false. But if, with White and Quine, one discards the notion of propositions, then to what do truth and
falsity apply? Quine believes that truth may be construed as “semantic assent.” To call a sentence
“true” is to say something about the world rather than language. “Snow is white” is true only if snow is
white. Quine writes that the truth predicate serves “to point through the sentence to the reality; it serves
as a reminder that though sentences are mentioned, reality is still the whole point.”55 Quine concludes
that “eternal” sentences stay true or false regardless of context. For example, the sentence “God led
Israelites out of Egypt in 1280 B.C.”—if true—is true timelessly.
In White’s account, truth and falsity apply to “what is said,” but only when what is said states “that
this is how things are.” This is an important proviso. In the same way that referring is not the only way
that sentences can “mean,” so “making a statement” is only one of the possible functions of sentences.
In effect, White limits truth and falsity to what is asserted. But much of what is said is not asserted.
“Saying” something is a broader notion than “stating” something. Given that only sayings of the type
“This is how things are, were, or will be” are candidates for truth or falsity, can we still agree with
Clark’s contention that most of the Bible is propositional (in the ordinary sense)? If not, does that mean
that some portions of Scripture are neither true nor false?
Our philosophical detour completed, what remains of “propositional” revelation? Are only the
assertions or statements made by the Bible to be regarded as revealed and true? Perhaps the very first
attack on the notion of propositional revelation is recorded in Genesis 3:1. Here the serpent asks, “Did
God say?” This is perhaps the critical question for all those who wish to defend the concept of biblical
revelation. But what was the serpent attacking? If he wanted to claim that a “proposition” had not been
conveyed by the divine utterance, he could have merely pointed out that what God said was a command
or warning—not an assertion—and thus neither true nor false. But what disturbed the serpent was that
God had said something at all. The serpent questioned whether sincere, intelligible communication had
in fact taken place.
Only a portion of the Bible seems to qualify as “propositional,” understood in its philosophical
sense. However, Henry’s loose use of “propositional” to refer to rational-verbal communication in
general is one way of refuting the serpent’s spurious insinuation that God did not say. Our task in the
remainder of this chapter is to understand revelation in a way that does justice to all that God says, not
only to the propositions (in the philosophical sense) conveyed by God’s saying.
Two diverse attitudes can be taken regarding “biblical propositions.” On the one hand, one may
accept the view that the Bible is composed of “ordinary” propositions, that is, verbal statements.
According to this view, the actual sentences assume primacy; textual criticism and translation are
assigned paramount importance. The extreme of this position would be a “biblical theology” that
merely repeated the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek sentences in the Bible (and their translated
equivalents). Though this is one way of preserving the biblical propositions, it is hardly a practical
option in contemporary theology. However, it remains a limiting case of what it means “to do justice
to” biblical propositions.
On the other hand, one may claim that the Bible conveys propositions of the “philosophical” breed;
accordingly, the actual sentences are translated into a clearer, more explicitly propositional form. The
extreme of this view would entail deriving a set of propositions in a precise discursive language and
calling these the “biblical propositions.” Opponents of Evangelicals warn that this is the constant
danger. As long ago as 1883, Henry Drummond proclaimed: “There is no worse enemy to a living
Church than a propositional theology.” If skepticism is a problem for those who believe we cannot
know the truth, dogmatism is the constant temptation for those who believe that the truth is available
and within their grasp.
It should be obvious by now that one’s stance toward biblical propositions has consequences for
one’s theological method. Is the role of theology to extract propositions from the Bible in their pristine
form—to make withdrawals from a divine deposit, as it were? Can Scripture be translated into a
theological Euclid? As we have seen, many modern theologians fear that this eventuality is the goal of
Evangelicals’ theology. They worry that propositional theology depersonalizes revelation by rendering
it abstract and lifeless, dulling the call of the gospel for decision and obedience. Another concern is that
revelation will be packaged into a neat propositional system that can then be manipulated by humans as
they manipulate other objects. Instead of intellectual “control” over an abstract system of doctrine, the
neoliberal theologians wish to have an existential encounter with an all-powerful Subject. This, at least,
is the critique of Evangelicals’ theology. Does the shoe fit?
We must recall the original purpose for which the phrase “propositional revelation” was brought
into service. In debate with neoorthodoxy, the term stressed the cognitive aspect of the divine
revelation. However, we have seen how Evangelicals have become entangled in philosophical
controversies over the nature of propositions and over what is susceptible to truth and falsity.
Consequently, we have wondered whether the concept of propositional revelation has outlived its
usefulness. Consider two Articles from the 1982 “Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics,” put
forward as a major statement of Evangelicals on an important issue:
Article VI: WE AFFIRM that the Bible expresses God’s truth in propositional statements, and we declare
that Biblical truth is both objective and absolute. We further affirm that a statement is true if it represents
matters as they actually are but is an error if it misrepresents the facts.
Article XIV: WE AFFIRM that the Biblical record of events, discourses and sayings, though presented in a
variety of appropriate literary forms, corresponds to historical fact.
Despite the key ambiguity in the term “propositional statements” (does it intend “propositional” in
its ordinary or philosophical sense?), the framers of these Articles suggest that biblical statements are
true when they state facts, facts that seem to be exclusively historical in nature. But does all of
Scripture “state facts”? We have shown that “what is said” includes more than “what is asserted.” For
the biblical record to “correspond” to historical fact, it must be read as containing assertions about the
past. Is there a possibility that “what is said” has been collapsed into “what is asserted,” so that every
sentence of Scripture is read as fact-stating and proposition-conveying? That is the charge leveled at
Evangelicals by Barr and David Kelsey.
As we mentioned above, Barr charged Evangelicals with making a literary category mistake in
insisting that the function of biblical sentences is to convey propositions or information. When biblical
narratives are read as history, Barr says that a theory of meaning as reference is presupposed, along
with the concomitant theological method of proof-texting. This has led, according to Barr, to a sort of
“biblical atomism.” Similarly, Kelsey’s analysis of the various ways in which the Bible is authoritative
for theology concludes that Evangelicals (represented in his study by Warfield) consider “doctrinal
content” the authoritative aspect of Scripture. Warfield foregoes the proof-texting method, however,
preferring rather to consider the doctrine of an entire book or writer and then collect it into a consistent
system or “biblical theology.” Kelsey calls this a “biblical positivism.” In Barr and Kelsey, then, we see
two criticisms of the Evangelical approach to biblical propositions: Barr objects to the use of biblical
sentences (“ordinary” propositions) as proof texts; Kelsey criticizes the concern for doctrines
(“philosophical” propositions) that are extracted from the text.
In the opinion of Barr and Kelsey, the issue at stake is the nature of language, meaning, and truth.
Both Barr and Kelsey associate Evangelicals with the theory that the meaning of a sentence is its
referents. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics seems to justify this interpretation: the
biblical record was there said to refer to “historical fact.” Evangelicals, thus, regard the Bible as a kind
of Tractatus Theologico-Philosophicus! This allusion to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s earlier work is not
coincidental. What the neoliberal critics of Evangelicals object to is a view of language and meaning
that was best expressed (and later repudiated) by Wittgenstein. It is, therefore, of some interest to
compare Wittgenstein’s early work with how Evangelicals view biblical propositions. In a later section,
we shall see fit to contrast Wittgenstein’s earlier view of propositions with his later theory of
language—one that displayed greater sensitivity to various literary forms.
Wittgenstein’s major philosophical concern in his first published work—a concern that stayed with
him throughout his life—was with the nature of language and its relation to the world. Wittgenstein
once wrote: “My whole task consists in explaining the nature of sentences.” How do marks on paper
come to signify the world? Like Evangelicals, Wittgenstein answered this question by appealing to
propositions and facts. A brief look at Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus will perhaps
clarify the theory of meaning referred to by Barr and Kelsey when they speak of “biblical atomism”
and “biblical positivism.”
For Wittgenstein, the world is the totality of facts (1.1). A fact is the existence of a state of affairs
(2), and a state of affairs is a combination of objects (2.01). The world is thus comprised of the sum
total of objects, things, or “atoms.” So much for the world. What about language and propositions?
Wittgenstein says that we “picture” facts to ourselves (2.1). These pictures are “laid against” reality
like a measure (2.1512), and if the picture agrees with reality it is true (2.21). Now a thought is a
logical picture of facts (3), and a “proposition” is an expression of a thought (3.1). Language is thus
made of propositions that “picture” the world. And, just as facts are made up of combinations of
objects, so propositions are made up of combinations of names. Wittgenstein’s central assumption, an
assumption that he later retracted, was that “A name means an object. The object is its meaning”
(3.203). So Wittgenstein’s “logical atomism” might be roughly pictured as follows:
LANGUAGE WORLD
comprised of comprised of
PROPOSITIONS FACTS
comprised of comprised of
NAMES OBJECTS
This way of correlating language and the world has been termed the “picture theory” of the
proposition. “A proposition is a picture of reality” (4.01). What is common to both reality and the
propositional picture is the “logical form,” the arrangement or ordering of the elements (objects and
names). Thus, for every simple object or “atom” in the world, there is an elementary proposition that
pictures (names) it (4.22). If we could only state every proposition, the world would be completely
described.
Does the concept of propositional revelation commit Evangelicals to a picture theory of the
proposition? Does, say, Article VI of the Chicago Statement do so? But forgetting momentarily the
possible parallels between Wittgenstein’s and Evangelicals’ understanding of the language—world
relation, what is wrong with Wittgenstein’s account of the proposition?
For our purposes, the theory of meaning and language put forward in the Tractatus has two major
faults. First of all, the account wholly ignores the importance of circumstances in determining
meaning—the setting-in-life or extralinguistic context of sentences. Before we say that a proposition
pictures reality, we must observe how the sentence is being used. Is it being used as a picture? If so, is
it being used as a scientifically accurate picture, a beautiful picture, a morally edifying picture?
Norman Malcolm, one of Wittgenstein’s commentators, observes: “How a picture is used will
determine what it is a picture of.” For this reason, we cannot assume that the meaning of a proposition
is the state of affairs with which it corresponds. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s later work was in large part an
attempt to correct his earlier mistakes in this regard and to do justice to the actual uses of language in
life.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Wittgenstein regarded ordinary language as inadequate:
“Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible
to infer the form of the thought beneath it …” (4.002).
Ordinary language is, in Wittgenstein’s opinion, unclear and obscures the logical form of the
proposition. The solution: analyze the sentence into its atomic picture; this is the task of philosophy as
Wittgenstein conceived it. When clarified, propositions will mirror the logical form of the world
(4.112). Now part of the “outward clothing” of sentences is their literary form. Wittgenstein’s theory of
meaning seems to entail regarding the literary form not only as dispensable packaging but as an actual
hindrance to the perception of meaning. The proper form of a proposition—and this is one of
Wittgenstein’s major theses in the Tractatus—is [ρ̄, ξ̄, Ν(ξ̄)] (6). The significance of the symbolism is
that it shows Wittgenstein’s concern to construct a formal language, a language of “proper”
propositions, untainted by the awkwardness and lack of clarity of ordinary language. The search for
transparent propositions thus seems to involve a disparaging of and cavalier attitude toward the
everyday forms of language.
This “picture” view of language and meaning would seem to necessitate an unpalatable corollary
for Evangelicals, namely, that there is some imperfection in Scripture, that God could have revealed
His propositions with greater perspicuity—an idea that would have surprised the Reformers. Should
theologians analyze what is said in Scripture and seek the exactness of the proposition, or should they
describe what is said and respect the ordinary language? This alternative reflects the major shift in
Wittgenstein’s own thinking. In his later work, Wittgenstein was interested above all in describing the
everyday forms and uses of language and in watching how they were employed in various contexts,
rather than tinkering with sentences and translating them into a standard form.
It is not for us to judge whether or not some Evangelicals, in their zeal for propositional revelation,
have avoided the pitfalls of the picture theory of the proposition. What is our concern is to provide a
model of biblical revelation that will preserve the substance of “propositional” revelation (i.e., the
emphasis on verbal, cognitive communication) while at the same time allowing for greater appreciation
of the “ordinary” language of Scripture and its diverse literary forms.
Here, then, is a declaration that diverse literary forms and truth are by no means incompatible.
However, this apparently peaceful coexistence is threatened when read in light of the subsequent
article:
ARTICLE XIII: WE AFFIRM that awareness of the literary categories, formal and stylistic, of the various
parts of Scripture is essential for proper exegesis, and hence we value genre criticism as one of the many
disciplines of Biblical study.
WE DENY that generic categories which negate historicity may rightly be imposed on Biblical narratives
which present themselves as factual.
The affirmation states that biblical sentences must be read in light of their literary context, or genre.
The denial, however, immediately rescinds the decisive importance of genre whenever historicity is at
stake. But to suggest that all narratives that appear to be factual must be historical is to ride roughshod
over the issue of literary genres. John Searle remarks that there are no formal features, no textual
properties that identify a given text as a work of fiction. Hence the “we value genre criticism” seems to
pay mere lip-service to the actual role of literary forms in deciding what kind of truth claims are
involved in a given narrative. The confusion in the Chicago Statement is exacerbated by the following
article:
Article XIV: WE AFFIRM that the Biblical record of events, discourses and sayings, though presented in a
variety of appropriate literary forms, corresponds to historical fact.
The variety of literary forms is herein smoothed over to ensure the unity of historicity. Clearly, some
other principle seems to be guiding the statement’s attitude toward biblical propositions than that of
recognizing literary genre. It is, we suggest, an apologetic rather than hermeneutical interest that
dictates that historicity take precedence in spite of the variety of literary forms. Ironically, the “Chicago
Statement on Biblical Inerrancy” handles Scripture’s diverse literary forms more successfully:
So history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor,
generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth.
By contrast, the “Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics” comes perilously close to imposing an
interpretive grid on Scripture rather than letting Scripture’s literary forms be literary forms.
In the work of Henry we again find the claim that truth and diverse literary genres are not mutually
exclusive: “Propositional disclosure is not limited to nor does it require only one particular literary
genre. And of course the expression of truth in other forms than the customary prose does not preclude
expressing the truth in declarative propositions.” In spite of this admission, Henry still seems to be
partial to the simple declarative statement: “Regardless of the parables, allegories, emotive phrases and
rhetorical questions used by these writers, their literary devices have a logical point which can be
propositionally formulated and is objectively true or false.”71
Henry elsewhere argues that the claim that the Bible is literally true in no way requires that only
prose serve as the vehicle of this truth: “Some literary techniques more than others sharpen the
communication of truth by rousing the imagination, stirring the emotions, and stimulating the will.”
Henry thus acknowledges that literary forms are not merely ornamental trappings of truth content, but
that they have a positive contribution to make in God’s revelatory communication. At the same time,
however, Henry is clear that the basic value of biblical symbols (and presumably other literary devices)
“lies not simply in their capacity to move us but more fundamentally in what they presumably tell us
about God.”73
In short, the informative function of language continues to enjoy preeminence in Henry’s
understanding of revelation. Consider his attitude regarding poetry: “Poetry can usually be restated in
prose form; prose is a kind of linguistic shorthand for poetic expression.” But to substitute prose
“shorthand” for poetry is to be guilty of what Cleanth Brooks has termed the “heresy of paraphrase.” 75
It is also to overlook Sir Philip Sidney’s dictum: “The poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never
lieth.” To believe, as Henry does, that what is said in poetry may be paraphrased so that its content is
clearly stated is to invoke the wrath of literary critics who view poetry and other literary forms as other
than informative.77
Barr presents the alternatives: should we read the Bible as descriptive information or as poetic
literature? Perhaps, says Barr, the primary way the Bible influences the church is by the stories it tells
that pattern our lives—and this regardless of whether or not the stories are historically true: “in the
Bible as a whole … the parabolic, mythical, or literary mode of impact is experienced as the primary
one, and this mode of impact becomes antecedent to the question of what actually happened or what
external realities are referred to.”
This is, roughly, the position of what we have termed the New Biblical Theology; and, as we
mentioned at the outset, the New Biblical Theologians can invoke the work of legion professional
literary critics in support of their nonpropositional reading of Scripture. Thus, as we had recourse to
detour into philosophy when investigating propositions, so we must now detour into literary criticism
in order to explore the proposition-conveying potential of various literary forms.
“It is axiomatic for a large number of contemporary poetic theorists that a poem, as a poem, does
not assert anything about the world.” So states Gerald Graff, a member of the minority opposition
party, about mainstream twentieth-century literary critics. It may be recalled that the New Biblical
Theology, in its opposition to cognitive revelation, took refuge in the distinction between descriptive
and poetic language. Similarly, a fundamental, essentially Romanticist, dualism runs throughout
modern literary criticism: “From Coleridge to Mallarmé, and from Yeats to Cleanth Brooks, Philip
Wheelwright, and Northrop Frye, a dualism very like that between symbol and allegory is carried
through as a distinction between the poetic or literary and the scientific or ordinary kinds of discourse.”
Throughout the English-speaking world, this dichotomy has been more or less de rigueur for
modern literary critics. Literature is considered an autonomous realm, hermetically sealed off from
“external” questions of history or science. Frank Lentricchia describes the situation: “The unique
discourse of literature is closed off (it is centripetally directed) from all that externality which is
attended to by the ‘centrifugal,’ ‘descriptive,’ ‘and assertive’ qualities of ordinary writing.”
For the English critic I. A. Richards, poetry is an emotive use of language. Scientific statements
describe the external world; poetic statements express the inner world of values. The poem is not so
much an assertion of thought as it is the dramatic enactment of the process of thought, of the poet’s
coming to grips with an idea, event, or person. For the American critic Brooks and the New Critics in
general, “a poem is a special mode of discourse whose statement-denying dynamic tends to keep the
reader’s consciousness trapped within an enclosed aesthetic space.”83 It was Brooks who explained
how the New Critics avoided the “heresy of paraphrase” when discussing poetry: “Any proposition
asserted in a poem is not to be taken in abstraction but is justified, in terms of the poem, if it is justified
at all, not by virtue of its scientific or historical or philosophical truth, but is justified in terms of a
principle analogous to that of dramatic propriety.”
In his reading of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for example, Brooks does not take the line
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” as asserting a proposition. Rather, the lines are “justified” by their “fit”
with the rest of the poem—the principle of dramatic propriety. By appealing to this principle, Brooks
hoped to free literary texts from the burden of declarative statement and himself from the heresy of
paraphrase. However, on reading T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Brooks finds the proposition “that
men have lost knowledge of good and evil,” even though it is not explicitly stated in the poem. Brooks
argues that the proposition is an abstraction of the complex dramatic action expressed in the poem. The
poem does not assert “that men have lost knowledge of good and evil,” but rather shows an attitude that
is trying to come to terms with this idea.
The extent to which this kind of literary criticism has infiltrated and influenced both biblical studies
and theology may be seen by examining the work of Northrop Frye. This Canadian critic has written
that “questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aim of producing a structure of
words for its own sake.” Here, then, is a call for what Lentricchia calls a “clean severance of the
literary mode from the centrifugal responsibilities to describe and to assert.”86 Frye differs from the
New Critics in seeing the individual text not as an autonomous entity but as a member of a larger
literary universe. Lentricchia calls this a poetics of “aesthetic humanism,” wherein aesthetics “releases
mankind from all the shackles of circumstance and frees him from everything that may be called
constraint, whether physical or moral.”88
Frye is of special interest as a literary critic because of the privileged place allocated the Bible in
his literary universe. According to Frye, the biblical images and narratives constitute the imaginative,
mythological universe within which all subsequent Western literature has lived, moved, and had its
being. For Frye, like Barr, the Bible’s significance resides in its shaping of the Western imagination. In
marked contrast to Clark’s belief that most of the Bible is composed of propositions, Frye claims that
Scripture’s “use of objective and descriptive language is incidental throughout.”90 The Bible for Frye is
a special kind of rhetoric—a kerygma—that is a mixture of the metaphorical and existential. Frye can
still call the Bible “revelation,” but this is not to be understood as the “conveying of information from
an objective divine source to a subjective human receptor,” for this would make Scripture a
“descriptive” text.
What does the Bible literally mean? Frye replies that it means what it says. However, Frye notes
that whereas some verbal structures are set up as counterparts to external events (histories), other verbal
structures exist for their own sake and have no such counterpart (literature). Frye thus sanctions the
now-familiar distinction that is at the heart of the New Biblical Theology, namely, the distinction
between “descriptive” and “poetic” texts. Moreover, Frye retains the New Critical point that the
primary aspect of a verbal structure is its self-referring, “centripetal” aspect. The Bible means literally
what it says, but it can only so mean by not referring to some extratextual matter. Frye cites an
example: “When Jesus says (Jn 10:9), ‘I am the door,’ the statement means literally just what it says,
but there are no doors outside the verse in John to be pointed to.” The same is true, says Frye, of the
great fish in the Book of Jonah. What makes a descriptive text true is its correspondence to an external
reference; but a work of literature has another criterion for truth: inner verbal consistency.93
An outstanding example of a work emanating from the New Biblical Theology that relies on
literary critical theories such as the ones we have been discussing is Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of the
Biblical Narrative. As Frye held that the literal meaning of the Bible is the poetic meaning, so Frei says
that the literal meaning of the Gospel narratives is its narrative shape. Frei laments that the meaning of
the Gospel narratives has come to be associated with something other than the narratives themselves,
namely, an external history. John Barton correctly observes: “In Frei’s book we have a non-referential
theory of biblical narrative texts, which is closely akin to the New Critical theory of literature in
general as non-referential.” Because the meaning of the narrative is the narrative form itself, it cannot
be paraphrased in nonnarrative form.
The challenge to propositional or cognitive revelation, therefore, comes not only from theologians
but also from professional literary critics who question whether literature functions to inform. These
literary critics particularly frown on two “heresies”: the heresy that literary forms are merely
ornamental gilding (e.g., Frei’s insisting that narrative shape is essential to its meaning), and the heresy
of paraphrase. These two heresies are perhaps, at root, one—the “propositional heresy”—the belief that
the content of literature can be restated in nonliterary form.
Not all literary critics and philosophers agree that to paraphrase is simultaneously to commit
heresy. One philosopher, D. H. Mellor, writes: “If a novel can properly be said to be true or false it
makes statements.” More precisely, a novel makes a set of statements (S) other than the set of
statements it ostensibly makes in its narrative (S’). The novel’s truth will be determined by the truth or
falsity of the statements in S—usually generalizations of a moral, psychological, or sociological kind
about real people: “The truth conveyed in the novel is that of the generalization of S, which is
independent of the truth or falsity of the illustrative statement S’ by which it is conveyed.”97 Contrary
to the mainstream of literary critics, Mellor claims that literature does affirm stateable truths.
In a similar fashion, Graff’s Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma is a bold manifesto that meets
head-on the nonpropositional view of literature. Graff admits that form and content are often
inseparable; any change in the wording of a poem risks changing its meaning or content. However,
Graff argues that the form “follows from” its conceptual content: “Our very ability to recognize such
common literary sins as … sentimentality … presupposes that an ideal of proportion between ground
and consequent governs the relation between content and form.” Graff is saying that we can only judge
the appropriateness of the form on the basis of the content. In the same way, the “poetic attitudes”
championed by Brooks and the New Critics are intelligible only in light of the conceptual statements of
the poem, which serve as their raison d’être.
Paraphrase does, according to Graff, constitute a part of a poem’s meaning: “But if the aim of
paraphrase is more modestly conceived as giving an equivalent not of the total meaning of the utterance
paraphrased but only of the conceptual portion of that meaning, then we can speak of most utterances
as accessible to paraphrase.” Graff suggests that nuances that resist paraphrase may nevertheless be
described. Once the conceptual grounds of the attitudes expressed in literature are made clear, we can
then assess the adequacy of the dramatized response that the poem is said to embody. Poetry is
distinguished from paraphrase by virtue of the former’s “highly developed and systematic employment
of rhythm.”101
Is biblical revelation, like poetry or literature, susceptible to conceptual paraphrase? This is
undoubtedly the thesis of those who speak of “propositional” revelation. But even Graff, a staunch
defender of the cognitive nature of poetry, admits that paraphrase captures only part of the total
meaning. What, then, escapes propositional paraphrase? Perhaps some examples from other
“languages” might prove helpful in considering this question. I, for one, have not come across a good
paraphrase of Brahms’ “Fourth Symphony” recently. Though the proposition “that life is grand but
ultimately tragic” makes a game stab at stating the conceptual content of Brahms’ music, something
inevitably gets lost in translation. In the realm of art, someone has said that the whole Protestant
doctrine of the human race is contained in Rembrandt’s paintings. But here too a systematic theologian
would be hard pressed to put this theology in propositional form.
Of course, it may be objected, music and art are nonverbal; surely words and texts may be
paraphrased more easily? Take, for instance, the familiar story of “Little Red Riding Hood.” What
statements (S) does the story (S’) make? A recent article in Time magazine reports that one hundred
scholars could not agree about the meaning of this fairy tale: “Nearly everyone agrees that the story
Little Red Riding Hood is an evocative tale of sex and violence, but exactly what it evokes is a matter
of dispute among folklorists, anthropologists, Freudians, feminists and literary critics.” And one muses
whether there would have been a greater consensus if theologians had figured among the participants.
Certainly one of the purposes of “Little Red Riding Hood” was to warn someone (girls, children?)
about something (men, strangers, wolves?). But many of the Old Testament narratives have a similar
purpose. The apostle Paul writes about the accounts of Israel’s history: “These things happened to them
as examples and were written down as warnings for us” (1 Co 10:11). That is, the Old Testament
record was written not only to convey information, but to affect its readers in certain ways. And as we
have shown, paraphrase is weakest in its attempts to preserve the noncognitive aspects of a text’s
meaning. We might perhaps generalize and say that what is lost in conceptual paraphrase is the power
and beauty of the in-formed content. Ironically, in its very concern to preserve the cognitive content of
literature, conceptual paraphrase strips the content of precisely those aspects that are most likely to
preserve it and its effect! Wordsworth’s lines describe the lifeless residue of propositional analysis:
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Some no doubt will object that this detour into literary criticism is irrelevant because the Bible is
manifestly not literature like “Little Red Riding Hood.” Norman Geisler, for example, argues from the
nature of truth to conclusions about which literary genres can or cannot be in Scripture, along lines
something like this:
1. Statements are true when they correspond to actual fact.
2. Midrash rejects the correspondence theory of truth.
3. The Bible is true in all that it states.
4. Therefore, midrash cannot be one of Scripture’s literary forms.
Whether or not his conclusion is correct, Geisler’s argumentation is surely faulty, dictating as it does a
priori the literary form the divine revelation must take. His is a case of putting the interpretive cart
before the horse, of pronouncing exegetical conclusions that do not logically depend on a reading of the
text. In similar fashion, Robert Preus states:
Certain alleged forms are not compatible either with the purpose of Scripture or with its inerrancy.…
Specifically, any literary genre that would in itself be immoral or involve deceit or error is not compatible
with Biblical inerrancy and is not to be found in Scripture.
It is difficult, however, to see how a literary form can inherently be immoral; only personal agents
can be morally responsible. Furthermore, the writer, in using a genre, is invoking known conventions.
So long as it is known what is being read, the reader is not deceived. Ramm goes so far as to say that if
pseudonymity “were a recognized form in the culture of the scriptural writer … then we must be
prepared to accept this as a proper form of special revelation.”
In contrast to Geisler and Preus, Ramm writes: “There is no inherent harm in a literary genre; there
is only harm or danger in how a scholar may use such a genre against a document. If such a genre plays
a positive role in the communication of revelation … we should not shy away from it.” Ramm notes
also that we are tempted to fix the literary forms of our day as the “standard” forms, forgetting that
literary forms have undergone historical development. Because God’s communication came at
particular times and places, it comes in particular literary forms. Ramm concludes that “much harm has
been done to Scripture by those within and without the Church by assuming that all statements in the
Bible are on the same logical level, on which level they are either true or false.”108
The genres that prove most worrisome to Evangelicals include legend, myth, midrash, and saga—
genres that appear prima facie to vitiate Scripture’s truthfulness. But even to read the Bible as history
(as many biblical critics do) does not guarantee its truthfulness, for many liberal critics conclude that
the Bible presents false history. One’s reading of Scripture, then, ought not to harbor prejudices against
some literary genres out of a concern for what the truth “must” be. This is the only way to avoid
criticisms such as John Barton’s that claim that Fundamentalists are seldom students of the humanities
and mainly read nonfiction and that consequently they do not know how to read the Bible. It would
perhaps be beneficial to look at a counter-example to this serious charge.
Myth or story is the “partial solution” to this dilemma. In the imaginative enjoyment of a great
myth “we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an
abstraction.” Paul Holmer believes that reality for Lewis cannot be summarized in a theory: “Literature
is not a disguised theory, nor an implied didacticism. Instead, it communicates in such a way that, when
successful, it creates new capabilities and capacities.”118 Myth is not abstract, as is truth; nor is it bound
to particulars, as is direct experience. As a “middle way,” myth is admirably suited to offer a concrete
taste of a universal reality. The main problem with propositional paraphrase is that it yields a
“tasteless” knowing, a knowing bereft of the power and beauty perceived and apprehended by the
imagination.
It is important to note that Lewis understood “myth” to include accounts of historical fact. He
speaks of the gospel story as “myth become fact.” This mythic appreciation of Christianity did not
come easily for Lewis. Though he could rationally accept theism, for a long while he could not accept
Christ nor understand the significance of such crucial aspects of the gospel as “sacrifice” and
“propitiation.” A late night conversation with J. R. R. Tolkien and “Hugo” Dyson showed him that it
was possible imaginatively and emotionally to “feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings
beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant.’ ” Lewis held that the
doctrines derived from myths are less true; they are but conceptual translations of what God has
already, and more adequately, expressed—namely, the actual Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection.
For Lewis, therefore, we might say that the gospel “myth” gave him a profound taste of history—of
history’s relevance, power, and beauty. Peter Schakel argues that “tasting” reality imaginatively
became more and more important for Lewis as he grew older, even influencing the particular genres
with which he chose to write his own work. Letters to Malcolm uses the literary device of an imaginary
correspondence to achieve its purpose—“to fuse the ‘knowing’ of ideas crucial to Christian growth
with the ‘taste’ of experienced reality necessary to give that knowledge vitality.”122 Literature for
Lewis serves to give power, life, and “taste” to the information it conveys.
Poetic language and imaginative literature serve other purposes in Lewis’s opinion as well. Poetic
language gives qualitative information, whereas scientific language yields quantitative information and
precision. Poetic language expresses emotion not for emotion’s sake but in order to inform us about the
object that evoked the emotion. And, as with myth, Lewis declares that poetic language may be used of
fact as well as fiction. Moreover, Lewis disparages the reader who is on the lookout for information
alone: “As the unmusical listener wants only the Tune, so the unliterary reader wants only the Event.”
But Lewis contends that some events cannot be conveyed as they are without engaging the heart—thus
the necessity of poetic language. Perhaps the most impressive example of this principle at work would
be the Psalms. Though we can pull any standard systematic theology off the shelf and read about God’s
eternal nature, the Psalms offer their own, more eloquent, “description” of God. So Lewis: “The most
valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.”
The indispensability of literary form is a theme that Lewis repeats in his treatment of the
epistemological value of the “pupil’s metaphor.” Some metaphors, says Lewis, are “our only method of
reaching a given idea at all.”127 In some cases, we just cannot know the object without the metaphor; in
these cases, a nonmetaphorical, or propositional, paraphrase is out of the question. While perhaps more
technical (though Lewis remarks that it is still metaphorical), calling God the “transcendent Ground of
Being” is simply not as inviting, nor as rich in meaning, as “Our Father who art in heaven.”
Why did God “take up” certain human literary forms and press them into His service? “We might
have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in
systematic form—something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the
multiplication table.” Even Jesus’ teaching lacks systematicity: “He preaches but He does not
lecture.”129 To pin down Jesus’ teaching in neat propositions is “like trying to bottle a sunbeam.” Lewis
suggests that the reason why Jesus’ teaching eludes our systematizing intellect is that, in so doing, it
demands a response from the whole person: “No net less wide than a man’s whole heart … will hold
the sacred Fish.” Compare the similar thought on the part of the theologian Abraham Kuyper:
The rationale for the diverse literary forms in Scripture is that revelation strikes all the chords of the soul,
and not just one, e.g., the rational one. This makes it clear that the historical doctrine of revelation is not the
barren propositional one it is often charged with being.
This demand for a total response is central to one of Lewis’s later works, An Experiment in
Criticism. Lewis here makes the novel suggestion that books should be judged on the basis of how they
are read: “Now the true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it wholeheartedly,
makes himself as receptive as he can.” Good readers receive the literary text; bad readers use it.
Whereas the receiver “rests” in the vision of the work, the user wants to make the vision into, say, a life
philosophy. As Schakel summarizes: “Reading involves an imaginative, emotional, and intellectual
interaction between the words an author writes and a reader’s understanding of and response to
them.”135 By Lewis’s criterion, the Bible is the paradigmatic good book. One cannot “use” it, for
example, to pass away the time. Rather, it demands a response, an “uptake.” In sum, good reading calls
for the response of the rationalist (who approaches the Bible as truth to be believed), as well as the
“romantic” (who approaches the Bible as a reality to be received). Lewis the Christian reader has an
appreciation for both the propositional, or rational, truth-bearing function and the nonpropositional, or
imaginative, reality-bearing function of good literature.
Here we have four different speech acts. But note that what Austin termed the sense and reference
(meaning) and what Searle calls the predication and reference (propositional content) is the same in
each of the four sentences. The referring expression (“David”) serves to identify an individual person
or object to whom the predication (“smiting Goliath”) applies. The reference and predication together
comprise the “proposition.” In Searle’s analysis, the same proposition (David smiting Goliath) is
expressed in each of the four sentences: “Whenever two illocutionary acts contain the same reference
and predication, provided that the meaning of the referring expression is the same, I shall say the same
proposition is expressed.”
In treating the Bible as “ordinary literature,” propositions are regained, although in revised form.
With Searle and also P. T. Geach, we may define “proposition” as “a form of words in which
something is propounded, put forward for consideration.” It is important to note that on Geach’s
account, there is a difference between “putting forward for consideration” and “putting forward for
consideration as true” (assertion). We thus agree with Helm’s description of Geach and Searle: “Both
claim that the question ‘Is it true or false’ cannot be asked of propositions simpliciter, only of particular
kinds of utterances.”
Searle identifies three things we do in speaking: utterance acts, propositional acts, and illocutionary
acts. Significantly enough, Searle claims that the propositional act cannot stand on its own:
“Propositional acts cannot occur alone; that is, one cannot just refer and predicate without making an
assertion or asking a question or performing some other illocutionary act.”
Searle’s understanding of propositional acts and propositions seems to conflict with the traditional
concept of propositional revelation. For one thing, propositional acts cannot occur alone; there is
always an illocutionary act that is simultaneously performed. More importantly, Searle holds that “a
proposition is to be sharply distinguished from an assertion or statement of it.” Though the
propositional content (reference and predication) of sentences (1)–(4) above is identical, the
illocutionary acts (force) is not. Searle offers “F(p)” as the symbolism of a speech act, where “F”
stands for the kind of illocutionary force and “p” for the proposition. To put it simply, “F” indicates
how a proposition is to be taken; “F” makes a proposition count as a warning, statement, etc.
How a proposition is to be taken is a matter of rules or convention. Some rules define, create, or
“constitute” a form of activity. A promise counts as an obligation to do something in the future, just as
a touchdown counts as six points in the language-game of football. In English, “I promise”
conventionally counts as the making of a promise. Thus, what one intends to do (promise) is not just
randomly related to what the sentence means (“I promise”). What, then, is the connection between the
intentional act and the conventional meaning? Searle answers that the speaker intends his hearer to
recognize his intention by virtue of his sentence meaning. By uttering “I promise,” the speaker invokes
the rules that govern the use of this expression and so attempts to get his audience to recognize his
intention. If I say “My house is on fire,” a correct understanding would involve recognizing that my
intent is not to state an interesting fact about my domicile but to warn its inhabitants to flee and to
request help. Illocutionary uptake involves understanding not merely the meaning of a sentence but the
force with which that meaning is to be taken. Unless the hearer recognizes my intent to warn, he has
not truly understood my sentence, even if he knows what it “means” (its propositional content).
Understanding, therefore, is knowing what the sentence means and what it counts as.
Instead of speech acts suffering from “infelicities,” Searle prefers to speak of “defects.” An
illocutionary act is defective if the four conditions for its successful performance are not all satisfied.
We illustrate these conditions with Searle’s analysis of promising:
(1) Preparatory condition: the speaker believes his audience would like him to perform an act (if
they did not, he would be making a threat rather than a promise).
(2) Propositional content condition: to make a promise, the proposition must predicate an act of the
speaker, and it cannot be a past act.
(3) Sincerity condition: the speaker must truly intend to perform the future act predicated of him.
(4) Essential condition: the speaker intends for his utterance to count as an obligation to do a future
action.
This last condition, as the name implies, is the most important, for it determines what an utterance
counts as (e.g., promise, warning, request). Similarly, to make an assertion, the speaker must have
evidence or reasons for supposing his proposition true (preparatory condition), he must believe his
assertion to be true (sincerity condition), and he must intend his utterance to count as a representation
of an actual state of affairs (essential condition).
How many types of illocutionary acts are there, how many “Fs” of F(p)? Wittgenstein in his later
phase believed that there were countless ways of using language, countless language-games. Searle,
however, disagrees: “the illusion of limitless uses of language is engendered by an enormous unclarity
about what constitutes the criteria for delimiting one language game or use of language from another.”
In Searle’s opinion, the essential condition forms the best basis for a “taxonomy” of illocutionary acts.
The essential condition helps define the illocutionary point, not to be confused with illocutionary force.
While the illocutionary point of both demanding and asking is to “get someone to do something,” the
illocutionary force of each varies in degree.
Searle also demarcates illocutionary acts according to the “direction of fit” between words and
world. Assertions match propositional content with the world, but requests attempt to match the world
with the words. Correctly perceiving the illocutionary point of an utterance is thus vital for determining
how the propositional content is to be taken with regard to the world. Finally, Searle appeals to the
different attitudes that the speaker expresses toward his propositional content (the sincerity
condition)—“belief” for assertions and “desire” for requests.
On the basis of these three criteria—illocutionary point, direction of fit between words and world,
speaker’s attitude—Searle declares that there are only five basic things we do with language: “we tell
people how things are, we try to get them to do things, we commit ourselves to doing things, we
express our feelings and attitudes and we bring about changes through our utterances. Often, we do
more than one of these at once in the same utterance.”
To this point we have limited our discussion to sentence-sized speech acts. Can we transpose the
theory and consider literature rather than a speaker’s utterance? To the extent that illocutionary force
depends on facial expressions or vocal intonations, it is less inscribable than is propositional content.
Yet Ricoeur admits that the “intentional exteriorization” of discourse in writing does succeed in
inscribing the whole speech act. Searle himself has made one foray into literary criticism by claiming
that the only way to identify a work of literature as fictional is to determine the illocutionary intentions
of the author.210 In a work of fiction, writes Searle, the illocutionary acts are feigned: “What
distinguishes fiction from lies is the existence of a separate set of conventions which enables the author
to go through the motions of making statements which he knows to be not true even though he has no
intention to deceive.” At the same time, Searle acknowledges the “serious” illocutionary acts
performed by fictions: “Almost any important work of fiction conveys a ‘message’ or ‘messages’
which are conveyed by the text but are not in the text.” One example of a piece of fiction that carries a
serious message would be Jesus’ parables.213
Searle’s programmatic suggestions for applying speech act theory to a theory of literature remain to
be developed. Some preliminary work has been done. Mary Louise Pratt argues that literature too is a
speech-context. Like other speech acts, literary works depend upon culturally shared rules and
conventions: “One of the most obvious kinds of contextual information we bring to bear in confronting
a literary work is our knowledge of its genre.”215 Genre defines the nature of the communication
situation. Susan S. Lanser has extended speech act theory to a study of narratives in particular: “In
speech act theory I found a philosophical basis for understanding literature as communicative act and
text as message-in-context.” As Barr has dismantled the linguistic theory behind the Biblical Theology
movement, so Lanser is concerned to rebuke modern literary critics who deny the referential nature of
literature: “Literature is communicative both in usage and intent, and the distinction between “literary”
and “ordinary” language which poeticians have tended to assume is not supported by linguistic
research.”
In light of these first steps in applying speech act theory to literature, we would like to propose
(moving beyond Searle) that there is a correlation between a text’s genre, or literary form, and a text’s
illocutionary point and force. If this principle is correct, then insensitivity to literary form entails a
diminished appreciation of a text’s peculiar force. While proponents of propositional revelation have
cherished the (p) of the speech act F(p), we have been arguing that the F’s have largely been
overlooked, at least in formulations of a doctrine about Scripture. All five illocutionary points
enumerated by Searle can be found in Scripture, and many biblical texts perform more than one act at
once (e.g., report and warn or encourage).
A thorough analysis of the semantics of biblical literature needs to take account of four factors:
1. Proposition — Fact — Issue
1. Every text is “about” something, whether it is “David’s smiting Goliath” or, in the case of Jesus’
parable of the prodigal son, God’s forgiveness of repentant sinners. Something in every text—the
proposition—is propounded for some type of consideration. The issue of a text is “neutral” (in that we
are not told how to take the particular fact propounded for consideration).
2. There is usually a reason for discourse. We speak or write in order to communicate something
about something to someone. The propositional content is intended to function or count as something
in the communicative act. The propositional content serves a specific purpose.
3. Once an author purposes to say something about something, he then seeks to express it in a
particular form, a form that is appropriate for the purpose of his proposition. The author’s
communicative intent is thus “incarnate” in a literary form that suits the message. The author is perhaps
most “present” in the literary form of the letter, but his “voice” is present in other genres as well. 220 In
the Gospel of John, for example, the authorial voice is that of the narrator, who is present to the reader
as eyewitness to the things recounted.
4. The power, force, or illocution of a text depends on the combination of the proposition, the
purpose of the author, and the particular form in which the author “incarnates” his authoritative voice
and presence.
Throughout this study we have tried to supplement a concern for the truth of propositions with an
appreciation of the power and purposes of Scripture’s diverse literary forms. We have revised the
notion of a proposition, following Searle and Geach, so that it means “something propounded for
consideration.” In its revised sense, “propositional revelation” has reference to the things that God has
propounded for our consideration in Scripture. As Christian readers, we ought to be interested not only
in the propositions themselves but in the manifold ways these propositions are presented for our
consideration. In the context of Scripture’s various genres, these propositions count as warnings,
commands, prayers, questions, etc. as well as assertions.
We have seen that the Bible is eminently human—not in the sense that it errs, but in the sense of
communicating to ordinary people in ordinary language and ordinary literature. In this way, the whole
person, not only the intellect, is addressed by Scripture. As the apparent weakness of the incarnate Son
of God was actually an essential factor in His accomplishing of God’s redemptive purpose, so the
apparent weakness of the incarnate biblical texts—their “humanity”—is an essential ingredient in their
fulfilling of God’s revelatory purpose.
C. SCRIPTURE DOES MANY THINGS WITH WORDS AND HENCE ITS AUTHORITY IS
MULTIFACETED
The appropriate response to authoritative doctrine is intellectual belief or assent. But as we have
seen, Scripture contains several other illocutionary points besides the Assertive. The Directives of
Scripture are also authoritative, and obedience rather than intellectual assent is the appropriate
response. Consider two types of Directives with varying degrees of force or intensity. The Proverbs
have the authority of “wise sayings” and, as such, require thoughtful consideration and gradual
integration into the very fabric of one’s life. The Ten Commandments, on the other hand, are a more
intense form of Directive and solicit absolute obedience.
Much of the Old Testament literature contains Commissive speech acts associated with the
Covenant, whereby God commits Himself to a future course of action. God’s promises of covenant
blessings and deliverance have the authority of divine Commissives, the proper response to which is
wholehearted trust. Assent, obedience, trust: these are all aspects of faith, but this should not be
surprising. The richness of the faith-response simply matches the richness of the divine
communication.
What of the authority of biblical texts with an Expressive illocutionary point? What kind of
authority is shared by the Psalms, the Song of Moses (Ex 15), and Mary’s Magnificat (Lk 1:46–55)?
We may say that God is here using human Expressives to communicate something of the nature of
human response when confronted with the majesty and character of God. As C. S. Lewis rightly
observed, the response speaks eloquently (in a qualitatively precise manner) about the person who
evoked it. These Expressives thus constitute normative responses in which the reader is invited to share
and participate. We too must respond to injustice with laments and prayers for justice. We too must
respond to God’s mercy and love with sincere praise. We too must have imaginations captive to the
vision of the kingdom of God. Not only our minds, but also our emotional responses are brought under
scriptural authority.
The speaker implicitly sanctions the truth of the tacit assertions (1) and (2) by crying out, “There’s a
bull in the china shop!” If either of the two assertions is false, then the warning is in some sense
vitiated or falsified—even though it may prove effective in, say, vacating the shop floor in less than
sixty seconds.
The preparatory condition tells us what the speaker implies in the performance of the speech act. By
asserting, a speaker implies that there is evidence for the proposition; by warning, the speaker implies
that there is reason to believe that something will occur that is not in the hearer’s best interest. In the
performance of any illocutionary act, the speaker implies that the preparatory conditions are satisfied
(that the speaker is justified in the illocutionary intent). God’s speech acts infallibly fulfill the
propositional and preparatory conditions, for God is all-knowing.
A review of these three conditions has served to remind us that a speech act can be sincere,
formally in order, justified, and yet false. To this extent the first objection makes a legitimate point: a
speech act can achieve its illocutionary intent—that is, be successful—and yet be untrue. The real
question raised by the first objection, therefore, pertains to the nature of the relation between the
success of a speech act and the truth of a speech act; and the real concern behind the first objection is
with the nature of Scripture’s truth. By saying that speech acts infallibly achieve their purpose, it is
objected that we are defining the truth of speech acts in terms of what is successful or effective—in
terms of what works. This “pragmatic” theory of truth must be viewed as inadequate for defining
Scripture’s truth, for could not Scripture “work” in spite of its “errors”? Barr, indeed, seems to suggest
as much when he claims that the power (i.e., “effect”) of the biblical story comes from its literary
features and does not depend on the events in the story having actually happened.
For Barr, perhaps, the truth of Scripture can be defined by its efficacy, but this is clearly insufficient
for a doctrine of Scripture informed by speech act theory. The “pragmatic” theory of truth is confused
in two important respects: it confuses (a) the truth of speech acts with their success and (b) the success
of speech acts with their efficacy. Our review of the necessary conditions for speech acts was intended
to show that for speech acts to be successful, certain formal conditions must obtain (sincere,
propositional, preparatory). But for speech acts to be true, certain presupposed states of affairs must
obtain.
Consequently, the pragmatic theory of the truth of speech acts is neither adequate to nor called for
by speech act theory. Successful performance of speech acts alone does not guarantee truth. Indeed, the
most telling point against the pragmatic construal of truth is that often something works for the wrong
reason. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the epistemological situation where S may make a true
assertion about X—but based on wrong or partial evidence. This situation is quite common. For
example, I may conclude that someone is out of money because he is unemployed; but unbeknown to
me he has inherited a good deal of money that he (still unbeknown to me) promptly donated to charity.
My judgment about his fiscal state will be correct, but can it be said to be knowledge? I think not, for
the correctness of my judgment was accidental. I believed the right thing for the wrong reason, and I
was not entirely justified in deducing so much from so little.
Justification plays an important role in other speech acts as well. Consider once more the warning
about the bull: the preparatory condition of this warning is that the speaker has reason to believe that an
event (the bull’s injuring me) will occur and not be in my best interest. Now imagine that I, in response
to the speaker’s warning, flee the building, which then immediately collapses, not as a result of the
bull’s charging, but because of an earthquake. I will have escaped unharmed, but can the speaker be
said to have warned me? No, for he was not at all justified in warning me about an earthquake.
Moreover, since the raging bull turned out to be a harmless cow, the speaker may have had reason to
believe that danger was imminent, but he would have been wrong. If the speaker had been justified in
believing me in danger from a bull, his speech act would have been at best successful but still false.
However, divine warnings, since they infallibly fulfill the preparatory condition, will always be true,
for God is all-knowing and will not only be justified in thinking that something is not in my best
interest; He will be certain of it. When God asserts, His speech act implies that He has certain evidence
for the truth of His assertion; when God warns, He has infallible reason to believe that something is not
in the hearer’s best interest.
To sum up our response to the first objection: an utterance may be a successful speech act, yet still
be false. This is similar to being right for the wrong reason or accidentally. However, the divine speech
acts will not only be successful; in infallibly satisfying the conditions that constitute a successful
speech act, God’s utterances will also be true. For not only is He sincere, but He also has an infallible
justification for what He says. God is never right for the wrong reason!
While a “successful” speech act is based on certain formal conditions (sincere, preparatory,
propositional), a “true” speech act is based on certain presuppositions that themselves must be true.
These presuppositions pertain to the propositional content of the speech act, namely, the predication
and reference. The predicate and reference indicate which state of affairs the speaker is committing
himself to, and the illocutionary force determines the particular mode in which the question of the truth
of the predicate expression is raised vis-à-vis the referent. If a divine warning depends upon latent
assertions (“There is a bull in the china shop”) for its truth, they must be true assertions, for God cannot
fail to have certain knowledge of the states of affairs and preparatory conditions presupposed by His
speech. In short, the success of a speech act must not be confused with its truth; but in the case of
divine speech acts, infallible success implies infallible truth.
A second objection to our notion of infallibility is conversely related to the first: whereas the first
maintained that success did not guarantee the truth of speech acts, the second criticism asks how a
speech act can be considered true if it does not produce an effect on the hearer. Can a speech act be
deemed true and successful if its effect is unfelt by the hearer? Can the Gospels infallibly succeed in
their proclamatory purpose if readers refuse to believe?
This objection is related to the first, for both assume that to successfully achieve the purpose of a
speech act is to be efficacious (to “work”). We have shown that such a pragmatic theory of truth is
inappropriate for speech acts. But the error of the second objection is essentially its confusion of
success and efficacy, or of the illocutionary and perlocutionary effects of speech acts. In the strict
parameters of speech act theory, the illocutionary purpose does not involve producing an effect in the
hearers. Searle explains the nature of the illocutionary effect: “But the ‘effect’ on the hearer is not a
belief or response, it consists simply in the hearer understanding the utterance of the speaker. It is this
effect that I have been calling the illocutionary effect.”
In other words, the intention or purpose of an illocutionary act is simply to be felt or understood for
what it is. It is a matter of the hearer recognizing the nature of the speaker’s meaning (i.e., as assertion,
as warning, as question). What the hearer does after recognizing the kind of illocution of the utterance
is irrelevant from the standpoint of the success of the speech act itself. We shall conclude, then, that the
success of an illocutionary act is constituted not by its having an effect on a hearer (apart, that is, from
the limited effect of producing recognition of the illocution) but rather by its satisfaction of the three
conditions without which any speech act is defective.
This distinction between the success and efficacy of speech acts has some interesting implications
for our doctrine of Scripture. Consider the following verses: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the
skies proclaim the work of his hands.… There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world” (Ps 19:1, 3–4). Here the
creation is said to “declare” or “proclaim” the glory of God—no mean illocutionary act! Of course, the
heavens do not speak verbally, but their communication is nevertheless so clear that the psalmist speaks
of their “voice.” But now compare this with Paul’s statement that God is angry with man for rejecting
this cosmic communication “since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has
made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power
and divine nature—have been clearly seen” (Ro 1:19–20a).
The point of this example is that the clarity—yes, success—of God’s communication about Himself
through nature does not depend on its producing a particular effect (belief, worship) on human beings.
God’s revelation is successful even if no one explicitly acknowledges it; the fault or lack of effect is not
a weakness in God’s speech act but rather a weakness in humans. The efficacy of speech acts (their
successful realization of their illocutionary purpose) is to be understood simply as their satisfaction of
the conditions necessary for bona fide speech acts. The “purpose” of speech acts is to mean—and to
mean clearly. In this, Scripture succeeds admirably.
The third and last possible objection is the most serious. Does not our concept of infallibility lead to
a theory of “partial” or “limited” inerrancy? If infallibility means that speech acts are performed
successfully, could not some “successful” assertions turn out to be false? We have already admitted in
discussing the first objection that success does not guarantee truthfulness. If it did, there could never be
anything such as a false assertion, a false promise, a false alarm. I may successfully assert (i.e., satisfy
all necessary conditions—including having a good reason for my assertion) that my tie is blue, but it
may in fact be red. Success alone in illocution does not guarantee truth. Successfully performed
assertions may be real assertions and still be false.
We need, therefore, to refine the meaning of “success,” for speech acts are “liable to fail” in two
quite different respects. In the strict sense, speech acts fail when something goes wrong with the speech
act itself—a flaw, misfire, or abuse. In these cases the speech act never gets off the ground, as it were,
and fails to perform its intended illocution. But in another sense of “liable to fail,” speech acts fail
when they are false. A false assertion or false alarm is in some sense a failure. Only divine speech acts
are infallible; only divine speech acts are not “liable to fail” in either sense of the term.
But do we not fall into the class of those who limit the inerrancy of Scripture by relegating truth to
only one category of speech acts, i.e., assertions? Are those passages or texts in Scripture whose
illocutionary point is other than assertive not susceptible to truth or falsity? This way of construing the
matter is clearly not adequate, for we have seen that the Bible itself (as well as ordinary language)
refers to, say, “true” promises (Commissives). We have also seen that speech acts with nonassertive
illocutionary points nevertheless presuppose certain states of affairs and believe they are “justified” in
doing so. Nonassertive speech acts (warnings, promises) may thus be “true” in a secondary sense.
These speech acts are true in a secondary sense because they do not “thematize” the question of truth.
That is, while the principal issue of assertives is the truth or falsity of a certain state of affairs, the
principal purposes of other types of illocutionary acts is something other than representing an actual
state of affairs. However, we have discussed several examples where the truth of nonassertive
illocutionary acts depends on the truth of certain presupposed states of affairs (“There really is a
dangerous bull in the china shop”).
What we need is an expanded notion of truth as correspondence, a notion that is broad enough to
include this secondary sense in which nonassertive illocutions may be said to be true. I suggest that the
nature of the correspondence to reality (and thus the nature of the truth) of an utterance is determined
by its illocutionary aspect and literary form. Scientific statements involve one type of correspondence
to reality, poetic statements another. But in this broader sense of the term, even speech acts that are not
Assertives may properly be said to “correspond to” reality. The warning about the bull does not
correspond to—does not “fit”—the situation, unless there is a dangerous bull on the shop floor.
Conversely, should there be a dangerous bull in the china shop, the warning may be said to “fit” the
situation and correspond to a concrete reality—or, in other words, to be “true.”
To say, then, that speech acts are infallible is to say (1) that the speech acts satisfy the necessary
formal conditions for the successful performance of a particular illocutionary act (i.e., the speaker
sincerely believes that he is justified in what he is saying) and (2) that the speech acts correspond to
reality in a manner appropriate for their particular illocutionary mode. Again, the nature of the
correspondence (or the “kind” of truth) that is invoked by a speech act can only be determined by a
close analysis of its illocutionary force or intent.
Perhaps a brief survey of the history of the term “infallible” will make even clearer the rather novel
and yet traditional sense in which I am using it. “Infallible” has a long history and until recently was
the church’s near unanimous choice for expressing its high view of Scripture as “exempt from the
liability to err” or “not liable to fail.” This traditional sense of infallibility is virtually identical with the
meaning of the more recent term “inerrancy”—freedom from error. “Inerrancy” was introduced into the
discussion of Scripture only when “infallibility” was perceived no longer to function with the same
meaning. Under duress from two centuries of biblical criticism, some modern theologians have
declared that the Bible was no longer “wholly trustworthy” in matters of science and history.
“Infallibility” has, in the twentieth century, come to be restricted to “matters of faith and practice.” This
second or revised sense of infallibility limits inerrancy to Scripture’s speech on religious matters.
This revised sense of infallibility has surfaced in various quarters. Post-Vatican II Roman Catholic
theology considers the Bible inerrant only when it touches on matters concerning the divine salvific
intent. This viewpoint has its adherents among Protestants as well. Daniel P. Fuller, for example, in the
judgment of Pinnock, “wants to define the macro-purpose of the Bible in soteric terms, and proportion
inerrancy to it.” This revised notion of infallibility has even found its way into I. Howard Marshall’s
recent work: “The purpose of God in the composition of Scripture was to guide people to salvation.…
We may therefore suggest that ‘infallible’ means that the Bible is entirely trustworthy for the purposes
for which God inspired it.”227 In a review of the book, D. A. Carson observes: “Marshall argues that
this analysis has the effect of shifting the focus away from the truth of the Bible to its adequacy for
what God intends it to do.”
It should be obvious by now that this revised sense of infallibility is diametrically opposed to our
proposed rehabilitation of the concept of infallibility as sketched out in this chapter. The revised, or
limited, notion of infallibility errs in viewing the Bible as a single type of literature unified by its
overarching salvific purpose. Despite the element of truth in this construal, the distinctive intents of the
various literary genres are by and large smoothed over to make a seamless canon that is efficacious to
God’s salvific purpose and that thus enjoys “saving” truth. But to fit the diverse literary forms of
Scripture into one mold—be it religious, salvific, or canonical literature—is to violate the semantics of
biblical literature. Even an “infallible” Procrustean bed is too short! As we have seen in discussing the
first objection, success in achieving a purpose—even a salvific purpose—cannot alone constitute the
truth of a text or speech act.
Furthermore, by insisting that Scripture is trustworthy only in matters of faith and practice, a
theological a priori is once again at work to frustrate the diverse illocutionary intents of Scripture as
revealed by a careful examination of the literary phenomena themselves. By noting the various
illocutionary intents of the sundry literary genres, our proposed notion of infallibility affirms that
Scripture is trustworthy in all matters on which it intends to speak. Against those who hold too narrow
a view of inerrancy, we have pointed out that Scripture’s truthfulness involves more than mere
adherence to a principle of strict historical correspondence. The manifold ways in which texts say truly,
we have argued, include more than wooden historical correspondence. On the other hand, our proposed
view of infallibility must acknowledge those biblical texts that do indeed have as one of their primary
purposes the communication of historical information (an acknowledgment that New Biblical
theologians are reticent to give). In these cases too, as in any others, Scripture speaks infallibly.
Inerrancy and infallibility are mere terms, theological constructs that serve as convenient shorthand
in expressing one’s view regarding Scripture’s truth and trustworthiness. Paul Feinberg states the real
issue succinctly: “It is the concept of a wholly true Bible for which I contend. If some better word can
be found, then let us use it.” Carson observes that the newer term “inerrancy” is merely intended to do
the same work once accomplished by the older “infallibility.”230 Feinberg offers the following
definition of inerrancy: “Inerrancy means that when all the facts are known, the Scriptures in their
original autographs and properly interpreted will be shown to be wholly true in everything they affirm,
whether that has to do with doctrine or morality or with the social, physical, or life sciences.”
Our proposed rejuvenation of the concept of infallibility set forth here preserves the substance of
the above-mentioned definition of “inerrancy” and at the same time puts the semantics of biblical
literature on the surer ground of a speech act philosophy of language and literature that does fullest
justice to the notion of “not liable to fail.” Our understanding of infallibility is thus in profound
agreement with earlier statements of inerrancy (i.e., the Ligonier statement and the Chicago statement)
even while moving beyond them. Our proposed view of infallibility assumes the concept of inerrancy
and expands it to cover (in a secondary sense) all God’s speech acts and all Scripture’s literary forms,
rather than having application only to direct affirmations or the “philosophical propositions” extracted
from Scripture. Inerrancy is “expanded” because we have seen that Scripture “corresponds” in many
ways to a variety of “facts” according to the illocutionary intent.
Scriptural truth is neither enslaved to the idea of correspondence to historical fact alone nor
relegated to the realm of faith and practice. Rather, as infallible, Scripture successfully and truly speaks
about many things in many ways, all of which “correspond” to reality. Far from limiting inerrancy, our
proposed sense of infallibility actually enlarges it and makes clear the ways in which Scripture may be
said to be both successful in its meaning-intents and wholly true. Scripture speaks truth in many ways.
Systematic theology attempts to give a coherent articulation of the Christian vision or world view, as
presented through Scripture’s literary forms. At the same time, theology is conscious of its second-
order status as a discourse. Because it stresses logical consistency, theology is prone to lose
noncognitive aspects of Scripture’s communication (such as its force).
Does this mean that the actual literary form is indispensable, that we can only have, say, “narrative
theology”? No, for theology can attempt to describe what it cannot conceptually paraphrase. But
theologians are bound to their texts unlike secular literary critics, for theology’s text is extraordinary: it
is the word of God. Theologies, then, are never substitutes for Scripture (for what God has said in
ordinary literature to ordinary people). Rather, theology is the humble attempt to receive God’s
extraordinary communication in all the fullness of its meaning, power, and truth.
CHAPTER THREE
THE PLACE OF HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION IN
NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM
Moisés Silva
Moisés Silva is Professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of Bob Jones University (B.A.), Westminster Theological Seminary
(B.D., Th.M.), and the University of Manchester (Ph.D.). He also did graduate work in Semitics at
Dropsie University. Prior to his present position he taught for nine years at Westmont College, where
he also served as chairman of the Department of Religious Studies. He has written two books—New
Testament Survey and Biblical Words and Their Meaning—and some periodical articles. He is the
editor of the Westminster Theological Journal and a member of the Society of Biblical Literature and
the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies.
CHAPTER THREE
THE PLACE OF HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION IN NEW TESTAMENT
CRITICISM
Not long ago, a biblical scholar polemicized against the doctrine of inerrancy by stating that the Bible
is not a history textbook. I have heard that argument before, but all the same it reflects considerable
naïveté with regard to how the doctrine of inerrancy is understood by those who hold to it. This
particular scholar gave the distinct impression that, in his opinion, people holding to that doctrine have
not given much thought to the character and purpose of the Bible. Surely—he appeared to reason—if
we could briefly educate them on this issue, they will abandon their view of an inerrant Bible. How
might he react if he knew that students in Fundamentalist schools are routinely warned not to misuse
the Bible by treating it as a textbook for history, science, etc.?
But then a related question comes to mind: To what extent have misunderstandings created
unnecessary conflicts between a conservative and a nonconservative approach to critical questions? If
the scholar mentioned above had understood that all responsible formulations of biblical inerrancy have
emphasized that the Bible is not to be read as a scientific treatise, he might have discovered that at least
some of his concerns were unnecessary. Conversely, those Evangelicals who take seriously their
position that the Bible is not an academic textbook will discover that their suspicions of higher-critical
methods and conclusions are not always well-founded.
It may be worth our while, therefore, to inquire more particularly whether the debates that arise
from attempts to reconstruct biblical history are vitiated by misunderstandings on the part of both
conservatives and nonconservatives. It would be a monumental error, of course, to suggest that the
differences between these two groups can be reduced to a question of semantics. One cannot wish away
the fundamental antithesis between a scholar who affirms that indeed all of Scripture is God’s very
breath (2 Ti 3:16) and one who does not. Accordingly, this essay is not an attempt to minimize the
differences, but to clarify them—not an effort to eliminate polemics, but to make sure that the debate
focuses on the real issues.
Even after we make allowance for Josephus’ prejudices, his testimony appears to conflict with that of
the Gospels. Is it really likely that large groups of religious people would have admired the Pharisees if
they had been avaricious and dissolute? Even more significant than Josephus are the documents of
rabbinic Judaism, such as the Mishnah, the Talmud, and Midrashim—writings that are generally
thought to reflect the views of Pharisaic Judaism (but see below). While these works contain features
that suggest the need for some of Jesus’ criticisms, one is hard pressed to find evidence of greed,
hypocrisy, lack of concern for the “spirit” of the law, or an emphasis on ritual acts at the expense of
moral acts.
B. THE SOLUTION
In the light of this apparently conflicting evidence, how does one proceed to reconstruct first-
century Pharisaism? The conservative Christian is jealous to guard the infallibility of our Lord’s
teaching, much of which He expressed by contrasting it to the views of the Pharisees. If His assessment
of the rabbis was off the mark, the validity of His message becomes suspect at a fundamental level. On
the other hand, for those who do not accept the infallibility of Jesus’ teaching as recorded in the
Gospels, an interest in historical objectivity—defined in such a way as to preclude divine revelation—
takes priority. Given these opposing starting points, it is almost inevitable that divergent
reconstructions of Pharisaism will result; yet one can argue that a considerable measure of agreement
on this question is possible if the following points are taken into account.
1. The Gospels confirm Josephus’ testimony that the common people generally held the Pharisees
in high regard as religious and moral leaders. As pointed out earlier, the parable of the Pharisee and the
publican has a shock value—it assumes that Pharisees are viewed as paragons of virtue. In fact, the
very nature of Jesus’ controversy with them makes sense only if Josephus’ description is basically
correct. This point is granted by conservatives and nonconservatives alike. What some conservatives
have failed to appreciate, however, is that the people’s high regard for the Pharisees as moral examples
is inexplicable if the Pharisees as a group were “the slaves of lust, and avarice, and pride,” if they
“made a prey of the friendless” and could be characterized as “dissolute.” In other words, it is clear that
one important element in some conservative reconstructions clashes with the very testimony of the
Gospels and, therefore, must be jettisoned.
2. Not all Pharisees were alike. The Mishnah itself speaks of the “wounds” (or “plagues”) of the
Pharisees (Sota, 3.4). The commentary on this passage in the Babylonian Talmud contains the famous
description of seven types of Pharisees, including those who were actuated by impure motives, those
who practiced their religion ostentatiously, etc. The biblical material itself suggests that Jesus’ more
severe criticisms, particularly those that addressed moral weaknesses (e.g., Mk 12:40; Lk 16:14),
applied restrictively to some, not all, Pharisees; consider, for example, Jesus’ commendation of a wise
scribe (Mk 12:34), John’s portrayal of Nicodemus (Jn 7:50–51), and the presence of Christian
Pharisees in the church (Ac 15:5).
The methodological significance of this point is that informal generalizations in the Bible (or
elsewhere) should not be confused with a historian’s endeavor to generalize in a more or less scientific
fashion. In daily conversations and informal speeches, we accept without offense broad generalizations
that we know cannot be substantiated. (“Car mechanics are thieves” in this type of context means, “The
last two times I had my car worked on I paid more money than seems fair.”) Thus, when Jesus says that
the Pharisees “love the place of honor at banquets,” we may understand that criticism as an informal
generalization: those who are listening and who know that Jesus cannot be describing all (perhaps not
even most) Pharisees understand the contextual restrictiveness of the statement and appreciate its
force—self-importance was a temptation to which Pharisees, because of their position, were
particularly susceptible.
3. Closely related to the previous point is the legitimate role that hyperbole can play in Scripture.
According to Matthew 23:5, Jesus said: “Everything they do is done for men to see.” This is more than
generalization—it is an “absolutization,” but clearly it is not meant in an absolute sense. In verse 3
Jesus had told the crowds to “do everything they tell you,” but I know of no one who would take that
statement literally.
4. Another consideration of a semantic nature is the use of the word “hypocrite,” which in English
has an unusually strong pejorative sense. The Greek hypokritēs, like its English cognate, indicates
inconsistency between what one says and what one does, but it would be difficult to prove that the
Greek word carries the offensive overtones (such as dishonorable motives) that we normally associate
with the English word. Paul describes the behavior of Peter and other Jews in Antioch as hypokrisis,
but it is unlikely that he was thereby impugning their motives.
5. As noted earlier in connection with Acts 12, a statement made with a polemical purpose cannot
be treated as one would treat an “objective” encyclopedia article. Jesus’ woes in Matthew 23 were not
intended to address the questions that twentieth-century historians might ask concerning Pharisaism.
The Pharisaic features Jesus chose to point out and the tone of the descriptions were intended to serve a
particular purpose; therefore, when this material, infallible as it is, is used for quite a different purpose,
one must guard against possible distortion.
6. What is true of Jesus’ statements in their historical setting is also true of the Gospel narrative in
its literary setting. We must not ignore the fact that the extensive discourse of Matthew 23 is distinctive
to Matthew and that it fits the polemic so characteristic of this Gospel. Without suggesting that the
Evangelist has misrepresented Jesus’ teaching, we may readily agree that Matthew’s particular slant
has affected his presentation: perhaps this chapter reflects some of the author’s own struggles with
Judaism at the time of composition.
7. We move to a different set of questions when we consider the proper use of the rabbinic
literature. The earliest of these writings (the Mishnah) was not published until well over a century after
the Gospels were composed. To be sure, the document embodies a corpus of oral traditions that had
been passed on for generations, but the dating of these traditions is fraught with difficulties, and some
scholars, notably Jacob Neusner, are very skeptical about how much we can know about pre-A.D. 70
Pharisaism. Against any extreme skepticism, one can argue plausibly that the main features of Jewish
religious attitudes and the basic outlines of rabbinic thought as represented in the Mishnah accurately
reflect Palestinian Judaism at the time of Jesus (even if we are uncertain about the dating of specific
customs and laws). Nonetheless, it cannot be doubted that the destruction of the temple played a
fundamental role in the development of Jewish tradition; the resulting discontinuity between pre-70 and
post-70 Judaism may account for some of the discrepancies between the Gospels and rabbinic
literature.
8. But even if we grant a significant measure of continuity between first-century Judaism and the
Mishnah, we still face a problem of interpretation. Most scholars operate within a framework that
identifies the Pharisees depicted in the Gospels as the precursors of rabbinic Judaism. This seems to me
a defensible interpretation of the evidence, but not all specialists agree. In particular, one should
acknowledge the work of Phillip Sigal, who views the Pharisees as “a complex of pietists and
separatists who made up a segment of Judaism and included such known entities as Essenes and
Qumranites as well as other unknown groups that proliferated at the time.” According to Sigal, the
Pharisees constituted only one element in the formation of rabbinic Judaism, whereas the true “proto-
rabbis”—a somewhat insignificant force in the first part of the first century—were not among Jesus’
antagonists. If one accepts this reconstruction, then our problems are solved with one stroke. I do not
believe that Sigal’s views will be generally accepted (the similarities between the Pharisees of the
Gospels and the later rabbis are too significant, as we shall see below), but he has brought together
considerable evidence to prove that a simple identification of the Pharisees with the rabbis is quite
unacceptable. In other words, we have good reason to believe that some of the objectionable features of
the Pharisees were never characteristic of Jewish religious leadership in general and that therefore these
features are not prominent in the rabbinic literature.
9. The evidence from Josephus too has come under scrutiny. Some scholars have noted that his
presentation (particularly in Antiquities) differs in some important respects from what both the Gospels
and the rabbinic literature preserve. While the differences do not affect directly our primary concerns, it
is important to point out that even Josephus, though he writes at much greater length than the
Evangelists, cannot avoid a very selective, and therefore incomplete, depiction of the Pharisees.
We have thus far noted that our three primary sources—the Gospels (1–6), the rabbinic literature
(7–8), and Josephus (9)—give us very limited information and are therefore somewhat inadequate for
the purpose of historical reconstruction. But now we must address a more significant set of questions,
namely, the precise nature of the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees.
10. Is it accurate to say that Jesus condemned the Pharisees for their legalism? The answer to this
question would be easy if all parties involved were to agree on the meaning of legalism and its
derivatives.
a. Most commonly, the term is used as a “slur word” to describe and condemn anyone who happens
to take a stricter view of conduct than that taken by the speaker. We may ignore this particular use, but
as we shall presently see, we make a serious error when we consider the Pharisees as “too strict.”
b. Closely related is the use of legalist to refer to people who appear to us to be “picky,” overly
concerned with relatively trivial matters, particularly when such an attitude is accompanied by lack of
concern for significant issues. One can argue, on the basis of Matthew 23:23–24, that at least some of
the Pharisees could be characterized this way, but this type of criticism is not prominent in Jesus’
teaching and does not by itself disclose the heart of the issue.
c. A third meaning is that which focuses more formally on questions of law. That the Jews were
preoccupied with legal issues goes without saying: the massive amount of material brought together in
the Talmud consists primarily of attempts to interpret, apply, and expand those Old Testament laws
intended to regulate the life of God’s people. Some Christians who seem too ready to scoff at the many
involved legal discussions of the Talmud forget that our modern legal system is incomparably more
detailed. (Tax regulations alone could easily challenge the whole of Jewish halakah for complexity!)
To be sure, one may point out that our legal system is not intended to legislate our religious behavior;
no doubt the rabbis were often in danger of equating the divine will with their precise definitions and
distinctions. All the same, it would be a grievous mistake not to appreciate the positive qualities that
motivated rabbinic debates. The rabbis
believed that their task was to realize in everyday life the precepts of the revealed Torah. “To do justice, love
mercy, and walk humbly with God”—to the rabbis these were not abstractions. They had to be effected in
the world, and nothing is so difficult in secular affairs as to find exactly what is justice or mercy here and
now—and what is to be done that is just and merciful. Since the Torah contained rules on many subjects, and
since these rules had to be interpreted to apply to wholly new matters and to issues important only long after
Sinai, we should not be surprised to find the sages concentrating on the minutiae of daily life.
It is not farfetched to suggest an analogy between the rabbinic debates and the current controversy
among Evangelicals about the ordination of women. We fool ourselves if we think that this sensitive
issue is not a legal question. Who may or may not rule (proistēmi, 1 Ti 5:17) is a matter of church
order, regulation, law. Dozens of books (to say nothing of specialized articles) have appeared, many of
them dealing with textual “minutiae” (the precise nuance of words, the force of Greek tenses, etc.). In
short, the mere presence of extensive legal discussion among the rabbis does not help us to identify the
nature of Jesus’ criticism.
d. An explicitly theological sense for the term legalism brings us closer to the real issue. Serious
writers who accuse the Pharisees of being legalistic have in mind a Jewish system of salvation that
depends on human merit rather than divine grace. Unfortunately, several weaknesses can be detected in
most characterizations. The first problem is a tendency to depict Jewish thought as monolithic. The
rabbis themselves never attempted to formulate a coherent soteriology; and those who seek to infer a
soteriology from the scattered comments in rabbinic writings face some serious pitfalls. The second
problem arises from the first: having assumed a monolithic Jewish theology, scholars find it easy to
play down or altogether ignore rabbinic emphases on such topics as repentance and the need to depend
on God’s mercy. Finally, rabbinic soteriology tends to be caricatured as teaching a crass “medieval”
doctrine that sees God balancing our good and bad deeds, our only hope being that the good outweighs
the bad. Of course, such a description is not even fair to medieval theologians, and one can produce
evidence that it distorts Jewish teaching on salvation.19
When all of this is admitted, however, one must still acknowledge that human merit plays a very
prominent role in broad segments of the rabbinic literature. Of special significance is the opinion (to
my knowledge not explicitly contradicted in the rabbinic writings) that certain human acts can expiate
sin. Even in such a pre-rabbinic document as Ecclesiasticus (3:3, 14, 30), sins are said to be atoned by
honoring one’s parents and by practicing almsgiving. The rabbis viewed acts of loving-kindness, the
penalty of lashes, and, in some cases, death as having the power to atone for sins. It seems impossible
to deny that, according to Jewish thought, good deeds should be viewed in some important sense as
meritorious; to the extent that human beings may be regarded as contributing to their salvation, the
biblical doctrine of grace is compromised in Jewish theology. But even these considerations do not
pinpoint clearly enough the source of the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees, and so we move on
to our final concern.
e. Legalism, theologically understood, can manifest itself in a variety of ways. Whether or not the
Pharisees explicitly taught a merit system such as was described in the previous paragraph, we must
recognize that Jesus is never represented in the Gospels as criticizing them for believing that they could
atone for their own sins. He does indeed condemn them for their legalism—but a legalism that finds
expression in a somewhat different form, namely, through the relaxation of God’s standards.
This point can be illustrated most clearly by referring to a well-known legal ruling, the prozbul,
attributed to Hillel the Elder, who apparently lived during the reign of Herod the Great. This ruling in
effect did away with the command that debts were to be cancelled every seven years (Dt 15:1–3). That
command was accompanied by a solemn warning: “Be careful not to harbor this wicked thought: ‘The
seventh year, the year for canceling debts, is near,’ so that you do not show ill will toward your needy
brother and give him nothing. He may then appeal to the LORD against you, and you will be found
guilty of sin” (v 9). During Hillel’s time, however, the wealthy were in fact refusing to lend money,
fearing they would lose it in the sabbatical year. Since the poor were the ones suffering, Hillel (if we
may trust the rabbinic attribution) used the legal fiction that debts cease to be private when transferred
to a court, and he ordained that in such cases the debts may be collected. For humanitarian reasons,
therefore, Hillel devised a way of “breaking” the Torah; the explanation, of course, would have been
that such “innovations and amendments … fulfilled the basic reason of the commandment, whereas its
literal observance nullified its original intent.”
This enactment—and other examples could be used—show that we miss the point when we view
the Pharisees as being concerned with the letter rather than the spirit of the law. While that may well
have been the case in some instances, it does not address the basic motivation for the rabbinic
interpretation of the Torah. If we wish to identify an overly strict Jewish group, we should turn to the
Qumran community; for example, while Jesus assumes that His hearers would certainly rescue an
animal if it should fall into a pit on the Sabbath, the Qumranites explicitly prohibited such an act. In a
very important sense, the Pharisees made the Torah easier to obey. As a result of the prozbul, wealthy
Jews no longer needed to be concerned about the solemn warning of Deuteronomy 15:9. The divine
standard had been relaxed. The Torah had been accommodated to meet the weaknesses of the people.
Alexander Guttmann sees this feature as the genius of the Pharisees’ approach.
Emerging from the ranks of the people, the rabbis spoke in terms intelligible to the populace and were
therefore able to lead the people in accordance with their teachings, a feat the Prophets had been unable to
accomplish. Uncompromising idealists, the Prophets demanded perfection and the establishment of God’s
kingdom on earth in their own time; therefore, they were doomed to failure. Prophetic Judaism never
became a reality but remained only an ideal, a goal, like Plato’s Republic. The rabbis were idealists, too, but
they were at the same time pedagogues. In guiding their people, they took the realities of life (among them
the weakness of human beings) into consideration. They upheld the Torah as the divine code, but at the same
time they recognized the need for harmonizing the Torah with the ever-changing realities of life.
It turns out, then, that Jesus, who like the Old Testament prophets demanded perfection (Mt 5:48),
would have been critical of the Pharisees, not because they obeyed the Torah too strictly, but because
they interpreted it too loosely. This is clearly and precisely the point of Mark 7:1–13, generally
recognized as a key passage for understanding the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees. The
controversy described in this passage centers on the law that ceremonial washing was required before
eating. In fact, this is not an Old Testament law; it is not part of the Written Torah. But it was part of
the Oral Torah, that is, the traditions of the elders. Scholars are generally agreed that the concept of the
Twofold Law was the most distinctive feature of Pharisaic and later rabbinic Judaism. The Oral Law
was viewed as on a par with the Written Law—indeed, in some respects, as more important, for a
ruling that is part of the Oral Law may in effect set aside the Written Law, as in the case of the prozbul.
Jesus’ response to the Pharisees in Mark 7 is that they “have let go of the commands of God and are
holding on to the traditions of men” (v 8). And, after describing a particularly insidious example, He
concludes: “Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down” (v 13).
This undermining of God’s Word, moreover, resulted in a muted consciousness of sin, for normally
there were ways of interpreting the divine commands that mitigated their force. This frame of mind is
almost surely the background for Matthew 5, where Jesus is said to demand of His disciples a
righteousness greater than that of the Pharisees (v 20). Then, to preclude any interpretive moves that
might render the law innocuous, He goes on to intensify specific scriptural commands. Just in case
anyone might have missed the point, He concludes, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is
perfect” (v 48), the equivalent of Leviticus 11:45, “… therefore be holy, because I am holy.”
The Pharisees were often in danger of thinking that they had adequately fulfilled their duty before
God (cf. Lk 18:9–12, 21), and therefore no great sense of dependence on God’s grace was likely to
arise. In contrast, Jesus emphasized that the true servants of God are those who are ever conscious of
their unworthiness (Lk 17:7–10) and who have learned to pray, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Lk
18:13).
The reader may wonder whether we have not moved too far from the subject of historical
reconstruction in pursuing these questions. The excursion was essential, however, if we were to
appreciate the complexities that a modern historian must face when reconstructing the past.
Conservative Christians who forget that the Bible is not a history textbook will jump too quickly from
the biblical data to create a picture of Pharisaic Judaism that is consistent with their presuppositions.
Nonconservatives too, however, sometimes appear to ignore the character of New Testament narrative
and tend to assume that the material is unreliable simply because it is incomplete and theologically
slanted. The result is two opposing historical reconstructions. In the one, the positive qualities of the
Pharisees are virtually ignored; in the other, Jesus’ condemnation is not taken seriously. In both of
them, the precise point of Jesus’ criticism may be missed altogether.
A. F. C. BAUR
In 1831, the controversial scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur published a lengthy article that was to
revolutionize the study of New Testament history. Prior to the appearance of that essay, it had been
generally assumed that the apostles and other leaders of the early church worked together in full
harmony. True, the Book of Acts preserves evidence of occasional friction (e.g., 11:1–18; 15:1–21, 36–
40; 21:20–26), and Paul recounts a sharp dispute he had with Peter (Gal 2:11–21), but these were
viewed as minor exceptions that proved the rule. The data in the Corinthian letters, however, persuaded
Baur that a fundamental conflict existed between Paul and the other apostles, especially Peter, who
represented Jewish Christianity. Further research led him to more radical ideas, such as his conclusion
that most of the letters ascribed to Paul were inauthentic. Finally, he published in 1845 a magisterial
synthesis of Paul’s life and ministry that presented in coherent form the “Tübingen School”
interpretation of early Christianity.
In the introduction to this work, Baur emphasizes that, while we have two accounts of early
Christianity (Paul and the Book of Acts), these two sources differ so much from each other that
historical truth must be entirely on one side or entirely on the other. To which it does belong can only be
decided by applying the undisputed historical canon that the statement which has the greatest claim to
historical truth is that which appears most unprejudiced and nowhere betrays a desire to subordinate its
historical material to any special subjective aim.
Now one could readily argue that the Pauline letters, especially Galatians, being intensely polemical,
are not to be trusted—that Paul, concerned to prove his authority, inevitably distorts the material. In
fact, this approach does not at all occur to Baur, who instead focuses on the apologetic aim of Acts: “its
chief tendency is to represent the difference between Peter and Paul as unessential and trifling.” The
resulting picture of Paul is that of someone sympathetic to the Judaizing party, but this is so clearly
contrary to the thrust of Paul’s writing that the historical character of Acts “can only be maintained at
the cost of the moral character of the Apostle.” Without denying the importance of Acts as a source of
apostolic history, Baur claims that the author is a second-century writer willing “to sacrifice historical
truth” as a means of harmonizing genuine Paulinism with its Judeo-Christian opposition.
B. PRESUPPOSITIONS
We need not pursue the details of Baur’s reconstruction, which in several respects set the agenda
for subsequent New Testament scholarship. What concerns us here is identifying the principles and
processes that led Baur, a brilliant scholar, to interpret the data as he did. Why does a J. B. Lightfoot,
after analyzing the same biblical data, come up with a reconstruction that is often taken as the definitive
refutation of the Tübingen School? And why does a Johannes Munck go even further than Lightfoot in
minimizing the significance of the Judaizing opposition to Paul? Why do a large number of scholars
reject Baur’s thesis of a monolithic party opposed to Paul, whereas Walther Schmithals sees in the New
Testament text new evidence for such a uniform opposition—only not Jewish but Gnostic?32
The simple answer is: presuppositions. Unfortunately, this is too simple an answer, for not
everyone means the same by that word. When applied to Baur, the term presuppositions usually refers
to his adoption of a Hegelian schema whereby Jewish Christianity was viewed as the thesis, Pauline
Christianity as the antithesis, and second-century Catholicism as the synthesis. It is doubtful, however,
whether Baur’s reconstruction would have been fundamentally different if Hegel had never existed.
The evidence indicates that prior to his acquaintance with Hegel’s dialectic, Baur had already identified
the Pauline/Petrine conflict as the key issue of apostolic history.34 While we need not play down the
significance of Hegel’s influence on Baur’s philosophy of history, this particular “presupposition” does
not account satisfactorily for Baur’s handling of the biblical data.
Another approach is that of Horton Harris, who argues that Baur’s radical interpretation of church
history resulted from broad dogmatic presuppositions that precluded a transcendent personal God and
miracles. But there are several difficulties with this analysis. Other scholars starting out with that same
set of presuppositions have developed widely divergent reconstructions of the apostolic age;
conversely, as we shall soon see, biblical students who allow for the truth of supernatural events may
also differ significantly among themselves in the interpretation of the data.
A second difficulty is that broad criticisms of this kind can easily encourage inexact descriptions of
a scholar’s view. It is quite unfair to Baur, for example, to say that he was “prejudiced in advance …
against the historicity of Acts,” for as late as 1829, when he had already given up supernaturalism, his
handling of Stephen’s speech betrays “not a trace of doubt about the historicity of the speeches of Acts
or of the book as a whole.” Again, it is an exaggeration to say that “the fundamental axiom of Baur’s
whole historical investigation was that the New Testament writings are not trustworthy historical
documents,”38 for the phrase “fundamental axiom” suggests that Baur did not attempt to set forth any
reasons for his skeptical approach. Moreover, even with respect to Acts he stated that it “remains a
highly-important source of the history of the Apostolic Age.”40
To complicate matters even more, Harris concludes his book in a way that suggests that Baur was
unconscious of his presuppositions:
The problem which still confronts the investigation of the historical sources of Christianity is to set forth a
total-view which takes full account of its dogmatic premises. For if we learn anything from the procedure of
the Tübingen School it is this: that Biblical exegesis and interpretation without conscious or unconscious
dogmatic presuppositions is impossible. The interpretation of the Bible and Biblical history demands an
open, unconcealed, and honest statement of the fundamental historical principles by which it is to be
interpreted. The validity of all Biblical exegesis and interpretation rests upon its readiness to set forth clearly
and unflinchingly the dogmatic presuppositions on which it is based.
But did Baur, as this statement seems to imply, fail to be open and honest about his “fundamental
historical principles”? Harris himself had earlier made clear that “Baur leaves us in no doubt” with
regard to his “central presupposition.” His basic principle was that of a purely historical approach such
as excludes the appeal to miracles as an explanation for what happened in the past. Now it is true that
Baur seems to have persuaded himself that his approach, if successfully carried through, would insure
complete objectivity, but he was quite ready “to set forth clearly and unflinchingly” his
antisupernaturalistic standpoint.43 The irony, in fact, is that Harris himself falls, as all of us do, into the
very pitfall that he warns us against. “And yet one has to read through the Clementine writings with an
open mind to see that Baur’s hypothesis is utterly untenable.… Whether anyone who was not
prejudiced in advance would recognize Paul in this description is indeed doubtful.”
These strictures are not meant to undermine Harris’s main concern, which is not precisely the same
as ours. One can hardly deny that a scholar’s fundamental assumptions about God will radically affect
one’s handling of the biblical material. Unfortunately, there is seldom (never?) a one-to-one
correspondence between those assumptions and the scholar’s historical reconstruction; therefore, to
dismiss the reconstruction on the grounds that the basic world view is faulty does not solve our
problem (particularly since faulty presuppositions sometimes open up legitimate options that another
scholar may resist due to “correct” presuppositions; more on that matter below).
One other, more fruitful, approach to the role of presuppositions is to focus on the narrower
network of mental associations that provides a meaningful interpretive framework for the scholar. In
this sense of the term, presuppositions need to be viewed not merely as valid but also as essential for
understanding information. Learning does not take place by appropriating individual facts in isolation
but by integrating them (consciously or not) into a prior coherent framework. Or to put it somewhat
tritely: it is by a knowledge of the whole that we understand the parts. Baur was keenly aware of this
fact and deliberately exploited it. For example, he knew well that many features of the Acts narrative
did not clearly conform to the apologetic aim; but since such an aim (the whole) is so clear, “we need
not give it up even though there should be some passages” (the parts) whose purpose seems to be
historical. More specifically, with reference to the second part of Acts: “… although the narrative of the
Apostle’s travels might seem to contain more personal and special details than the apologetic aim
required, still it is clear that this very narrative is coloured throughout in accordance with that aim.” It
is plain that, for Baur, once the general thesis has been ascertained, any details that appear to contradict
it are simply to be adjusted to it.46
Particularly interesting is the preface to Paul, where Baur challenges his opponents to prove him
wrong: “… let [my results] be denied and destroyed by the power of facts and arguments, if any one
feels that he can do so!” Of course, he knows full well that at numerous points his interpretation of the
data is subject to debate, and thus he must qualify himself:
There is no limit to controversy on points of detail. The abstract possibility of this and that detail can never
be disproved: but this is not the way to dispose of a comprehensive historical theory. Such a theory appeals
to its broad general truth, to which details are subordinate, and on which they depend: to the logical
coherence of the whole, the preponderating inner probability and necessity of the case, as it impresses itself
quietly upon the thoughtful mind; and against this the party interests of the day will sooner or later cease to
assert themselves.
Baur is not thereby seeking to dodge the issue. The validity of a scientific theory is not necessarily
disproven by the existence of contradictory data—what is needed is an alternate theory that has greater
power to account for the facts. Yet one can also argue—with a justifiable measure of frustration—that,
according to Baur’s thoroughgoing application of this method, the facts seem to count for very little.
C. J. B. LIGHTFOOT
An interesting illustration of how facts—even a large number of them—may be easily ignored in
the interests of a broad thesis is furnished by diverging reactions to Bishop Lightfoot’s response to the
book Supernatural Religion. In his essays, Lightfoot sought to refute the claim that the Gospels are
historically worthless. Stephen Neill views Lightfoot’s refutation as “tearing to shreds” the author of
Supernatural Religion and unequivocally disproving its thesis. But another scholar, Otto Pfleiderer,
thinks that Lightfoot’s answer was “extraordinarily weak.” Pfleiderer regrets that “the short-sighted
scholar found nothing better to do than to submit the author’s examination of references in the Fathers
to the Gospels to petty criticism; while, even if all the Bishop’s deductions were correct, the general
result of the author’s inquiries would not be in any way altered.”50 It is clear that agreement on a vast
array of details does not insure a common interpretation of the larger picture.
The reference to J. B. Lightfoot is useful in another way, however, since he is usually regarded as
having put to rest Baur’s reconstruction of early Christianity. Of singular importance for our purposes
is Lightfoot’s essay, “St Paul and the Three,” an eighty-two-page monograph that ranks among the very
finest works of modern biblical scholarship. In erudition, logical power, and lucidity, it remains a
model of scholarly writing. Significantly, Lightfoot’s answer to the Tübingen theories does not take the
form of listing objections to them or answering Baur’s arguments one by one. Rather, Lightfoot
proceeds by presenting a positive reconstruction of his own. Indeed, anyone reading this essay who
happened to miss a couple of footnotes would not be aware at all that it was written as a polemic
against Baur and his colleagues. This matter needs emphasis because here Lightfoot certainly did not
fall into the trap of debating the many points that Baur himself acknowledged were debatable (in other
words, Pfleiderer’s criticisms of Lightfoot’s Essays on ‘Supernatural Religion’ do not apply in this
case). On the contrary, Lightfoot set forth an alternate and coherent theory that, to apply Baur’s words,
“appeals to its broad general truth, to which details are subordinate, and on which they depend.”
What is seldom pointed out, however, is how many important features Lightfoot’s reconstruction
shares with Baur’s. In the preface to his commentary on Galatians, Lightfoot refers to the “extravagant”
views of the Tübingen School, then adds: “But even in extreme cases mere denunciation may be unjust
and is certainly unavailing. Moreover, for our own sakes we should try and discover the element of
truth which underlies even the greatest exaggerations of able men, and correct our impressions
thereby.” That Lightfoot is not merely paying lip service to the value of radical scholarship becomes
clear from the commentary itself, where he shows remarkable sensitivity to the tensions between Paul
and the Jerusalem apostles. His comments on 2:4 bear quoting:
What part was taken in the dispute by the Apostles of the Circumcision? This question, which forces itself
upon us at this stage of St Paul’s narrative, is not easily answered. On the whole it seems probable that they
recommended St Paul to yield the point, as a charitable concession to the prejudices of the Jewish converts:
but convinced at length by his representations, that such a concession at such a time would be fatal, they
withdrew their counsel and gave him their support.… [This interpretation] best explains St Paul’s language
here. The sensible undercurrent of feeling, the broken grammar of the sentence, the obvious tenour of
particular phrases, all convey the impression, that though the final victory was complete, it was not attained
without a struggle, in which St Paul maintained at one time single-handed the cause of Gentile freedom.
And in the next paragraph he penned that memorable sentence (in a way the key to his interpretation of
Galatians): “The counsels of the Apostles of the Circumcision are the hidden rock on which the
grammar of the sentence is wrecked.”
But this is not all. What characterized the apostle’s ministry after the Jerusalem Council?
Lightfoot’s answer is in “St Paul and the Three”:
Henceforth St Paul’s career was one of life-long conflict with Judaizing antagonists. Setting aside the
Epistles to the Thessalonians, which were written too early to be affected by this struggle, all his letters
addressed to churches, with but one exception [Ephesians], refer more or less directly to such opposition.…
The systematic hatred of St Paul is an important fact, which we are too apt to overlook, but without which
the whole history of the Apostolic ages will be misread and misunderstood.
Significantly, he ends the essay by disabusing us of the notion that the New Testament period was
characterized by “an ideal excellence.” On the contrary, “the theological differences and religious
animosities of our own time … are far surpassed in magnitude by the distractions of” that age.
It is ironic that nonconservative, even radical, scholars in our day would probably view Lightfoot’s
reconstruction as simplistic—as a casualty from the days when the Tübingen theories affected every
scholar’s thinking. It is, of course, impossible to determine whether the basic outlines of Lightfoot’s
position would have developed even if he had never heard of Baur. In any case, he openly
acknowledges, as we have seen, a measure of indebtedness to the Tübingen School, and one could
plausibly argue that the extreme conclusions of a scholar with wrong presuppositions was what made
possible significant progress in uncovering the history of the apostolic period.
Lightfoot, of course, opposed a fundamental feature of Baur’s thesis: for Lightfoot, all the apostles
were in substantial agreement regarding the message of the gospel. Closely related to this point,
moreover, is his high regard for the reliability of Acts. Paradoxically, Lightfoot criticizes Baur for
valuing Paul’s letters too highly as a source for historical reconstruction! While it is doubtful whether
Lightfoot himself would have put it in such terms, note how he approaches the problem:
St Paul himself is so clearly reflected in his own writings, that a distorted image of his life and doctrine
would seem to be due only to defective vision. Yet our first impressions require to be corrected or rather
supplemented by an after consideration. Seeing him chiefly as the champion of Gentile liberty, the constant
antagonist of Jew and Judaizer, we are apt to forget that his character has another side also. By birth and
education he was a Hebrew of the Hebrews: and the traditions and feelings of his race hold him in
honourable captivity to the very last.
Lightfoot openly admits that the tone of the Acts narrative “differs somewhat from the tone of the
epistles,” but the reason is that the latter were “written in the heat of the conflict, written to confute
unscrupulous antagonists and to guard against dangerous errors.” In short, “St Paul’s language could
not give a complete picture of his relations with the Apostles and the Church of the Circumcision.”
There is intense irony in the possibility that Baur was led astray because he treated the Pauline
letters as a history textbook! Though he was perfectly aware that they were written for quite a different
purpose—to meet specific problems—Baur’s broader concern to preserve Paul’s personal integrity60
kept him from perceiving the fragmented and slanted character of the historical picture provided by
those letters. Here, then, is another crucial factor in Baur’s “preunderstanding” that materially affected
his reconstruction. Indeed, we might be able to identify numerous other factors that provided Baur with
a mental grid through which alone individual facts could be filtered and appropriated.
But if that is the way a historian works, we can begin to appreciate how difficult—nay, how
hopeless and irrelevant—are the attempts to dismiss a theory on the grounds that its author had come
up with it before examining the facts. As Barth once remarked, “Only God knows whether Baur found
this historical line a priori or a posteriori.” Baur himself could not have told us. We are not very
accurate judges of our own mental and psychological processes, and we do well to take with a grain of
salt the frequent and no doubt sincere claims of authors who tell us they have approached their material
with no preliminary hypothesis or even with a hypothesis quite different from the actual conclusions.
D. HISTORICAL OBJECTIVITY
What does all of this do to the goal of historical objectivity? Is it a complete illusion? Some writers
have argued, sincerely, that knowledge of the past is quite beyond our reach. Practicing historians are
seldom bothered by this philosophical problem; and specifically with regard to objectivity—an issue
that cannot be ignored so easily—they tend to be fairly optimistic. Consider, for example, the high
regard with which Herbert Butterfield is held as an objective historian. In the introduction to that
author’s posthumous work, The Origins of History, Adam Watson commented:
Butterfield approached this vast and largely uncharted subject in a characteristic way, with no
preconceptions, not knowing in what direction his researches would lead him.… The trouble [with broad
interpretations such as Spengler’s or Toynbee’s] was that in all of them the theory of interpretation or
diagram came first. They were a priori intuitions. Sometimes, as he once said to me, it was a grandiose and
imaginative one, but derived only very partially from the facts and owing more to other beliefs and other
purposes in this world.… Butterfield was concerned to start with the facts [followed by more detailed
research and reflection]. He developed an extraordinary flair for this kind of open-minded deduction.…
[The] refusal to force the facts, [the willingness] to suspend judgment until they offered you their own
answer, the ability not to prejudge anything, Butterfield called elasticity of mind.
One cannot avoid detecting a measure of naïveté in Butterfield’s judgment. Note, for instance, how
he judges the credibility of the Gospels when they describe the disciples’ reaction to Jesus’ death:
The description of their shortcomings must have come from the confessions of the disciples themselves, for
the authors of the Gospels could hardly have had any motive for inventing such things if they had not been
known to be true, even though these pictures of human frailty do add realism to the narrative, and it might be
argued that they served a purpose, bringing into greater relief the transformation that took place in the
disciples immediately afterwards.
In this one sentence, Butterfield himself gives us two perfectly plausible motives for fabricating the
accounts: to heighten the realism of the narratives and to exploit the apologetic value of the disciples’
later change. Yet these two reasons are relegated to a long clause that is grammatically subordinate to
the main point, namely, that the accounts are authentic, since the Evangelists had no motive for
inventing them!
Lapses and inconsistencies of this sort, however, do not give us sufficient reason to doubt all of
Butterfield’s conclusions, or to reject his method, or to abandon his goal. The fact that controversial
interpretations of history occupy most of our attention tends to obscure another, more significant fact,
namely, the enormous amount of accessible historical data about which no one expresses any doubt.
Moreover, there are vast areas of research in which scholars have provided reconstructions that remain
unchallenged (save for details that do not substantially affect the larger picture). We may wish to
question Butterfield’s criticism of historians that begin with a general theory; we dare not question his
call to exercise restraint in making the facts fit the theory. We can argue that presuppositions play a
much more positive role than Butterfield allows for; we cannot give up the struggle for objectivity in
historical interpretation.
But is it really meaningful to use the term objectivity once we have conceded so much that seems
incompatible with it? The standard answer is that scholars should seek to attain as much objectivity “as
is possible,” but this tells us nothing. The only kind of objectivity that we can sink our teeth into is that
which is recognized as such by the community of scholars who evaluate historical interpretations.
Asking a scholar to be objective is not a demand that he or she adopt a particular psychological attitude
or an acceptable step-by-step mental process. It does mean that the scholar should seek to persuade
other scholars who scrutinize any new interpretation according to agreed-upon canons of historical
persuasiveness. Such a community process does not guarantee that any one historian will be objective,
but it is a compelling force in determining whether a particular reconstruction approaches objectivity.
The much used—and abused—analogy with the judicial process in criminal cases helps us here.
Although prospective jurors are rejected if they appear prejudiced, no juror can be expected to be free
of the subjective element. Yet, we are all satisfied that, in the vast majority of cases, agreement among
the jurors insures an acceptable measure of objectivity—enough, at least, that we are unwilling to
replace this process with an “arbitrary” system. The rapid disintegration of the Tübingen School is,
therefore, the clearest evidence that Baur’s handling of the facts can hardly be regarded as objective—
quite irrespective of whether or not Baur had an a priori theory and whether or not he was aware of his
fitting (forcing?) pieces into the large picture.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
It is now time to return to our initial question: Have misunderstandings created unnecessary
conflicts between conservative and nonconservative historical reconstructions? The answer is certainly
yes. But this issue must be distinguished from a very different question: Can we avoid widely divergent
historical reconstructions? This second question requires a negative answer. Even authors who share a
large number of significant premises will often interpret the data quite differently. Besides, highly
idiosyncratic theories—obnoxious and harmful as they sometimes may be—force us to face new
questions that can open productive new avenues of research. At any rate, it would be an illusion to
think that individual scholars could submit themselves to carefully defined reasoning steps or to
arbitrary limits on their imagination.
On the other hand, it is possible to acknowledge the existence of misunderstandings and thus to
avoid unnecessary polarization of viewpoints. To begin with, we all need to watch our language. As we
have seen, nonconservatives tend all too easily to use terms such as “unreliable” when all they have
shown is that the material so described will not serve them to solve a problem that actually lies outside
the scope of the biblical writer.
For their part, conservatives tend to read too much into some terms that are perceived, perhaps
rightly, as objectionable. For example, Evangelicals understandably cringe when they hear a certain
saying of Jesus described as “inauthentic.” Often such a description does indeed contradict biblical
infallibility, but in some cases all that is meant is that the saying was not recorded in the Gospels in its
original form. Evangelical scholars have always insisted that infallibility does not demand verbatim
quotations: when a saying of Jesus occurs with different wording in two Gospels, it is quite possible
that one of the Gospel writers may be giving an abbreviated or paraphrased form of the saying. In such
a case, a scholar may ask which of the two is “authentic”—perhaps an unfortunate choice of terms but
one that does not necessarily impugn the authority of Scripture if the scholar is merely concerned with
establishing which Gospel has preserved the “primitive” form of the saying.
Similarly, unnecessary polarization has often resulted through the insensitive use of language in
describing the diversity of theological expression that is found in the New Testament. The presence of
such diversity does not at all undermine the divine unity of scriptural revelation. Conservatives,
however, sometimes appear to impose an artificial uniformity on the New Testament (though Lightfoot
taught us otherwise!), while nonconservatives very quickly identify diversity as contradiction. There
will always be points of material disagreement in these areas as long as Evangelicals hold to an
infallible Bible and non-Evangelicals do not; but some present conflicts do not belong in this class, and
a genuine effort must be made to identify them.
In addition to the need for more careful use of language, another item that requires further
reflection is the by now commonplace plea for scholars to show a sharper awareness of their
presuppositions. The truth is (strange as it may appear to some) that most biblical scholars are not
fools; they know full well there are limits to their objectivity, and their writings generally indicate some
degree of self-consciousness as to what those limits are. We cannot give in to the temptation of simply
dismissing what we don’t like on the grounds that “those liberals” (or “those conservatives”!) are
slaves to their presuppositions. Still, there is something to be said for the view that scholars should
make a greater effort to identify those premises that provide their framework for selecting, interpreting,
and synthesizing the data.
Finally, an effort must be made to refine and make explicit those “agreed-upon canons of historical
persuasiveness” that make it possible for the community of biblical scholars to weed out unacceptable
theories. Considerable frustration will persist as long as the scholarly orthodoxy appears to use a
measure of arbitrariness in determining what is allowed as proper evidence.
The perennial focus of controversy, of course, is the Book of Acts. Lightfoot once stated that this
book “in the multiplicity and variety of its details probably affords greater means of testing its general
character for truth than any other ancient narrative in existence; and in my opinion it satisfies the tests
fully.” At the turn of the century, the extensive research of William Ramsay provided further means of
checking the book’s veracity at numerous points.68 Virtually everything that the book asserts, where it
can be verified, checks out; yet most contemporary scholars maintain that the book is not to be trusted
at those points where it cannot be falsified! This would not be so bad if a serious attempt were made to
refute the significant body of evidence that has been brought to bear. Routinely, however, the evidence
is simply ignored. The standard critical commentary on Acts knows not Ramsay,70 and the innocent
reader of a recent and important synthesis can only deduce that all thinking persons regard Acts as a
basically legendary work that happens to incorporate a handful of historical passages.
Conservative scholarship can hardly be expected to take these judgments seriously—let alone agree
with them—as long as they are evidently not based on a sober analysis of all the relevant data. To be
sure, we can argue just as easily that conservative scholars have a good deal of homework to do in
refining their criteria for what constitutes acceptable and persuasive evidence. The frequency with
which Evangelicals use isolated bits of data ad hoc to support their positions has understandably
alienated the scholarly establishment and provided an excuse for ignoring responsible work.
In either case, it should be marked, the impasse arises because of the scholar’s perception as to
where the burden of proof lies. An F. C. Baur is impressed with the differences between Acts and the
Epistles; that leads him to place the onus probandi on the scholar who would argue for the reliability of
Luke’s description of Paul. A William Ramsay is stunned by the accuracy that characterizes Luke’s
habit of mind; therefore, he will not be budged unless someone shows him overwhelming evidence to
the contrary. Perhaps it is possible for the scholarly community to define with some clarity the place
and limits of the onus probandi in historical argumentation.
One must not think, however, that progress in these areas will resolve the basic conflict. By and
large, modern critical scholars have persuaded themselves that the biblical view of the relation between
faith and history must be totally reversed—the risk of faith, we are told, must not be avoided by
appealing to objective historical reality. So long as historical veracity is viewed by one party as more or
less irrelevant or secondary, genuine rapproachement is impossible. The Evangelical, convinced that
any faith not based on historical truth is illusory (e.g., 1 Co 15:17; 2 Pe 3:16), will continue to be
scoffed at for failing to adopt a post-Kantian dichotomy between the religious and the scientific. This
very commitment by Evangelicals, however, argues for a fearless approach to historical questions. An
intelligent reliance on the authority of Scripture, coupled with sensitivity to its true character and
purpose, yields the best prescription for responsible historical reconstruction.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE LEGITIMACY AND LIMITS OF HARMONIZATION
Craig L. Blomberg
Craig L. Blomberg is Assistant Professor of Religion at Palm Beach Atlantic College, West Palm
Beach, Florida. He is a graduate of Augustana College (B.A.), Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
(M.A.), and the University of Aberdeen (Ph.D.). He has contributed a number of articles to journals and
has written “Midrash, Chiasmus, and the Outline of Luke’s Central Section” and “Tradition and
Redaction in the Parables of the Gospel of Thomas” for the six-volume work Gospel Perspectives.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE LEGITIMACY AND LIMITS OF HARMONIZATION
I. INTRODUCTION
The consensus of modern biblical scholarship disparages virtually all attempts to “harmonize” the
scriptural data. The implausibility of the proposed harmonizations of certain conservative scholars only
reinforces the criticism of the majority. Nevertheless, all historians, whether they employ the term or
not, practice some kind of harmonization as they seek to reconstruct the truth of past events. The
purpose of this chapter is to explore both the legitimacy and limitations of this method.
A major part of the debate stems from varying definitions of the word harmonization. Paul
Achtemeier’s otherwise lucidly written work on the inspiration of Scripture nicely illustrates this
problem. Achtemeier quotes James Packer as representative of the inerrantist position, a position that
commits one “in advance to harmonize and integrate all that we find Scripture teaching, without
remainder.” Then, after discussing examples of what he believes are errors in Scripture, Achtemeier
returns to the problem of harmonization, which he rejects because of its artificial or contrived nature.
But here it becomes clear that he has equivocated on the meaning of the term, since the method he
rejects is that of trying “to show that seemingly discrepant accounts can be reconciled by showing that
they are only partial accounts of an actual event.”2 As will become clear, however, this is but one of
many methods by which apparent discrepancies between parallel historical narratives can be
reconciled. To reject harmonization in this narrower sense in no way calls into question the viability or
even the necessity of attempting, via whatever method, a harmonization in Packer’s broader sense of
the term—that is, showing that no real discrepancy exists.
The investigation of the legitimacy of harmonization in this broader sense lies outside of the scope
of this study and is virtually identical with inquiry into the legitimacy of systematic theology per se or
into unity and diversity of biblical theology.5 At this point it need only be noted that it is not merely
evangelical scholars who have defended the propriety of this type of harmonization; even the most
“radical” of biblical commentators recognize that certain apparently conflicting data can be brought
into agreement with each other. For example, among recent Synoptic studies, F. W. Beare’s work on
Matthew is one of the most skeptical of that Gospel’s historical accuracy; yet Beare resorts to very
traditional, harmonizing exegesis (in the broad sense of the term) when he explains that Matthew 7:1
does not preclude the judgments Scripture elsewhere enjoins upon Christians but merely stresses that
such judgment “must not be harsh.” Simple common sense dictates such exegesis; one cannot escape
harmonizations of some kind. And, as will be discussed further below, this is a technique all historians
utilize—even with somewhat errant documents.
On the other hand, if the interpretation is to be fair, certain tensions within documents representing
similar religious or philosophical systems must be allowed to stand. One thinks of the way Scripture
holds together seemingly disparate themes (e.g., predestination and free will, security and apostasy, the
preservation and yet supersession of Old Testament law). The compatibility of the two members of
each pair is not easily proved, but neither is their incompatibility; and the biblical writers’ regular
juxtaposing of contrasting themes suggests that they did not find the tension that severe.
The key question for this study, therefore, remains that of the use and abuse of harmonization,
narrowly defined. Yet even here, critique is not leveled only by those who would disassociate
themselves from an Evangelical view of Scripture. Robert Gundry, writing as an avowed inerrantist,
laments the fact that “conservative Protestants bend over backward for harmonizations,” appealing to
linguistic or literary solutions as well as the straightforward “additive” reconstructions noted by
Achtemeier. Yet such harmonizations “often become so complicated that they are not only
unbelievable, but also damaging to the clarity of Scripture.”9 Gundry believes that redaction criticism is
the preferable method, its application revealing that the Gospel of Matthew is a midrashic mixture of
fact and fiction. Unfortunately, Gundry has employed the term “redaction criticism” in a much broader
sense than is customary, with the result that several even more conservative scholars have overreacted
(though not for this reason alone) by calling for Evangelicals to abandon redaction criticism
altogether.11
With all of this terminological confusion, a study of the proper and improper types of solutions to
the apparent discrepancies of Scripture is absolutely crucial. Moisés Silva has graphically illustrated the
problem, showing the varying amounts of liberties the Gospel writers seem to have taken with their
sources, and D. A. Carson has called for a balance between adopting “glib harmonizations” and
refusing “easy” (i.e., obvious, common-sensical) ones.13 But no one has attempted to draw up a road
map to point the way out of this methodological maze. Hopefully, this essay can begin to chart a few
directions toward that end. In short, its thesis is that “additive” harmonization (what will be called the
“narrower” sense) and redaction criticism are but two of several methods that can be legitimately
employed to explain apparent discrepancies among documents of various historical genres. These
methods will be discussed with somewhat detailed illustrations from the Synoptics and then applied
more briefly to selected problems between parallel passages in Kings-Chronicles, Josephus, and ancient
historians of Alexander the Great.
II. DEFINITIONS
At least eight main categories of types of resolutions of apparently conflicting historical data
warrant attention here. Redaction criticism and harmonization, narrowly defined, are perhaps the two
most controversial, so they will be treated last and in slightly more detail. Six other methods and the
assumptions on which they are predicated, however, deserve brief treatment first.
A. TEXTUAL CRITICISM
In most study of ancient historical writing, the autographs of the relevant texts no longer exist.
Conflicting testimony may, therefore, result from copyists’ errors where the original manuscripts would
not have disagreed with each other. The situation with Scripture is no different; most scholarly
inerrantists (at least in Protestant circles) would emphasize that their doctrine of inerrancy applies only
to the autographs.
B. LINGUISTICS
Apparent contradictions may arise due to inadequate understanding of the meaning of words,
phrases, clauses, sentences, and even larger units of writing. When works of antiquity are under
consideration, the “culture gap” makes this problem prevalent. Where the translation of foreign
languages is involved, the potential for misunderstanding becomes even greater. The trend in recent
biblical scholarship has been to emphasize the difference in meaning between words that could be
synonyms, and this often makes parallel accounts of the same event seem more divergent than they
really are.
C. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Due to the limited information available, modern historians have problems using apparently
contradictory testimony to reconstruct the facts of an event. In some cases, a formal contradiction exists
between statements that were both true in some limited context but that could not both be true if
universalized, either temporally or geographically. In other instances, a writer may assume knowledge
on the part of his audience—knowledge that would resolve an apparent contradiction but that he has
not preserved for later readers’ access.
D. FORM CRITICISM
Much more often than is true of modern writings, documents of antiquity were based on long
periods of oral tradition before any written text appeared. If there is reason to assume such an oral stage
behind a given text, the ways in which that tradition might have altered the text need to be taken into
consideration when trying to explain conflicting accounts. On the other hand, it could be that originally
parallel testimony agreed with itself, and later errors—and therefore contradictions—crept in during
oral transmission. Evangelical scholars have rightly recognized that this type of assumption could not
coexist with a belief in biblical inerrancy, but their rejection of these form-critical presuppositions is for
the most part based not on this recognition but on valid observations about the differences between the
formation of the historical writings of Scripture and that of other orally transmitted traditions of old. On
the other hand, many stylistic variations between biblical parallels, especially in the Synoptics, most
likely do arise due to form-critical processes, and the awareness of valid tendencies of transmission can
help to explain otherwise perplexing differences among the Evangelists.
E. AUDIENCE CRITICISM
Based on J. A. Baird’s pioneering work, this approach assumes, contra the prevailing fashions of
biblical criticism, that the narrative settings and, more particularly, the audiences ascribed to the
various Gospel pericopae are reliable. The paucity of such specific settings throughout the Gospels
makes Baird’s position highly probable; had the Evangelists felt free to invent settings at will, many
more ought to appear than actually do. Some problems between apparent parallels may, therefore, best
be resolved by acknowledging that the different settings given them show that they are probably not
genuine parallels after all.18
F. SOURCE CRITICISM
Many ancient writings have a complex literary as well as preliterary history. In the case of the
Synoptics, the two-document hypothesis remains the most probable, as the comprehensive studies of C.
M. Tuckett and K. Uchida have demonstrated. A recent trend among certain conservatives to herald
some form of Matthean priority as more amenable to a high view of Scripture seems misguided;20
commentators may just as consistently hold to Markan priority and the Q hypothesis along with a high
view of the editorial accuracy of Matthew and Luke. In general, however, the significance of source
criticism is that it enables one to locate at what stratum of a book’s composition potential problem
passages appear, information which may turn what appears to be deliberate contradiction into an
unwitting coincidence of noncomplementary but noncontradictory terminology. The epistolary example
of James versus Paul on faith and works springs naturally to mind.22
G. REDACTION CRITICISM
As noted, the biggest problem here is certainly one of definition. This chapter will use redaction
criticism to refer merely to what many Christians have been doing ever since the Gospels were
written—and to what all modern historians do to all sorts of ancient texts—namely, reflecting upon the
distinctive themes, purposes, motives, and emphases of a given writer, especially in comparison with
others who have written on the same topic(s). This method takes seriously the vast amount of material
that any historian of any age could have chosen to include in his work and yet omitted; as a result, it
asks why the author included what he did. Selectivity, however, scarcely implies errancy. The words of
Lord Macaulay merit frequent repetition in the modern Weltgeist: “What is told in the fullest and most
accurate annals bears an infinitely small proportion to what is suppressed,” and “he who is deficient in
the art of selection may, by sharing nothing but the truth, produce all the effect of the grossest
falsehood.” Generalizations, summaries, and excisions must punctuate any chronicle in order for it to
become intelligible history.
Evangelicals do well to reject the type of redaction criticism practiced by some extremely “radical”
scholars, in which negative presuppositions about historicity are, by definition, part of the method. But
this is not always the case, even in so-called liberal circles. For example, W. G. Kümmel’s standard
textbook refers to redaction criticism merely as attending to “the literary, sociological, and theological
presuppositions, methods, and tendencies of the individual evangelists.”25 Of course, Kümmel sees
some of those tendencies involve distortion of part of the tradition beyond the bounds of historical
accuracy, but nothing in his definition itself requires this.
Rather, redaction criticism can be neutral, in which various questions are raised to account for the
editorial activity of the author. Where particular themes, distinctive vocabulary, and stylistic
characteristics appear far more often in one writer than in another, especially when comparing closely
paralleled material, it is reasonable to attribute the distinctives to conscious editorial preference. Such
analysis is necessarily subjective, but proper statistical methods can identify with virtual certainty a
limited number of features whose frequency of occurrence precludes coincidence. But the attribution of
a word, sentence, or theme to a redactional origin in this sense proves nothing about its historical
accuracy, which may only be determined by an application of valid criteria for authenticity and
inauthenticity.27 In fact, redaction criticism, as will be argued below, can become a powerful tool for
defending the accuracy of Scripture rather than impugning it; for, without resorting to artificial and
discrediting harmonizations, it can give reasonable explanations for why one writer altered a canonical
source.
H. HARMONIZATION
In this narrower sense of one among many methods, harmonization refers to the explanation of
apparent discrepancies between parallel accounts where it is assumed that both accounts are correct
because similar events happened more than once or because each author has chosen to recount different
parts of a fuller, original narrative. Not nearly as many of the classic problems in reconciling Scripture
warrant a harmonizing explanation, in this limited sense, as those that have received one, and it is for
this reason that the method is often rejected wholesale. Such, however, is standard practice among
secular historians of both written and oral traditions, and Gilbert Garraghan emphasizes that “almost
any critical history that discusses the evidence for important statements will furnish examples of
discrepant or contradictory accounts and the attempts which are made to reconcile them.” 29
Garraghan’s examples show as many instances of “additive” harmonization as of the other methods
noted. Implausibility usually arises only when harmonistic hypotheses have to be multiplied, as for
example in the coincidence of not only two but perhaps three or more people with the same name
involved in similar circumstances.
Before turning to specific examples of each of these eight methods for resolving apparent
contradictions, some objections to this entire enterprise need to be addressed. Although harmonization,
both broadly and narrowly defined, is a standard practice among virtually all historians, many students
of the Gospels would want to argue that the genre of the Synoptics is not a sufficiently historical one
for the principles of modern historiography to be applied to them. Stewart Goetz and I have addressed
that problem in our article on the burden of proof. Suffice it here to say that the two major works on
this topic published since then, both dealing with Matthew, have not overturned the evidence cited
therein. On the one hand, Gundry’s analysis of Matthew as midrash has generally failed to convince
both “conservative” and “liberal” reviewers, while on the other, Philip Shuler’s identification of
Matthew as encomium biography compares that Evangelist favorably with Polybius, Cicero, Plutarch,
and Lucian, all of whom rank among the more respected historians of the ancient Greco-Roman
world.32
Of course, part of the problem in discussing “historical” genres is again the question of definition,
but if all one requires is that the document be a narrative of purportedly factual events where a strong
likelihood is present of recovering a fair amount of accurate information about the past, then the
Synoptics fit the bill handily.34 The seemingly indestructible tendency to pit history against theology
must just as consistently be exposed for the false dichotomy that it is, but the editorial concerns of each
Evangelist do suggest that a redaction-critical explanation may account for the differences between the
Gospels more often than a traditional harmonization. Moreover, as Werner Kelber stresses, when one
uses harmonization not for historical reconstruction but to interpret one Gospel in the light of
information in its parallels, the exegesis runs the inevitable risk of doing “violence to the integrity of
both.”
A. TEXTUAL-CRITICAL SOLUTIONS
The establishment of the original text of the New Testament remains far more certain in all but a
handful of instances than for any other important text of antiquity; conjectural emendation is, therefore,
virtually never appropriate. Caution must be exercised, however, against making the latest Nestle/UBS
a new Textus Receptus; and a specially relevant problem is that, due to the principle of lectio difficilior,
harmonizing variants are almost never accepted as original. The harder reading, though, can be too
hard,38 and in two instances it seems at least plausible to suggest that adopting a different reading than
that chosen by Aland’s committee provides a good solution to apparent discrepancies.
1. Did Jesus promise that His heavenly Father would give good gifts or the Holy Spirit to His
children (Mt 7:11/Lk 11:13)? The high degree of verbal parallelism between the rest of the two
versions of this pericope (cf. esp. Mt 7:7–8 and Lk 11:9–10) seems to preclude the recourse to
assuming two different sayings from two different occasions in the life of Jesus, although this is not
impossible. The frequent conclusion that Luke prefers to add references to the Holy Spirit to his source
material seems less certain since the study of C. S. Rodd.40 Grundmann therefore suggests that the
Lukan variant (πνεῦμα ἀγαθόν)—attested by p45 L pc aur vg—is perhaps original. It is a lectio dificilior
of sorts, since “good Spirit” is not a common biblical term, and it adequately accounts both for
Matthew’s abbreviating ἀγαθά and for the later scribal change of Luke’s text to the more standard
πνεῦμα ἅγιον.
2. To which side of the Sea of Galilee did the disciples head after the feeding of the five thousand
(Mt 14:22/Mk 6:45)? Although at first glance the problem seems to be between Mark’s reference to
Bethsaida (east bank) and Matthew’s reference to the “other side” (west bank; cf. Jn 6:17, which
explicitly mentions Capernaum), the mention in Mark 6:53 of Gennesaret makes it clear that there is an
internal tension in Mark’s own account as well. The critical consensus is that Mark is simply careless in
his geographical references or uses them in service of theology rather than topography. But such
specific place names are so rare in Mark that this seems improbable. The traditional conservative
responses usually employ additive harmonization, either arguing for two Bethsaidas—one on each
shore of the lake—or for two meanings of “the other side” so that Mark refers only to the other side of
the small bay just outside of Bethsaida.43 But there is no archaeological evidence for any Bethsaida
west of the Galilean sea—John 12:21 must not be pressed—nor would Mark’s readers have any way of
distinguishing this Bethsaida from the one referred to in Mark 8:22. The latter harmonization runs
aground on the fact that εἰς τὸ πέραν is a stock phrase in the Gospels, referring to a trip across the entire
sea (cf. Mk 4:35; 5:1, 21; 8:13; 10:1).
Carson prefers a linguistic solution, noting that Matthew’s ἕως οὗ plus the subjunctive strictly
implies “until,” whereas Mark’s ἕως plus the indicative means “while.” Thus, Jesus sent the disciples
ahead to Bethsaida while He dismissed the crowds, and then they headed on across to the western
shore. The syntax, however, only sustains this interpretation with difficulty, since πρὸς Βηθσαϊδάν
reads more naturally as a definition of εἰς τὸ πέραν. The best solution, therefore, appears to be a
textual-critical one, à la Lane, Cranfield, and Taylor. “To the other side” is omitted by p 45 W λ q sys,
and if this were a later, harmonizing variant, it would have made even more sense to omit “to
Bethsaida.” Rather, it seems that the disciples did start out by boat for Bethsaida Julias but were blown
off course and landed on the west bank instead. The very severity of a storm capable of carrying them
this far from their destination makes the need for the subsequent miracle more intelligible. It also
provides incidental corroboration that the reference to the storm is an integral part of the setting of the
story, not an interpolation into an original narrative that told only of Jesus walking on the water.
B. LINGUISTIC SOLUTIONS
The plausibility of an alternate translation to remove an apparent contradiction between texts
increases in direct proportion to the unusual nature of the construction in the original language or to the
coherence of the proposed, new translation. Some examples may be helpful at this point.
(1) Did Jesus preach his great sermon on the mount or on the plain (Mt 5:1/Lk 6:17)? The answer
seems to hinge on Luke’s word πεδινός in both its diachronic and synchronic contexts. In Luke 6:12,
Jesus is already in the mountains; and Matthew can scarcely have envisioned the large throng of people
gathered on a steep incline. Some type of level place, or plateau, of which there were many in the
Galilean hills, naturally suggests itself. Isaiah 13:2 (LXX) clearly reflects this usage of πεδινός; and the
other Septuagintal references, while often contrasting πεδινός with ὄρος, also regularly employ it as
one of several geographical categories and as one of apparently higher elevation than the coast (Jos
9:1), the Negev (Jos 10:40), the low country (Shephelah; 2 Ch 26:10), and the valley (Jer 31:8).
Gundry’s objection that all the diseased people (Mt 4:24/Lk 6:17–18) would scarcely have climbed into
the hills to reach Jesus not only underestimates the length to which sick people will go to find cures but
also renders major portions of the Gospels unintelligible, since those who are ill confront Jesus at
nearly every turn of the hilly, Galilean terrain that He traverses. However, to resort to believing that
Jesus preached two different, programmatic sermons with remarkably similar introductions,
conclusions, structure, details, and setting (apart from the mount/plain problem) leaves one
unnecessarily vulnerable to hasty rejection by those who are already skeptical of harmonizing methods.
(2) Who was high priest when David ate the sacred showbread, Abiathar or Ahimelech (Mk 2:26/1
Sa 21:1–6)? A textual-critical solution falters on the lack of any early manuscript supporting the
omission of ἐπὶ Ἀβιαθάρ. Most scholars simply acknowledge that Mark contains a historical error but
give no plausible explanation of how this entered into what shows all signs of being at the very least an
early Palestinian tradition from a Jewish-Christian community that knew well its Old Testament.51
William Hendriksen squeezes the texts entirely out of shape to suggest that both father and son gave
the bread to David! The best solution again appears to be a linguistic one. John Wenham has called
attention to the parallel construction in Mark 12:26 (ἐπὶ τοῦ βάτου), in which ἐπί means “in the passage
about.” Ahimelech is certainly the more dominant of the two high priests in the larger context of the
latter portion of 1 Samuel, making Wenham’s application to Mark 2:26 extremely plausible. Moreover,
in eighteen of the twenty-one Markan uses of the preposition, ἐπί has a local or spatial rather than a
temporal sense, rendering the traditional translation (“when Abiathar was high priest”) less likely.
There are certainly other problem passages in the Synoptics where a linguistic solution seems best.
Included among these would be (3) Mark 14:66–72 and its parallels. Any scenario that envisions Peter
denying Jesus more than three times entirely trivializes the force of Jesus’ original prediction;
similarly, “the” maid of Mark 14:69 need not be resumptive, and the “man” of Luke 22:58 could be
generic. Also included are (4) the Old Testament fulfillment quotations, especially in Matthew 1–2; the
semantic range of πληρόω in these formulae certainly exceeds the mere occurrence of what was
straightforwardly predicted. Likewise, (5) “three days and three nights” (Mt 12:40) almost certainly
does not equal seventy-two hours. Similarly, (6) the Gerasene/Gergesene/Gadarene demoniac(s) of
Mark 5:1 and its parallels probably hailed from Khersa, (7) the linguistic convention of citing only one
source for a composite quotation explains the reference to Jeremiah in Matthew 27:9, and (8) the
problem of determining the day of the week on which Jesus was crucified is removed by recognizing
that the “Passover” could refer both to the initial day of the feast as well as to its week-long
celebration.58
A specially significant type of linguistic analysis may account for several additional examples of
the apparent license taken by the Synoptists in rewriting their sources. This subcategory perhaps ought
to appear under redaction criticism or—if the changes be attributed to a traditional stage—as an
example of form criticism. But the parallels with issues raised by the science of modern Bible
translation justify its inclusion here. The procedure has been called dynamic equivalence,
contextualization,60 or contemporization, but Joachim Jeremias’s term representational change is the
most descriptive.
In brief, the concept behind these terms is that the imagery and idioms that prove meaningful to one
community or culture may need to be re-presented in quite different terms for a different audience in
order to preserve their original meaning. Bible translations sometimes employ this procedure (most
notably, with units of measure), and more paraphrastic compositions do so regularly (cf. the striking
“flashlight” of Ps 119:105 or the “shake hands warmly” of Ro 16:16 in the Living Bible). Probable
Synoptic examples of representational change include Luke’s versions of the parables of the two
builders and of the mustard seed (Lk 6:47–49/Mt 7:24–27; Lk 13:18–19/Mt 13:31–32). Thus, Luke
turns Matthew’s distinctively Palestinian wadi (a waterless ravine with steep sides that occasionally
turned into a raging river after severe rains) into a broad river like the Orontes at Syrian Antioch, where
temporary summer shelters had to be abandoned before the winter rains set in. Similarly, Luke’s
mustard seed grows in a domestic garden rather than a rural field, again reflecting a concern for
intelligibility in a more urban, Hellenistic context.
Even most conservative commentators seem relatively comfortable with applications of
representational change like those discussed above. But is it not possible that such contemporization is
in fact more widespread in the Gospels than they have generally recognized? For example, Grant
Osborne suggested that the Trinitarian formula of the Great Commission (Mt 28:19) was a redactional
expansion of an original monadic expression. Yet the criticism he received for this view later led him to
back away from his suggestion.64 Of course, the standard critical assumption—that Jesus could not
have spoken of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, because Trinitarian theology developed only in a later
stage of the history of Christianity—cannot be the motive for adopting a position like Osborne’s initial
one.
But what if the disciples had begun to realize that when Jesus spoke of His Father, He referred to a
God with whom He and the Spirit were also uniquely one? Suppose also that Jesus only commissioned
them to baptize in the name of the Father. Matthew could scarcely have recorded such words verbatim
and expected an audience (whether Jew or Gentile) familiar with traditional Jewish monotheism to
understand the new meaning that Jesus had invested in the word “Father.” Some kind of clarifying
expansion would be essential for the very purpose of preserving the meaning of Jesus’ original
utterance intact. Now this may well not be the best explanation of Matthew 28:19—and, in fact, I
suspect rather strongly that it is not—but in principle the Evangelical should not dismiss it on the
grounds that it contradicts a belief in inerrancy; quite the opposite, it suggests at least one way in which
Matthew could have chosen accurately to communicate the original meaning of Jesus’ terminology and
to avoid the misconceptions that a new audience might derive from it. Blanket criticism of a view of
ipsissima vox that allows for this type of representational freedom is entirely unwarranted.
C. HISTORICAL-CONTEXTUAL SOLUTIONS
The types of limitations imposed by historical context emerge most clearly in a discussion of
“progressive revelation.” Logical contradictions between Old and New Testament teaching do occur
(consider all the so-called ceremonial laws that the New Testament no longer enjoins upon God’s
people) until one recognizes the New Testament belief that the Old Testament no longer applies as it
did before the coming of Jesus. This altered historical perspective also accounts for seeming
discrepancies within the Gospels (and Acts), since these books describe the events (from the
Crucifixion through Pentecost) that brought about this change.
1. Thus, in Matthew 10:5–6 Jesus commands the disciples to go nowhere among the Gentiles but
only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, while in the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18–20) He sends
them to all the ἔθνη of the earth. Despite elaborate attempts to explain this change of heart in terms of
some division within the Matthean community, the best explanation remains the traditional one—Jesus
(like Paul) came first for the Jews, and after He and His disciples had preached almost exclusively to
them, they turned their attention to the larger Gentile world surrounding them.
2. Similarly, the perplexing inconsistencies of Luke-Acts, with its portrait of the first Christians’
somewhat schizophrenic attitudes toward the law, most likely reflect accurate historical reminiscence
of a fledgling religion frequently uncertain as to how to identify itself over and against Judaism. As I
have argued in detail elsewhere, Luke must not be pitted against other New Testament writers as a
more conservative defender of the Law. Rather, a careful study of his redactional tendencies reveals
that he strongly emphasizes the freedom and newness of the inaugurated kingdom.
A more subtle problem in historical-contextual analysis surfaces when authors assume knowledge
on the part of their audiences that may no longer be recoverable. The historian (secular or religious)
often has to postulate a resolution of conflicting data that may be far from demonstrable. At other
times, supplementary historical information may grant a particular reconstruction greater probability.
3. For example, did Jesus allow for an exception to His mandate against divorce (Mt 19:9/Mk
10:11)? Carson’s thorough resumé of the complex literature on this issue permits omission of detail
here. The traditional explanation of this formal contradiction remains the best. Mark’s version assumes
the reader’s familiarity with the contemporary debate on divorce, in which all parties agreed that
adultery offered legitimate grounds. Matthew merely makes this assumption explicit. The recent reply
from Charles Ryrie and his students that this interpretation leaves Jesus’ position no different from that
of Shammai70 misses the full force of the overall pericope (Mt 19:3–12/Mk 10:2–12), in which Jesus
challenges even the strictest Pharisaic position (“for your hardness of heart he wrote you this
commandment”—i.e., Dt 24:1–4). Moreover, neither Evangelist gives any grounds for supporting
Ryrie’s alternate interpretation, in which Jesus, in the middle of the dialogue, changes the meaning of
ἀπολύω) from “divorce” to “annul.”
4. The likelihood that gaps in historical knowledge provide the key to an alleged error in Scripture
greatly increases when that “error” involves a conflict with extrabiblical data. The classic Synoptic
example is the problem of dating the census under Quirinius. The linguistic explanation that says αὕτη
ἀπογραφὴ πρῶτη ἐγένετο should be translated “this was before the census” rather than “this was the
first census” substitutes a rather rare usage of πρῶτος for a moderately awkward one. The
developments since Ramsay’s proposal of an earlier administration of some kind by Quirinius, though,
have only questioned certain details of his argument and have raised many new possibilities for a
historical-contextual solution. John Thorley has surely not overstated his recent conclusion from a
classicist’s standpoint: “Until we can prove conclusively that Luke was wrong, perhaps we should at
least allow that he may yet prove not to have misled Theophilus.” More positively, E. Jerry Vardaman
has discovered micrographic lettering on coins and inscriptions of the time of Christ that appear to
substantiate a proconsulate for Quirinius in Syria and Cilicia from 11 B.C. until after Herod’s death.
5. A similarly classic example, from the Book of Acts, is the alleged contradiction between Luke
and Josephus on the chronology of Theudas and Judas (Ac 5:36; Ant. 20:97–98). I. H. Marshall cites
this as the clearest example of the scriptural phenomena that make him uneasy with the term
“inerrancy,” especially since the rarity of the name “Theudas” weighs against arguing for two different
men of the same name leading similar rebellions. Yet the similarities between the accounts end there,
as E. Yamauchi has emphasized,75 and Theudas can be a contraction of Theodotus, Theodorus, or
Theodosius. That Luke and Josephus had two separate people in view remains the most probable
explanation, even from the standpoint of a secular historian.77 Who is to say that archaeologists will not
yet unearth some documentation or inscription to corroborate Luke here as they have done for him
consistently elsewhere?
D. FORM-CRITICAL SOLUTIONS
1. The Role of Oral Transmission
The exhaustive study by E. P. Sanders of the tendencies of oral transmission in early Christian
tradition dealt a fatal blow to Bultmann’s “law of increasing distinctness,” and Leslie Keylock’s
subsequent work should have buried it. Instead, a tendency towards abbreviation frequently appears, as
I have discussed in some detail in connection with the Gospel of Thomas. But many stylistic tendencies
peculiar to the oral retelling of the various forms that Bultmann enumerated remain valid. 80 For
example, the Lukan account of the parable of the wicked husbandmen streamlines and restructures the
arrival of the various servants into a climactic threefold sequence (Lk 20:9–16a/Mk 12:1–9). So too the
famous inversion of the killing and casting out of the son in the same parable (common to Luke and
Matthew) probably reflects no theological allegorization of the crucifixion of Jesus outside the walls of
Jerusalem but only a stylistic improvement to create climactic order. The most likely locus for both (1)
and (2) is in oral tradition.
Matthew’s omission of the Capernaum centurion’s Jewish embassy to mediate between him and
Jesus to request healing for his slave probably also reflects form-critical processes at work. Ancient
convention permitted referring to someone speaking or acting when it was a subordinate who actually
carried out the command (cf. Mt 27:26 on Pilate scourging Jesus, 2 Ki 21:10 with 2 Ch 33:10 on God
speaking to Manasseh by His prophets, and Plutarch’s Life of Alexander 73:1 with Arrian’s Anabasis
7:16.5 on Alexander “meeting” the Chaldean seers through Nearchus), and modern convention is not
that different (e.g., saying that “the president announced …” when in fact it was his press secretary who
spoke with reporters). But form criticism supplies the motive for this type of shorthand. H. J. Held
labels it the “law of scenic twofoldness.” In other words, the oral transmission of a detailed narrative
tends to simplify the story so that no more than two characters engage in conversation at any one time.
No theological distinctive or correction of earlier tradition is intended.83
E. AUDIENCE-CRITICAL SOLUTIONS
If the Evangelists supply obviously distinct settings for what synopses nevertheless present as
parallel passages, those pericopae deserve a priori consideration as different sayings or events from
different times in Jesus’ ministry. Two examples that I have discussed elsewhere are the Matthean and
Lukan “versions” of the parables of the talents (pounds) (Mt 25:14–30/Lk 19:11–27) and of the lost
sheep (Mt 18:12–14/Lk 15:3–7).
An apparent doublet within one Gospel offers another type of illustration. Many critics, for
example, assume that Mark (or his tradition) invented the feeding of the 4,000 (Mk 8:1–10) on the
basis of the feeding of the 5,000 (6:33–44). Yet Mark implicitly contrasts a largely Jewish (the 5,000)
audience with a largely Gentile (the 4,000) one, with the latter narrative grouped together with other
stories of Jesus’ travel outside of the land of Galilee (7:24–37; cf. also the distinctive words for
“basket” in 6:43 and 8:8). Moreover, Mark subsequently depicts Jesus referring back to both events as
separate incidents (Mk 8:19–20). The only real stumbling block to agreeing with Mark’s presentation is
the apparent absurdity of the disciples not recalling the first feeding as they question Jesus before the
second (8:4). Yet Knackstedt points out that the Matthean parallel (Mt 15:33) strongly emphasizes that
the disciples’ question could refer only to their inability to deal with the problem alone. Carson
concurs, considering that the new Gentile audience, Jesus’ rebuke in John 6:26, and the “vast capacity
for unbelief” inherent in humanity all ensure that the disciples’ response is “not sufficient to prove this
pericope a doublet.”
In fact, audience criticism regularly provides the antidote to hypotheses of apparent doublets. An
important line must be drawn between the modification and the invention of Gospel material, whether
at the traditional or at the redactional stage. As Goldingay emphasizes, even precritical historiography
rarely employs wholesale creation de novo.
F. SOURCE-CRITICAL SOLUTIONS
The ascription of specific settings or audiences in the Gospels is rare enough that even when
audience criticism cannot demonstrate that two apparently parallel pericopae in fact represent different
events, this possibility must be entertained. In some instances, it may be source criticism that points in
this direction.
1. Major portions of Luke’s central section, for example, probably stem from sources peculiar to
that Evangelist, and a selection of the parables scattered throughout these chapters, including all of
those obviously unparalleled, form a chiastic sequence suggesting some kind of pre-Lukan unity.
Included in this chiasmus, however, are the parables of the watchful servants (Lk 12:35–38) and of the
great supper (Lk 14:16–24)—for which many have found parallels in Mark 13:34–37 and Matthew
22:1–10, respectively. Source criticism (including an analysis of vocabulary as well as structure) points
in the opposite direction, and the problems inherent in assuming that such drastically different
“parallels” developed from a common original disappear.
2. Did Jesus command His disciples to take a staff and sandals on their “missionary” journey or not
(Mt 10:10/Mk 6:8–9/Lk 9:3)? The absolute antithesis here between Mark and Matthew/Luke has
convinced even very conservative scholars of Scripture’s errancy. Inerrantists’ replies vary. (a) Two
different types of staffs and sandals are envisioned98—but there is no difference in the Greek diction to
support this. (b) Matthew’s κτίζω means “acquire” (i.e., extra items), while Mark’s αἴρω refers to what
they are already carrying/wearing—but Luke also uses αἴρω, and in any event this solution permits too
much; Matthew would then be permitting the disciples to carry the money that Mark denies them. (c)
All three Gospels agree on the basic concept of traveling light; only the details differ—but this solution
must still admit the presence of a contradiction, even if it seems incidental.
The critical consensus, therefore, opts for a source-critical explanation for the differences, the
commonest of which is that Matthew conflated two different accounts of the commission—Mark’s and
Q’s (reflected in Luke). This, however, only pushes the problem back a stage and does not remove the
discrepancy. A historical-contextual solution, in which Mark is making an implicit assumption explicit,
works for Luke’s omission of any reference to sandals but not for Matthew’s version nor for either
Evangelist’s prohibition of a staff. A source-critical solution does seem preferable—but with the
somewhat distinct nuances offered by Osborne. Luke 10:1–12 describes Jesus’ subsequent sending of
the seventy (-two), which contains some closer parallels to Matthew 9:37–10:16 than does Luke 9:1–6.
Matthew has consequently conflated Mark’s account of the sending of the twelve with Luke’s account
of the seventy (whether from Q or from some other source), while Luke has assimilated some of his
material from chapter 10 into his account in chapter 9. In other words, the prohibitions against staff and
sandals originally stemmed only from the latter mission; in the former Jesus did permit these two items.
Is this reconstruction compatible with a doctrine of inerrancy? Indiscriminate conflation and
assimilation certainly is not, but in this case Osborne’s solution works, precisely because the twelve
were most likely part of the seventy. Luke’s use of ἑτέρους in 10:1 at first seems to contradict this
claim; but on closer examination it contrasts with the three who reject discipleship in 9:57–62 and not
with the twelve, who do not reappear until 10:17, 23, where they seem to overlap with the seventy.
Neither Matthew nor Luke expected readers to compare his Gospel with Mark’s; taken on its own,
Matthew and Luke each presents entirely factual reports of what Jesus told His disciples before sending
them out to minister in His name, even if they do not spell out the number and nature of these missions
as clearly as modern readers might have wished.
G. REDACTION-CRITICAL SOLUTIONS
The abuse of redaction criticism by its more radical practitioners should not blind the more cautious
critic to its immense value. In many cases, it provides a more convincing explanation for the
differences between the Gospels than does traditional harmonization, without jeopardizing the
reliability of any of the canonical versions. The Evangelists’ editorial activity includes both stylistic
and theological re-presentation of tradition, and one of the reasons redaction criticism sometimes seems
so suspect is that certain critics have too often appealed to the latter rather than to the former.
1. Stylistic Redaction
The following two examples present parallel passages where stylistic motivations probably best
account for the seeming contradictions, despite the fashion of scholarship to favor more radical
evaluations.
a. Did Jesus rebuke the disciples for their lack of faith before or after stilling the storm, and how
harsh was He (Mt 8:26/Mk 4:39–40)? Ever since Bornkamm’s pioneering redactional study, many have
argued that Matthew here contradicts Mark by reversing the order of miracle and rebuke and by
substituting “little faith” for “no faith” in order to stress the positive side of the disciples’ belief in
Jesus. Yet it is hard to see how ὀλιγόπιστοι is any less harsh than οὔπω ἔχετε πίστιν; One could even
argue the reverse, that Matthew’s declarative label leaves no room for the possibility which Mark
preserves for answering his interrogative with a partially positive reply! Matthew does emphasize
discipleship (note his addition in 8:23b) but not so as to contradict Mark. As for the change in order, if
either evangelist is intending a chronological sequence at this point, it would more likely be Matthew
(τότε [Mt 8:26] vs δέ [Mk 4:39]). Mark is content to preserve his typically paratactic narrative without
implying that Jesus did not speak to the disciples until after the miracle. Stylistic improvement and
characteristic diction best account for Matthew’s language, and no contradiction with the Markan
narrative need be inferred.
b. Did Jesus cure blind Bartimaeus before or after entering Jericho (Mk 10:46/Lk 18:35)? Here a
redactional analysis of Luke’s style suggests a better approach than traditional harmonization. Many
have argued that Jesus was leaving “old Jericho” and heading toward “new Jericho,” since the rebuilt
city had left the old ruins intact at a separate nearby site. But what reader would ever suspect that Mark
had this former, virtually uninhabited location in mind, especially when he describes Jesus as leaving
with “a great multitude”? Hiebert adopts a linguistic solution in which Luke’s ἐγγίζειν refers merely to
being in the vicinity without the specific connotation of “drawing near.” This view would resolve the
apparent contradiction, but it supplies no motive for Luke’s alteration. A study of Luke’s redactional
tendencies, however, offers the missing motive. Luke (or the tradition he inherited) consistently
abbreviated Mark, as word counts from parallel passages readily show.109 For Luke’s purposes, Mark is
unnecessarily detailed (lit., “and they come to Jericho, and as he was leaving Jericho …”); so Luke
streamlines the narrative while substituting a sufficiently ambiguous verb so as not to contradict Mark
(ἐγγίζω) for ἔρχομαι). But why not avoid the potential confusion altogether by omitting mention of
Jericho as well?
The answer emerges from a study of Luke’s geographical references. Despite the impression that
Luke 9:51–18:34 is a travel narrative, fewer specific place names occur in these chapters than in any
other section of similar length in the Gospels. A topical rather than a chronological outline best
accounts for this material. With the reference to Jericho in 18:35, the situation reverses itself
dramatically. Luke locates each succeeding pericope in or near a specific city until Jesus and His
entourage finally enter Jerusalem (18:35; 19:1, 11, 28–29). The proximity of all cities to Jerusalem
(Jericho, Bethphage, and Bethany) reinforces the previously dormant emphasis of 9:51 and prepares the
reader for the climactic arrival in the holy capital and the events that await Jesus there.
Assuming Mark 10:46 is accurate, the conversion of Zacchaeus (Lk 19:1–10) must have occurred
before the healing of the beggar, but Luke inverts their order to create a climax within three closely
linked pericopae (18:35–43; 19:1–10; 19:11–27; and note the closure in 19:28a). All portray Jesus
upending traditional Jewish expectation, but each successive scene causes severer shock waves—
healing a blind and so presumably sinful man, fellowshipping with a tax collector, and destroying
servants and enemies in a parable in which they clearly stand for the Jewish leaders. Nevertheless,
Luke’s inversion creates no chronological error, since 19:1 supplies no temporal link with the
preceding paragraph.
The examples of the differences between the parallel versions of the storm-stilling and Bartimaeus
miracles have raised the question of topical versus chronological narrative in the Gospels. One of the
most significant contributions of redaction criticism (some would distinguish this by calling it
“composition criticism”) is its emphasis on the structure of the Gospels and the original outline and
literary design of each Evangelist. The dictum of modern biblical criticism that not one of the Gospels
gives enough data for a detailed reconstruction of the chronology of Jesus’ ministry merits
acceptance—for no other reason than that the data themselves bear this out. A careful analysis shows
that no two Gospels contradict each other’s chronology—but only if no chronology is read into the
juxtaposition of pericopae except where undeniably temporal connectives appear.
Granted this principle, it is, therefore, methodologically inconsistent to infer chronology from mere
narrative sequence, even where no potential conflicts with parallels arise. Moreover, all three
Synoptists regularly group pericopae by form or topic with few temporal connectives (e.g., the miracles
of Mt 8–9, the controversy stories of Mk 2:1–3:6, and Luke’s central section), so that it is a priori
likely that other sections of the Gospels less clearly demarcated in structure also follow a logical rather
than chronological outline. Mark’s Gospel, often felt to be the most chronological of the three, may in
fact be the most topical. Luke’s claim to have written in order (Lk 1:3) does not make his Gospel any
different; καθεξῆς may refer just as easily to topical as to temporal sequence. An important implication
of these findings is that a detailed harmony of the life of Christ is no longer recoverable, not because
the Gospels contradict each other in chronology but because they provide too little chronological data.
At best, any harmony must be judged merely “possible” and not “demonstrable,” and exegesis should
base few conclusions upon the hypothetical order of events proposed.116
2. Theological Redaction
The second main category of editorial activity is theologically motivated redaction. Certain cases
are clear-cut and widely recognized even among conservatives.
a. For example, Luke reverses the order of the second and third temptations of Jesus and replaces
the potentially temporal connective τότε with a simple δέ (Lk 4:9/Mt 4:5) in order for the ordeal to
climax at the Jerusalem temple. Luke consistently emphasizes Jesus’ relationship with that site; his
entire two-volume work is probably best outlined geographically, with chiastic parallelism centering
attention on the resurrection appearances in and around Jerusalem. Other examples prove more
controversial, as with the two that follow.
b. Did Jesus curse the fig tree before or after He cleansed the temple (Mt 21:18–22/Mk 11:12–14,
20–25)? Close attention to transitional vocabulary again demonstrates that no necessary contradiction
exists. Mark has apparently preserved the more complex historical sequence, which Matthew
telescopes and presents as an uninterrupted event. Translations of πρωῒ that include a definite article
(e.g., “in the morning”) may mislead the reader of Matthew 21:18; Matthew himself gives no indication
of the day to which he is referring. Similarly, there is no problem presupposing a gap between Matthew
21:19 and 20, since Matthew never reveals when the disciples saw the withered tree (“at once” only
governs the withering, and Mark 11:14 suggests that the disciples only heard Jesus’ original curse from
a distance). The Synoptists omit much information that one could wish they had preserved, so that
postulating gaps of this nature is scarcely special pleading. Rather, it fits exactly with the type of
redaction that lies behind virtually every page of the Gospels.
Theologically, both Matthew’s and Mark’s presentations sandwich the cursing miracle and the
temple ministry (Mt 21:12–17, 18–19, 20ff./Mk 11:12–14, 15–19, 20–25), thus interpreting the former
in light of latter. Jesus’ Strafwunder acts out the parable of the fig tree (Lk 13:6–9), pointing to God’s
coming judgment upon the faithless, Jewish leaders. Only this type of symbolic or metaphorical
explanation of Jesus’ actions can save them from seeming extremely capricious, and Matthew’s and
Mark’s redactional linkage in fact clarifies Jesus’ historical intentions. The juxtaposition of Jesus’
sayings on faith (Mt 21:21–22/Mk 11:22–25) does not refute this interpretation, since the mountain to
be cast into the sea probably stands for the temple on Mount Zion and its impending obsolescence.
Redaction criticism and a presumption of historical authenticity actually complement one another in
service of a coherent exegesis.
c. Did the rich young ruler ask Jesus about the good or did he call Him good (Mt 19:17/Mk 10:18)?
An additive harmonization simply affirms both, but the grammatical thread on which this hangs (the
continuous force of ἐπηρώτα in Mk 10:17) is extremely slender. A typical redaction-critical
explanation alleges that Matthew wanted to avoid the potential mistake that Mark’s readers might have
made if they inferred that Jesus denied either His divinity or His essential goodness. 120 If such an
explanation derives from an invalid reconstruction of the development of primitive Christology, then it
of course must be rejected. But it need prove no more problematic than, say, Luke’s insertion into the
parable of the wicked husbandmen of “perhaps” (ἴσως) before the vineyard owner’s declaration that
“they will respect” his son (Lk 20:13; cf. Mk 12:6), lest it appear that Jesus thought that God really
believed the Jews would accept Him as their Messiah. Furthermore, the result of Matthew’s
modification of the rich young ruler’s dialogue with Jesus in fact shifts the focus of attention from
Christology to the Law, thereby making any emphasis on a heightened view of Jesus unlikely.
Redaction criticism, then, supplies a motive for Matthew’s change, but does his resultant narrative
remain within the bounds of the ipsissima vox Jesu? Here a more traditional (but not “additive”)
harmonization provides a method for replying affirmatively. If the man, as in Mark, originally asked
“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Matthew would be entirely justified in
interpreting the question as one about a good work (ἀγαθόν). Jesus could then very easily have replied
in a way deliberately susceptible of a double meaning. Even in Greek, τί με λέγεις ἀγαθόν can just
conceivably be translated, “Why do you say to me ‘good’?”—which could then hark back to either
Mark’s or Matthew’s use of the adjective. A harmonization that might seem at first like a desperate
expedient and a redactional analysis reminiscent of an unwarranted skepticism in fact combine to lend
credence to each other. Neither Evangelist has distorted Jesus’ original meaning, and the motives of
both become intelligible.
Similar marriages of these odd bedfellows undoubtedly occur much more often than commentators
of any ideological commitment have suspected. At least two other probable examples include the
chronology of the Transfiguration (six days or eight after the first passion prediction?—cf. Mk 9:2 and
Lk 9:28) and the centurion’s cry at the Crucifixion (Son of God or innocent man?—cf. Mk 15:39 and
Lk 23:47). In the former instance, Luke’s “about” (ὡσεί) avoids a formal contradiction with Mark, but
only a realization of the theological parallels between the Transfiguration and the ministry of Moses
(which included a six-day preparation for revelation—Ex 24:16) makes any sense of the difference. In
the latter instance, a nonadditive harmonization can supply an original saying of the centurion from
which both Mark’s and Luke’s versions can be derived as faithful interpretations (e.g., “Certainly this
man was justified in calling God his Father.”). Yet only the recognition of Mark’s emphasis on “Son of
God” and Luke’s apologetic for the legality of Christianity account for such drastic editing.
H. HARMONIZATION
The last examples above form a natural bridge to this final category of solutions to discrepancies
between Synoptic parallels. In certain limited instances—especially where the Gospel writers greatly
abbreviate accounts of complex events that occur in several stages or over long periods of time—
applications of harmonization in its narrower, additive sense do seem justified.
1. George E. Ladd’s reconstruction of the sequence of events surrounding Jesus’ resurrection offers
a good example. The four Evangelists chose to record primarily divergent features of a complex Easter-
event, yet without entangling themselves in any necessary historical contradictions. For shorter
narratives, however, usually some type of external evidence that key details are missing is needed
before one can feel very comfortable with harmonization.
2. For example, Luke’s love of logical inversion leads one to suspect that, for some topical purpose,
he has simply switched the order of the bread and the cup in his account of the Last Supper (Lk 22:15–
19a/cf. Mk 14:22–25). No such purpose, however, readily presents itself, and familiarity with the four
cups drunk during the Passover haggadah makes probable the explanation that Luke and Mark are
referring to different portions of the ceremony. The resurgent favor with which text critics look upon
Luke 22:19b–20 greatly enhances this hypothesis.
3. Or consider the “trials” of Jesus before the Sanhedrin (Mk 14:55–65, 15:1/Lk 22:66–71). The
discrepancy between Mark’s nighttime and Luke’s daytime hearings seems inescapable until one
realizes that the Sanhedrin probably could not reach a legal verdict at night and that Mark 15:1a refers
to some type of brief postdawn proceedings. Yet, in their ecstasy of finally having captured Jesus, it is
historically incredible that the Jewish authorities should not have begun the unofficial nighttime
interrogation that Mark depicts.127 The only obstacle to this reconstruction lies in the close similarity
between the Markan and Lukan dialogues. Would Jesus so graciously have indicted Himself a second
time (Lk 22:69), even despite His more muted response (vv 67–68, 70)? Yet, even a veiled affirmative
(v 70) to the question of His identity with the Son of God would have satisfied the Sanhedrin, and Luke
may have simply assimilated additions from Mark’s narrative into his own version, knowing that the
council had, in some sense, to repeat its agenda. As Carson cautions,
the sad fact is that there are few methodologically reliable tools for distinguishing between, say, two forms
of one aphoristic saying, two reports of the same saying uttered on two occasions, or one report of one such
saying often repeated in various forms but preserved in the tradition in one form (surely not problematic if
only the ipsissima vox is usually what is at stake).
Although the trial narratives are not aphorisms, the proposed assimilations involve only brief,
memorable utterances, so an application of Carson’s principle to this new situation seems safe.
4. Additional applications of straightforward harmonizing seem plausible for the famous examples
of character doubling (two blind men—Mt 20:30/cf. Mk 10:46; two demoniacs—Mt 8:28/cf. Mk 5:2;
two men by the empty tomb—Lk 24:4/cf. Mk 16:5). If there were two, then obviously there was one.
Examples of such doubling are too rare to attribute them to either form or redaction-critical processes,
and the Evangelists make nothing of the additions. Harmonization seems sanest; one member of a pair
(or group) often stands out from the other(s) and thereby receives exclusive attention. In the Gospels,
this focus usually falls on the person who acts as a spokesman.130
I. CONCLUSIONS
This survey of problem passages has admittedly proved sketchy. Some will prefer solutions for
certain passages different than those suggested here. Appreciation of the categories of types of
solutions and of the principles involved in applying them is more important than complete agreement
with the category chosen under which to subsume each individual illustration. As Carl Henry stresses,
“evangelical scholars do not insist that historical realities conform to all their proposals for
harmonization; their intent, rather, is to show that their premises do not cancel the logical possibility of
reconciling apparently divergent reports.”
Two fundamental conclusions, however, do merit more widespread acceptance than they have
received. First, “additive” harmonization is entirely legitimate as one among many tools for alleviating
tension between Gospel parallels, but a survey of the classic “contradictions” suggests that in most
cases it is not the best tool. Second, the newer branches of Gospel study (source, form, and redaction
criticism), far from necessarily proving Scripture’s errancy, regularly enable the exegete to reconcile
apparent contradictions in a much less contrived and artificial manner than traditional harmonization.
Of course, complex problems regularly require a combination of methods, and the innovative
conjunction of redaction criticism with harmonization emerges as a powerful but little-used tool for
breaking down some of the most resistant barriers to belief in the accuracy of the Evangelists’
narratives.
A. CHRONICLES-KINGS
The classic problem of the Old Testament contrasts the works of the Chronicler and the so-called
Deuteronomic historian. Chronicles has generally received short shrift in scholarly circles, but recent
studies have rehabilitated the reputation of its author as a theologian and even to a limited extent as a
historian.133 In fact, all eight categories applied to Synoptic divergences come into play in a study of
Chronicles.
1. The Old Testament autographs prove vastly more difficult to reconstruct than their New
Testament counterparts. The undeniable contradictions that punctuate the extant texts of Samuel
through Chronicles most likely reflect copyists’ errors. Numbers and names have become distorted
most easily; on the former, John Wenham cogently stresses that “the more absurd the figures the less
likely it is that they were invented,” and the “absurdity suggests the likelihood that someone has been
trying to transmit records faithfully, in spite of the fact that they do not seem to make sense.” Wenham
itemizes eight types of textual corruption and then discusses at length twelve possible meanings of אלף
besides “thousand.” J. Barton Payne supplements Wenham with an exhaustive listing of the 213
numerals that Chronicles contains for which parallels occur elsewhere in Scripture, and he notes that
only nineteen create contradictions. The maxim that Chronicles consistently embellished its sources
fails utterly—and all the more so since it contains the higher of the divergent figures in only eleven of
the nineteen cases.
A more famous contradiction pits Elhanan against David as the slayer of Goliath (cf. 1 Ch 20:5
with 1 Sa 17:4, 7, 50 and 2 Sa 21:19). The Chronicler has preserved what was most likely the original
text of 2 Samuel, with Elhanan slaying Lahmi the brother of Goliath and not Goliath himself. It is easy
to see how את־לחמי אחי ּגליתcould give rise to ּביתהלחמי את ּגלית. Interestingly, traditional
Jewish exegesis opts for a less likely, additive harmonization in which there were two different giants
with the same name or title!138
2. Contextual analysis suggests that the “help” Tiglath-pileser gave Ahaz (2 Ki 16:7–9) proved
short-lived and misguided, so that the Chronicles can deliver the verdict of a later generation that Ahaz
received no help (2 Ch 28:16, 21). Chronicles also uses the word “war” in a sense that excludes minor
border skirmishes, so that it can claim that Asa and Baasha lived in peace with each other for twenty
years (2 Ch 15:10, 19) despite the apparent disagreement of 1 Kings 15:16. An appreciation of the
Chronicler’s redactional motives makes both of these linguistic explanations intelligible, since he
sought to summarize each king’s reign with sweeping, moralistic generalizations.
More controversial are some apparent representational changes. Did Solomon’s “molten sea” hold
two thousand (1 Ki 7:23–26) or three thousand baths (2 Ch 4:2–5)? Wenham and Payne favor textual
corruption; Curtis and Madsen, a historical error; and the Targums harmonize by assuming that one
bath is a dry and the other a liquid measure. Evidence shows, though, that the capacity of a bath had
changed over time, so that Chronicles alters the number precisely to preserve the original measure, just
as English translations often provide British or American equivalents.141
The Chronicler similarly turns the temple guard, including foreign mercenaries (Carites), into
Levites (2 Ch 23:1–11/2 Ki 11:4–12, 2 Ch 24:4–14a/2 Ki 12:4–16). The typical conservative
harmonization that centurions, Carites, and Levites all worked together does not seem to do justice
either to the Chronicler’s overwhelming preoccupation with the Levites or to their almost total absence
from all of Samuel-Kings (Chronicles—99 times, Samuel-Kings—3 times). The critical consensus still
concludes that no Levites functioned during the early monarchy, because it is thought that that part of
the “mosaic” code did not develop until later; but this requires the references that do occur in the
Deuteronomist’s work (note also the 14 in Joshua and 10 in Judges) all to be later interpolations. May
not a mediating view that sees a contemporization occurring prove best? As R. J. Coggins says, “we
should not dismiss this as falsification; the Chronicler is concerned to tell the story in terms that would
be appropriate for his own day, when there was no closer equivalent to a royal bodyguard than the
religious leaders of Jerusalem.” Goldingay concurs: “Thus he describes as Levites those who would
have been Levites in his day.”144
3. The most famous illustration of extrabiblical history helping to solve discrepancies within Kings-
Chronicles involves the Assyrian king lists aiding in synchronizing the chronology of the Israelite and
Judean kings’ reigns. The scholar who almost single-handedly discovered a reconciliation for all the
apparently conflicting data is Edwin R. Thiele. The type of critique that his work deserves far outstrips
the bounds of this study, and several of the problems that he solves by historical criticism may instead
reflect textual corruption.146 Siegfried Horn, nevertheless, concludes that “Thiele’s chronological
scheme with its logic and historical integrity has gradually become accepted by an everwidening circle
of biblical scholars of all persuasions.”
4. Almost no form-critical study of Chronicles exists, primarily because its author claims to have
worked almost exclusively from written sources (1 Ch 29:29; 2 Ch 9:29; 12:15; etc.). Nevertheless, he
occasionally presents a narrative more abbreviated and freely rewritten than typically; perhaps the
tendencies of oral tradition account for a few of these (esp. 1 Ki 3:6–14 and 2 Ch 1:9–12).
5. Audience criticism also rarely enters into the study of Kings-Chronicles, but 1 Chronicles 23:1
and 29:22 present one apparent doublet. Was Solomon really proclaimed king of Israel twice? The
contexts suggest that the first ceremony involved only Israel’s leaders, while the second enacted
David’s decree in front of all the people of Jerusalem.
6. On the other hand, source criticism looms even larger in the study of Kings and Chronicles than
it did for the Synoptics. The detailed lists of sources scattered throughout these works makes their
unparalleled material readily attributable to these long-lost documents. One “microlevel” and one
“macrolevel” example illustrate further. First, the Chronicler lists additional “mighty men” of David
not found in his primary source (1 Ch 11:41b–47/2 Sa 23:24–39). Stylistic variations and authentic
trans-Jordanian locations suggest that this material stems from a different source—one that
supplements the earlier list rather than contradicting it. Second, the most striking omission of 1 and 2
Chronicles is the large amount of information about the court history of David and about Elijah and
Elisha. Since some of this material could have enhanced the Chronicler’s narrative and coheres with his
purposes, the omission proves puzzling. Yet recent studies favor viewing the “succession narrative”
and the Elijah-Elisha cycles as independent sources supplementing the Deuteronomist’s work; thus, A.
G. Auld speculates that the Chronicler simply may not have had access to them.149
7. Redaction criticism again combines with harmonization to solve two of the strangest differences
between the Chronicles and the Deuteronomist—one very famous and one rather obscure. The classic
“contradiction” comes with David’s infamous census. Did God or Satan move David to number Israel
(2 Sa 24:1/1 Ch 21:1)? Almost all agree that the Chronicler wanted to avoid the mistaken inference that
God directly causes evil, and more conservative commentators stress that Scripture always portrays
Satan as subordinate to God. Chronicles, therefore, does not contradict Samuel. The Targum to 1
Chronicles 21:1, in fact, conflates the two, having Yahweh incite Satan to move David to number
Israel! As with the pericopae of the rich young ruler and Jesus, a canonical writer markedly alters his
source—but for the very purpose of preventing a tragic misinterpretation of it. Redaction criticism
supplies the motive for the change and rescues an accompanying harmonization from the charge of
being arbitrary.
A second illustration comes from a comparison of 2 Chronicles 2:13–14 with 1 Kings 7:13–14.
Was Huram-abi’s mother from Dan or Naphtali? The contiguity of these two territories makes a
mistake unlikely and points toward Dillard’s harmonization as the most probable of several proposed;
one is her geographical residence and the other her genealogical relationship. But why would
Chronicles bother to notice this? Dillard continues: “rather than be distracted by a harmonistic problem,
it is more important in this case to see that the Chronicler has assigned Huram-abi a Danite ancestry to
perfect further the parallel with Oholiab.” Oholiab, from the tribe of Dan, was one of the two master
craftsmen who constructed much of the tabernacle in the wilderness (Ex 38:22–23), and many
commentators have noted that the Chronicler viewed Solomon and Huram (the suffix -abi actually
means “my master”) and their work in God’s temple in a similar light. Redaction criticism explains
even an obscure change from Kings to Chronicles and prevents the inference that either author erred.
8. “Additive” harmonization has already come into play in the previous two examples; two others
afford instances of its use apart from other critical tools. The last pair of parallels notes also that Huram
comes from Tyre, but so does the king of that city who has the identical name (2 Ch 2:11).
Surprisingly, I have not discovered anyone claiming that these texts should not be harmonized and
taken to refer to two different people, presumably because Solomon could scarcely have conscripted a
foreign king into manual labor (1 Ki 7:13). But then similar harmonizations elsewhere should not
receive the undue scorn sometimes unleashed. A second example involves the sources for Asa’s reign.
Were the rest of his actions recorded in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah (1 Ki 15:23)
or in the Book of the Kings of Judah and Israel (2 Ch 16:11)? The proliferation of sources cited in
Kings and Chronicles makes “both” the most likely answer; it is even possible that the two names refer
to the same work.
The conclusions arising at the end of this survey strikingly resemble those from the study of the
Synoptics. None of the “contradictions” cited proves irreconcilable with its parallel, but harmonization,
narrowly defined, is only a relatively unimportant tool among many for solving the various problems.
In some instances, however, its legitimacy increases as it joins hands with redaction criticism to
provide probable solutions, when either method alone would fall far short of convincing.
In the case of the canonical evidence for Jesus, “apparently contradictory” is a more accurate
assessment, but otherwise Welles’ analysis stands. The discussion here will limit itself to Alexander’s
Greek biographers (Arrian and Plutarch); if the later Latin writers were added (Quintus Curtius,
Diodorus, and Justin), a short treatment would become impossible. Generally, though, this so-called
“Vulgate” tradition is not held to contain nearly as much reliable history, so its omission from this
survey seems justified. Parallels with the Gospels also extend to the emergence of apocryphal,
legendary traditions, but these later “Alexander-romances” are sufficiently separated in time from his
historians that they too may be passed over.174
An important difference between Arrian and Plutarch on the one hand and Matthew, Mark, and
Luke on the other is that the former often admit that their sources contradict each other and that they
have had to choose among them or attempt a harmonization (see, e.g., Anab. 2:12.8 or 3:30.5). They
agree that Aristobulus and Ptolemy provide the most reliable eyewitness testimony, though even here
they make no pretense for the inerrancy of their most trusted authorities (see esp. Anab. 4:14.3–4). Alan
Wardman elaborates:
It was an accepted practice for ancient historians to decide between different or conflicting versions of the
same event by appealing to the criterion of probability.… As source criticism in the modern sense was
virtually unknown, writers could do little else than keep in mind the more obvious bias or prejudice of their
sources and follow what seemed to be the more likely account.
Yet even this “crude” method resembles modern redaction criticism more than traditional
harmonization, reinforcing the claim of the former to an ancient pedigree. Oral tradition also comes
into play, as many ancient historians wrote from a combination of notes and highly trained (though
fallible) memories. Occasionally form-critical processes will therefore reveal themselves, too. In fact,
once again all eight of the categories utilized throughout this article take turns in accounting for
discrepancies between Arrian and Plutarch.
1. Textual corruption again plagues the transmission of numbers. Arrian, for example, allows
Alexander not much more (οὐ πολλῶ πλείους) than 30,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry for his march to
the Hellespont (Anab. 1:11.2). Plutarch frankly admits that his sources vary, with figures from 30,000
to 43,000 footmen and from 4,000 to 5,000 horses (Alex. 15:1). A. B. Bosworth, nevertheless, offers an
additive harmonization by claiming it “extremely likely” that the higher figures “include the forces
already across” the river, while P. A. Brunt believes they include additional mercenaries.179 Here are
two expert, contemporary classicists putting forward the very type of harmonizations that most biblical
critics would reject out of hand if they came from Evangelicals.
2. When they heard of Alexander’s conquest of Thebes, did the Athenians abandon their mystery
festivals because of consternation (ἐκπλαγέντες—Anab. 1:10.2) or due to mourning (ὑπὸ πένθους—
Alex. 13:1)? The semantic overlap between these expressions suggests that one need reject neither,
although Hamilton correctly points out that Arrian is more precise. A linguistic solution similarly
accounts for a more trivial discrepancy involving names, yet one that is regularly paralleled in biblical
orthographic variation (recall the example of the “Gadarene” demoniac). In Alexander 66:1, Plutarch
notes that Alexander calls a certain island Σκιλλοῦστιν whereas others call it Ψιλτοῦκιν. Arrian
accounts for the disagreement; neither is completely precise, for the natives name their homeland
Κιλλουτά (Anab. 6:19.3).
3. New historical data have made plausible one of the most incredible episodes in Alexander’s
adventures, the crossing of the ravine to the Rock of Chorienes by the impromptu erection of a massive
causeway of tree trunks. Arrian describes the bridge-work done from above and below, requiring the
narrowest part of the valley to be somewhere between the top and the bottom (Anab. 4:21). Sir Aurel
Stein discovered a ravine of approximately the right shape and size at Aornos, so that J. G. Lloyd can
claim: “At first reading Arrian’s account of its capture seems impossible. No man and no army could
achieve such things. But archaeology has proved it. The site is as Arrian describes, and Alexander
virtually redesigned the landscape to make the hill accessible.”182
4. As with Chronicles and Josephus, Plutarch and Arrian depend primarily upon written sources for
their information, so form-critical tendencies appear only occasionally. The virtually complete lack of
verbal parallelism between these historians of Alexander—even where they are following the same
source and including the same sequence of details—highlights the occasional exception all the more. A
few memorable sayings appear in almost identical form in both; these suggest careful transmission in
oral tradition. Three good examples involve (a) the oracle of Orpheus, when Aristandrus commanded
Alexander to cheer up (Anab. 1:11.2/Alex. 14:5), (b) the description of Alexander breaking the Gordian
knot (Anab. 2:3.7/Alex. 18:2), and (c) Alexander’s rejection of Callisthenes’ kiss (Anab. 4:12.5/Alex.
54:4). In other instances, closely paralleled content (i.e., conceptual rather than verbal parallelism) will
suddenly intrude into otherwise highly divergent (noncomplementary, though usually non-
contradictory) narratives, thus lending credence to the singly attested material as well. Two illustrations
here arise out of the stories of Alexander and Parmenio crossing the Granicus (Anab. 1:13.6–7/Alex.
16:2–3) and Cleitus taunting Alexander (Anab. 4:8/Alex. 50–54).
5. The similar missions of Phrataphernes and Stasanor during subsequent winters (329–28, 328–27
B.C.) lead Bosworth to label them doublets (Anab. 4:7.1, 18.1), but audience criticism corroborates
Arrian. In the first passage, the two men have returned from arresting Arsames, Barzanes, and the rebel
compatriots of Bessus; in the latter, Alexander dispatches Phrataphernes to bring back Autophradates
and Stasanor to become satrap of Media. The similarities between passages are clearly quite meager.
An example of apparently conflicting audiences between Plutarch and Arrian also proves
harmonizable. Who advised Alexander to attack Darius by night at Gaugamela—Parmenio only (Anab.
3:10.1) or a group of lower-ranking advisors (Alex. 31:6)? Plutarch’s earlier mention of Parmenio
(Alex. 31:6) actually suggests he was part of the group, while Arrian’s later reference to others who
were listening (Anab. 3:10.2) also shows that Parmenio was not alone.
6. Regular reference to explicit sources throughout the lives of Alexander makes a written origin for
undocumented material again very probable. An interesting phenomenon noted also in Josephus
strengthens traditional views of Synoptic literary dependence. Even where Arrian and Plutarch narrate
the same event from the same source, verbal parallelism is virtually absent. As noted above, the rare
exceptions are often attributable to oral tradition, suggesting that ancient historians felt a need to
rephrase their sources, even when they had nothing new to add.
This should warn the Synoptic scholar against too quickly reading major implications into minor
differences between parallels, and it should also strengthen the Q-hypothesis. Gospel commentators are
used to observing the greater variation between Matthew’s and Luke’s shared material than between
either of those Evangelists and Mark. Reading other parallel histories of antiquity, however, underlines
the marked parallelism between Matthew and Luke that does exist. The linguistic evidence for some
type of Q considerably outweighs that for written sources behind Josephus or the Alexander-historians,
where such sources are undeniable!
7. More so than for Chronicles or Josephus, a redactional study of Alexander’s biographers reveals
periodic interruptions of a basically chronological narrative with topical digressions. Plutarch is
especially this way (e.g., Alex. 21:5–23; 28; and 39:1–42:4, which illuminate Alexander’s self-control,
attitude toward divinity, and generosity or loyalty, respectively), but Arrian also evidences
“dischronologization.” For example, he explicitly acknowledges that “all this which took place not long
afterwards, I have related as part of the story of Cleitus, regarding it as really akin to Cleitus’ story for
the purpose of narration” (Anab. 4:14.3–4). Such topical narration may well account for the baffling
differences between Plutarch and Arrian on the dating of Darius’ embassy to Alexander proposing an
early truce (Anab. 2:25.1—during the siege of Tyre; Alex. 29:4—after returning from the Egyptian
oracle to Phoenicia). Bosworth assumes that Arrian has erred, while Hamilton distrusts Plutarch; the
tendency to prefer the testimony of any source other than that on which one is commenting seems to
extend outside of biblical circles! Yet it seems plausible that Plutarch is simply writing topically at this
point. He links his new material to the previous paragraph only loosely (δέ), 28:1 suggests the theme
that connects the passages (“In general, he bore himself haughtily toward the barbarians”), and 31:1
clearly resumes a chronological outline.
Redaction criticism can also identify clear emphases and “biases” distinguishing Arrian from
Plutarch. Arrian’s work is an “encomium,” noticeably paralleling Chronicles’ preference for
praiseworthy material dealing with public—and especially military—accomplishments. Plutarch, on
the other hand, “psychologizes” by probing into Alexander’s inner motives and recounting more
private events, not unlike the presentation of John vis-à-vis the Synoptics.
These distinctives may explain the contrasting depictions of Alexander’s response to Parmenio’s
urgent cry for help in the battle of Gaugamela. According to Arrian, he rushes to help him at once
(Anab. 3:15.1), while Plutarch portrays him rebuking Parmenio’s embassy (Alex. 32:4). Yet Plutarch
narrates a second summons for which Arrian has no parallel; and Alexander eventually does leave his
phalanx (Alex. 33:7). Arrian seems similarly incomplete, and Anabasis 3:15.5 offers incidental
corroboration of Plutarch’s version; Alexander rests his cavalry ἐπὶ μέσα νύκτας, implying that the
battle took longer than a superficial reading might suggest. A complete harmonization may no longer
be possible, but Hamilton agrees that Plutarch’s sources “evidently spoke of two requests” (and the
“Vulgate” tradition corroborates this hypothesis). Alexander probably scorned the first plea for help but
responded to the second. More importantly, redaction criticism justifies our historians’ selectivity.
Philip Stadter’s assessment of Arrian’s silence merits acceptance:
The omissions for which Arrian has been faulted, such as his silence on the efforts for the Persian right wing
under Mazaeus to outflank Parmenio, seem for the most part the result not of ignorance, or confusion, or of
the limited scope of Ptolemy’s narrative, but of deliberate decision. Throughout Arrian concentrates on the
essentials, making clear the sequence of the events and the tactical genius of Alexander. He avoids
completely the romantic, the spectacular, the melodramatic which so dominate our other sources.
8. A straightforward harmonization suggests itself for the problem of how many soldiers had
statues erected in their honor after the battle of the river Granicus. Plutarch cites Aristobulus, who
records that nine footmen out of thirty-four on Alexander’s side were memorialized in this manner
(Alex. 16:7–8). Arrian, however, awards the honor to twenty-five territorial troops (ἑταίρων—Anab.
1:16.4). Is it pure coincidence that 25 + 9 = 34, or might it not make sense to assume that both authors
are correct?
There are probable errors in Arrian and Plutarch; and, again, a few of the passages surveyed may
just contain simple mistakes. As with Josephus, though, such errors are not the focus of attention.
Rather, the findings of this section again reinforce the general historical trustworthiness of the authors
studied; parallel problems in Scripture should seem rather less insoluble as a result.
V. CONCLUSION
The results of these studies of the Synoptics, Chronicles, Josephus, and Alexander dovetail
remarkably. The more one studies extrabiblical historiography, the more inescapable the legitimacy of
harmonization becomes, even in its narrower, additive sense. At the same time, even the least
tendential of annals reveals principles of selectivity that justify a thoroughgoing application of
redaction criticism and, although usually less significant, of all of the other branches of literary and
historical criticism as well.
Yet what applies to noncanonical literature applies, mutatis mutandi, to the biblical writings. As A.
Momigliano emphasizes, the problems of understanding the text, discovering sources, and determining
the truth are basically the same for both biblical and Greco-Roman history. But, as he continues, the
really serious problem of the day is the “widespread tendency … to treat historiography as another
genre of fiction.”190 A reassessment of the historical accuracy of more than one ancient document is in
order. For the results to be unprejudiced, apparent discrepancies between paralleled texts should be
subjected to all eight of the methods enumerated above (and these may, in turn, be subdivided or
combined in many ways) to see if any yield plausible explanations. Until this has been done, any
verdict that equates a given discrepancy with a genuine error will have to remain suspect. In addition,
utilizing one category to suggest an implausible solution does not mean that another category may not
supply a perfectly valid one.
As for the biblical texts in particular, the sample of some of the most obvious candidates for errors
in the Gospels and Chronicles shows that this presumption is rash; all can be explained, even if
competing explanations are not equally probable. The tools of higher criticism not only do not have to
be viewed as inherently destructive but can, in fact, join hands with traditional harmonization in the
service of a high view of Scripture.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PROBLEM OF SENSUS PLENIOR
Douglas J. Moo
Douglas J. Moo is Associate Professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School,
Deerfield, Illinois. He is a graduate of DePauw University (B.A.), Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
(M.Div.), and the University of St. Andrews (Ph.D.). He has authored The Old Testament in the Gospel
Passion Narratives and The Epistle of James: An Introduction and Commentary (TNTC) and co-
authored The Rapture: Pre-, Mid-, or Post-Tribulational?
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PROBLEM OF SENSUS PLENIOR
I. INTRODUCTION
No factor is cited as an argument against the inerrancy of Scripture more often than the Bible itself.
Whatever conclusions about the nature of Scripture that can be demonstrated by theological deduction
or on the basis of the claims of the Bible for itself must be tested against the data of the text. And, many
conclude, when these phenomena are considered, the idea that the Bible is true in all that it affirms
becomes clearly impossible. Careful, objective study of the text reveals numerous errors of one kind or
another—historical inaccuracies, discrepancies between the scriptural record and the findings of
modern science, and, above all, contradictions between and within biblical books.
Inerrantists, it is often alleged, are guilty either of sweeping these phenomena under the rug of pure
deduction or of doing a disservice to the biblical text by foisting on it unlikely and sometimes fantastic
harmonistic explanations in order to save their theory. This criticism comes from some within the
inerrancy camp as well as from those without. Robert Gundry, for instance, finds numerous clear,
theologically motivated contradictions between Matthew on the one hand and Mark and Luke on the
other. He criticizes fellow Evangelicals for failing to take seriously the force of this evidence and
concludes that inerrancy can be upheld only by adopting the extreme (and most unlikely) hypothesis
that Matthew has written in a “midrashic” style and is therefore often uninterested in reporting
historical fact. More typically, the weight of the phenomena is held to invalidate the notion of inerrancy
altogether. As William Abraham put it, “[The doctrine of inerrancy] involves enormous strain when it
comes into contact with inductive study of the text. Indeed the strain is too great for any reasonable
person to want to bear.”2
What may be said in reply to such a claim? “Induction”—the process by which theological
conclusions are drawn only as they emerge from the data—certainly has a legitimate place in
formulating a doctrine of Scripture. But two things need to be said. First, as Warfield pointed out long
ago, the claims made by the biblical authors for their writings is also evidence from the texts, capable
of being molded into an inductively based argument for the nature of Scripture. Some parts of the
phenomena of the text may present a problem; but it is wrong to cast the issue as one of induction
versus deduction. Second, it should be recognized that induction and deduction need to be used
together in formulating a doctrine of Scripture; not even “pure” scientists use induction to the exclusion
of deduction in the construction of theoretical models.
Nevertheless, it is true that all the phenomena of the biblical text must ultimately be considered in
the formulation of a satisfactory doctrine of Scripture. Too many discrepancies between these
phenomena and the doctrine of inerrancy would cast serious doubt on the validity of the doctrine. But,
though often claimed, it is by no means clear that the phenomena of Scripture present so great a
problem for the view that the Bible is completely truthful. Specific issues relative to this problem are
dealt with in several essays in these two volumes: here, however, I will examine the problem created by
the use of the Old Testament in the New. Long a matter of fascination, perplexity, and fruitful study to
Christian preachers, theologians, and laypeople, the general issue of the Old Testament in the New has
received much scholarly attention in the last forty years. Numerous offshoots of the problem have taken
root in the course of the discussion, involving textual criticism, hermeneutics, and Jewish exegetical
history, to name only three of the more important.
The implications of the subject for the nature of Scripture have also received considerable attention.
Of specific interest to us is the allegation that the way in which the New Testament uses the Old
Testament is incompatible with the notion that the Bible is completely true in all that it teaches. Paul
Achtemeier’s statement of the case is typical. To attribute inerrancy to the books of the Bible, he
claims, is to ignore the New Testament authors’ attitude to the Old Testament, as demonstrated in their
actual use of the Old Testament. Their frequent modifications of the Old Testament text and their habit
of reading into that text meanings obviously not intended in the original demonstrate clearly that they
did not regard the Old Testament as an eternal, unchanging, inerrant document. Rather, Achtemeier
argues, their use of the Old Testament shows that the New Testament authors regarded the canonical
books as part of a living tradition that could be freely modified in order to fit new situations. If we
would be true to the New Testament itself, then, we will not impose on the Bible a static, oracular
status such as the doctrine of inerrancy implies; we will view it and use it as the living, changing,
tradition that it is.
In formulating his argument, Achtemeier has two specific phenomena in mind: (1) places where the
New Testament uses a text form of an Old Testament passage that differs from the accepted Masoretic
tradition and (2) places where the New Testament gives a meaning to an Old Testament passage that
does not appear to agree with the intention of the original. That the issues are intertwined is obvious:
new meanings are often given to an Old Testament passage by means of a change in text. However,
since Moisés Silva has dealt competently with the textual side of the problem in his essay “The New
Testament Use of the Old Testament” in Scripture and Truth, we will focus in this essay on the second
issue. To put the problem simply: how can we accord complete truthfulness to writings that appear to
misunderstand and misapply those texts from which they claim to derive the authority and rationale for
their most basic claims and teaching? Although not always framed in just this way, this question has
been one that has challenged Christian theologians from the earliest days of the church. We would do
well to glance at some of the more important responses to this issue in the history of theology.
B. ALLEGORIZATION
The method that quickly became the most important way of finding this “Christian” meaning was
allegorization. Allegory finds meanings hidden behind the words of the text; the text is treated as a
series of symbols that provides the discerning reader with a “higher” or “deeper” meaning. Origen’s
role in making the allegorical approach the Christian approach to the Old Testament was central.
Without denying the “literal” sense, he held up the “spiritual” sense as ultimately the most important.
This sense, however, could be perceived only by the spiritually “enlightened.” Since this method takes
the New Testament as the “code” that provides the insight into the “spiritual” meaning of the Old
Testament, there was naturally no “problem” in the way the New Testament used the Old.
While the allegorical method, then, quickly came to dominate patristic interpretation of the Old
Testament—as Henri de Lubac says, “The so-called mystical or allegorical meaning was always
considered as the doctrinal meaning par excellence”—other options were explored. The “Antiochene”
school is well-known for its opposition to the excesses of Alexandrian allegory. In place of allegory,
they advocated a more historically based theoria concept, according to which the Old Testament
author’s own vision was seen as embracing both the ultimate Christian fulfillment and his immediate
perspective. Still, the Antiochenes saw this Christian meaning as a “higher sense” beyond the literal
meaning, and their differences from the dominant Alexandrian approach must not be overemphasized.10
The ultimate codification of the allegorical approach came with the formulation (by about the fifth
century) of the famous quadriga (“four horse chariot”), which outlined the four meanings to be found
in every Old Testament text: (1) the literal meaning, (2) the “allegorical” meaning (the most important
basis for doctrine), (3) the “tropological” meaning (specifying the moral implications of the text), and
(4) the “anagogical” meaning (which provided the eschatological focus of the text). In practice, the
basic distinction was between the “literal” and the “spiritual” sense—or, to use the terms that often
were associated with the two meanings, the “letter” and the “spirit.” A central motivating factor in the
insistence on the spiritual sense was the need for the church to show that its interpretation was the
“correct” meaning of the Old Testament, over against both the merely literal, “Judaizing” interpretation
of the Jews and the literal but disparaging interpretations of the Gnostics.12
As some Christians became reacquainted with Jewish interpretations—and some, including Andrew
of St. Victor (twelfth century), adopted many of them—the relationship of the literal and spiritual sense
was explored anew. Thomas Aquinas’ solution was widely received. The literal sense is based on the
words of Scripture and should include all that those words may signify by means of metaphor,
symbolism, and the like. The spiritual sense, on the other hand, is found in the things to which the
words refer. Since the Bible is the only book with both a human and a divine author, only it can possess
this twofold sense.
Others, however, insisted that the “spiritual,” Christian sense was the only true, literal sense, while
some, more interested in finding better historical justification for the Christian interpretation, proposed
a “double literal sense.” James Perez of Valencia (d. 1490) distinguished between the grammatical
sense and the hidden sense spoken by the Spirit—an idea resembling the currently popular sensus
plenior approach that will be examined below. These different proposals seem to be trying to take the
“spiritualizing” approach to the Old Testament that had become standard and to put it on solid footings
by providing some systematic hermeneutical foundations for the process.
C. THE REFORMATION
As is well-known, a key ingredient in the Reformers’ interpretation of Scripture was their general
rejection of the traditional “spiritual” meaning. Luther, after “driving” the “four horse chariot” in his
early biblical expositions, violently rejected the system. Indeed, James Samuel Preus has argued that
Luther’s recovery of a genuine historical appreciation for the Old Testament was a prime factor in his
theology and deeply significant for the course of the Reformation. Luther gave to Old Testament Israel
a religious experience in its own right; and the Old Testament was viewed not simply as a quarry for
Christian symbolism but as a book with its own significance. This meant, in practice, that Luther was
freed from the necessity of using an allegorical method to find Christian meaning in the Old Testament;
he recaptured a genuine sense of salvation history. Thus, Luther’s interpretations, as Heinrich
Bornkamm says, are characterized above all by a “comprehensive prophetic application of the Old
Testament to Christ.”17 If anything, Calvin was even more insistent on the importance of the literal
sense, as his many fine biblical commentaries demonstrate.
Still, the Reformers and their followers certainly did not abandon allegory entirely. Luther approves
of an allegorical interpretation where theological sense can be derived from a text in no other way; and
the “hermeneutical textbook” written by the Lutheran Flacius (d. 1575) contains limited approval for
allegorical methods. In addition, Protestant interpreters retained a sensus mysticus or spiritualis
alongside the sensus literalis, although there was concern to distinguish this secondary sense from
Roman Catholic notions of the mystical sense by insisting that it was part of the one sense intended by
the true author of Scripture, the Holy Spirit. The centuries of “Protestant orthodoxy” (not to be as
sharply distinguished from the sixteenth-century Reformers as is all too common) saw a continuation of
these methods, with a greater emphasis in some circles on “typology” as a hermeneutical key. The
“Cocceian” school is especially famous for an overuse of typology, in which petty details of the Old
Testament text were accorded symbolic significance.
A. A FIDEISTIC APPROACH
One way, then, of dealing with the problem, advocated both by some Protestants and some Roman
Catholics, is to argue that it is the modern view of exegetical procedure, not the New Testament, that is
at fault. The revelatory stance of the New Testament is the validation for their interpretations; and
when we cannot discover this meaning in the Old Testament through our exegetical techniques, then
we should either abandon that method or else admit the inadequacy of it.
There is no doubt some point to this proposal. The danger of “modern snobbishness”—the
conviction that only we moderns have somehow transcended cultural bias and are uniquely able to
understand things correctly—is real. As Moisés Silva reminds us, we must be careful not to think that
“the authority and validity of apostolic interpretation … depend on its conformity to modern exegetical
method.” In this, as in all other matters, Scripture itself must judge our understanding, not we it; and
ultimately, we will conclude, it is impossible to “validate” the New Testament use of the Old, in
general or in detail, without a prior decision to accept what they say as true and authoritative.
But while this kind of response is, at a certain level, adequate for the problem, it is ultimately less
than satisfactory. First, constant dismissal of these kinds of problems by appeal to the uncertainties and
fallibility of all knowledge—the record of ancient history is far from complete, modern science could
very well be wrong, etc.—while appropriate to a degree, would in the last resort place Scripture in a
realm above any real historical investigation or criticism. At some point, the weight of unexplained
discrepancies would be too much for the doctrine to bear. Moreover, if apparent discrepancies between
our reading of the Old Testament and the apostles’ reading are dismissed out of hand because of the
fallibility of our interpretation, we are in a rather vicious circle; for we can know what the apostles’
interpretation of the Old Testament is only by using those same methods that we have rejected.
A second reason for wanting to go beyond the fideistic course outlined above is that the New
Testament appeal to the Old Testament is too basic to the church’s very identity to leave it in the realm
of unexplained assertion. For all our legitimate emphasis on Christ as the center and fulfillment of
revelation and as the “hermeneutical key” to the Old Testament, we sacrifice too much by refusing to
allow the Old Testament to stand, to some extent at least, as an independent witness to the New. J. A.
Sanders puts it well: “All the while that we insist that nothing is exempt from the judgment of Christ—
even our faith-understanding of the Old Testament—we must remember that the Old Testament was
and, in some sense, is the criterion whereby Christ is Christ.” How can the church’s claim that it, not
Judaism, is the true “completion” of the Old Testament be validated if its (rather than Judaism’s) use of
the Old Testament cannot be shown to best accord with the meaning of the Old Testament?
B. TYPOLOGY
In the last thirty years, typology has reemerged, after a period of relative neglect, as one of the most
popular ways of explaining the relationship between the Testaments. Typology is set forth by many
scholars as the key to understanding the New Testament use of the Old. Unfortunately, there is
widespread disagreement about the definition and extent of typology.
Most would agree with David Baker’s simple definition: “a type is a biblical event, person or
institution which serves as an example or pattern for other events, persons or institutions.” Basic to
typology, it is generally agreed, is the belief that God acts in similar ways in both Testaments; hence,
there can be a real correspondence between the Old Testament and the New. That typology works from
the narratives of God’s activity in history is also a matter of general consensus—although whether the
type must always be a historical figure, event, or institution is debated. Most scholars also carefully
distinguish typology from allegory—on the basis of the strongly historical character of typology and
the “real” correspondence that must exist between type and antitype; where allegory looks for meaning
behind the text, typology bases meaning on the events narrated in the text. An eschatological “fullness”
or advance (Steigerung) in the New Testament antitype over against the Old Testament type is also
usually considered essential to true typology.
Once we move beyond these general characteristics, however, considerable disagreement sets in.
Particularly significant for our purposes is the debate about whether typology is prospective or
retrospective. Does the Old Testament type have a genuinely predictive function, or is typology simply
a way of looking back at the Old Testament and drawing out resemblances? Related to this question is
the matter of classifying typology. Is it a general way of viewing the relationship between Old
Testament and New (a “pneumatische Betrachtungsweise,” as Leonhard Goppelt calls it), a system of
exegesis, a form of prophecy, or what? A certain circularity of procedure is often evident at this point,
as scholars—according to the definition they have established—select what they think are genuine
instances of New Testament typology.
Without attempting anything approaching a definitive definition, we suggest that typology is best
viewed as a specific form of the larger “promise-fulfillment” scheme that provides the essential
framework within which the relationship of the Testaments must be understood. This “salvation-
historical” movement from Old to New Testament permeates the thinking of Jesus and the early church
and is the ultimate validation for their extensive use of the Old Testament to depict and characterize
their own situation. The two Testaments are bound together by their common witness to the unfolding
revelation of God’s character, purpose, and plan. But the salvation wrought by God through Christ is
the “fulfillment” of Old Testament history, law, and prophecy. This being the case, New Testament
persons, events, and institutions will sometimes “fill up” Old Testament persons, events, and
institutions by repeating at a deeper or more climactic level that which was true in the original
situation.
If we ask whether the typological correspondence was intended in the Old Testament, we would
answer differently according to what is meant. If by “intended” is meant that the participants in the Old
Testament situation, or the author of the text that records it, were always cognizant of the typological
significance, we would respond negatively. But 1 Corinthians 10 suggests that there is some kind of
“prospective” element in typological events. In this passage, Paul warns the Corinthians about
presuming that the sacraments will shield them from the judgment of God by pointing out that the
Israelites also possessed a “baptism” and “spiritual food” but nevertheless suffered the judgment of
God. What is significant is that Paul says that these events “happened” to the Israelites “as types”
(typikōs), by which he implies that there was typological significance to the events as they took place.
The “anticipatory” element in these typological experiences may sometimes have been more or less
dimly perceived by the participants and human authors; but it is to be ascribed finally to God, who
ordered these events in such a way that they would possess a “prophetic” function.
The use of Psalm 22 in the New Testament affords a good example of typological relationship. This
psalm, usually categorized as an “individual lament,” figures prominently in the narration of the
crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus Himself uses its opening words to convey His sense of abandonment (Mk
15:34/Mt 27:46); John states that the dividing of Jesus’ clothes “fulfilled” Psalm 22:18, and all four
Evangelists allude to Psalm 22 in their depiction of the Crucifixion.
What is the basis for this significant application of language that appears to have no prospective
force to Jesus’ passion? Albert Vis finds no basis of any kind: he argues that the early church has
arbitrarily and illegitimately applied the psalm to Christ for apologetic reasons. But, taking David to be
the author of the psalm, we must remember that he is much more than an “individual” righteous
sufferer. The promises given to him and to his progeny and his status as Israel’s king give to many of
his psalms a corporate and even eschatological significance.68
Some, then, have viewed the psalm as a direct messianic prophecy, but the historical circumstances
are too clear to accept this proposal. It has been popular more recently to see the psalm as part of a
widespread “righteous sufferer” motif that the Evangelists used to show the innocence of Jesus. Others
see this as an instance of sensus plenior (for which, see below).
But it is best to think that the use of the psalm is based on an underlying typological relationship:
Jesus is the ultimate “fulfillment” of the experience and feelings that David undergoes in this passage.
It is not clear that David would always have been aware of the ultimate significance of his language;
but God could have so ordered his experiences and his recordings of them in Scripture that they
become anticipatory of the sufferings of “David’s greater son.” It is this fundamental identification of
Christ with David in a typological relationship, not chance verbal similarities, that undergird the
extensive use of this psalm.
It appears, then, that typology does have a “prospective” element, but the “prospective” nature of
specific Old Testament incidents could often be recognized only retrospectively. In some cases,
certainly, the Israelites themselves will have recognized the symbolic value of some of their history
(e.g., the Exodus) and institutions (the cultus, to some extent). But not all typological correspondence
involves recognizable symbols; and the prospective element in many Old Testament types, though
intended by God in a general sense, would not have been recognized at the time by the Old Testament
authors or the original audience. Without confining valid types to those specifically mentioned in the
New Testament, then, it is nevertheless true that we would not know of some types had the New
Testament not revealed them to us and that any types we may suggest lack the authoritative status
enjoyed by those singled out by the inspired authors.
That typology offers some help for the problem we are considering is obvious. What might at first
sight appear to be arbitrary applications of Old Testament texts, based on mere verbal analogies or the
like, can often be seen to be founded on a deeper, typological structure. On the other hand, it must be
admitted that typology will itself be accorded legitimacy only if the basic assumptions on which it is
founded are granted—that God had so ordered Old Testament history that it prefigures and anticipates
His climactic redemptive acts and that the New Testament is the inspired record of those redemptive
acts. An appropriate recognition of the place of typology in New Testament interpretation of the Old is
important as providing a structure that gives coherence and legitimacy to many specific applications.
On the other hand, however, it leaves unexplained many interpretations that involve an apparently
strained interpretation of specific words or where the element of correspondence is not clear. While
according to typology the significance it deserves, then, we must look for other explanations of some of
the problem texts.
C. ELIMINATION OF THE PROBLEM THROUGH THEOLOGICAL EXEGESIS
Over the last two decades, no one has given more attention to the implications of the use of the Old
Testament in the New for inspiration and inerrancy than Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. Because of this, and
because his approach raises in a particularly insistent form some of the most important questions
involved in the problem we are considering, we will devote some space to an analysis of his solution.
From a doctrinal standpoint, he is convinced, it is illegitimate for a New Testament author to find
more, or different, meaning in an Old Testament text than the original human author himself intended.
As he puts it at one point, “… the whole revelation of God as revelation hangs in jeopardy if we, an
apostle, or an angel from heaven try to add to, delete, rearrange, or reassign the sense or meaning that a
prophet himself received.” Kaiser does allow that a New Testament author may draw out some of the
implications or applications of an Old Testament text, but this involves significance, not meaning.
Hermeneutically, Kaiser endorses an “intentionality” theory of meaning, according to which the
meaning of any text is tied to what the author of that text intended to say. This meaning, although
potentially embracing more than one concept or application, is nevertheless one: it is wrong, as well as
hermeneutically disastrous, to think that a text can have more than one meaning.
Kaiser does not rest with simple dogmatic assertion; he has sought to demonstrate the validity of his
approach inductively by tackling over the years some of the knottiest problem quotations in the New
Testament. We have noted above his treatment of one such text (1 Co 9:9). His approach to the text is
typical of his method: careful consideration is given to the context of the Old Testament text cited,
particularly the larger theological context that too many exegetes ignore or fail to see. An illegitimately
atomistic exegesis or a narrow, one-sided concern with form-critical questions frequently prevents the
exegete from recognizing the “informing theology,” the rich tapestry of unfolding theological themes
and concepts within the Old Testament that provide the crucial context for many prophecies. Once
sufficient account is taken of this theological context, and the New Testament context is similarly
understood in all its theological richness, apparent discrepancies between the meaning of an Old
Testament text and the meaning given that text in the New Testament disappear.
Kaiser is to be commended for bringing to our attention the seriousness of the issue. And there is
much in his approach that is right on target. Far too many approaches to Old Testament exegesis focus
so exclusively on putative stages of tradition and interpret texts so rigidly in terms of hypothetical Sitze
im Leben that the theological significance of the final product is entirely ignored or obscured. When
this happens, it can legitimately be objected that the texts are no longer being given their natural,
contextual, theological sense, and alleged discrepancies between findings reached by such methods and
interpretations found in the New Testament should be accorded little significance. It is no wonder that
when such an exegetical procedure is employed, New Testament authors—who read the Old Testament
as a single, thoroughly theological book—are found to misinterpret the Old Testament.
Kaiser is also justified in his strictures against the “hermeneutical nihilism” that plagues much
modern literary criticism; it is vital that we not surrender the insistence that a text has a single,
determinative meaning. And finally, in what is the acid test for any theory, he succeeds in
demonstrating that it is capable of explaining several otherwise problematic applications of Old
Testament texts.
Several questions, however, have been raised with respect to this proposal. Some have criticized
Kaiser for committing the “intentional fallacy,” but this criticism is wide of the mark. More serious is
the criticism that he does not allow sufficiently for the intention of the divine author of Scripture or for
the “added” meaning that a text takes on as a result of the ongoing canonical process. We will deal with
both these issues below; here we will simply note that it is not so certain that meaning should be
confined to the intention of the human author of Scripture.
What is ultimately crucial is the question whether the approach advocated by Kaiser can solve
every “problem text” with which we are confronted in the New Testament use of the Old. The success
of Kaiser’s approach depends on the extent and nature of the “informing theology” that he claims as the
undergirding context of many texts. While many Old Testament exegetes undoubtedly accept far too
little by way of overarching theological constructs, it may be that Kaiser on occasion finds more than is
clearly supported by the text. For example, in dealing with the quotation of Hosea 11:1 in Matthew
2:15, Kaiser argues that the key to the legitimacy of Matthew’s interpretation is the fact that Hosea “no
doubt understood the technical nature of ‘my son’ along with its implications for corporate solidarity.”
But what is the evidence that Hosea intended this in his use of “son” here? He never elsewhere uses the
word in a theological sense; nor is there a great deal of evidence that ben is a corporate concept in the
Old Testament.
Another crucial issue is whether we can speak of “meaning” or “significance” in Old Testament
texts as they are cited in the New Testament. If the latter, the New Testament application need not,
according to Kaiser, be clearly present in the original author’s intention; if the former, then it must be.
In the case of the use of Deuteronomy 25:4 in 1 Corinthians 9:9, for instance, the meaning of the Old
Testament text is the principle that workers (whether animal or human) deserve to be rewarded. Paul’s
application of the principle, then, to Christian ministers validly draws out the significance of that text.
But there are other texts where the distinction is not so neat and where the New Testament author
appears to assign more, or different, “meaning” to an Old Testament text than can legitimately be
inferred as being part of the human author’s intention. A series of texts in which this seems to be the
case are those in which Old Testament passages describing God or Yahweh are applied to Jesus in the
New Testament. Romans 10:13, for instance, applies to faith in Jesus the words of Joel 2:32 (MT; LXX
3:5): “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” There is no evidence, either from
Joel or from an “antecedent theology,” that the prophet would have intended his words to refer to
Christ. From the standpoint of the revelation of the nature of Jesus in the New Testament, of course, we
can understand the legitimacy of applying Old Testament passages about God to Christ. Now perhaps
Kaiser would regard this as an instance in which a New Testament author perceives further significance
in the Joel text. But it seems to me that this kind of procedure goes beyond the drawing out of the
significance of the text; the meaning of the word Yahweh (= LXX kyrios) is being expanded and,
implicitly, more precisely defined by Paul.
A similar situation seems to exist in the application to Jesus of texts such as Psalm 2:7 (“You are
my son, today I have begotten you” RSV) or 2 Samuel 7:14 (“I will be his father, and he will be my
son”). Granted that there is behind both texts the concept of the Davidic King and his descendants as
the heirs to the promise, it is nevertheless the case that the meaning of the word “son” is distinctly
different when applied to David or Solomon than when applied to Jesus.
Therefore, while remaining extremely sympathetic to Kaiser’s general approach, and, in fact,
strongly supporting much of what he says, I am not convinced that his approach offers an ultimately
satisfactory answer to all the problems raised by the use of the Old Testament in the New. There are
places where the New Testament attributes to Old Testament texts more meaning than it can be
legitimately inferred the human author was aware of. Nor do I think it is fatal to the doctrines of
inspiration or inerrancy to suggest this. Only if the meaning of Old Testament texts must be confined to
what we can prove their human authors intended does such a problem arise. Therefore, we will now
look at some proposals that look beyond the original human author for a solution to these problem
quotations.
D. SENSUS PLENIOR
Sensus Plenior, “fuller sense,” is a phrase that was first coined by Catholic scholars, who have
subjected the concept to thorough analysis and debate. But the concept denoted by the phrase—and
often the phrase itself—is also popular among Protestants. Although precise definitions of the idea may
differ, we will use it to designate the idea that there is in many scriptural texts a “fuller sense” than that
consciously intended by the human author—a sense intended by God, the ultimate author of Scripture.
It is this meaning, an integral part of the text, that is discerned and used by later interpreters who appear
to find “new” meaning in Old Testament texts. This “new” meaning is, then, part of the author’s
intention—the divine author and not necessarily the human author.
Raymond Brown, whose monograph is the most important statement and defense of the approach,
describes sensus plenior as “that additional deeper meaning, intended by God but not clearly intended
by the human author, which is seen to exist in the words of a biblical text (or group of texts, or even a
whole book) when they are studied in the light of further revelation or development in the
understanding of revelation.” Several elements of this definition must be further explained if we are to
understand the nature of this proposal.
First, Brown insists that the sensus plenior—though by definition involving a meaning not fully
understood by the human author—could, nevertheless, have been dimly perceived by him at times. As
he puts it, the human author’s awareness of the sensus plenior could range “from absolute ignorance to
near clarity.” Generally, however, sensus plenior is used to refer to a meaning that cannot be
demonstrated by means of traditional grammatical-historical exegesis. Second, there must be a relation
between the literal sense intended by the human author and the “fuller” sense intended by God.
Advocates of the approach insist on this control lest the concept be used as an excuse for uncontrolled
allegorizing.
Third, the sensus plenior is to be distinguished from typology; the former has to do with the deeper
meaning of words, the latter with the extended meaning of things. The bronze serpent in the wilderness
may be considered a “type” of Christ on the cross, but the application to Christ of Psalm 2:7 (“you are
my son”) involves a “deeper sense” of the words themselves. Fourth, the sensus plenior is also to be
distinguished from what Roman Catholic scholars have called “accommodation,” the application of a
biblical text to a situation not envisaged in the text itself. (“Accommodation” in this sense is to be
distinguished from “accommodation” as used with respect to God’s adapting Himself to human words
in the process of revelation.) Brown argues for the need of the sensus plenior approach by pointing to
the inadequacy of “accommodation” to handle the data: “[The New Testament writers] certainly give
no evidence that they are using the Scriptures in a sense not intended by God (accommodation); on the
contrary, they make it clear that their spiritual meaning is precisely that meaning intended by God, but
not realized by the Jews.”
Fifth, as the quotation above specifies, a valid sensus plenior can be adduced only on the basis of
“revelation” or “further development in revelation.” For Brown and other Roman Catholics, this
authority includes the church (the “magisterium”) and the New Testament. The sensus plenior becomes
very important, then, for Roman Catholics, in that it provides a way to justify through Scripture the
development of Mariology and other such otherwise poorly supported theological concepts. But, as we
suggested earlier, the sensus plenior approach is also very popular among Protestants—who, naturally,
confine the “further revelation” on which a fuller sense can authoritatively be based to the New
Testament.
What are we to make of this proposal? Many object to the notion because the lack of objective
controls renders it liable to abuse. On what basis does one decide what the Spirit might be saying
through the words of a text? Some respond that only those “deeper meanings” specifically enumerated
in the New Testament should be accepted. But whether this restriction be accepted or not, it is a well-
known logical principle that difficulties created by a theory are never sufficient to falsify that theory, if
it is well-enough established on other grounds. If sensus plenior be demonstrated to be a viable
concept, we will simply have to live with the difficulties, much as we live with the difficulties inherent
in a teleological view of world history.
A second objection to the idea of a sensus plenior holds that the New Testament authors would not
have appealed to a “hidden” meaning in the text, because this would have evaporated any apologetic
value from the appeal. Would sceptical Jews be likely to accept the claims of the early church if they
were based on unprovable assertions about what the Old Testament “really” meant? This objection has
some point, but its force is mitigated by two considerations. First, we must be careful not to think that
methods of proof not convincing to us would necessarily have been equally unconvincing to first-
century Jews. The use of Scripture both at Qumran and by the rabbis gives little evidence that modern
notions of biblical argument were considered important among ancient Jews. Second, we must ask to
what extent the New Testament appeal to Scripture is intended for “general” consumption or with
apologetic purpose. Much, if not most, of the use of the Old Testament in the New is designed to assure
or convince Christians, for whom the general relevance of the Old Testament for the church was
already assumed.
Since no biblical text clearly teaches the concept and no biblical text clearly refutes it, our final
acceptance or rejection of the idea will depend on whether it is necessary and adequate to explain the
phenomena and whether it coheres with an acceptable theory of inspiration. It is with respect to this
second point that the most serious objection to the theory is raised. Inspiration, as we noted earlier, is
generally conceived to be a “concursive” phenomenon whereby God so uses the human author that the
final product, Scripture, is definitely and uniquely God’s Word and, at the same time, the culturally,
historically, linguistically conditioned words of human beings. If this is so, it is argued, the notion that
God has placed in Scripture a meaning unknown to the human author (the “instrument” by which God
produced Scripture) is inconsistent with inspiration. Whatever it is, then, this “fuller meaning” cannot
be part of the text, since the meaning of that text is limited to what the divine/human author intended.
There is validity to this objection. A notion of inspiration that “divides” the divine and human authors
of Scripture may be theologically as suspect as a Christology that too rigidly separates the divine and
human natures of Christ.
However, this objection is not decisive. Brown, replying to such criticism, argues that the
“instrumentality” of the human author of Scripture cannot be taken in the rigid, technical sense implied
by some statements of the problem. As long as God uses that “instrument” (the human author)
according to its “proper sphere” (viz., cognition and intention) and the human author always is really an
instrument (in the sense that the “literal” sense is always present and not excluded by the “fuller”
sense), then it is neither impossible nor objectionable to think that God could “… elevate that
instrument to produce an additional effect outside the sphere of its proper activity.” Brown goes on to
quote Manuel de Tuya: “From the fact that God is using an instrument which is capable of knowledge,
it does not follow that God can use this intelligent instrument only in as much as he actually knows all
that God wanted to express.’ ” While not strictly parallel, since the production of inspired Scripture is
not involved, the example of the “prophecy” of Caiaphas (Jn 11:49–52) is suggestive: as “high priest
that year,” he communicated a message from God that goes beyond anything he consciously intended.
Walter Kaiser objects, “Could God see or intend a sense in a particular text separate and different
from that conceived and intended by his human instrument?” But this is to erect a wider chasm
between the “literal” and the “fuller” sense than advocates of a sensus plenior conceive. Brown insists
that the sensus plenior be “homogeneous” with the literal sense, and J. I. Packer, defending a limited
“fuller sense,” insists that this further meaning “… is simple extension, development, and application
of what the writer was consciously expressing.”93 The question should rather be: Could God have
intended a sense related to but more than that which the human author intended? I cannot see that the
doctrine of inspiration demands that the answer to that question be negative.
It is not clear, then, that the usual objections brought against the idea of a sensus plenior are cogent.
There does not appear to be any compelling reason for rejecting the hypothesis. On the other hand,
there are reasons to hesitate before embracing it as a comprehensive explanation of the “problem” uses
of the Old Testament in the New. For one thing, the New Testament sometimes appeals to the human
author of the Old Testament text for what appears to be a questionable application. For instance, Peter
specifically states that David spoke about the resurrection of the Messiah in Psalm 16 (Ac 2:25–28).
Yet few scholars find any evidence in the text of that psalm that David had anyone but himself in mind
as he wrote it. Moreover, the New Testament generally gives the impression that the meaning they find
in the Old Testament can be seen by others, too, once certain basic presuppositions are granted (see Jn
3:10; Mk 12:26). Yet if Jesus and the New Testament authors are appealing to a “hidden” sense of the
text, revealed only by the Spirit to them, such an argument is nonsensical. Therefore, without at this
point excluding the possibility that a sensus plenior may be the best explanation for some of the
problematic quotations, we are encouraged by these remaining difficulties to investigate other possible
approaches first.
E. A CANONICAL APPROACH
A renewed interest in the final, canonical form of the Old Testament and its significance for
exegesis and interpretation has been a hallmark of recent Old Testament studies. Many scholars, who
for various reasons find themselves unable to accept the sensus plenior approach in its usual form, have
focused on the ultimate canonical context of any single scriptural text as the basis on which to find a
“fuller” sense in that text than its human author may have been cognizant of. Norbert Lohfink, for
instance, suggests that the need to posit a sensus plenior is largely due to the unnecessarily stringent
restriction of the “literal sense” to what can be discovered through historical-grammatical exegesis.
Instead, he argues, one should posit a “ ‘theological’ literal sense,” which “means nothing other than
the meaning of the scripture read as a whole and in the analogia fidei.”
Without calling this further meaning the “ ‘theological’ literal sense”—a designation of
questionable appropriateness, since it is liable to confusion with the human author’s conscious
intention, often “theological” in nature—a number of other scholars have advocated a similar proposal.
Common to them is the argument that any specific biblical text can legitimately be interpreted in light
of its ultimate literary context—the whole canon, which receives its unity from the single divine author
of the whole. The original human author may often have had an inkling that his words were pregnant
with meaning he himself did not yet understand, but he would not have been in a position to see the
entire context of his words; some biblical books written before him may not have been available to
him, and, of course, he was unaware of the revelation that would be given after his time.
This way of looking at the phenomenon of the use of the Old Testament in the New has much to
commend it. First, it builds on the scripturally sound basis of a redemptive-historical framework, in
which the Old Testament as a whole points forward to, anticipates, and prefigures Christ and the
church: “all the law and the prophets prophesied until John” (Mt 11:13 RSV); “Christ is the telos [goal
and end] of the law” (Ro 10:4). These texts and others show that the New Testament views the Old
Testament as a collection of books that, in each of its parts and in its whole, was somehow
“incomplete” until “filled up” through the advent of Christ and the inauguration of the era of salvation.
Jesus “fills up” Israel’s law (Mt 5:17), her history (Mt 2:15), and her prophecy (Ac 3:18). That He
might also “fill up” the meaning of many specific Old Testament texts would not be at all
incommensurate with this characteristic pattern.
Second, this scheme can be shown to have its antecedents in what the Old Testament itself does
with earlier revelation. Outstanding events like the Exodus take on more and more significance as they
are used to model the future dealings of God with His people. The significance of Israel’s Davidic king
as an anticipation of the messianic king becomes clearer and more specific as the Old Testament
unfolds. The “meaning” of the choice of David to be king of Israel becomes deeper in the light of
further Old Testament revelation, going beyond what would have been recognized by David’s
contemporaries, by Samuel, or even by David himself. And not until the greater son of David himself
appears on the scene does this meaning reach its deepest level.
Third, the questionable division between the intention of the human author and that of the divine
author in a given text is decreased, if not avoided altogether, in this approach. Appeal is made not to a
meaning of the divine author that somehow is deliberately concealed from the human author in the
process of inspiration—a “sensus occultus”—but to the meaning of the text itself that takes on deeper
significance as God’s plan unfolds—a “sensus praegnans.” To be sure, God knows, as He inspires the
human authors to write, what the ultimate meaning of their words will be; but it is not as if He has
deliberately created a double entendre or hidden a meaning in the words that can only be uncovered
through a special revelation. The “added meaning” that the text takes on is the product of the ultimate
canonical shape—though, to be sure, often clearly perceived only on a revelatory basis.
And this means, fourthly, that the “fuller sense” discovered by Jesus and the apostles in Old
Testament texts is, at least to some extent, open to verification. One can, by reading the Old Testament
in the light of its completion and as a whole, as they did, often demonstrate the validity of the added
meaning they find in texts. But this must also be qualified. It is no doubt true, though the point is often
exaggerated, that Jesus and the apostles did not always work by conscious hermeneutical principles in
their application of Old Testament texts. The revelatory stance of the New Testament interpreters of the
Old must not be ignored; and some of the applications they make would never have been discovered if
they had not told us of them. Who would have guessed, for instance, that Rachel’s weeping for her
children (Jer 31:15) would have been “filled up” in the weeping of the people of Bethlehem over their
slaughtered infants (Mt 2:17–18)? The specificity of the application could not have been made without
the benefit of revelation. On the other hand, it needs to be stressed again that the “fulfillment” of this
Old Testament text does not imply that Matthew views it as a prophecy; and the context of Jeremiah
shows how appropriate and theologically profound Matthew’s application of this text is.
In the debate over whether we can “reproduce the exegesis of the New Testament,” then, our
answer must be carefully nuanced. On the one hand, we do not have the same revelatory authority to
make the specific identifications made in the New Testament. But, on the other hand, we can usually
see the theological structure and hermeneutical principles on which the New Testament interpretation
of the Old rests; and we can follow the New Testament in applying similar criteria in our own
interpretation.
The nature and usefulness of this approach can be better appreciated if we apply it to some specific
examples. We will look at two Old Testament texts, one from the Psalms and the other from the
Prophets, whose extension of meaning in the New Testament is best explained as due to deepening of
meaning through further revelation.
In 1 Corinthians 15:27, Paul quotes Psalm 8:6 (“God has put all things in subjection under his feet”
RSV) as proof that Christ’s reign must culminate in His sovereignty over everything, even death itself (v
26). Unlike both the MT and the LXX, Paul’s citation uses the third person singular verb rather than the
second person, but this modification—being necessary to fit the verse into Paul’s context—does not
really affect the meaning. Psalm 8 praises God’s majesty and expresses awe at the dignity and
supremacy to which God had raised insignificant mankind. The “man” of the psalm is clearly the
generic or representative man, particularly in his original created state.
What right, then, does Paul have to take language from the psalm and apply it to Christ? One
possible response is that Paul does not really “quote” from the psalm but simply uses the language of
the psalm to make his point (cf. our discussion about Old Testament language as a “vehicle of
expression” above). But although Paul does not use a formula to introduce the quotation, the
significance of the appeal in its context suggests that he is adducing proof from an outside source.
Others, then, consider this a case of sensus plenior: Paul, from his inspired standpoint, discerns in the
verse the meaning that God had ultimately intended in it. In the nature of the case, this possibility
cannot be excluded, but other options should be explored first.
Since Psalm 8:4 uses the phrase “son of man,” it has been suggested that an implicit Son of Man
christology lies behind the use of Psalm 8 both here and in Hebrews 2. Paul’s application would then
be validated by virtue of a typological or even prophetic understanding of Psalm 8. But Paul’s failure to
use an explicit “Son of Man” christology makes this suggestion questionable. A better approach is to
recognize the significance of the Adam-Christ comparison in Paul’s theology—specifically in 1
Corinthians 15. Paul sees Christ as the “second Adam,” the “spiritual,” “heavenly,” eschatological
Adam (1 Co 15:45–47). Christ, then, is both “like” Adam in his significance as “representative head”
and different from Adam in origin, nature, and impact on humanity (cf. also Ro 5:12–21). In some
sense, then, Paul views Christ as “perfect” man—the ideal not realized by Adam but now embodied in
the “last Adam.” Granted this perception of Christ, we can see how Paul would naturally attribute
language about the “ideal man” to Christ. The psalm itself gives no indication that anything other than
man in his ideal, created state is in view; but, in the light of New Testament revelation, it can now be
seen that none other than Christ fulfills this role of the ideal man. Paul’s use of this psalm, therefore,
receives its validation from the legitimacy of regarding Christ as ideal man. His is not an appeal to a
meaning deliberately hidden in the text by God but to the meaning that that text can now be seen to
have in the light of the significance of Christ.
No Old Testament text is more significant for Paul than Habakkuk 2:4b: “the righteous will live by
his faith.” It is cited in both Romans (1:17) and Galatians (3:11) as substantiation for Paul’s crucial
doctrine of justification by faith. The textual situation is complicated and debated. The MT adds after
“faith” (’ĕmūnâ), the third person singular pronominal suffix (“his”)—almost certainly referring to the
“righteous one” (ṣadîq). In the LXX, however, the first person singular possessive occurs (pisteōs mou,
“my faith”), a reference, it seems, to the faith, or “faithfulness,” of God.
Paul’s omission of any possessive is probably deliberate and has been variously explained. Some
have suggested that Paul in Galatians 3:11 intends a reference to God’s faithfulness rather than to
man’s faith, but this is unlikely. It is more likely that Paul omits the qualifier to highlight his notion of
faith as something “extra nos”—the gift of God, not a possession or quality of man. Here, then, is a
case in which a modification in the text effects a certain nuance of meaning. A further preliminary issue
is the strongly contested issue of what Paul intends the prepositional phrase ek pisteōs to modify. Is he
stressing that “the one who is righteous will live by faith” (taking ek pisteōs with zēsetai) or that “the
one who is righteous by faith will live” (taking ek pisteōs with dikaios)? Certainty is impossible, but
the emphasis on righteousness in both Romans and Galatians favors the second translation.
What can be said, then, about Paul’s hermeneutical procedure in using this text to support his
teaching of justification by faith? It is true that each of the three key terms in the quotation has a
specific theological nuance derived from Paul’s distinctive theology. For Paul, the one who is
“righteous” is the one who has experienced the eschatological gift of Christ (not one who is “right”
according to the standard of the law), “faith” takes on all the richness of Paul’s characteristic, dynamic
understanding, and “life” denotes eternal life.
However, the difference between Paul’s use of these terms and their meaning in Habakkuk should
not be exaggerated. In Habakkuk, the verse comes as God’s answer to the prophet’s complaint about
the judgment to be visited upon Israel through the wicked “Chaldeans.” The term ṣadîq means not
simply those who are “morally upright” but, as often in the Old Testament, those who belong to God’s
covenant. “Live” (yiheyê), to be sure, does not mean “eternal life,” but neither does it mean no more
than “exist”; the word connotes “life before God,” the enjoyment of His covenant grace and blessings.
And ’ĕmūnâ means a firm, settled trust in God that rises above the circumstances. Thus, while there is
no doubt that Paul gives to each of the terms a specific nuance that the original did not have, his
interpretation preserves the essential thrust of Habakkuk’s meaning—far different from the way the
verse was used at Qumran and in some rabbinic texts, where keeping the law was brought into the
situation.115
Once again, then, we find an Old Testament verse that is given an added depth, a new richness, a
more precise significance in the light of the “revelation of the righteousness of God” (Ro 3:21). That
God foresaw this added dimension to His words through the prophet is obvious. But there is no
evidence that Paul has cited the verse on the basis of a hidden meaning in the text. It is the further
revelation of God that brings out from Habakkuk’s great principle its ultimate meaning.
The use of the Old Testament in the New cannot be understood without setting it in the framework
of the canon as witness to salvation history. This “canonical approach”—to be distinguished from the
more specific and far-reaching concept advocated by Brevard S. Childs and others—is an essential and
basic element in the answer to the problem we are considering.
But is it able to explain all the problems? R. E. Brown compares this kind of approach unfavorably
to the sensus plenior explanation because, he claims, the New Testament authors are clear in ascribing
the “added meaning” they find to the actual text they cite, not to a new appreciation for the place of that
text in the history of redemption. It was David, as we noted earlier, who “foresaw and spoke of the
resurrection of the Christ” in Psalm 16 (Ac 2:31 RSV).
In this case, however, Brown’s sensus plenior solution fares no better, since the meaning is directly
ascribed to the human, not the divine, author. What is apparently happening here is not that Psalm 16
takes on added meaning in the light of further revelation but that further revelation enables us to
understand for the first time the ultimate significance of David’s words. And, in the case of Caiaphas, a
still different situation seems to obtain: while John’s recognition of the ironically prophetic significance
of the high priest’s words came long after the fact, on the basis of further revelation, he nevertheless
implies that the words, at the time of their utterance, possessed a meaning unknown to Caiaphas. Here,
perhaps, we come closest to a genuine sensus plenior, although we must keep in mind that Caiaphas is
not an author of Scripture.
VI. CONCLUSION
These examples, and others like them, suggest that our explanation of instances where the New
Testament finds meaning in Old Testament texts that cannot be demonstrated through normal
exegetical procedure cannot be reduced to a single formula. The ultimate canonical context of all of
Scripture is the basic starting point and is the ultimate validation of the New Testament approach. From
this basic conviction, however, Jesus and the apostles appear to proceed in several different ways.
Perhaps most frequent are occasions when later revelation provides the basis to draw out further
meaning from the text—meaning not clearly envisaged by the human author but compatible with his
intent. Typology is best viewed as a special form of this relationship. In other instances, the brute facts
of who Jesus is and what He did, combined with the inspired authors’ unique revelatory stance, serve to
give them a knowledge of the meaning of the text that would otherwise not have been possible (e.g., Ps
16 in Ac 2). And, finally, it may be that some citations are best explained according to the traditional
sensus plenior model: by direct, inspired apprehension, the New Testament authors perceive the
meaning in a text put there by God but unknown to the human author. Even in this case, however, it is
important to insist that this “deeper meaning” is based on and compatible with the meaning intended by
the human author. And, while there is some truth to the assertion that the New Testament practice of
interpreting the Old Testament should inform our own interpretation, we should be very cautious about
suggesting “deeper meanings” in the text that are not clearly enunciated within Scripture.
We have now reached the end of our analysis of popular approaches to the problem of the Old
Testament in the New. We have seen that many apparently “new” meanings discovered in Old
Testament texts by New Testament authors are no more than the literal sense of those passages when
read against the “informing” theology that precedes them.
Not all New Testament citations can be satisfactorily explained by this method, however. There
remain some that actually do give to Old Testament texts meanings that do not correspond to the
“grammatical-historical” meaning of the text, even when the “informing theology” is fully taken into
account. When this happens, it is best to think that the New Testament authors have read the text
against the background of the whole scope of revelation, preserved in the developing canon. The
meaning intended by the human author of a particular text can take on a “fuller” meaning, legitimately
developed from his meaning, in the light of the text’s ultimate canonical context. Without necessarily
appealing to the divine author as intending a meaning separate from, and hidden from, the human
author at the point of inspiration, we would appeal to the divine author as providing the larger context
of the developing canon as the framework within which the New Testament writers read the Old
Testament. What is involved is not just the ultimate significance of a text, or its valid manifold
applications, but the meaning of the text, not fully understood by the human author.
While advancing this viewpoint as the most important for understanding the New Testament use of
the Old, we have admitted that not all of the “problem texts” can be satisfactorily fit into this approach.
Acts 2 makes clear that the prophecy of the resurrection that Peter finds in Psalm 16 was David’s
intended meaning—a specificity of meaning that cannot be demonstrated from exegesis of the psalm.
Here Peter is operating on a revelatory basis that is not open to proof or disproof. All that we can show
is that the meaning Peter finds is not incommensurate with the original purpose and language of the
psalm; but whether we think his interpretation is correct will depend on whether we consider him to be
an inspired, accurate interpreter of the Old Testament.
In other words, when dealing with the problem before us, we must forthrightly admit that we cannot
prove that the New Testament interpretation of the Old Testament is correct at every point. We can
show that many are straightforward, legitimate interpretations and that many others can be considered
valid if we admit the principle of the canon as the ultimate context of meaning. In other cases, while
arguing that the meaning found by the New Testament author does not violate the meaning of the
original, we will be unable to show how or why they arrived at the meaning they did—we will have to
take them by faith, in the best sense of the word.
Does this admission mean that the phenomenon we have considered stands as an argument against
inerrancy? We would answer no. For it to be considered as evidence against inerrancy, we would have
to be able to show that Jesus or a New Testament author attributes meaning to an Old Testament text
that appears to be entirely unrelated to the evident meaning of that text. Does this ever occur? To
answer that question, we would have to conduct a thorough inductive study of every use of the Old
Testament in the New. But what can be said is that the principles enumerated in this essay—allowing
for the hermeneutical axioms of the interpreter, considering the larger theological framework of
specific texts, recognizing the validity of the developing canonical context—suffice to explain any
“problem text” of which I am aware. The “ultimate,” christological meaning discerned by New
Testament authors in passage after passage of the Old Testament often extends beyond, but is always
based on the meaning intended by the human author.
CHAPTER SIX
THE SPIRIT AND THE SCRIPTURES
John M. Frame
John M. Frame is Associate Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology at Westminster
Theological Seminary, Escondido, California. He is a graduate of Princeton University (A.B.),
Westminster Theological Seminary (B.D.), and Yale University (M.A., M.Phil.). He has authored many
articles, and his Doctrine of the Knowledge of God has been accepted for publication.
CHAPTER SIX
THE SPIRIT AND THE SCRIPTURES
The Holy Spirit is involved with the Bible in a wide variety of ways. As the Third Person of the
Trinity, He participated in formulating the eternal plan of creation and redemption, of which Scripture
is a part (Eph 1:3, “spiritual” referring to the Holy Spirit). Further, He was involved in the creation of
the heavens and the earth, without which Scripture, God’s Word to his creatures, would have had no
role (Ge 1:2; Ps 33:6 [“breath” suggests “spirit” in Hebrew]; Ps 104:30). Then, He was the author of
revelation, the one who revealed God’s truth to the prophets (Isa 61:1–4; Ac 2). Next, He was the one
in charge of inspiration, the one who supervised the placing of God’s Word in writing (1 Co 2:9–10; 2
Ti 3:16 [“spirit” being implicit in the Greek word for “inspired”]; 2 Pe 1:21). Finally, by the internal
testimony of the Spirit, He enables the “hearers” of the Word of God to savingly appropriate it (Ro
8:14–17; 1 Co 2:10–16; 1 Th 1:5; 2:13; 1 Jn 2:27; 5:9). In all of these ways, the Spirit validates God’s
Word—planning it, creating the media for its communication, authoring it, recording it, driving it home
to human hearts.
The present study will be concerned primarily with the Spirit’s work in revelation, inspiration, and
internal testimony.
A. COMMUNICATION
In giving us the Bible, God’s purpose is communication. Clearly, the art of communication is to
speak the language of one’s hearers. When God communicates, therefore, He speaks as humanly as
anyone could possibly speak—the language humans are used to, in ways humans are used to hearing.
In the Incarnation, God became truly human, enduring all the sufferings and temptations of human life.
Jesus did not live on earth with a halo or perpetually surrounded by hosts of visible angels. Many
would not have known by looking at Him that He was the true God made flesh. God did this so that
Jesus might be sympathetic as High Priest, a true representative of humanity before God (Heb 2:10–18;
4:14–16). Similarly, God’s written Word is a truly human word, one that captures all the nuances of
human life and human communication.
Some types of “uniformity” actually hinder communication. Utter constancy of style can be
monotonous. Recounting every detail of a historical event with “pedantic precision” can detract from
the point of the story. (If someone asks my age, and I give it down to the hour, minute, and second,
surely I have, in most situations, placed a roadblock in the process of communication.) If God had
spoken to the Hebrews using the precise language of twentieth-century science, He would have been
thoroughly incomprehensible. If every apparent contradiction were explained in context, what would
happen to the religious and emotional impact of the words?
Considerations like these help to reassure us that God’s ways, after all, are best. The humanity of
Scripture ought not to be an embarrassment to us, a weakness in an otherwise powerful document.
Rather, the humanity of Scripture is its strength. It is an index of the success of God in speaking our
language, in communicating His Word clearly to us.
B. VARIETY
The truth of God is many-faceted. It includes teaching about eternity past, time, and eternity future.
It tells of the various parts of God’s creation—heaven, earth, stars, and seas. It speaks to men, women,
and children of all ages. It speaks of salvation as a comprehensive change in our hearts, affecting every
aspect of life.
Describing all of these matters requires, sometimes artistry, sometimes conceptual sharpness,
sometimes analytical clarity. It requires the poetic gifts of David, the wisdom of Solomon, the passion
of Amos for social justice, the brilliant arguments of Paul, the intuitive clarity of John, the historical
scholarship of Luke. A “more uniform” text would be poorer than the Bible we have; for it would not
display as clearly the incredible richness of our salvation in Jesus Christ.
C. MYSTERY
How, then, did the Spirit work as He inspired Scripture? The answer is, mysteriously. That is what
we expect from Him (Jn 3:8). He works, paradoxically, most divinely when He is speaking most
humanly, for then He shows the perfection of His communication. Most writers on the subject of
inspiration admit that Scripture tells us very little about the way in which God inspires. Sometimes,
what He does seems to be “dictation,” however much we may wish to deny a “dictation theory” (see
Isa 6:9ff.; Rev 2; 3). Other times He works through methods of human reasoning (including an author’s
historical research—Lk 1:1–4). Sometimes He may give to a writer extraordinary knowledge of some
historical information that is otherwise unknowable, but that is not usual. In every case the Spirit
creates, by the human writer, a text that is God’s Word, in the best form for communication.
Berkouwer is a subtle thinker, and often it is not easy to describe precisely what he has in mind.
There are always qualifiers that take the sharp edges off his more controversial statements. Note above,
for example, that he does not deny that the Spirit witnesses to the biblical text, only that He so
witnesses “in abstraction” from Scripture’s “message.” Later on, in fact, he does clarify this point:
“Reformed theology was not confronted with the dilemma of a dualism between authoritative scripture
and the message it brings, because Reformed theology hears the message of salvation precisely in the
witness of scripture.”34
Nor does he quite deny that the Spirit witnesses concerning biblical authenticity, canonicity,
inspiration, historical, chronological, and geographical data. If he did, then, of course, we would have
to raise questions; for Scripture contains a great deal of material about such matters, and it is unclear
why the Spirit would leave such data out of His purview. Rather, what Berkouwer denies is that the
Spirit testifies to these “directly” or “as such” or “as nuda facta.” What, we want to know, is the “cash
value” of all this? What is Berkouwer, concretely, trying to rule in and to rule out?
Sometimes it seems as if what Berkouwer wants is a certain order of topics: “On the basis of the
New Testament, the confession of the Spirit is first of all related to salvation in Christ; and then the
Word of God is discussed.”
But it is hard to believe that Berkouwer’s concern is as trivial (and formal!) as a mere order of
discussion. Is he concerned, rather, about an emphasis? Sometimes we get that impression. But
“emphasis” in theology is itself a rather subtle matter. Berkouwer does not mean, evidently, that the
author of a paper on the Spirit’s witness, for example, must spend, say, eighty percent of the text
discussing salvation and only twenty percent discussing biblical authority. And surely an intelligent
theologian like Berkouwer would not want to limit theological reflection to those topics “emphasized”
in the New Testament, as if it were somehow impious to write about the veiling of women in 1
Corinthians 11. In what sense, then, are we required to “emphasize” matters of salvation when
discussing the Spirit’s witness? Perhaps Berkouwer’s point, after all, is not well-described as a “matter
of emphasis.” But in that case, what is he saying? What does it mean to deny that the Spirit witnesses to
historical data “as such”?
Berkouwer’s chapter on the Spirit’s witness leaves these matters rather unclear, but other parts of
the book illumine his concern somewhat. In the chapter on “reliability,” for instance, Berkouwer
mentions differences in the Synoptic accounts, and concludes that the biblical concepts of witness,
truth, and reliability are
not in opposition to a freedom in composing and expressing the mystery of Christ; their purpose is rather to
point in their testimony to that great light.… The aim of the portrayal was not to mislead and to deceive; it
was not even a “pious fraud,” for it was wholly focussed on the great mystery. This explains why the church
through the ages was scarcely troubled by the difference pointed out long before, and by the inexact, non-
notarial portrayal. A problem was created only as a result of attempts at harmonization and the criticism that
followed.… But through a recognition of the true nature of the Gospels, the way is opened to hear and
understand the one testimony.
Here Berkouwer argues that since the purpose of Scripture is to proclaim the “great mystery,” we
should not expect a “notarial” precision in the biblical narratives. Scripture can witness adequately to
its content and message without such exactness. Therefore, in making judgments about the “reliability”
of Scripture, we must take into account its content, message, and purpose. Relating this discussion to
the Spirit’s work, then, we may say that, for Berkouwer, the Spirit does not testify to a “notarially
precise” Scripture; He validates the truth of Scripture but only that kind of truth appropriate to the
message.
All of this is true enough as far as it goes, but it is scarcely new. Orthodox Protestants have long
denied that biblical inerrancy entails “pedantic precision.” How, then, does Berkouwer differ from
those orthodox thinkers whom he seems to be criticizing? Chiefly, I think, in the vagueness of his
formulation and also in his special agenda: Berkouwer throughout the book seems to be urging upon
theological conservatives a greater openness toward current forms of biblical criticism,38 often charging
them with “fear” or with avoiding questions40 when they are not as open as he would like. But he rarely
indicates that there are any limits at all to this openness. (He does, to be sure, indicate that Bultmann’s
demythologization is unacceptable). The reader is left with a vague feeling, then, that he ought not to
fuss too much over biblical criticism, that he should be open to almost any critical proposal. That vague
feeling seems to be the “bottom line” of Berkouwer’s analysis.
I suppose, then, that in evaluating Berkouwer’s view we should ask whether he has succeeded in
justifying this vague openness to biblical criticism. And, of course, the answer is no. Certainly,
Scripture’s purpose is to proclaim Christ, and it is worth pointing out as Berkouwer does (and most all
the orthodox do) that this purpose does not necessitate “pedantic precision.” But there is nothing about
this purpose to warrant a vague openness concerning the theories of modern biblical scholarship.
On the contrary, there is much in Scripture to warn us against such openness. Scripture teaches us
that we live in a fallen world, in which the fashionable currents of human learning are opposed to God
and to His gospel (Ro 1; 1 Co 1; 2). It warns us over and over again about the danger of false teaching
from within the church (Mt 7:15–20; Gal 1; 2 Th 2; 1 Ti 1:3ff.; 4:1ff.; 2 Ti 3:1ff.; 2 Pe 2). Thus, if we
are really to read Scripture in terms of its central message, we will be suspicious of modern biblical
scholarship, particularly when it comes from those who have renounced the Bible’s own supernatural
world view. This does not mean that there is no truth in the writings of modern scholars; the question
before us is one of our attitude or disposition toward them. Berkouwer has not succeeded in justifying
his recommendation of sunny optimism.
Otherwise, much of Berkouwer’s concern is legitimate. He is right in saying that we should not fear
to investigate the difficult questions. Berkouwer is also right to insist that the Spirit does not merely
witness to the authority of a book. He witnesses to the gospel message, to what the book says.
Believing Scripture is believing that message.43 At the same time, believing the message entails
believing the book, for the message is the book’s content. And, although the book is centrally focussed
in certain great events—Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection—it speaks out about everything in creation,
including history, geography, and science. It speaks of a God who made the heavens, earth, and sea and
who acted in earthly history and geography to save us from our sins. It urges us to do all things to His
glory, whether we are preachers or carpenters or historians or scientists (1 Co 10:31). As long as we
read Scripture responsibly (yes, “in relation to its message”), we need not fear (as I believe Berkouwer
does) studying its implications for these and all areas of human life. Berkouwer’s view is not only
wrong but greatly harmful, insofar as he discourages such study, which study is in essence the attempt
to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Co 10:5).
Does the Spirit tell us what books belong in the canon? Does He help us decide between rival
interpretations? Does He help us with scholarly questions about literary genre, variant readings, and the
like? Not in the sense of whispering in our ears the solutions to these problems! On that question, the
Reformers, the orthodox, and Berkouwer are agreed: Scripture never represents the Spirit’s work as the
giving of new information about the Bible. No one, for example, ought to claim that the Spirit has
given him a list of canonical books; the actual list comes through historical and theological
investigation of the contents of these books. Yet the Spirit has certainly played an important role in the
history of the canon. By illumining and persuading the church concerning the true canonical books, He
has helped the church to distinguish between false and true. He has motivated the church to seek out
reasons for what He was teaching them in their hearts.
Thus, the Spirit gets involved in everything we think and do as Christians. There is no area from
which He, or His Scriptures, may be excluded. In that Berkouwer calls us to read those Scriptures
responsibly, he should be applauded. But insofar as he discourages (as he does, at least by the
ambiguity of his proposals) the comprehensive application of Scripture to all of life in opposition to
unbelieving thought, he is not a reliable guide.
Here Calvin talks as if the Spirit’s testimony and rational arguments were competing factors, as it
were, contributing to our assurance of Scripture. It sounds as if arguments are an inadequate means of
assurance, the Spirit’s testimony an adequate means. Now it is surely true that many arguments are
unsound and do not truly warrant faith in Scripture and that, therefore, the testimony of the Spirit goes
beyond those arguments. It is also true that even sound arguments without the Spirit’s testimony will
not lead anyone to saving knowledge of Christ and Scripture. Doubtless points of this sort were in
Calvin’s mind.
But Calvin’s expressions might also be taken to mean that the case for the truth of Scripture is
inadequate, and that we may come to belief in it only by irrational means. Such a view would certainly
be illegitimate (and I think contrary to Calvin’s own intent). Or, these statements might be understood
as meaning that the Spirit supplements the evidence, giving us a legitimate warrant in place of
inadequate ones. But what could this mean but that (1) Scripture lacks objective authority apart from
the Spirit’s witness (a notion we have refuted in section I), and (2) the Spirit gives us a new revelation
to provide the adequate warrant, a notion that Calvin always rejects?
Such data have led to problems in the interpretation and theological use of Calvin’s doctrine. We do
not have the space for a historical excursus, but I do believe that the Dutch Calvinist theologians
Kuyper and Bavinck, along with the philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (not to mention Barth and
Berkouwer, whom we discussed earlier) have pressed Calvin’s teaching in a somewhat irrationalist
direction. Similarly, the contemporary philosopher Alvin Plantinga has spoken of a “reformed
epistemology” in which belief in God is accepted as “properly basic” (that is, not based on any
reasoning or evidence). Jay M. Van Hook argues that although Plantinga can successfully defend the
rationality of theistic belief on this basis (all systems of thought have to begin somewhere, therefore
Christianity has a right to begin with God), he cannot show the irrationality of someone who denies
Christianity (holding that something other than the biblical God, the Great Pumpkin for instance, is
“properly basic”).
I think there is much value in Plantinga’s concept of “proper basicality.” God is the Christian’s
presupposition, the norm of all his thinking about everything else. More needs to be said, however,
about how one distinguishes rational from irrational “presupposings” and about how the Christian
presupposition has a rational basis in God’s self-revelation. And there is some danger now that
reformed people will avoid wrestling with such questions, thinking that the doctrine of the Spirit’s
testimony answers them sufficiently.
That doctrine, however, is not suited to that particular purpose. Scripture does not present it for the
purpose of overcoming inadequacies in the rational basis of Christianity. The point we need to
remember is that there is no competition between the rationality of the Scriptures and the witness of the
Spirit. We do not need to make the case for Scripture somehow irrational or inadequate in order to do
justice to the Spirit’s testimony. If knowledge of God is to be possible, both rationality and the Spirit
are needed—rationality so that faith will be warranted, indeed obligatory, and the Spirit so that our
sinful unbelief, our refusal to accept our obligation, will be overcome.
The above discussion will seem rationalistic to some. For the record, let me indicate my belief that
human reason has a great many limitations, especially in matters of faith. I freely grant that the
“knowledge of God” in Scripture is far more than a theoretical contemplation, that it involves
obedience, love, and trust. Further, coming to know God is far from a merely intellectual or academic
experience. It involves all our faculties (as well as those of the Spirit!); it is more like coming to know
a friend than coming to know, say, wave mechanics. For that matter, even learning wave mechanics is
not a “purely intellectual” process, whatever that may mean. Intellectual operations are always
dependent upon our experience, our emotional make-up, our religious and ideological commitments,
etc.60
It should be said, too, that the testimony of the Spirit works in the Spirit’s typically mysterious way
(Jn 3:8). As we have said, He does not whisper in our ears; but neither does He work predictably
through the normal channels of education so that those with advanced degrees automatically have the
greatest spiritual perception. He gives us, rather, a sort of “intuition” for things divine, as many writers
have put it. We recognize Scripture as the Word in the same way we recognize white to be white or
sweet to be sweet. Suddenly, that Word, which we had, as unbelievers, despised, becomes fresh and
exciting and precious to us. Arguments and reasons that, perhaps, we have heard many times and
rejected display their cogency suddenly before our eyes. We recognize the loveliness of the gospel and
respond with joy.
Nor do I wish to say that we must be able to supply proofs and arguments in order to justify faith.
As I have said, much of our reasoning is very informal, like that of the football quarterback. Generally
it is not formulated into syllogisms, and usually it would be difficult, I think, even for a professional
logician to identify the premises and the logical steps. God has simply given us a sense of what is
reasonable, and usually that is sufficient. (Note how all reasoning, not just that which deals with
matters of faith, may involve something like the Spirit’s testimony.) On the other hand, if someone has
the God-given skill to develop some kind of formal proof, I know of nothing in the doctrine of the
Spirit’s testimony that would prevent him from doing so.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SOME MISCONCEPTIONS OF THE IMPACT OF THE
“ENLIGHTENMENT” ON THE DOCTRINE OF SCRIPTURE
John D. Woodbridge
John D. Woodbridge is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Church History at Trinity
Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. He is a graduate of Wheaton College (B.A.), Michigan
State University (M.A.), Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (M.Div.), and the University of Toulouse
(Doctorat de troisième cycle). He has written Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim
Proposal, co-authored The Gospel in America: Themes in the Story of America’s Evangelicals (with
Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll), edited Renewing Your Mind in a Secular World, co-edited four other
books, and contributed chapters and articles to numerous other publications.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SOME MISCONCEPTIONS OF THE IMPACT OF THE
“ENLIGHTENMENT” ON THE DOCTRINE OF SCRIPTURE
Orthodoxies of historical interpretation are often imposing edifices. Even when compelling evidence
demonstrates that they are built on shifting foundations, they do not usually collapse in a heap. Those
interpretations that commend a theological system are especially resistant to criticism.
Recently, I spoke with a distinguished German scholar about Luther’s views of biblical authority.
The professor’s comments confirm how difficult it is to challenge “accepted” historical interpretations.
One segment of the conversation went something like this:
“Did Martin Luther believe that the Bible was without error?”
“Yes.”
“Did Martin Luther include within the purview of biblical authority the natural world?”
“Yes. Neoorthodox writers of this century created the idea that Lutherans of the sixteenth century
did not think that the Bible spoke about the natural world. I published a volume by a Lutheran
theologian of the sixteenth century who used the Bible as his sourcebook for a discussion of birds, fish,
and animals. My study was not welcomed by some scholars in Germany, given its implications. It was
published in Austria.”
Here was a renowned specialist, with apparently no theological brief to deliver, who acknowledged
without hesitation that Martin Luther upheld complete biblical infallibility and that it was a
neoorthodox historiography that had contributed to a widespread misunderstanding of Luther and early
Lutherans on that point.
This exchange with the professor underscores an age-old problem: the theological presuppositions
of historians (including the present writer) sometimes get in the way of their honest effort to write
scrupulously fair history. The spate of recent interpretations regarding the history of biblical authority
may mirror the theological presuppositions of their authors more than unwary readers might suppose.
What has prompted the renewed interest in the history of biblical authority within recent decades?
Several eminent historians have turned to the topic because they are students of “secularism” and of
“culture.” They want to determine how the Bible lost its status as an authoritative, divinely inspired
book in the minds of many Europeans or how its teachings helped shape a particular culture at a
particular time. Other historians have written on the subject, motivated by a quest to legitimize their
own beliefs. This seems especially true of several Roman Catholic theologians. At Vatican II, their
church delimited the scope of biblical inerrancy to “that truth which God wanted put into the sacred
writings for the sake of our salvation,” thereby generally excluding the domains of history and science
from the purview of inerrancy. This was a new stance, perhaps dictated by the church’s desire to seek
an accommodation with higher criticism and macroevolution. For centuries, Roman Catholics had
taken it for granted that the church upheld the Bible’s complete infallibility (including the domains of
history and science). Professor James T. Burtchaell of Notre Dame writes aptly:
Christians early inherited from the Jews the belief that the biblical writers were somehow possessed by God,
who was thus to be reckoned the Bible’s proper author. Since God could not conceivably be the agent of
falsehood, the Bible must be guaranteed free from any error. For centuries this doctrine lay dormant, as
doctrines will: accepted by all, pondered by few. Not until the 16th century did inspiration and its corollary,
inerrancy, come up for sustained review. The Reformers and Counter-Reformers were disputing whether all
revealed truth was in Scripture alone, and whether it could be interpreted by private or by official scrutiny.
Despite a radical disagreement on these issues both groups persevered in receiving the Bible as a
compendium of inerrant oracles dictated by the Spirit.
Post-Vatican II scholars sensed that the council’s delimitation of inerrancy to “salvation truths” had
to be explained. Several like Oswald Loretz wrote essays and books attempting to demonstrate that the
new delimitation corresponded to what Christians of earlier generations had believed. This
concordance alone, it was felt, might help justify their claim that their church’s new statement
continued to reflect “orthodoxy” in the best sense of that expression.5
In their revisionist efforts, these Roman Catholic interpreters encountered a stubborn historiography
that is very old. It has survived sharp criticisms from Johann Salomo Semler in the eighteenth century,
Samuel Coleridge and Charles Briggs in the nineteenth, and Protestant liberal and neoorthodox
historians in the twentieth. This historiography, summarized above by Professor Burtchaell, propounds
the thesis that the so-called “central tradition” of the church retained the doctrine of biblical inerrancy
until at least the eighteenth century.
For many contemporary critics this historiography has uncomfortable implications. It suggests quite
strongly that their own beliefs about biblical authority are innovative and have probably departed from
the basic teachings of the Christian churches. These scholars prefer to view biblical inerrancy as a
novel doctrine created during one era or another of church history; they want to represent their own
beliefs as reflecting what the Bible teaches and what wise Christians of earlier generations believed.
But when, according to these scholars, was biblical inerrancy created, and who were its originators?
Here differences of opinion begin to multiply. The candidates for originators of biblical inerrancy have
been numerous. During the heyday of neoorthodoxy, prominent scholars propounded the thesis that
biblical inerrancy was created by Protestant Scholastics who sought certitude in the truthfulness of
written text rather than being content with the authority of Christ, whom one encounters in the text. The
creation of the doctrine of inerrancy allegedly took place in the late sixteenth century and is particularly
associated with the names of Lambert Daneau, Flacius Illyricus, and other second- and third-generation
Protestants. With the recent work of Jill Raitt, Olivier Fatio, and Richard Muller, the historical
synthesis sustaining a neoorthodox interpretation of theology is under considerable strain. Its very
survival is in doubt.7
Persuasive monographs continue to appear that argue for greater continuity between the Reformers’
theological teachings and those of their descendants. Professor Geoffrey Bromiley has well described
the views of Scripture advocated by continental Protestant theologians of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries as compared to the perspectives of Luther and Calvin:
In these writers the doctrine of scripture is no doubt entering on a new phase. Tendencies may be discerned
in the presentation which give evidence of some movement away from the Reformation emphases. The
movement, however, has not yet proceeded very far. The tendencies are only tendencies. What change there
has been is more in style, or materially, in elaboration. The substance of the Reformation doctrine of
scripture has not yet been altered, let alone abandoned.
The neoorthodox historiography regarding the Bible is less persuasive today than it was in the 1940s
and 1950s.
In 1979 Professors Jack Rogers and Donald McKim published The Authority and Interpretation of
the Bible: An Historical Approach. They moved the creation of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy back
to the last decades of the seventeenth century, linking it to the work of Francis Turretin and the
influence of Newton and Locke on theological reflection. In this fashion, Rogers and McKim,
Presbyterians both, could deny that the Westminster divines’ commitment to biblical infallibility was
equivalent to a commitment to biblical inerrancy. Obviously, if the Westminster divines drew up their
Confession in the 1640s, they did so before the doctrine of biblical inerrancy was fully fashioned. For
Professors Rogers and McKim, the Bible’s infallibility excludes purposeful deceits but not “technical
errors.” It is infallible in accomplishing its saving purpose, but not infallible for matters such as history,
science, and geography.
In 1980 the study by Professors Rogers and McKim was voted “Book of the Year” by reviewers of
Eternity magazine. But eventually criticism of the volume began to build. A good number of historians
and theologians were unprepared to accept its linchpin thesis that when Augustine, Luther, and Calvin
indicated that the Bible was without error, they simply meant that it contained no “purposeful deceits.”
This criticism stemmed from writers whose own theological outlooks differed considerably. The
Rogers and McKim proposal did not ultimately weather its reviews very well.
Perhaps the most subtle of the newer interpretations to challenge the older “stubborn
historiography” regarding biblical inerrancy is one that emphasizes a distinction between formulations
of biblical inerrancy before the mid-seventeenth century and modern formulations of the doctrine. This
interpretation acknowledges that biblical inerrancy was indeed espoused by earlier Christians but that
the formulation of the doctrine advocated by today’s proponents differs substantially from the one
entertained by these earlier Christians. According to this interpretation, the modern formulation of
biblical inerrancy is a product of “the scientific age and age of rationalism” (generally associated with
the Enlightenment).
This proposal has been championed by Professor Bruce Vawter (a Roman Catholic scholar) and, to
a certain extent, by Professor George Marsden (a Protestant specialist in the history of American
Fundamentalism). Professor Vawter concedes that the church fathers advocated a belief in biblical
inerrancy. However, he quickly adds the caveat that they, unlike many modern defenders of biblical
inerrancy, coupled it to a doctrine of “condescension.” The doctrine of “condescension,” then, is a
major variable that sets off the early church’s perception of biblical inerrancy from “Fundamentalist”
conceptions of the same doctrine. Vawter explains:
The fathers did of course believe that the Bible was an inerrant and, if you will, an infallible repository of
revealed religion; but from right to left, from John Chrysostom, let us say, to Theodore of Mopsuestia, by
theological recourses like synkatabasis, “condescension,” to be discerned in the inspired word, they
recognized its limitations and time-conditionedness in respect to a continually developing human awareness
and factual knowledge which is also the gift of God.
When did the later “Fundamentalist” doctrine of biblical inerrancy allegedly emerge? Professor
Vawter perceives its origins in an age that is apparently associated with the “Enlightenment”:
“Biblical inerrancy” or “infallibility” in the fundamentalist sense, as has often been observed, is the product
of the scientific age and the age of rationalism, a simplistic response to both. It is definitely not one of the
authentic heritages of mainline Christianity.
Professor Vawter’s influential interpretation is showcased in an essay that generally defends the
Christian’s acceptance of macroevolution.
Professor George Marsden has drafted a proposal that shares several of the same features as the one
preferred by Professor Vawter. Like Vawter, he allows that the premise that the Bible does not err is an
old one. But then he associates the “Fundamentalist” doctrine of inerrancy with the Bible perceived as
a scientific textbook. According to Professor Marsden, this latter doctrine differs from the way the
biblical authors perceived the truthfulness of their accounts and from the way earlier Christians spoke
about the “errorless” character of the Scriptures. He summarizes his argument in this striking way:
It is incorrect then to think of fundamentalist thought as premodern. Its views of God’s revelation, for
example, although drawn from the Bible, are a long way from the modes of thought of the ancient Hebrews.
For instance, fundamentalists’ intense insistence on the “inerrancy” of the Bible in scientific and historical
detail is related to this modern style of thinking. Although the idea that Scripture does not err is an old one,
fundamentalists accentuate it partly because they often view the Bible virtually as though it were a scientific
treatise.
For Marsden, the “Fundamentalist” doctrine of biblical inerrancy is based on the scientific model
associated with Newtonism and Baconian inductivism. The impact of Common Sense philosophy also
helped fashion its configuration.19 Dispensational writers of the nineteenth century who allegedly
submitted to these influences were pivotal in shaping the doctrine. Marsden observes:
It was vital to the dispensationalists that their information be not only absolutely reliable but also precise.
They considered the term “inerrancy” to carry this implication. Statements found in Scripture would not
deviate from the exact truth. The importance of this assumption for prophetic interpretation is obvious.
Precise numbers of years had to be calculated and correlated with actual historical events.
In sum, Marsden views the “Fundamentalist” definition of inerrancy as emphasizing the precision
of biblical statements regarding history and science. And, like Vawter, he notes elements of
“Enlightenment” thought that allegedly helped create the doctrine of inerrancy in its modern format—a
format that is not completely commensurate with the earlier statements of the Christian churches that
the Bible has no errors.
In contradistinction to the influential Augustinian tradition on the subject, Marsden does not
apparently believe that the doctrine of inerrancy has much to do with the issue of the Bible’s authority.
He downplays the doctrine on a consistent basis, often identifying it solely as a Fundamentalist belief.
In defining who an Evangelical is, he declines to mention the doctrine; rather, he argues that the
Evangelical is one who believes in “the Reformation doctrine of the final authority of the Bible.”22 In
reality, the Reformers were Augustinian and would have had little truck for Marsden’s ambivalence
towards an affirmation of inerrancy. Augustine wrote: “For it seems to me that the most disastrous
consequences must follow upon our believing that anything false is found in the sacred books.”
Whereas for both Vawter and Marsden, the “Enlightenment” created the intellectual context for the
shaping of the “Fundamentalist” doctrine of biblical inerrancy, Bernard Ramm notes the fact that
biblical scholars in the Enlightenment recognized the humanity of the biblical texts and in their biblical
criticism challenged an unhealthy emphasis of “orthodox” Christians upon its divinity. Ramm invites
Evangelicals to come to grips with certain elements of the Enlightenment’s view of the Bible in
forming their own perceptions of biblical authority. For him, Karl Barth serves as a remarkable
resource person in this regard. According to Ramm, Barth made his peace with the Enlightenment
without succumbing to its more negative criticisms of the Christian faith.25 If Evangelicals will do the
same, they will avoid “obscurantism.”
The “Enlightenment,” then, has emerged as a historical period of great significance for several
recent interpreters of the history of biblical authority. For Professors Vawter and Marsden, it was
during the Enlightenment that the modern “Fundamentalist” doctrine of biblical inerrancy began to be
formulated; for Professor Ramm, it was during this period that scholars began to give due attention to
the humanity of the Scriptures and to recognize its fallibility.
How valid are the claims of these distinguished scholars? Before we assess their claims, we should
comment briefly about the difficulties associated with our authors’ use of global expressions such as
“scientific age and the age of rationalism” (Vawter), “modern style of thinking” (Marsden), and
“Enlightenment” (Marsden, Ramm). These “paradigmatic” expressions are losing much force today as
scholars grapple with the difficulties of defining what the “Enlightenment” may have represented.
The authors were impressed by the staying power of the Christian faith during the eighteenth century.
Specialists in the history of the book trade also want to track how the books, broadsheets, journals
and other printed materials purveying “Enlightenment ideas” moved through the cosmopolitan
Republic of Letters from one nation to another. Are there chronological sequences to be charted? Is the
year 1680, associated with Paul Hazard’s dating of the “Crisis of the European Mind” (1680–1715), the
baseline from which any such tracking should begin? Or should another year be selected? Complicating
these issues even further is another issue that Professor Aram Vartanian has brilliantly brought into
focus. In reviewing benchmark studies by Professors Michel Vovelle, Daniel Roche, and Robert
Darnton, Vartanian points out that Michel Vovelle discovered signs of “dechristianization” in the
province of Provence decades before the writings of the philosophes Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, La
Mettrie, and others were widely disseminated:
What the graphs show, therefore, is that Lumières as a literary and philosophical enterprise, and
dechristianization as a social process, were independent phenomena, though destined to converge in the Late
Enlightenment. Put another way, when the spirit of the Enlightenment eventually reached the general public,
the latter had already prepared itself, by a different route, to receive, and practice it.
Vartanian proposes that the crucial question on the agenda of present research for French historians is
to explain what forces were bringing about the “dechristianization” processes that occurred in general
isolation from the “literary-philosophic” movement associated with the French philosophes.
Here the research of Professor Dale Van Kley may be of signal importance. He does not disparage
the importance of interpretations that stress the influence of the philosophes’ writings or the role of
economic factors in giving shape to the Siècle des lumières in France. But he does suggest with
sophisticated arguments and rich documentation that the “unraveling of the Old Order” has much to do
with religious controversies between Jesuits and Jansenists that spilled over into the political domain
especially during the refusal of sacraments dispute of the 1750s and the broils associated with the
expulsion of the Jesuits in the 1760s. These controversies contributed to the breaking down of the
loyalties of many Frenchmen to the institutions of the Ancien Régime.
Van Kley’s studies once again bring to the fore the seriousness with which many eighteenth-
century Europeans treated questions of religion. It will not do to speak of the Enlightenment as a period
of unmitigated “secularism” or indifferentism. Even Christianity’s most virulent foes (e.g., Voltaire)
viewed the times as a mixed age of “lights” (the progress of la philosophie) and “darkness” (the
superstition and fanaticism that he associated with the practitioners of the Christian religion).
These brief comments should give us pause. Historians today are not at all certain that Immanuel
Kant was speaking for a majority of Europeans when he penned his controversial definition of the age
in the essay “Was ist Aufklärung?”: “Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity.
Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another.” Professor
Vartanian reminds us that the number of Frenchmen whose religious beliefs were molded by the
writings of the philosophes was quite small: “Clearly, those whose religious attitudes were formed
through exposure to the philosophes should be counted as an integral part of the Enlightenment proper.
They must have been no more than 50,000 individuals, and their class-reference was no doubt quite
diversified.…”
Recent studies are taking far more note of the persistence of the Christian faith in the eighteenth
century. Even Baron d’Holbach’s famous coterie at Paris was not the hotbed of atheism that a
longstanding historiography had announced with assurance. Contemporaries often viewed the Seven
Years War (1756–1763) as a war of religion pitting Roman Catholic against Protestant powers.
No longer is it possible to identify the age solely with Voltaire or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, both of
whom died in 1778. Nor can we rely upon paradigmatic expressions such as the “scientific age and age
of reason” (Vawter) without specifying exactly what we mean. The diversity of intellectual opinion and
religious convictions in the period does not lend itself to overly bold categorizations of this type. In
bolstering an argument, contemporaries frequently appealed to “everyday experience” as much as they
did to reason. John Wesley and George Whitefield lived their lives in the eighteenth century as
vigorously as did Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1984, Professor Vartanian suggested that
new research is forcing us to reconsider dramatically what the nature of the “Enlightenment” may have
been.
From Morgan’s point of view, a belief in biblical infallibility abets the cause of “atheists” because
they can exploit its actual errancy. Individuals should turn towards Reason as a final authority.
Challenges of this kind often prompted “Enlightenment” Christians to construct their apologies in the
various ways that they did. Professor Hugh D. McDonald’s thoughtful assessment of the value of their
apologetic choices stands as a heuristic counterevaluation to Professor Vawter’s harsh judgments.
In the last decades of the seventeenth century, daunting quests to determine criteria upon which
religious belief could be established and to draw up a list of essential doctrines upon which Christians
of all communions could agree captured the attention of such disparate thinkers as John Locke and
William Stillingfleet in England and Gottfried Leibniz in Germany. But the issues had become far more
complex because critics were now questioning the infallibility of the Bible, thereby challenging it as a
source of utterly truthful information and right doctrine.
In earlier centuries, Christians had simply assumed that the Bible was infallible, as Professor
Burtchaell noted. This explains why several Roman Catholic scholars were dismayed when Erasmus
not only seemed to dispute the infallibility of the Vulgate through his lower criticism but went a step
further by suggesting that the original authors of the Scriptures could have made errors. John Eck
counseled Erasmus about his disquieting comments on Matthew 2:6:
Listen, dear Erasmus: do you suppose any Christian will patiently endure to be told that the evangelists in
their Gospels made mistakes? If the authority of Holy Scripture at this point is shaky, can any other passage
be free from the suspicion of error?
Eck did not believe that “any Christian” would listen to the claim of the sage of Rotterdam with
equanimity. Moreover, he cited Saint Augustine to the effect that if a genuine error existed in Holy
Scripture, that fact alone would throw the authority of Scripture into jeopardy. Perhaps due to negative
reactions, Erasmus did ultimately revise his interpretation of Matthew 2:6. In the early sixteenth
century, when the Reformers put quill to paper, few dared challenge the infallibility of Holy Writ.
However, by the second half of the seventeenth century, not only had a number of Socinians,
Libertines, Remonstrants, La Peyrère, Hobbes, and members of several radical groups insisted that the
Bible contained a few errors in minor matters, but Roman Catholic writers like Henry Holden (1596–
1662) and the biblical critic Richard Simon (1638–1712) began to question the Bible’s sufficiency to
communicate revealed truth perfectly. In his Divinae fidei analysis (first edition, 1652; 1655; 1685;
1767), Holden, using a “rational” method (whose inspiration was probably Cartesian), attempted to
separate out what was “certain” from what was “doubtful” in Christianity. Holden was perhaps the first
major Roman Catholic thinker to limit inerrancy to matters of faith and practice. 67 In his Histoire
critique du Vieux Testament (1678), the Oratorian Richard Simon apparently denied that Moses wrote
all the Pentateuch. Although Simon claimed that his controversial “public scribes” hypothesis actually
responded to Baruch Spinoza’s earlier criticisms against biblical infallibility and the Mosaic authorship
of the Pentateuch in the latter’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), a good number of
contemporaries like Bossuet wondered if Simon could be a Spinozist in priest’s garb.
Modern scholars are so accustomed to theological pluralism that they often have difficulty grasping
the fact that before 1680 most Christians believed that to challenge the Mosaic authorship of the Bible
or the doctrine of biblical infallibility was tantamount to challenging the truth claims of the Christian
religion. Little wonder, then, that Spinoza’s Tractatus—which also contested the value of miracles and
prophecy as validating pillars of Christian truth claims—transformed its author into a theological
pariah in the eyes of the orthodox. Even Pierre Bayle described the book as “pernicious and
detestable.” Little wonder that Simon was excluded from the Oratorian order in 1678 and that the first
edition of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament was confiscated and burned. Only a few volumes of
this edition escaped the flames.
But we should recall, as Professor Jacques Le Brun astutely observes, Holden and Simon belonged
to a long line of Roman Catholic controversialists (Erasmus, François de Sales, Charron, Camus,
Valeriano Magni, and others) who, in their attempts to exalt the authority of the church, emphasized the
insufficiency of Scripture. The alleged insufficiencies and weakness of Scripture “were apologetical
arguments before they became the conclusions of criticism.”73 Simon, then, who has been hailed as the
“Father of Biblical Criticism” (as has Spinoza), still worked ostensibly with the agenda of a traditional
Roman Catholic disputant, but his hypotheses and conclusions ranged far beyond those of earlier more
conservative apologists
The irony of the Roman Catholic “pyrrhonical,” or skeptical, argumentation is that deists frequently
exploited its arsenal not only in their attacks against the Protestants’ perspectives on Scripture but
against the Christian faith in general. For example, the free-thinkers John Toland and Anthony Collins
cited the arguments of Simon to demonstrate that the Bible contained “errors.” The deist Matthew
Tindal, in a tour de force, proceeded to argue that if the Scriptures are errant, God cannot hold us
accountable to them. To what standard can God in justice hold us accountable if the teachings of the
Bible and the churches are uncertain? Tindal’s answer was plain: Reason. If we follow the light of our
reason as best we can, God cannot help but judge us positively. We did the best we could with the light
we had.76
Astute contemporaries perceived that deists were borrowing Roman Catholic pyrrhonical
arguments. William Bentley, a shrewd critic of Anthony Collins, pinpointed this borrowing clearly.
Collins had portrayed several Roman Catholic scholars (including Simon) as intent upon demonstrating
the corruption of the texts of Scripture in order to force Protestants to accept the authority of the
church. To this Bentley responded:
One confesses that the painstaking research of Father Simon had no other goal than to sap the foundations of
the Reformed Religion and that this savant Roman Catholic thought nothing better for his own goals than to
render Holy Scripture precarious. This ruse is thus a knavish ecclesiastical trick à la Roman; and how can it
be, if you please, that a man [Collins] who professes to declare war on all Priests, and all knavish
ecclesiastical tricks, feels so at home with a Roman Catholic priest, and supports him with so much warmth
in the pious intention of maintaining the cause of Popes?
Bentley also fended off Collins’ claim that the Christian faith is uncertain because we no longer
have the original documents of the Scriptures. Roman Catholics like Simon had earlier argued in a
similar fashion, except the Oratorian had riposted that recourse to Roman Catholic traditions
reestablished the certainty. Bentley was particularly galled because Collins had cited his own
philological work to bolster the hypothesis. Collins had reasoned this way: if as the Cambridge scholar
Bentley had argued, some thirty thousand variants exist in the New Testament alone, how can one
know with assurance anything about what the Bible teaches?
Bentley responded to Collins with a gloves-off counterstroke. He wisely remarked that the
discovery of many manuscripts since the fifteenth century had provided biblical scholars with greater
means for emending obvious faulty readings in the Greek texts than when they had fewer manuscripts.
In turning the tables on the freethinker Collins, Bentley was not striking a new pose among Christians.
Richard Baxter had argued much the same way earlier in the seventeenth century. Bentley’s
contemporary, Jacques Basnage, a French Protestant, argued at length against the Roman Catholic
apologetic that tried to exploit the “lost originals” idea.82 Basnage believed that the originals had been
lost by Tertullian’s day but that accurate copies nonetheless had been preserved. Protestants did not
need to resort to Roman Catholic tradition to counterbalance the nefarious effects of the loss of the
“originals.” For that matter, Augustine had recommended that students correct the mistakes in their
copies of Holy Scripture.84
The emphasis by many Protestants in the eighteenth century upon the accuracy of the Bible’s
historical accounts and teachings regarding the natural world becomes more understandable when we
perceive how deists—and to certain extent Roman Catholics—had exploited the issue. Moreover, at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, various illuminist groups such as the French Inspirés seemed to
deemphasize Scripture by their appeal to personal prophetic utterances. But eighteenth-century
Protestants who believed that the Bible was without error in historical detail were not innovators; they
were defending a position long honored in the Christian churches.
Even a cursory reading of commentaries from earlier centuries reveals that Christians, whether
Roman Catholic or Protestant, believed that the Bible gave truthful information in its historical
allusions and comments about the natural world. Professor John Redwood describes the commitments
of seventeenth-century Christians: “To the seventeenth-century biblical chronology, the account of
Moses, and the science of geology were all part of the same world of learning. No one seeking to
enquire into rocks or minerals, into earth history or the formation of the earth’s configuration could
afford to ignore or deny the value of his primary source, the Bible.” James Ussher in the early
seventeenth century had based his dating of creation at 4004 B.C. on a detailed and literal reading of the
historical accounts (whether we judge his interpretation right or wrong). Many seventeenth-century
histories of the world began with recitations about Adam and Eve and assigned a specific date for
creation and other events spoken of in the Scriptures. Johann Heinrich Alsted, Joseph Mede, James
Ussher, and others propounded prophetical schemes that assumed that the historical accounts in
Scripture were very accurate indeed. In the early seventeenth century, exegetes went to great length to
defend the accuracy of the Bible’s description of the flood. Moreover, in the sixteenth century, a
Reformer like Martin Bucer assumed that the historical accounts of the Scriptures were utterly reliable.
It will not do to suggest that a concern for the historical infallibility of the “facts” of the biblical text
first emerged in the “Enlightenment” due to the impact of “Baconianism,” Common Sense Realism,
Newtonian science, or some other factor. The freethinker Morgan perceived the “historical infallibility”
of the Bible as a common belief to overthrow, not one that was just coming into existence.
In the last two decades of the seventeenth century, the task of “orthodox” Protestants was further
complicated by the emergence of an openness to errancy among fellow Protestants, especially in
Remonstrant circles in the United Provinces and in Latitudinarian circles in England. For example,
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645)—the jurist, political theoretician, and biblical scholar—had, early in the
seventeenth century, advocated a doctrine of accommodation, which was in turn taught at the
Remonstrant Seminary at Amsterdam by Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736). According to this Socinian
teaching, God accommodated portions of the Bible to the understanding of the contemporaries of the
biblical authors. Small errors occur in those passages where the Bible’s human authors incorporate
contemporary opinions about history and the natural world, even if these opinions were not “truthful.”91
This doctrine of accommodation regarding the Bible differed substantially from the doctrine of
accommodation proposed by Saint Augustine and John Calvin. According to their perspective, God did
accommodate the Scriptures to the understanding of us humans, but He did so without allowing the text
of Scripture to be alloyed with errors.
When the Roman Catholic Richard Simon and the Protestant Jean Le Clerc did battle royal in a
four-volume match between 1685 and 1687, careful scorekeepers—and they were many in the
Republic of Letters—noticed a peculiar twist. Theoretically, each combatant represented a different
confession. But Le Clerc’s emphasis upon reason, an errant text, and criticism for traditional views of
the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch did not seem too far removed from Simon’s praise for a
“criticism” of the text unhampered by a concern for theological presuppositions (despite his claim to
defend Roman Catholic tradition) and Simon’s own peculiar views of Mosaic authorship. In an earlier
unpublished manuscript, Simon had defined a critic as a person who is “judicious,” free from prejudice,
impartial, and “a good man who loves truth.”94 Le Clerc probably would have concurred with this
definition.
In sum, when orthodox defenders of the Bible’s truthfulness wrote in the eighteenth century, they
faced challenges from various quarters. Deists and Socinians highlighted the rights of reason to judge
revelation; rationalistic Remonstrants like Le Clerc argued that an errant text had no negative
entailments for the truthfulness of the gospel; even conservative Roman Catholics highlighted textual
difficulties in the Scriptures as they continued to wage pyrrhonical warfare against Protestants;
Protestant and Roman Catholic illuminist writers often separated Word from Spirit; and Spinoza
criticized the Bible’s authority from the vantage points of “morality” and a Cartesian emphasis upon
reason. The ranks of those who opposed biblical infallibility were swelling in number. The need to
emphasize the truthfulness of the historical accounts in the Bible had become all the more urgent.
Hostile critics like Spinoza, Toland, Collins, and others were, from their claim that the Bible was
errant, drawing devastating conclusions about the Christian religion. Those Christians who accented the
veracity of the historical accounts did not help create the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, but they may
have emphasized this veracity more than earlier Christians, given the worrisome apologetical
exigencies of the day.
This recitation by H. J. De Jonge, a modern scholar, captures well the preeminent authority of Holy
Scripture for the Protestants celebrating the founding of the University of Leiden, an institution that
was to exert wide influence in Protestant Europe. According to these Protestants, the Bible was not to
be subservient to any discipline. It judged them all, as it did for the Lutheran theologians who rejected
the heliocentric theory due to their reading of Holy Scripture.
That the Bible should enjoy such a privileged position in late sixteenth-century thought was no
novelty. Many Roman Catholics had esteemed it in a similar fashion centuries before the birth of
Martin Luther. During the Middle Ages, the Bible enjoyed a place of honor as a divinely authoritative
source of knowledge. Manuscript collections were often organized under three rubrics: (1) manuscripts
of the Holy Scripture standing supremely by themselves, (2) manuscripts that helped readers
understand Holy Scripture, and (3) diverse manuscripts.
A number of medieval scholars like John Wycliffe apparently believed that the Bible was a divine
encyclopedia of all knowledge. Other scholars did not support this idea but incorporated the Bible’s
teaching into their cosmologies and world views. Professor N. Max Wildiers, who introduced the
writings of Teilhard de Chardin to a large public, describes their perspective in this fashion:
The main question with which they were preoccupied and to which they devoted numerous writings, was
precisely how a harmonious fusion of biblical data and Greek science could lead to a completely satisfactory
and irrefutable picture of the universe. Countless texts were devoted to this venture.
Many medieval scholars used three basic sources in constructing their views of the cosmos, as
Wildiers observes: “1. the scientific conceptions of the ancient Greeks, supplemented by the works of
Jewish and Arabian scholars; 2. the data of sacred Scriptures; 3. the teaching of the Church Fathers.”
They assumed that the Scriptures were an “infallible” authority with truthful and binding teachings
about the natural world.129
These illustrations should be sufficient to demonstrate that “Enlightenment” Christians engaged in
no new exegetical move when they viewed those details of the Bible that speak of the natural world as
authoritative and corresponding with what is the case. Undoubtedly, a number of writers did not take
notice of the Augustinian insight regarding the accommodated character of some of the biblical
passages regarding the external world. But even these commentators had precursors in the history of
the Christian churches, who treated the Bible as if it were a “scientific textbook.”
Nor will it do to suppose that “Enlightenment” Christians adopted from Newton a “precisionistic
Newtonian” view of the Bible and thereafter developed a doctrine of inerrancy. For one thing, Newton
apparently advocated an Augustinian version of accommodation and had the “give” of that approach in
his exegesis. He argued that Moses adapted his comments about creation to what common people
would have seen if they had been there.131 But in speaking in this accommodated fashion, Moses
always told the truth:
As to Moses, I do not think his description of ye creation either Philosophical or feigned, but that he
described realities in a language artificially adapted to ye sense of ye vulgar. Thus when he speaks of two
great lights I suppose he means their apparent, not real greatness.
In Newton’s discourse we hear echoes of Augustine’s and Calvin’s commentary on Genesis 1:16.
With these two theologians, Newton asserted that Moses could have spoken with greater detail but
chose not to do so because he knew the needs of his audience. Newton’s perspectives do not represent a
doctrine of accommodation that entails errors in the biblical text; nor do they entail high levels of
precision. The thesis that biblical inerrancy emerged when Enlightenment Christians forced Scripture’s
language to “conform to Newtonian notions of perfection” and Scripture’s message to “accord with
Lockean reason” (Rogers and McKim) stands in need of serious revision.134 Newton did not establish a
“precisionistic” standard by which to measure the Bible’s truthfulness.
Newton’s admirers may have done that, however. But even here the burden of proof remains on
modern scholars like Professors Vawter and Marsden to clarify with care how their alleged
“precisionistic” exegesis, for example, differed from the “literalistic” exegesis of many sixteenth-
century Christians who opposed the Copernican hypothesis. To what extent did it differ from the
harmonization efforts of Saint Augustine, who on occasion was concerned to explain how one word of
Scripture should be understood, so intent was he to guard the infallibility of Holy Writ? And why did
eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Christians wrestle with some of the same “Bible difficulties”
as Calvin and Augustine did, if they were locked in an intellectual paradigm that was incommensurable
with the “paradigms” of Calvin and Augustine?
Nor should we accept Professor Vawter’s interpretation that a doctrine of condescension
satisfactorily explains the difference between these “precisionistic” moderns and the Reformers and
Augustine. For Professor Vawter incorrectly assumes that the doctrine of accommodation accepted by
Augustine and the Reformers dictated that errors be found in the text of Scripture. He bases this
judgment on a misconstrued syllogism he applies in his discussion of accommodation: The Bible has
human authors; to err is human; the Bible possesses errors. Regrettably, this is a misrepresentation of
the frame of reference out of which Augustine and the Reformers formed their doctrines of
accommodation.
Ironically, the “Fundamentalists” whom Professor Vawter caricatures undoubtedly represented
views closer to the thinking of the Reformers and Augustine than those of Professor Vawter himself.
As noted earlier, Vawter’s hypothesis that the accommodated language of Scripture must contain errors
is an interpretation totally alien to the thinking of the Reformers or Augustine.
More obviously in the “central tradition” of Christian thought about Scripture’s authority are the
Evangelicals (e.g., British scholar James I. Packer) who defend not only the complete infallibility of
Scripture but acknowledge an Augustinian definition of accommodation. To dismiss their position as
merely a parochial extension of the nineteenth-century Princetonians or of American Fundamentalism
betrays a genuine unfamiliarity with the history of biblical authority.
Johann Jakob Rambach’s Instituiones Hermeneuticae Sacrae (1723), the principal book on
hermeneutics used by Pietist theologians, affirmed not only the inerrancy of Scripture but also the
inspiration of the Masoretic pointing of the Hebrew text. Due to its popularity, the volume passed
through eight editions by 1764. Thus, some orthodox and Pietist authors in Germany did probably
overemphasize the divinity of Scripture and did not sufficiently take into account developments in
textual criticism and the human authorship of Scripture.145
In challenging the accent of the “orthodox” upon the Bible’s divinity, however, the Neologians
bypassed the positions of Luther and Calvin to espouse theories that made the humanity of the biblical
writers the basis for the errancy of Scripture. John Calvin understood perfectly well that the Scriptures
bore the marks of their human authors. His commentaries give abundant evidence of this awareness.
But the Reformer did not infer from the “humanity” of the Scriptures that they must be errant. Martin
Bucer and Martin Luther did not make this connection either.147
But did not the Neologians see themselves as recovering the exegetical and theological insights of
their Lutheran “predecessor” Martin Luther after the alleged dismal and dark days of Protestant
Scholasticism? Have not recognized scholars like Professor Gottfried Hornig argued that Johann
Salomo Semler did have a rightful claim upon Luther as one who shared similar convictions about the
text of Scripture?
Although Semler did evoke the name of Luther to give credence to his own ground-breaking
studies, he also adduced the name of the Roman Catholic Richard Simon as the scholar (besides
Erasmus) whose program of criticism he most appreciated. In fact, Semler, like the learned John David
Michaelis, claimed that Simon was the “founder” of historical criticism.150 Moreover, Sémler’s
important doctrine of accommodation (which Hornig cites as a key for understanding his doctrine of
Scripture) resembles more closely the “Socinian” version of that doctrine than the one that Reformers
espoused. The theologian from Halle upheld the time-bound character of some of the biblical writings
and the fallibility of these same texts. This “Socinian” doctrine of accommodation that Semler probably
borrowed from Jean Le Clerc became a vehicle by which higher criticism could enter more easily into
theological debate during the last decade of the eighteenth century. Professor Hornig tells us that
between 1763 and 1817 there appeared no fewer than thirty-one titles that focused on the question of
accommodation.
Little wonder that Charles Hodge could criticize Semler and Van Hemert in 1825 and complain
about this faulty version of the doctrine of accommodation: “Perhaps few causes have operated more
extensively and effectually in promoting erroneous opinions than the problems of this doctrine [a false
concept of accommodation].” Hodge noted that those scholars who argued that the Bible’s
accommodated language encompassed errors were then obliged to pick and choose which sections of
Holy Writ were truthful and which were not. That is, their reason judged Scripture: “It is evident that
this doctrine is only a modification of the theory, which determines the sense of SS., by deciding what
is, or is not reasonable; and which has as effectually excluded the doctrines of the Deity of Christ, and
his atonement from the SS., because they are deemed inconsistent with reason.”155
The neoorthodox claim that an errant text and principles of higher-criticism find rootage in the
thought of Martin Luther is not warranted. The assertions of the Neologians that they were the direct
theological descendants of Luther are also unfounded. A growing number of scholars are beginning to
realize this.
When Professor Ramm urges Evangelicals to come to grips with the “Enlightenment” (which he
amorphously defines) and with the biblical studies of the Neologians, he is making a call that has
serious implications. He is actually advising them to consider departing from the central tradition of the
Christian churches regarding the authority of Scripture.
Professor Ramm should consider well what he is advocating to the Evangelical community. His
cure for “obscurantism” is undoubtedly more costly than the supposed inconveniences of upholding the
doctrine of biblical infallibility. For many Evangelicals, that latter stance represents what the Bible
teaches about itself and reflects the central tradition of the Christian churches. It is neither “scholastic”
(Rogers and McKim), nor “orthodoxist,” nor “obscurantist” (Ramm). Rather, it is sound doctrine.
If some “orthodox” Christians spoke without proper qualifications about the Bible’s divinity, the
Neologians fell into a more grievous error by subjecting God’s Word to their personal judgments
regarding what was authentic Scripture and what was not. In practice, they sometimes argued that the
humanity of the Bible (including its alleged contradictions) confirmed the validity of the Scriptures as
an authentic collection of religious books bearing God’s moral message. Many of their disciples drew
out unhappy implications about the truthfulness of the Christian faith from the premises that the
Neologian theologians and Gotthold Lessing had proferred.159
We would be well advised to follow the lead of Luther and Calvin, who believed that the Bible was
both a fully divine and fully human book that does not err. Moreover the Reformers upheld the verbal
inspiration of Holy Scripture without relying on a mechanical dictation theory.
Is it possible that future generations will view “macroevolution” as one of those hoary but quaint
theories of days past?
Doubtless, Scripture itself should determine what our views of biblical authority are. On the other
hand, it is instructive to learn that many Christians in centuries far removed from us affirmed a belief in
the utter truthfulness of God’s Word. Even if some of them employed the rather formidable theological
word accommodation, they probably found it awe-inspiring to realize that the all-powerful Lord God,
who was one and the same with their loving heavenly Father, had stooped to speak to humankind in
mercy and in grace, using words that they basically understood. And for us today, if we sense even in a
halting fashion the love that prompted this revelation, our hearts should be filled with gratitude for the
Written Word, Holy Scripture, which speaks of the Living Word, our matchless Savior, Jesus Christ.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE IN KARL BARTH
Geoffrey W. Bromiley
Geoffrey W. Bromiley is Senior Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at Fuller
Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. He is a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (B.A.
and M.A.), and New College, Edinburgh (Ph.D., D.Litt.). An ordained deacon and priest in the Church
of England, he has served four parishes and been vice-principal of Trinity Theological College, Bristol.
He has written a number of books, including Historical Theology: An Introduction and An Introduction
to the Theology of Karl Barth. Also, he has edited such books as Zwingli and Bullinger, the
Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, and the revision of The International Standard Bible
Encyclopedia, edited and translated Barth’s Church Dogmatics, and translated Ellul’s The Politics of
God and the Politics of Man, Kasemann’s Commentary on Romans, and Thielicke’s Evangelical Faith.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE IN KARL BARTH
I. INTRODUCTION
“In my work as a pastor I gradually turned back to the Bible and began my commentary on
Romans.” In this statement in a radio interview, the older Barth drew attention to the decisive change at
Safenwil that brought him not only to new biblical study but to a strong consistent reaffirmation of
biblical authority.
As he pointed out, this was a turning back. Under his father’s direction, which he recalled with
gratitude, he had been nurtured in a conservative tradition. His roots were in the Swiss Reformed
Church, with its historic attachment to the primacy of Scripture. In this church he had been confirmed
and had received from Aeschbacher, his pastor, the impetus to pursue theological study. In this church
he had prepared for ordination, taking courses and serving assistantships in the Bernese Oberland and
the Jura. In this church he had been ordained and commenced his ministry at Geneva before moving on
to the pastoral charge at Safenwil.
Yet Barth had succumbed to the allurements of more liberal teaching. Against his father’s better
judgment, he had done work at Berlin and Marburg, where he came under the powerful influence of
Harnack and especially Herrmann, whom, during a whole year at Marburg, he had absorbed “through
every pore.” Schleiermacher and Kant were at this time his heroes, and by helping Martin Rade to edit
the Christliche Welt he came into touch with many of those who were shaping contemporary religious
and theological thought. The brief stay in Geneva renewed his interest in Calvin, in whose church he
preached, but only to inspire him with the idea of a great synthesis of romantic and Reformation
theology.
The situation at Safenwil shifted Barth’s attention away from theological matters to social issues, in
which he followed the lead of Ragaz and Kutter. Besides work done on sermons and confirmation
classes, he spent much time in study of factory acts and in struggles on behalf of workers. So forcefully
did he identify himself with the Social Democratic Party that he gained notoriety as “the red parson of
Safenwil” and considered running for political office.
“A change came only with the outbreak of World War I,” as he put it later. This change took a
threefold form. First, the support that his theological mentors gave to the German war effort
compromised their theology beyond redemption. Second, the failure of the German Social Democrats
to resist militarism brought him serious disillusionment regarding the possibilities of political and
social progress. Third, as he found help in the message of the Blumhardts and perceived the
eschatological dimension of the kingdom of God, he became concerned about his pulpit ministry, or,
more specifically, “the textual basis” of his sermons.3 Was he really proclaiming God’s Word as his
office demanded? What was this Word, and how could he proclaim it?
In some sense, of course, Barth had never really abandoned the authority of Scripture. He had
thought he was preaching its message with his presentation of the liberal and social version of
Christianity. The crisis of the war years involved biblical authority, not in the sense of a return to
acceptance from total rejection but in the sense of a return to biblical teaching from an understanding
that had obscured it and in that way eroded its authority. The task for Barth and his friend Thurneysen,
according to a momentous decision in 1916, was to resume theological study so as to find out what the
Bible itself says and by that means to restore to it an authentically normative and dynamic role.
Surrounding himself with a stack of commentaries, Barth began at once the examination of Romans
that would lead to his epoch-making book and initiate the revolution that changed the course of
twentieth-century theology.
B. DOGMATICS
As regards the practical application of scriptural authority to dogmatics, Barth offered a mature
discussion in his final course on Evangelical Theology and ongoing examples in the volumes of his
Church Dogmatics.
In Evangelical Theology Barth repeated many of his main themes. The prophets and apostles, he
affirmed, were divinely appointed and elected witnesses who spoke and wrote what they heard and
saw. Their words are thus “authentic, trustworthy, and authoritative testimonies to the Word of God.”
Failure to recognize the unity of the Old and New Testaments means that “theology is threatened by a
cancer in its very bones.” Christ’s own unity is also a basic premise; a twofold Jesus “can be deduced
from the New Testament texts only after he has been arbitrarily read into them.”
On this basis Barth considered the special relation of theology to Scripture. Theology knows God’s
Word “only at second hand, only in the mirror and echo of the biblical witnesses.” Theologians have no
right “to look over their shoulder benevolently or crossly, to correct their notebooks, or to give them
good, average, or bad marks.” “Even the smallest, strangest, simplest, or obscurest” of them “has an
incomparable advantage over even the most pious, scholarly, or sagacious latter-day theologian.”
Heeding the “polyphonic” testimony of Scripture, theology must avoid being “monolithic, monomanic,
monotonous,” or “boring.” Its task is not to put the Bible into “transitory jargon” but “to draw nearer to
what stands there.”
Defining theology, Barth called it “a science learning in the school of Holy Scripture.” It should
serve as simply “an introduction to the source and norm of all theology,” that is, the Bible. The first
discipline, then, is that of “biblical exegesis.” Theology is “originally and especially the science of the
Old and New Testaments.” It seeks “to clarify what is actually written in the Scriptures and what is
meant by all that is written.” It must respect their own presupposition that they are “to be read and
explained as attestation and proclamation of a divine act and speech” and that “testimony to the God
who calls for faith will confront it in these texts.” A truly biblical dogmatics will avoid systematization
in the sense of construction upon or around a single doctrine, for “what should rule in the community is
not a concept or principle, but solely the Word of God attested to in the Scripture and vivified by the
Holy Spirit.”108
How far Barth himself tried to base his dogmatics on the Bible is suggested at once by the 60 pages
of Old Testament references and the 110 pages of New Testament references listed in the General
Index to the Church Dogmatics. The quotations come in varying proportions from every biblical book
and include not a few that are given intensive exposition. Barth used the Bible in many different ways.
At times he heaped up verses (as in giving biblical backing for the divine perfections—II, 1). At times
he offered extended exegesis of individual statements (e.g., Jn 1:14 in I, 2, or Jn 3:16 and 2 Co 5:18ff.
in IV, 1). At times he worked expository sections into the main discussion (e.g., Ro 9–11 in II, 2). At
times he expounded whole books (e.g., Galatians in IV, 1 and Amos in IV, 2). At times he used Old
Testament incidents as illustrations (as in the account of sin—IV, 1 and 2). At times he engaged in
typology (as in II, 2). At times he even made a biblical commentary his main presentation (e.g., Ge 1
and 2 in III, 1).
Always he tried to take Scripture as it stood, paying scant attention to source analysis or alleged
discrepancies. Always, too, he tried to give due weight to all relevant material, the only exceptions of a
glaring nature being the references to the human spirit in 1 Thessalonians 5 and to the angelic fall in
Jude, which did not harmonize with his own thinking or, he believed, with the main thrust of the
biblical teaching. Whether or not his expositions are correct may obviously be debated. His
understanding perhaps owed more than he realized to extraneous factors, although he was not unaware
of the pressure they exerted. What is hardly contestable is that he did make a sincere and consistent
effort to practice what he preached, namely, to give his own theology a solid grounding in Scripture
and to test his dogmatic judgment by the biblical norm.
C. COUNSELING
Barth’s letters shed interesting light on another aspect of his practical submission to biblical
authority. Various pastoral and theological matters came up in his extensive correspondence, and in his
initiatives and responses alike he often referred to Scripture and its authoritative role.
Thus, answering a person in prison who found no help in prayer or deep biblical study, he advised a
reading of the Christmas story in Luke, “not deeply but very simply, with the thought that every word
there, and every word in the Twenty-Third Psalm too, is meant for you too, and expressly for you.” To
a railroad official wrestling with grace and freedom, he suggested: “Do not stop testing and correcting
your insights by Holy Scripture.”110 When a pastor who was trying to interest him in the No Other
Gospel movement mentioned that he suffered from profound depression, he sent him back to a quiet
reading of the Bible and the hymnbook.
Some remarks about Scripture in the letters have to do with aspects of liberal teaching. Barth told
one professor he had become too American in treating the Bible as a kind of dish “from which all can
serve themselves as they think good or as they desire.” When a Basel theological student was enthused
about building up the kingdom, Barth said it was nonsense and that he did “not contradict merely one
‘insight’ but the whole message of the whole Bible.” He also advised him that, unless he changed his
mind, he should “take up any other career than that of a pastor.”113 In reply to the news from his
daughter-in-law that her agnostic father was reading the Gospels and that she was trying to interest him
in Teilhard de Chardin, he compared movements like Teilhard’s to “giant snakes by which the poor
gospel of the Old and New Testaments must let itself be gulped down,” declared his “allergic reaction”
to them, and asked why she could not quietly leave her father in the school of the Gospels “when you
will probably annoy him again with T. de C. and at worst might even lead him to error.” To another
pastor he expressed confidence that even in the age of Bultmann and Robinson the church need not be
“too quickly flabbergasted by a handful of pompous professors and a few hundred excited students and
candidates” when the Bible (and God) had already withstood many similar assaults “and will withstand
this one too.”115
Finally, in relation to Roman Catholicism, Barth welcomed the new weight that Vatican II gave to
the Bible but still thought it necessary to stress the Scripture principle over against Roman Catholic
teaching. Asked to distinguish between Evangelical and Roman Catholic confessions, he pointed out
that in the former “the Bible has strictly the first word over against church tradition,” but the latter
tends “to understand the Bible in the light of tradition.”
Again, when he took issue with the pope over the appeal to natural law in human life, he allowed
some agreement that revelation “is to be found in the strict sense only in Holy Scripture” but
complained that the encyclical “sets nature and conscience alongside revelation as equally divine,” and
asked: “Where does this equation occur in Holy Scripture? Where is it prescribed or even permitted …
in Holy Scripture?” Whereas Cardinal Cicognani was claiming that revelation “does not suppress
natural law, which is equally divine,” Barth thought it better to uphold strictly “the irremovable
distinction between the unequivocal word of God on the one side and the ambivalent voices of nature
and conscience on the other” and in this way to give the encyclical “the character of a proclamation of
the gospel,” not a law. He could have no real confidence that Vatican II had brought the Roman
Catholic world to a full acceptance of the uniquely direct, absolute, and material authority of Scripture
that he himself espoused and tried to practice.
V. EVALUATION
A. PROBLEMS
The many quotations from so many works of Barth, which could well be multiplied, demonstrate
beyond cavil his resolute commitment to biblical authority and his sincere intention to observe it in his
own Christian service. Nevertheless, certain problems arise regarding aspects of his understanding of
this authority that might seem to weaken or compromise the very position that he ardently seeks to
maintain.
First, his stress and insistence on the witnessing role of Scripture leave at times an impression of
devaluation of Scripture as God’s word. Barth’s aim, of course, is the laudable one of differentiating
Scripture from the incarnate Word (i.e., from God Himself). He also offers the safeguards that the
Bible, although not revelation, is God’s written word, that it was raised up within the event of
revelation and as part of it, and that there is a perichoresis of the three forms of the word. Yet the
accent falls so heavily on the function of witness as to suggest, even if unintentionally, that Scripture
has an inferior role except in so far as the Holy Spirit empowers it in sovereign freedom. Indeed, some
scholars have found in Church Dogmatics IV, 3 a tendency to retreat from the identification of
Scripture as word, though this is saying too much in view of Barth’s reference to his fuller discussion
in I, 1. The true problem is that—perhaps even in I, 1 and I, 2—Scripture is to some extent undermined
by the hierarchy of the threefold word rather than established by it (as Barth intended).
Second, Barth’s muted championship of the past inspiration of Scripture as compared with its
present inspiring produces further uncertainty about its objective authority. Is it authoritative because
God inspired it once and for all, or is it authoritative only ad hoc as God inspires it when heard or read?
Here again, of course, Barth made efforts to reduce the difficulty. He did not dispute the past act
whereby God raised up prophets and apostles to speak and write the primary words of testimony. He
insisted that the Holy Spirit speaks uniquely in Scripture. He did not view its present authority as a
matter of human subjectivity. He contended that we may and should approach Scripture with the full
expectation that God will impart His word in and through it. Yet the emphasis of his presentation
leaves serious questions as to the scope, meaning, and solid objectivity of the authority that he
proclaimed.
Third, Barth’s dismissal of biblical inerrancy and his assigning of a special historical character to
events like the Resurrection pose the question whether the biblical books can really enjoy the status of
direct, absolute, material authority, except by a sacrifice of the intellect, if they do in fact contain
demonstrably incorrect statements or tell of events that do not meet the test of normal historical
verifiability. Barth himself apparently did not feel the difficulty. He accepted the general facticity of
God’s saving work and the veracity of the records. He never specified actual errors in the Bible. He
saw no place from which to decide that the Bible is mistaken. He disputed the possibility of describing
the Resurrection in ordinary historical categories, not that it really happened. He rejected the idea that
the authority of Scripture should be suspended on inerrancy or its demonstration. For many people,
however, doubt seems unavoidably to arise about the great reality to which the Bible bears witness if it
might be in error, or even under suspicion of being in error, about plain facts.
Barth compounds his problem by speaking of a capacity for error but not giving examples of the
types of error he has in mind. His supporting arguments are also weak. Undoubtedly, to err is human,
but this does not entail a flat equation of humanity and error, as human experience amply demonstrates
and the Inoarnation itself should remind us. Again, God may speak through our own fallible human
materials, so far as they are faithful to Scripture, but Barth himself sees a qualitative distinction
between these materials and Scripture’s normative testimony. Of no more value is the idea that God’s
speaking through what is erroneous at the human level is a greater miracle than His speaking through
what He Himself has freed from error by His own prior action. Barth himself may ride roughshod over
the problems that his teaching raises in this regard, but when essential facts or doctrines are at issue, as
distinct perhaps from formal points of style or syntax, he seems to be unfortunately undercutting the
very position on authority that he is passionately seeking to establish.
Finally, Barth’s handling of biblical commands creates difficulties in the practical application of
Scripture’s authority in the ethical field. As Barth saw it, the commands were given to specific people
in specific situations. Hence, we are not to make a simple transfer to different people in different
situations. The commands are God’s only as the Spirit so speaks through them that they go forth again
as the direct voice of God. In this way, of course, Barth hoped to avoid legalism and casuistry, yet
without falling into relativism or situationism. The Spirit speaks through the same commands without
relinquishing personal control, whether to Scripture or to its hearers.
The problems arise, however, whether the commands have any real authority unless God speaks
through them, and how one is to know that He really does speak, either enforcing the commands or
making permissible exceptions. Barth himself in his conservatively biblical outworking of ethics could
proceed only by finding criteria by which to assess the proper course in given circumstances. In so
doing, he relieved the difficulty in practice. In principle, however, the problem still obtrudes that at any
given time there may be no coincidence of the living voice of the Spirit and the permanent record of the
commands. If not, Scripture may still have indirect, relative, formal authority, as church law also does,
but its readers or hearers are deprived of the decisive divine authority that it ought to enjoy.
B. MERITS
Barth himself seemed not to feel the force of the problems that have arisen for others. He thought
that he had provided sufficient safeguards against them. Even if not, he believed that the merits of his
doctrine of authority outweighed possible disadvantages. There are indeed some real merits, which are
for the most part the reverse side of the problems.
Thus, the emphasis on the witnessing aspect of Scripture has a twofold value. First, it clarifies the
fact that God Himself is the true source of authority in the things of God; Scripture is authoritative
because it is divinely authorized by Him who is always both subject and object. Second, it also points
to God’s authority as it is incarnate in the Son—who is Himself the truth of God in person, who as such
is the origin and theme of Scripture, and who grants Scripture its authority as the written word by
association with Himself as the revealed word. Scripture, then, is not left on its own in the conflict of
competing human authorities. As itself God’s word of witness to the incarnate Word, it stands against
all comers as divine authority.
Second, the orientation to the present act of inspiring serves as a valuable reminder that God is no
deistic or absentee God who has simply placed His authority elsewhere by a past act. The divine author
of the Bible is the living God, who as Spirit still speaks and rules in and through the written word.
Barth certainly uses the very text of Scripture; he insists on verbal inspiration in this sense, and so he
demands careful exegesis. But God does not allow the recipients of Scripture to become its lords, nor
does He allow Scripture to become a mere textbook of religion—as though its truths could be taught
and learned like the truths of an academic discipline. Scripture has unique authority precisely because
its divine author Himself speaks through it to call, claim, judge, enlighten, regenerate, and save. Barth
saw in this emphasis no surrender to human subjectivity such as many fear. Instead, he found the very
opposite, namely, an orientation to the objective reality of God, who as supreme object and subject
speaks His own word in human words and thus gives the human words an authority that no human
court can ever achieve.
Third, Barth was convinced that authority rather than inerrancy is the critical point in the doctrine
of Scripture. In his view, it is a crippling mistake to suspend authority on the human ability to establish
inerrancy. Liberation from the related defensive apologetics brings authority into proper focus, makes
possible a fruitful use of the critical method in the exegetical task, dispels the insecurity that results
when it is feared that possible errors will overturn the Bible’s authority, and makes unnecessary the
expenditure of time and labor on a buttressing of inerrancy that will not necessarily go hand in hand
with a better hearing of God’s message or a more faithful keeping of His commands.
Of course, Barth agreed that scientific criticism is a poor master in biblical studies. He saw no
reason to make common cause with those who ignored the Bible’s true status and function and focused
on its humanity alone. He had no interest in publishing a message of biblical errancy. His primary
concern was that God’s authoritative word should come through the human authors and a proper
exposition of their teaching. Concentration on the inerrancy of Scripture might seem to serve biblical
authority by meeting critical objections on their own plane. In Barth’s view, however, it involved a
fatal shift of concern which could only weaken the true authority and use of Scripture that it desired to
establish. Whether or not he judged rightly in this regard, his main point that authority on the basis of
divine authorship and authorization is the real issue, so that inerrancy will be primarily an implication
rather than a demonstrated presupposition, certainly deserves serious consideration.
Barth himself, of course, does not view inerrancy as an implication, and for this reason one may
question whether he succeeds, or can succeed, in his desired aim of shifting the focus to authority.
Thus, if Scripture is God’s direct, material, and absolute Word, and if it also testifies to its own total
reliability and truthfulness, then Barth’s failure to accept the implication involves an inconsistency that
already throws doubt on his assertion of biblical authority. Again, the supposed fallible humanity of
Scripture stands in contradictory antithesis to the irrefutable infallibility of Scripture as God’s Word.
Thus, even though Barth may well be right that the ultimate issue in the church is the authority of
Scripture, his denial of inerrancy as an implication means that he himself can make the shift only by the
tour de force of self-contradictory disjunctions, which are unlikely to command substantial or lasting
assent.
Fourth, Barth’s insistence on God’s direct commanding preserves a place for living divine
authority, blocks the legalistic view of the Bible as merely a code of divine law, and resists the erosion
of biblical commands on the plea of dispensational or cultural change. A problem of human caprice
remains, for readers may always reject the divine direction, or pretend not to have heard it, or to have
heard something else. But this is a problem in all ethics; even those who see in Scripture a set of given
commands disagree widely on what the commands are or how to fulfill them. If, however, readers
approach the Bible with the prayerful expectation that God will command, they need not suppose that
He will withhold His voice, for He has specifically raised up Scripture in order to speak through it. It is
through these texts that God does in fact issue His commands. Hence the subjective caprice of
deafness, resistance, or evasion does not negate the objectivity of the authority in either the biblical
embodiment or the free and living action of the Spirit.
A final merit of Barth’s presentation demands brief notice. Making biblical authority dependent on
God and not on human effort, Barth had full confidence that Scripture will never be reduced to a paper
tiger any more than it should be exalted as a paper pope. It will always do its work, which is God’s
work, as God Himself decides. No fear need arise that unless it be supported by arguments,
supplemented by reasoning, ornamented by rhetoric, or empowered by technique, it will be powerless
to speak its message, exercise its rule, and make its impact. In every age, culture, and situation, God
may be trusted to speak through the Word that He caused to be written as a normative word of witness.
No doubt some aspects of Barth’s presentation give rise to problems. No doubt faults may be perceived
in both his understanding and practice of authority. Nevertheless, the strength of his doctrine of
scriptural authority comes to clear expression in the confidence in Scripture that it confers and in the
attempted obedience that it consequently evokes.
CHAPTER NINE
THE BIBLICAL CANON
David G. Dunbar
David G. Dunbar is President of Biblical Theological Seminary in Hatfield, Pennsylvania. He is a
graduate of Pennsylvania State University (B.S.), Biblical Theological Seminary (M.Div.),
Westminster Theological Seminary (Th.M.), and Drew University (Ph.D.). Prior to his present position
he was Associate Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity
School, Deerfield, Illinois. He has published articles in Vigiliae Christianae and The Westminster
Theological Journal.
CHAPTER NINE
THE BIBLICAL CANON
I. INTRODUCTION
A. THE RECENT PROMINENCE OF CANONICITY
There are signs all about that major new developments with regard to the Christian Bible are just around the
corner. I see six areas of intense activity which will sooner or later precipitate a massive series of changes
regarding the shape and content of the Bible which should rival for creativity the Reformation period, if not
the second through the fifth centuries.
In the decade since David Dungan published these words, the “massive series of changes” has not
taken place and, in my judgment, is not likely to occur. Though bold in his claims, the author
simultaneously underestimates the stability of the canon as it has been held by the church during the
last fifteen centuries and overestimates the “creativity of the Reformation period,” which was marked
indeed by a Protestant rejection of the Old Testament apocrypha but no change at all in the New
Testament canon.
It is nevertheless true that canon studies find a prominent place on the contemporary theological
agenda. This prominence reflects a number of issues. First, there is the ongoing attempt of liberal
theology, perhaps best illustrated in the collection of essays edited by Ernst Käsemann under the title
Das Neue Testament als Kanon (1970), to salvage some notion of biblical authority from the wreckage
of three centuries of historical-critical attacks on Scripture. The development of the school of canon
criticism, associated especially with the names of Brevard Childs and James Sanders, forms only the
most recent attempt of critical scholars to find some abiding importance in the traditional canon.
Second, there continues to be a strong interest in the history of the formation of the canons of both
the Old and the New Testament. This has certainly been stimulated by the mid-century discoveries of
the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coptic Gnostic documents from Nag Hammadi. Important monographs by
Albert C. Sundberg, Jr., and Sid Z. Leiman on the Old Testament and Hans von Campenhausen and
Isidore Frank on the New Testament, along with a spate of journal articles, have continued to focus
attention on the historical aspects of canonization.
A third issue contributing to interest in the canon is the growth of ecumenism and pluralism.
Concern among the various separated communions for the reunification of Christendom has led to a
search for a common Bible. Publishers like Doubleday (Anchor Bible Commentary) and Fortress
(Hermeneia) are committed to publishing complete commentaries on the Apocrypha. In this connection
it is also significant to find Protestant scholars challenging the Reformers’ rejection of the canonicity of
the Apocrypha.5
However, many ecumenically minded theologians, particularly those of Protestant stripe, desire a
unification that allows the fullest possible measure of doctrinal diversity. Theological pluralism is
advocated not only as a fact of the modern ecclesiastical scene but as an inherent element of genuine
and, therefore, original Christianity. This partially explains the great interest generated by the
publication of the English translation of Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity
(1971). Bauer saw the early church as marked by widespread pluralism that was eventually suppressed
by the rise of Catholic orthodoxy. Since the present canon reflects the ascendancy of the orthodox
party, the question must be raised as to the legitimacy of the canon as a norm for original Christianity.
More recently, Bauer’s emphasis on early Christian pluralism has been applied to the canonical
materials themselves. According to James Dunn, diversity is fundamental to the canon: “We cannot
claim to accept the authority of the NT unless we are willing to accept as valid whatever forms of
Christianity can justifiably claim to be rooted in one of the strands that make up the NT.”
By contrast with the broad-based interest in the canon, Evangelical theology has devoted little
attention to the current discussion. Major studies of biblical authority continue to be produced by
Evangelicals who seldom interact with problems of canon. Since Laird Harris’s 1957 monograph, The
Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible, no attempt has been made at a comprehensive treatment of the
historical and theological issues surrounding the canon. Perhaps no further apology is needed for an
Evangelical reconsideration of the canonization process.
B. DEFINITIONS
Etymologically, kanōn is a Semitic loan word that originally had the meaning “reed.” From this
came the figurative sense of a “measuring rod” or “ruler” and from this the general idea of a “norm” or
“standard.” Finally, the term could adopt the purely formal sense of a “list” or a “table.” In
ecclesiastical usage during the first three centuries of the Christian era, kanōn refers to the normative
ethical and doctrinal content of the Christian faith. The use of kanōn to designate the Old or New
Testament Scriptures originates in the latter half of the fourth century.
In the present study, “canon” will be used to refer to a closed collection of documents regarded as
Holy Scripture. As far as delimitation and closure belong to the idea of the canon, it will be necessary
to distinguish canon from the concept of “Scripture”—although the former presupposes the latter.
Canon, I shall argue, is a historical-theological idea that views the process of divine revelation as
complete or at least in abeyance for the present. Only when the age of revelation is regarded as part of
the past does the idea of a definite canon become explicit for the people of God. In what follows we
will examine the process by which the writings of the Old Testament (and subsequently the New
Testament) were explicitly recognized as belonging to a period of God’s unique revelatory activity.
B. JOSEPHUS
The Jewish historian Josephus (c. A.D. 37–c. A.D. 100) is the first to discuss explicitly the formation
and limitation of the Old Testament canon. In his treatise Against Apion he writes:
It therefore naturally, or rather necessarily, follows (seeing that with us it is not open to everybody to write
the records, and that there is no discrepancy in what is written; seeing that, on the contrary, the prophets
alone had this privilege, obtaining their knowledge of the most remote and ancient history through the
inspiration which they owed to God, and committing to writing a clear account of the events of their own
time just as they occurred)—it follows, I say, that we do not possess myriads of inconsistent books,
conflicting with each other. Our books, those which are justly accredited, are but two and twenty, and
contain the record of all time.
Of these, five are the books of Moses, comprising the laws and the traditional history from the birth of a
man down to the death of the lawgiver. This period falls only a little short of three thousand years. From the
death of Moses until Artaxerxes, who succeeded Xerxes as king of Persia, the prophets subsequent to Moses
wrote the history of the events of their own times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns
to God and precepts for the conduct of human life.
From Artaxerxes to our own time the complete history has been written but has not been deemed worthy
of equal credit with the earlier records, because of the failure of the exact succession of the prophets.
We have given practical proof of our reverence for our own Scriptures. For, although such long ages
have now passed, no one has ventured either to add, or to remove, or to alter a syllable; and it is an instinct
with every Jew, from the day of his birth, to regard them as the decrees of God, to abide by them, and, if
need be, cheerfully to die for them.
It is evident that at least by the end of the first century A.D. the Jews understood that the biblical
canon was closed. For Josephus, canonicity is based upon prophetic inspiration (tēn epipnoian), and he
is conscious of “the failure of the exact succession of the prophets.” The biblical books were all
produced during the period from Moses to Artaxerxes (i.e., to the time of Ezra and Nehemiah).
Although the four books of “hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life” are not given
explicit chronological placement, we may assume that these, too, were understood to belong to the age
of the prophets.
The canon is fixed at a total of twenty-two books, which almost certainly correspond to the
Talmudic canon of twenty-four books. The smaller figure results probably from counting Judges-Ruth
and Jeremiah-Lamentations as single books. The canon is tripartite and consists of the following: (1)
the five books of Moses, (2) thirteen books of the prophets (Joshua, Judges-Ruth, Samuel, Kings,
Isaiah, Jeremiah-Lamentations, Ezekiel, the Twelve Minor Prophets, Job, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah,
Chronicles, Esther), and (3) four books of hymns and precepts (Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of
Songs).
Later Jewish sources commonly number twenty-four books in the biblical canon. The earliest
attestation of this number is in 2 Esdras 14:44ff. A specific list and order of biblical books is given in
the Talmudic passage Baba Bathra 14b–15a, where the (unstated) total is twenty-four books. Although
the tripartite division of the canon is clear, apart from the Torah (whose order is assumed rather than
stated) the ordering of the books in the Prophets and Writings differs substantially from that of
Josephus. Thus, the Prophets number eight in the following order: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings,
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and the Twelve Minor Prophets. The order of the eleven Hagiographa is
Ruth, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Daniel, Esther, Ezra, and
Chronicles. Later Jewish manuscripts are consistent with Baba Bathra in the books assigned to the
Prophets and Hagiographa, although they register variations in ordering the books within each
category.
C. PHILO
For the evidence prior to Josephus we may consider first the Jewish philosopher Philo of
Alexandria (c. 25 B.C.–c. A.D. 50). Philo does not list the contents of the biblical canon, although his De
Vita Contemplativa shows an awareness of the tripartite division. His writings contain about two
thousand quotations from the Pentateuch as against fifty from the remaining two sections of the
Hebrew Bible.30 This could reflect a less authoritative status for the second and third divisions, or it
may simply be due to Philo’s adherence “to an Alexandrian tradition of exegesis which was established
when the Pentateuch alone had been translated into Greek.” But then again, the larger part of Philo’s
works are given over to an allegorical exposition of the patriarchal and Exodus narratives; having
chosen such a subject, the higher proportion of Pentateuchal quotations would not be surprising, nor
would it necessarily tell us anything of the relative authority of divisions of the canon. Philo cites all of
the Old Testament writings except Ezekiel, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther,
and Daniel.32 Whether his silence on these books is significant for his conception of the canon is
impossible to judge. It is not clear whether Philo shows any knowledge of the Apocrypha—certainly he
never quotes them as Scripture.34
D. NEW TESTAMENT
The New Testament likewise bears witness to a tripartite division of the Jewish Scriptures: “the
Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms” (Lk 24:44). However, the threefold division is not
emphasized. More common is the dual reference “the Law and the Prophets” or “Moses and the
Prophets.” Alternatively, the Old Testament can be described generally as “the Law” or again as “the
Prophets.”36 Paul’s reference to the reading of the old covenant (tēn anagnōsei palaias diathēkēs, 2 Co
3:14) probably is a similar collective reference to the entire Hebrew Bible. So also the term “Scripture”
(graphē) or its plural “the Scriptures” frequently refers not to a particular passage but to the various
biblical books conceived as a whole.
The high authority accorded to the Old Testament by New Testament writers is reflected in the fact
that “the books of the NT contain about 250 quotations, some of them fairly extensive, and in
individual expressions and turns of speech more than 900 allusions to the Old Testament.” While
debate can be raised on specific references, we may safely make the following generalizations about
the New Testament use of the Old.39 (1) The five books of the Law are cited and recognized as
authoritative. (2) As far as the Prophets are concerned, Joshua, Judges, (perhaps) Ezekiel, Obadiah,
Nahum, and Zephaniah are not cited. But the last three would have been included with the rest of the
twelve Minor Prophets, and therefore the lack of citation suggests nothing about their canonical status.
Ezekiel may be referred to in 2 Corinthians 6:16–17, and there are clear allusions to it in the
Apocalypse. Joshua 1:5 may be quoted in Hebrews 13:5, and a knowledge of Judges is presupposed in
Hebrews 11:32. It is safe to conclude, therefore, that all of the Prophets as they were later transmitted
in the second division of the Old Testament canon were recognized by the New Testament writers as
canonical Scripture. The reading of the Prophets alongside the Law in the synagogue in New Testament
times (Lk 4:16–17; Ac 13:15ff., 27) supports the conclusion that by now the Prophets formed a
recognized and defined corpus. (3) The Writings constitute the greatest problem for analysis. Clearly,
Psalms is given canonical status, being quoted more than any other Old Testament book. The five
Megilloth, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles are not quoted directly, although Matthew 1:5 is likely
dependent on Ruth 3:18 and Matthew 23:34–35 (Lk 11:51) on 2 Chronicles 24:20–22.
The Matthew 23 text is particularly interesting because of its possible implications for the concept
of canon. Jesus warns the scribes and Pharisees, “upon you will come all the righteous blood that has
been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom
you murdered between the temple and the altar” (Mt 23:35). If Abel is chosen because he was the first
righteous man in history to suffer persecution from the wicked, why the mention of Zechariah? Many
scholars judge that the reference is to Zechariah son of Jehoiada (2 Ch 24:20, 22). Since Zechariah is
not chronologically the last martyr named in the Old Testament,42 it is assumed that he is mentioned
here because Chronicles was, by New Testament times, understood to be the last book in the Hebrew
Bible. Thus, Jesus’ statement would mean “the blood of all the martyrs mentioned in the Old
Testament.”
If this is the proper interpretation of the text, then it suggests that Matthew and Luke—and,
assuming the reliability of their witness, Jesus also—regarded the canon as a completed entity with an
order similar to that of Baba Bathra. Otto Eissfeldt notes that this would still fall short of demonstrating
that the New Testament knew all the books of the third division of the canon. True. But it coheres
nicely with the rabbinic view, and it seems probable that the New Testament writers at least conceived
of a closed canon of Jewish Scripture—and perhaps one identical with that of later Judaism.45
However, if we affirm that the New Testament witnesses to a closed canon, the question must be
raised as to what use the New Testament makes of extracanonical literature—Apocrypha,
pseudepigrapha, or various other forms. Scholars vary greatly in their estimates of the influence of
extracanonical materials on the thought forms and expressions of the New Testament authors. Without
attempting a detailed consideration of all the alleged parallels, we should make several observations.
First, many of the parallels suggested do not show close correspondence, and this raises the possibility
that such correspondence as there is may be either simply fortuitous or due to a mutual dependence of
both the New Testament literature and the extracanonical sources on the Old Testament47 or even on
oral tradition.
On the other hand, it is quite likely that New Testament writers do allude to extracanonical
materials. It would not be surprising, for example, that if Paul knew and cited secular Greek authors, 50
he would also be free to use materials of Jewish provenance.
Moreover, it is obvious that if the appeal to secular Greek authors does not entail that they are
regarded as canonical by the New Testament writers, then the presence of allusions to the Apocrypha
or (in a much smaller number of cases) to the pseudepigrapha does not establish the canonical status of
such documents. Even the Old Testament writers used source material that they evidently did not
regard as canonical (e.g., the Book of the Wars of the Lord, Nu 21:14). The New Testament authors
never designate extracanonical literature as Scripture. The closest approach to such a designation
occurs in Jude 14–15. Here a quotation of 1 Enoch 1:9 is introduced as a genuine prophecy—
Proephēteusen de kai toutois hebdomos apo Adam Henōch. Obviously 1 Enoch was highly regarded by
Jude, but whether it had canonical status cannot be determined. As will be seen below, the Enoch
literature was also valued by the Qumran community, but here, too, the question of its canonicity
cannot be definitely answered. There seems to be no compelling reason, therefore, to conclude that the
Old Testament canon of Jesus and the Apostles was other than the twenty-two (twenty-four) book
canon of Josephus and later Rabbinic Judaism.
E. AN ALEXANDRIAN CANON?
Some assert that the Greek translation of the Old Testament (called the Septuagint or LXX) offers
evidence that the canon of diaspora Judaism, particularly as it was represented in Alexandria, was
different from that of Palestinian Judaism. While initially the Septuagint translation involved only the
Pentateuch, the whole of the Old Testament was eventually rendered into Greek, most of it before the
beginning of the Christian era. The LXX codices preserved from the fourth and fifth centuries show
significant variations from both the ordering and the number of books in the Jewish sources cited
above.
While the books of Moses are always first in Septuagint ordering, the Prophets and Hagiographa
are broken up and rearranged according to their literary style or content or their presumed authorship.
Further, the LXX enlarges upon the Old Testament canon by including a number of documents
originating in the period from 200 B.C. to A.D. 100. Codex Vaticanus (4th c.) includes all of the
Apocrypha with the exception of 1 and 2 Maccabees, Codex Sinaiticus (4th c.) has Tobit, Judith, 1 and
2 Maccabees, Wisdom, and Ecclesiasticus, and Codex Alexandrinus (5th c.) adds all of the Apocrypha
plus 3 and 4 Maccabees and the Psalms of Solomon.
Eighteenth-century scholars, in an effort to explain the difference between the Septuagint codices
and the Jewish reckoning (of twenty-two or twenty-four books), developed the hypothesis of a
distinctive canon among Alexandrian Jews. According to this hypothesis, the liberal attitudes of
diaspora Judaism would have permitted in Alexandria and elsewhere a more expansive biblical canon
than that recognized in Palestine. It was this canon that was appropriated by the Christian church. As
Christianity grew and expanded beyond the borders of Palestine, Christians would naturally have
adopted the canon of the Hellenistic Jews around them. Consequently, the larger Alexandrian
collection became the fixed canon in Christian usage.
With good reason this hypothesis has now largely been abandoned. (1) It has long been recognized
that the evidence of the LXX is late and derives from Christian sources. The Septuagint, thus, cannot
simply be assumed to give directed evidence for the canonical views of Alexandrian Jewry, certainly
not those of the first century A.D. (2) Alexandria itself yields little evidence for a broader canon. Philo
does not cite extracanonical literature as Scripture, although, as noted above, he makes very few
references even to biblical materials outside of the Pentateuch. Further, two Alexandrian Fathers
(Origen and Athanasius) both state that the Jewish canon was twenty-two books, and both give
canonical listings that vary only slightly from the Jewish reckoning.57 (3) There is no evidence for the
kind of independence of diaspora Judaism from Palestinian Judaism that is assumed by this theory. A.
C. Sundberg, Jr., correctly asks,
Do not the proponents of the Alexandrian canon hypothesis really have to show how it was that Alexandria
and Judaism of the dispersion deviated from the practice in Palestine with respect to canon while the Temple
(to which pilgrims from all Judaism made pilgrimages for holy days) stood but quickly submitted to the
decision of the schools at Jamnia after the disruption of Palestinian Judaism in A.D. 70? Such acquiescence
to the Jamnia decisions is hardly understandable except on the assumption of the accustomed leadership of
Palestine throughout Judaism generally.
F. THE APOCRYPHA
Sundberg’s monograph, The Old Testament of the Early Church (1964), which has been widely
influential in bringing about the demise of the Alexandrian hypothesis, has also served to revive
another ancient question, namely, the authority of the Old Testament Apocrypha. While we have
argued for a closed canon in Palestinian and diaspora Judaism during the first Christian century,
Sundberg adopts the thesis that in Judaism prior to A.D. 90 the third division of the canon was
amorphous: “in addition to closed collections of Law and Prophets, a wide religious literature without
definite bounds circulated throughout Judaism as holy scripture before Jamnia.” Evidence for the
openness of the third division of the canon is found in (a) the usage of extracanonical literature by the
Qumran community, New Testament authors, and early church fathers, (b) the divergence in LXX
codices, and (c) the difference of opinions among the early Fathers on the extent of the Old Testament
canon. After A.D 70, Judaism and Christianity went their separate ways and thus established the bounds
of the canon relatively independently of one another. In any case, no appeal can be made either to later
Jewish statements or to New Testament writers to justify the Christian canon of the Old Testament;
there are no historical antecedents upon which to ground the church’s decisions.
The implications of Sundberg’s position for Protestants are serious. Since the early days of the
Reformation, Protestant theologians have supported their more restrictive view of the Old Testament
canon by appeal to the presumed canon of Jesus and the Apostles. But, says Sundberg,
there is reason to ask … whether this position is any longer tenable. It now appears that the bases upon
which Luther and subsequent Protestants separated the books of the Apocrypha from the Christian Old
Testament are historically inaccurate or misleading. Not only was the so-called Palestinian or Hebrew canon
not closed in Jesus’ day, but a de facto Hebrew canon paralleling the later Jamnia canon did not exist either.
The alternative for Protestantism, Sundberg says, is either to return to a pre-Reformation position
(implying acceptance of the canonical status of the Apocrypha) or to develop a new (nonhistorical)
apologetic for its Old Testament canon.
Several criticisms may be offered to the theory of an undefined pre-Jamnian canon. (1) Sundberg
relies heavily on the thesis that the delimitation of the Hagiographa is the product of the Jamnia
Council. However, the constitutive nature of these rabbinic discussions for the closure of the canon has
been too severely undermined to bear the weight of Sundberg’s hypothesis. (2) The appeal to the
variation of the earliest (4th and 5th c.) Septuagint manuscripts from one another and from the order
and numbering of the rabbinic sources is not decisive. These LXX codices are Christian productions
and questionable sources from which to derive the shape of the Hebrew canon in New Testament times.
If, as previously noted, this criticism is valid for the “Alexandrian hypothesis,” it must also tell against
Sundberg’s reconstruction. (3) Reference to the church fathers for support of an undefined canon of the
first century is open to precisely the same objection as the appeal to the LXX. Nor does Sundberg give
sufficient attention to assessing the relative value of the patristic sources.63 (4) Even if it is the case that
the Qumran sect recognized as Scripture a broader range of materials than did later Judaism (see
discussion below), the views of this group cannot without explicit evidence be extrapolated to all of
Judaism outside Qumran.
There is then no compelling reason to revise the historic Protestant evaluation of the Apocrypha.
The New Testament writers did not acknowledge these books as Scripture, nor did a significant number
of the Patristic writers who witness to the Hebrew tradition of twenty-two biblical books. That a wider
range of books than those of the Hebrew canon came to be included in the Septuagint was due in part to
the increasing ignorance among Gentile Christians of Jewish views on the subject. In addition, the
move from scrolls to codex form may well have added to the confusion of the early Christians. As
Bruce Metzger observes,
Books which heretofore had never been regarded by the Jews as having any more than a certain edifying
significance were now placed by Christian scribes in one codex side by side with the acknowledged books of
the Hebrew canon. Thus it would happen that what was first a matter of convenience in making such books
of secondary status available among Christians became a factor in giving the impression that all of the books
within such a codex were to be regarded as authoritative.
The translation of the Septuagint (including the Apocrypha) into Latin in the latter part of the
second century A.D. strengthened the case for a broader Old Testament canon in the Western church;
and, in the fifth century, Augustine’s advocacy of the Apocrypha prevailed over Jerome’s endorsement
of the Jewish canon. Perhaps describing the Protestant canon as “a failure on historical grounds”68
reveals more about the historian than about the canon.
Of the Apocrypha, only manuscripts of Tobit, Ecclesiasticus, and perhaps the Epistle of Jeremiah
have been identified, nor are there any distinct quotations from the Apocrypha, although there may be
allusions to Ben Sirach. There is no reason to think, therefore, that the Qumran sect regarded any of the
Apocrypha as Scripture. Several other documents—Ian H. Eybers notes particularly Jubilees, the
“Book of Meditation,” Enoch, and The Testament of Levi—enjoyed high esteem in the community, but
whether they were regarded as Scripture is uncertain. Patrick Skehan speaks for a broad group of
scholars when he concludes, “All in all, the Qumran library gives the impression of a certain
selectivity, but hardly any fine distinction between a closed canon and all other texts.”82
The discovery at Qumran of over thirty distinct texts of the Psalms has had particular significance
for the discussion of the canon. Not only do these manuscripts provide exemplars a thousand years
older than any previously known; they also include psalms additional to the biblical Psalter and arrange
certain of the canonical psalms differently from the Masoretic order. Attention has focused on the
Psalms Scroll from Cave 11 (11QPsa). This scroll contains forty-one biblical psalms plus another eight
noncanonical compositions. Of the latter, three are psalms known from ancient versions of the Old
Testament (Syriac, Greek, Latin),85 one is a canticle from Ecclesiasticus (51:13ff.), and four are
previously unknown compositions. Most of the variations from the “standard” Masoretic ordering are
in the last third of the Psalter. J. A. Sanders has argued from this evidence that as late as A.D. 50, the
Psalter at Qumran, although authoritative, was not fully defined, at least in books III–V. On the other
hand, some suggest that the Psalms Scroll represents a nonauthoritative liturgical variant of a
previously fixed Psalter.88
Thus, the Qumran materials witness to the scriptural status of the Law and the Prophets. The full
extent of the second division is not established; possibly it included most or all of the materials
presently grouped among the Hagiographa. The questions about books of the third division arise in part
from lack of evidence. Certain extracanonical compositions (Jubilees and 1 Enoch) were highly
esteemed, and it is conceivable that they were acknowledged as Scripture, although again there is no
positive evidence for such a view. The Book of Psalms was clearly canonical, but the precise order and
content of the Psalter were still in question.
I. SUMMARY
In the light of the preceding survey, we may attempt some reconstruction of the development of the
Old Testament canon. In accord with the definition of canon given in the introduction, our concern is
not merely with the status of a writing as inspired Scripture but also with its distinctiveness from other
writings and its place as part of a recognized corpus. With regard to scriptural status, there is no
historical evidence for the biblical books “acquiring” such a position. The earliest references to biblical
books (or to portions of them) treat them as authoritative. Questions over a few of the books are raised
by the rabbis at Jamnia or later, but these presuppose that the books are already generally accepted. The
Protestant Reformers spoke of Scripture as “self-authenticated” (autopiston). Hence, its authority does
not depend on its recognition by the people of God; rather, it is constitutive of the very existence of the
people of God. While the historical evidence does not demonstrate such a claim, neither does it
disprove it. We have suggested, however, that the recognition of the canon is a related but slightly
different issue: how and when were the books gathered into closed collections?
A number of scholars have questioned whether the tripartite division of the canon reflects directly
the history of canonization. For example, E. J. Young writes that “there certainly is no evidence to
support the view that there were three canons, that the Pentateuch was first accepted as canonical, then,
at a later time, the Prophets and, finally, the Writings.” Yet, it is reasonable to assume that the
canonical recognition of the Pentateuch took precedence chronologically over the rest of the Old
Testament. According to R. T. Beckwith,
The likelihood that this was so arises from the fact that it was basically the work of a single prophet of very
early date, which was edited after his death but was not open to continual addition, whereas the other
sections of the Old Testament were produced by authors of later date, whose number was not complete until
after the return from exile.
The formation of the remaining books of the Old Testament as a delimited corpus must obviously
postdate the exile. A certain amount of time would have been necessary in order to confirm the
cessation of classical prophecy. Only when the Jews became conscious of this qualitative change in the
divine revelation would the idea of a limited canon surface. The earliest evidence, as we have seen, is
Ecclesiasticus (c. 180 B.C.), yet the contents of the second and third divisions are not stated. That some
collection of the prophetic writings was started much earlier is witnessed by Daniel 9:2, where the
prophecy of Jeremiah is reckoned a part of the Scriptures.
It does not appear that the Prophets and the Writings formed two rigidly distinct categories prior to
the second century A.D. Initially they may have formed one general collection that was only later
divided into two sections. However, the division had been made at least by the end of the second
century B.C., when it appears in the prologue of Ben Sirach.
Placing a terminus ad quem on the completion of the Old Testament canon is difficult, partly due to
an almost total lack of evidence. Ancient Jewish and Christian tradition connect the closing of the
canon with the ministry of Ezra. But if the idea of the canon is a historical one that included the belief
that the line of the ancient prophets had ceased, then a date subsequent to Ezra is more likely. R. K.
Harrison suggests a date about 300 B.C. for the fixation of the essential parts of the Old Testament,
even though discussion of certain books continued into the Christian era. Beckwith contends, however,
that the closing of the second and third divisions was the work of Judas Maccabaeus about 165 B.C.
Yet, the tradition concerning Judas (2 Macc 2:14) says only that he collected books that were lost
because of the war. This could have involved final collections of the canonical books, but this is not
demanded by the text.
What can be said with confidence is that at least a century before the Christian era, the Jews were
conscious that prophecy in its classical form belonged to the past. If the failure of prophecy and the
closure of the canon were understood as correlative ideas in intertestamental Judaism (as they were
later with Josephus), then a date of about 100 B.C. would seem to be the latest that could be entertained
on the basis of our evidence. On the other hand, if Sirach 48:22–49:10 does reflect a canonical
ordering, a substantially earlier date for closure would be likely.
Although New Testament authors made no explicit claims to be writing Scripture, they did expect
at least some of their writings to be circulated among the churches and read in the presence of the
congregation (1 Th 5:27; Col 4:16; 1 Co 14:37; Rev 1:3, 11), a practice paralleling the reading of the
Old Testament in the synagogue. The Pauline correspondence was so highly esteemed it was placed on
an equal footing with the Old Testament—“the other Scriptures” (2 Pe 3:16).
How early the New Testament literature was collected and circulated is impossible to establish.
Jean Carmignac has argued that the contrast drawn by Paul between the New Testament and the Old (2
Co 3:6, 14) presupposes that if the latter could be read (v 14), so could the former. He does not suggest,
of course, that the New Testament collection was complete but only that it was a “collection important
enough and typical enough in order to have provoked the creation of a suitable comprehensive title:
‘New Testament,’ and to have imposed on the works of the Old Covenant the correlative term: ‘Old
Testament.’ ” If Carmignac’s position is valid, it confirms in a striking way that the notion of an
authoritative body of literature parallel to the Old Testament was organically related to the church’s
beginning.
Against the objection that the gospel is not to be found in the Old Testament (the “charters”),
Ignatius affirms a thoroughly Christocentric interpretation as the only appropriate understanding of the
ancient revelation. The emphasis seems to be not “that what the prophets say is inferior to what Christ
and the apostles say, but that it is essentially the same, though less complete.”
Therefore, for Ignatius, Jesus Christ is the full revelation of God. Jesus is “our only teacher,” and
Christians are to be “imitators” (mimētai) of Him in accordance with His instruction.157 But together
with Jesus stand the apostles. By contrast, Ignatius makes no such claims for his own writings. Even
though his letters demand a high place for the office of the bishop, he does not give orders as did Peter
and Paul: “They were apostles, I am a convict; they were free, I am even until now a slave.”159
Ignatius, like Clement, shows acquaintance with a wide range of New Testament materials. He
mentions sayings of Jesus based on the Synoptic tradition (Matthew in particular). But, in contrast to
Clement, there are also allusions to the Gospel of John. Ignatius seems to know most of the Pauline
Epistles, especially Romans and 1 Corinthians. There is considerable evidence for his knowledge of
Ephesians and Colossians and probably also 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, and the Pastorals.
His statement that Paul makes reference to the Ephesians “in every epistle”161 suggests that Ignatius
may know a collection of the Pauline letters. Additionally, he may allude to either James or 1 Peter.163
In summary, we may say that Ignatius stresses the authority of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.
This revelation is proclaimed through the prophets and the apostles. The teachings of the former are
known through the Old Testament; similarly, for Ignatius, the apostles’ teachings are known through
their writings. There is, however, no indication that Ignatius viewed the apostolic writings as Scripture
parallel to the Old Testament. For him the issue is the authority of the revelation—not its form, whether
oral or written.
As Ignatius was on his way to martyrdom, the church of Philippi wrote to Polycarp to request
copies of any letters of Ignatius in his possession. Polycarp’s reply is given in his letter to the
Philippians. It is thought that the last two chapters were written first (c. 110?) as a cover letter for the
Ignatian correspondence and that chapters 1–12 were written later, perhaps about 135.
Polycarp’s letter is saturated with biblical language and imagery, so that “his letter is a veritable
mosaic of quotation and allusion to [the New Testament writings].” Like Clement and Ignatius,
Polycarp sees an integral unity between the Old Testament prophets (“who foretold the coming of our
Lord”) and the apostles (“who brought us the gospel”).167 However, there is also a difference with
Polycarp; for while the formal authority of the Old Testament is the same, the attention given it by
comparison to the New is far less. Polycarp is acquainted with most of the present New Testament
(including the Synoptics, Acts, the majority of the Pauline corpus, Hebrews, and most of the Catholic
Epistles). There appear to be no allusions to the Fourth Gospel, Jude, or Revelation.
Of particular interest is Polycarp’s apparent designation of a Pauline text (Eph 4:26) as “Scripture”:
For I am confident that you are well versed in the Scripture [sacris literis], and from you nothing is hid; but
to me this is not granted. Only, as it is said in these Scriptures [his scripturis], “Be ye angry and sin not,” and
“Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.”
It is generally accepted that Polycarp recognized the first part of Paul’s exhortation as a quotation of
Psalm 4:4 and that in the words his scripturis Polycarp points only to the Old Testament via Paul’s
quotation. However, Charles Nielsen has championed the view that in the light of Polycarp’s limited
use of the Old Testament and his wide acquaintance with Paul, it is much more likely that Ephesians is
here referred to as “Scripture.”171 His interpretation is persuasive.
So we see a movement in Polycarp beyond the position of Clement and Ignatius. The importance of
the Old Testament has receded in favor of increased esteem given to the writings of the apostles,
particularly Paul. Nielsen states:
As we know, Polycarp hardly remembers the Old Testament at all, but he is very conscious of Paul. On this
ground it would seem that the Pauline Epistles have more right to be called Scripture than the Old
Testament, although let me say once again that I do not mean to imply that Polycarp had removed the Law,
the Prophets and the Writings from the canon. What I am saying is that whereas the Old Testament was
hardly a practical functioning authority for him, some Christian writings were. Surely this situation could
have important consequences for one’s view of the canon. Thus it is no accident that Polycarp calls
Ephesians “sacred Scripture.”
The next work to be considered is the Didache. This composite document in its present form
probably dates from the first half of the second century. It introduces itself as “the Lord’s teaching to
the heathen by the twelve apostles.” The warning of Deuteronomy 4:2 neither to add to nor subtract
from the word of the Lord is here applied to the “apostolic” teaching. The function of the apostles
blends together with that of the prophets. Any apostle who fails to meet certain behavioral standards is
a false prophet.
There is a similarity between the need to distinguish true and false prophets (or apostles) and the
church’s need to recognize the canon. The issue is to identify that which is authentic and apostolic.
Denis Farkasfalvy notes that for the author of the Didache, this takes place in part through a written
standard:
… he produces this book of his as an instrument to be used by the Churches, and he gives his presentation
under the title of “The Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles.” We see here the principle of apostolicity at work: it
leads to the production of literary works enshrining old oral tradition and is used to give maximum authority
to the resulting written work.
The Epistle of Barnabas (early 2nd c.?) is related to the Didache by its use of the same “Two
Ways” tradition of ethical paraenesis (Barn. 18–21; Did. 1–6). Most of the Epistle (chs 2–17), however,
is a polemical foray into interpreting the Old Testament. Barnabas wrestles with the problem of
continuity/discontinuity between the Old and New Covenants. How could Christianity maintain its
continuity with the Old Testament and recognize Abraham as the father of all those who believe and at
the same time proclaim that in Christ God has established a New Covenant that made Judaism
obsolete? Barnabas resolves the problem by asserting that Israel, because of its sin, had never actually
received the covenant.
Moses received it, but they were not worthy. But learn how we received it. Moses received it when he was a
servant, but the Lord himself gave it to us, as the people of the inheritance, by suffering for our sakes.
The way is hereby opened for Barnabas to appropriate almost anything from the law, history, or
prophetic literature of the Old Testament, and, by means of allegorical or typological exegesis, apply it
to the church.
This “almost schizophrenic mentality with regard to Christianity’s Jewish origins” is important for
reflecting the proportions of the second-century doctrinal problem raised by the Old Testament. The
allegorical “gnosis” of the Old Testament provided by Barnabas will become even more radical in the
full bloom of Gnosticism, and Marcion’s complete rejection of the Old Testament will provide the
consistent, if unacceptable, resolution of the tension between Old and New.
So it should not surprise us that as the problems of Old Testament interpretation grew, the church
would become more conscious of its literature as forming a complementary Scripture, a New
Testament. There is no need, therefore, to evade or minimize Barnabas’ citation of Matthew 22:14—
“many called but few chosen”—with the introductory formula “as it is written.” Apparently at least one
of the Synoptics has, for Barnabas, a recognized status as graphē fully equivalent to the authority of the
Old Testament.
This interpretation is supported by the anonymous Christian sermon that goes under the misleading
title Clement’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, which probably originated before the middle of the
second century. The sermon distinguishes two coordinate authorities: “the books” (ta biblia), that is,
the Old Testament, and “the apostles” (hoi apostoloi). Both were probably read during public worship
and were followed by the sermon.185 We must give full weight therefore to the dominical quotation, “I
have come not to call the righteous but sinners” (Mt 9:13; Mk 2:17; Lk 5:32), introduced by the phrase,
“and another Scripture also says.”
In summary, the evidence from the Apostolic Fathers suggests that there was little conscious
reflection on the authority of the apostolic witness in its written form during the later part of the first
century and the opening of the second century. There is, however, a commonly shared assumption that
the apostolic traditions stand alongside the Old Testament as a parallel authority. The hesitancy of
some (e.g., Clement and Ignatius) to refer to the apostolic writings as graphē probably indicates only a
deference to traditional modes of expression in which the Old Testament was Scripture par excellence.
This does not entail a negative estimation of the authority of the New Testament. Moreover, at least by
the middle of the century, church practice finds its echo in the formal citation of the apostolic
documents as Scripture (Polycarp, Barnabas, and 2 Clement).
E. MARCION
Marcion’s role in canonical understanding was crucial, though there is much debate over the extent
of his contribution. His teachings called forth a steady stream of orthodox polemic from Justin Martyr
(c. 150) on into the fifth century. Under his influence, Marcionite churches were established that
maintained their separate existence until late in the third century in the West and some two centuries
longer in the East. Yet, like so many figures in the early church, Marcion is surrounded by shadows.
Information about his life and teaching comes almost entirely from the writings of his opponents, 205
and these are not always in agreement among themselves. His excommunication by the church at Rome
for false teaching is usually dated about A.D. 144, but it is safe to assume that Marcion engaged in an
extensive teaching ministry in Asia Minor some decades earlier.
Marcion’s teaching was marked by a fundamental dualism that “looks like a combination of
Christianity and Syrian gnosis.” He distinguished between the highest God (the merciful Father
revealed in Jesus Christ) and the just but cruel God (the Creator and Lawgiver revealed in the Old
Testament). He regarded matter as evil, denied the resurrection of the body, advocated a strict
asceticism, and held to a docetic Christology. Correlative with his dualism of the two Gods, his
complete disjunction between law and gospel entailed rejecting the Old Testament in its entirety and as
well those New Testament writings he judged to be infected by the “Judaizing” error. In fact, Marcion
believed that all of the original apostles had fallen away from the truth revealed in Jesus; only Paul
represented Jesus’ teaching in its pure form. Thus, the Marcionite canon consisted of the ten letters of
the “Apostle”—the Pauline corpus minus the Pastoral Epistles—and the “Gospel”—an edited version
of Luke.209
The influence of this Gospel-Apostle collection on the developing canon of the church “remains a
subject for educated conjecture.” Although there is broad agreement that the crisis evoked by Marcion
was not the only factor affecting the canon and that even apart from this crisis the church would
certainly have arrived at the notion of a closed canon, Harnack, by contrast, argues that Marcion “is the
creator of Christian Holy Scripture.”211 Similarly, Hans von Campenhausen says this:
The idea of a normative Christian canon, of a new collection of writings, or “scripture”, is as yet nowhere to
be found [prior to Marcion].… From every side we converge on the same result: the idea and the reality of a
Christian Bible were the work of Marcion, and the Church which rejected his work, so far from being ahead
of him in this field, from a formal point of view simply followed his example.
Now the truth of these assertions lies in the fact that Marcion seems to have been the first to
advance the idea of a closed canon, but even here his originality must be stated cautiously. An edition
of the Pauline letters may well have circulated prior to Marcion, and it is possible that a four-Gospel
collection did likewise, though there is no clear evidence for the idea of a fourfold Gospel prior to
Tatian’s Diatessaron (c. 150–60). But if collections of New Testament writings were being formed
prior to or concurrent with Marcion’s efforts, then the question of closure was at least implicit in the
church’s action—even if largely unconscious.215 Quite in accord with this are those few examples
noted previously where Christian writers introduce New Testament quotations with formulas normally
used for Old Testament citations.
John Knox argues that Marcion’s dual structural principle “Gospel and Apostle” became “the
organizing idea of the catholic New Testament.” Other organizational principles would have been
equally as possible, so it is argued, but because we are accustomed to the present canonical shape, we
“easily overlook the fact that in itself there is nothing whatever obvious or inevitable about it.”218
Marcion, therefore, must be given his due as the prime shaper of the orthodox canon, for, according to
Knox, the New Testament was a conscious creation of the church in reaction to Marcion.
But while the particular form was not inevitable, it is by no means surprising in the light of what we
have discussed in regard to the authority of Jesus and the apostles; no categories would have been more
appropriate than “Gospel” and “Apostle.” Moreover, the concepts “Gospel” and “Apostle” had already
been correlated by the church before Marcion.
Finally, how did the church relate to Marcion’s concept of the closure of the canon? Did the church
appropriate this directly from him? In fact, Marcion’s limitation of the canon was based squarely on his
doctrine of true and false apostleship. The canon was not formed to discriminate between that which
was apostolic and that which was not but to distinguish the writings of the larger group of the apostles
(who had “intermingled the things of the law with the words of the Savior”)221 from those of Paul (who
had alone preserved the truth in its pristine purity). So the difference between the church and Marcion
was not merely quantitative but qualitative: Marcion’s principle of closure was theological in the strict
sense. The church, on the other hand, was to conceive of the closure of the canon as a function of
salvation history; all was canonical that derived from the ministry of the apostles.
Denis Farkasfalvy summarizes the distinction between Marcion and the orthodox church:
[Marcion’s closure] was aimed at restricting the canon to the heritage of one apostle at the exclusion of the
Twelve, rather than being the fruit of the realization that the formation period of the Church came to an end
and thus the Church of the beginnings became the norm and guide for subsequent periods. When the anti-
Gnostic Church settled for a closed canon because it acknowledged only apostolic books, the closure of the
canon came about as a decision flowing from the principle of apostolicity against any other claim of later
norms. Thus it seems that the closure of the canon as it happened after Marcion had a meaning different
from what Marcion had in mind.
F. JUSTIN MARTYR
The Marcionite challenge did not long go unanswered; and anti-Marcionite reaction was registered
partly in the church’s view of New Testament authority and tradition. Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) is the
first writer known to us to respond to Marcion by name. Justin groups the Marcionites together with the
Valentinians, Basilidians, Saturnalians, and others who, though they claim the name of Christ, are in
reality “atheists, impious, unrighteous, and sinful, and confessors of Jesus in name only.” According to
Irenaeus,224 Justin wrote a treatise, now lost, against Marcion, but Justin’s three extant works accepted
as genuine—the two Apologies and the Dialogue with Trypho the Jew—do not deal specifically with
Marcion or the Gnostics. For this reason, and also because his writings are addressed to those outside
the church, Justin’s views on the extent and authority of the New Testament literature are unclear and
are subject to varying interpretations.
Like those before him, Justin stresses the importance of the apostolic witness. In his salvation-
historical theology, the apostles speak in unity with the Old Testament prophets—the predictions of the
prophets have been fulfilled in Christ, and to this the apostles bear witness. It is only through the
insight Jesus gave the apostles after the Resurrection that Christians are able (better than the Jews) to
understand the meaning of the prophets.227
The witness of the apostles, however, is a written witness: “For the apostles, in the Memoirs
composed by them, which are called Gospels, have thus delivered to us what was enjoined upon them.”
Where Justin found the term “Memoirs” (apomnemoneumata) is not known—perhaps from
Xenophon’s “Memoirs of Socrates” (apomnemoneumata Sokratous)—but evidently he preferred it to
the term “Gospels”230 because it better expressed the historical value of the documents, an important
point for their apologetic use. The contexts in which Justin discusses the Memoirs indicate that they
“were in substance identical with our Synoptic Gospels, whatever else they contained.”232 Perhaps, as
E. F. Osborn believes, Justin relied for his citations on a Synoptic harmony. On the other hand, the
references to the Memoirs never include any citations of the Gospel of John, though there are a number
of parallels between Justin and the Fourth Gospel. Probably the surest is the statement, “For Christ
said, ‘Unless you are born again [anagennēthete] you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven’ ” (1
Apol 61.4), which seems to conflate John 3:3, 5. Why Justin is reluctant to cite John’s Gospel is not
obvious, but it seems unlikely that it reflects a negative judgment on the apostolic character or
scriptural status of the book.235
As concerns other New Testament writings, Justin mentions the Apocalypse by name and the
apostle John as its author. He evidences knowledge of Acts, a number of the Pauline letters, Hebrews, 1
John, and perhaps 1 Peter,237 but again none is cited directly.
Therefore, an attempt to reconstruct Justin’s views on the New Testament canon is beset with
uncertainties. Willis A. Shotwell states that “whether or not Justin considered the writings that now
constitute the New Testament to be inspired and canonical is a moot question.… From his extant
writings no conclusions may be ascertained regarding the state of the New Testament canon.”
But this is too strong. Justin gives the fullest picture so far of the life of our Lord, and he does so by
repeated appeal to documents written by the apostles. These apostolic Memoirs are regarded most
probably as equal in authority to the Old Testament prophets. This is supported by Justin’s report that
both the prophets and the Memoirs were read in the weekly worship services of the church. Thus, while
our findings are somewhat tentative, it is reasonable to see Justin as part of the general movement in
the church toward a fixed documentary authority. If he does not yet have a fourfold Gospel canon, he is
not far from it, and his own student Tatian would shortly produce a harmony based on the four Gospels.
Much of the rest of the New Testament is known to Justin, though the use he makes of it is limited,
perhaps by virtue of his apologetic concerns. There is no reason to suspect that Justin is moving away
from or in opposition to the general canonical developments in the church.240
G. IRENAEUS
A more thorough refutation of Marcion and the Gnostics appears with Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (c.
178–200), in his work Against All Heresies. The leitmotif of Irenaeus’ theology is unity. This theme is a
conscious reaction to the pluralistic or dualistic tendencies characteristic of the Gnostic systems. The
Gnostics distinguished a creator god from that god who was the savior and redeemer, they frequently
differentiated the heavenly Christ from the earthly Jesus, and they maintained that beyond the publicly
announced message of Christianity there were esoteric truths given only to the initiated. On the
contrary, argues Irenaeus, there is but one God, one Christ, and one tradition passed on in the church.
This unity also has implications for Irenaeus’ theology of revelation. Commenting on John 5:39–
40, Irenaeus says that all the Scriptures point to Christ because they all derive from one God: “How
therefore did the Scriptures testify of Him, unless they were from one and the same Father, instructing
men beforehand as to the advent of His Son, and foretelling the salvation brought in by Him?” As
Denis Farkasfalvy observes, “This uniqueness of the source of all revelations establishes the unity of
the two Testaments and unites all scriptural records of revelation into one coherent collection of
writings.”243 The unity of the Testaments means that citations from both are often quoted as parallel
authorities whose difference is to be understood only by reference to salvation history: for Irenaeus, the
truth is that “which the prophets proclaimed … but which Christ brought to perfection, and the apostles
have handed down.”
His Christocentric interpretation of Old Testament revelation stands, as we have seen, in a line with
the earlier picture of the church. But there is a change; in Irenaeus the accent falls decidedly upon the
apostolic witness—and this in its specifically written form. After devoting the first two books of
Against All Heresies to a description of the Gnostic systems, Irenaeus proposes in the introduction to
book 3 to “adduce proofs from the Scriptures” in order to provide “the means of combatting and
vanquishing those who, in whatever manner, are propagating falsehood.” But in the “proofs” that make
up the bulk of books 3–5 a new prominence is given to the writings of the apostles. Campenhausen
observes that
the appeals to the Old Testament and its prophecies have not disappeared; but they are far outnumbered by
the innumerable quotations from the New Testament, and these too now serve to construct a formal “proof
from scripture” such as had previously been drawn from the Old Testament. This is the really new thing
which has to be explained.
The explanation is partly to be found in the Gnostics’ disparagement of the Old Testament, which
made its witness apologetically less valuable. But even more significant for the shift toward the New
Testament writings was the church’s need to refute the Gnostic claims to a secret tradition that had
preserved the true teaching of Christ and the apostles. Whereas the prophecy-fulfillment structure of
Justin’s apologetic focused attention more on the relation between Christ and the Old Testament, the
Gnostic crisis raised the question of the relation between Christ and the church of the second century,
i.e., the question of the nature and content of the apostolic tradition. As a result, Irenaeus reflects with
greater depth on the nature of the apostleship than any before him.
The church is founded upon the apostles. They have received from the Lord the power to announce
the gospel, and through them we know the truth. It was to the apostles that Jesus said, “He who hears
you hears me, and he who despises you despises me and the one who sent me” (Lk 10:16). The plan of
salvation was first proclaimed publicly by the apostles and then later delivered to us in the Scriptures,
to be “the future ground and pillar of our faith.”251 The two forms, oral and written, of the apostolic
witness are a unity. Neither has preeminence over the other, and for Irenaeus there can be no thought of
any contrast or conflict between them. This is the error of the Gnostics, for they demean the Scriptures
by appealing to esoteric traditions.253 By contrast, Irenaeus argues that the testimony of the apostles is
public, having been proclaimed in the most ancient (apostolically founded) churches and preserved by
an unbroken succession of faithful bishops. It is this same tradition, however, that is recorded in the
(New Testament) Scriptures, “which are indeed perfect since they were spoken by the Word of God
and his Spirit.”255 And it is this latter source, the corpus of the apostolic writings, that is given greatest
emphasis: “for all practical purposes, when he wants to ascertain the apostolic teaching about any
particular question, he turns to Scripture using practically those same books that figure in the canon of
the Church in later centuries.”
Irenaeus sees the doctrine of the apostles in the gospel. Following the general custom of the early
church, he often designates by this term simply the contents of the apostolic preaching. “The
Gospel(s)” can also refer, as in Justin Martyr, to written accounts of the preaching. But, moving beyond
Justin, Irenaeus recognizes all four of the present canonical Gospels by name and argues that “it is not
possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer than they are.”258 Two of the Gospels were
written by apostles (Matthew and John) and two by apostolic associates (Mark and Luke), yet they are
“apostolic” and of equal authority, for Mark was the disciple and interpreter of Peter and Luke the
companion of Paul.
To confirm the unique status of these particular writings, Irenaeus adduces the “proof” that there
are four points of the compass and four principal winds. The church, which is spread throughout the
world, appropriately rests on four pillars (the four Gospels). The four living creatures of the
Apocalypse correspond to the four aspects of the person of Christ developed by the Evangelists.
Moreover, the four Gospels correspond to the fourth and last of the covenants that God has made with
the human race. This is an argument a posteriori given to defend the quadriform Gospel against the
multiplication of Gospels by the Gnostics on the one hand and against the reductionism of groups like
the Marcionites and the Alogi on the other.
There is no need to be overly critical of the allegorical argument, for its purpose is only to defend
the providential sufficiency of the church’s gospel. The allegorical justification does not in any case
furnish a criterion of selection. The basis for all of Irenaeus’ argumentation is the tradition of the
church, which believes that these four Gospels alone had their origins in the ministry of the apostles.
Irenaeus cites most of the other writings of the New Testament. With the exception of Philemon, he
refers to all the Pauline Epistles, including the Pastorals. In spite of some scholars’ statements to the
contrary, Irenaeus seems to regard Paul’s writings as equal in authority to the Old Testament and the
fourfold Gospel.263 The Book of Acts is frequently quoted and fully authoritative. Irenaeus is perhaps
the first of the Fathers to cite Acts explicitly, and it plays an important role in enabling him to affirm
the unity of Paul with the rest of the apostles. Definitely cited are 1 Peter, 1 and 2 John, and the
Apocalypse, and there are probably allusions to James and Hebrews. It is evident, then, that Irenaeus
used a body of authoritative literature whose lines conformed closely to our present canon.265
A number of advances are made for the church’s canonical understanding. (1) More than ever
before, the teaching of the apostles (particularly the written fixation of the teaching) is recognized as
the norm of the church’s existence. (2) Apostolicity is developed more extensively as a theological idea
and as the criterion of canonicity. (3) The definiteness of the arguments for the fourfold Gospel shows
that the process of closure was now consciously underway.
Whether Irenaeus had similar views on the definition and shape of the rest of the New Testament is
debatable. For example, he gives no allegorical justification for a defined Pauline corpus parallel to the
argument for the Gospels. Outside of the Gospels we should probably see a relatively well-defined
body of literature that functions with full scriptural authority but whose canonical position is still more
implicit and practical than explicit and theological. In response (partly at least) to the Marcionite
elevation of Paul to the detriment of the authority of the other apostles, Irenaeus upholds “the ascription
of authority to the entire apostolic community and to the canon of the NT, and, consequently, the
insistence that there was no conflict between the teaching of Paul and that of the other apostles.” 267 In
this sense Irenaeus may properly be spoken of as the first catholic theologian.
There is envisioned a definite collection of writings associated with the “New Testament.” The
collection is regarded as fixed, at least to the degree that writings of recent vintage could not qualify for
inclusion. On the other hand, the term “New Testament” has still its broad sense as referring to the final
period of salvation history. As Campenhausen notes, “We have not yet arrived at the purely literary
meaning of the word.”
The polemics of the anti-Montanist raise the question of what impact Montanism or the “New
Prophecy” had on the New Testament canon. The Montanist movement, which arose in Asia Minor not
later than A.D. 170, was an attempt to repristinate the church by stressing a fervent eschatological hope,
a vigorous asceticism, and a renewal of the prophetic gift. “Montanus himself seems to have made the
claim that the promise of Jesus concerning the Paraclete had been uniquely fulfilled in him.”273 It was
this claim to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, made not only by Montanus but also by some of his
disciples, that challenged the church’s understanding of authority.
The result of the Montanist challenge on the question of canon has long been debated. Such
influence as the New Prophecy had on the emergent canon was certainly indirect. Montanist polemic
comprised no attack upon the authority or validity of the biblical writings, whether Old Testament or
New Testament,275 nor were Montanist oracles, collected in written form, seen as equivalent to
Scripture. According to Andrew F. Walls, “It seems in fact, that while the Montanists always held the
unique inspiration of Montanus and his colleagues as an article of faith, we have little evidence that in
practice they attached overmuch weight to the writings of the New Prophecy.”
In fact, the real attacks upon the emergent canon came not from the Montanists but from some of
their more radical opponents. The Roman presbyter Gaius rejected the authenticity of the Johannine
Gospel and the Apocalypse presumably because both were important to Montanist teaching and
apologetics. Against Gaius, Hippolytus of Rome argued for the authenticity of the Johannine writings,
while against Montanism he taught that the era of prophecy had ceased with the apostles. The task of
the church was not to receive fresh revelation but to interpret the revelation already given through the
apostles and recorded in the Scriptures. So a collection of Scriptures rooted in the distinctive age of the
apostles was by implication a closed collection.
The first extant canonical listing of the New Testament books is the Muratorian Canon, which
probably originated in Rome about A.D. 200 or earlier. The manuscript is fragmentary, but although it
lacks reference to Matthew or Mark, these apparently headed the list, for Luke is mentioned as the third
Gospel and John as the fourth. Luke is also recognized as the author of “the acts of all the apostles.”
Thirteen letters are acknowledged as authentically Pauline, while an Epistle to the Laodiceans and
another to the Alexandrians (perhaps Hebrews?) are rejected as Marcionite forgeries. Two Johannine
Epistles and Jude are also accepted. The Apocalypses ascribed to John and to Peter are received, but
the Muratorianum affirms that there was some opposition to the public reading of the latter work. The
Shepherd of Hermas is accepted for private but not public reading because it was written too recently.
A strange reference to the Wisdom of Solomon finds it canonical. All Gnostic, Marcionite, and
Montanist writings are rejected.
Efforts to find a consistent rationale for the formation of Muratorianum have proved difficult. This
gives some justification to the oft-repeated comment of Adolf Jülicher that, according to the
Muratorian canon, “the principle of the Church in the origination of the canon was a lack of principle.”
Certainly authorship by an apostle or an apostolic associate is stressed, yet this appears more as a
justification a posteriori than as an actual criterion of selection. The specific shape of the canon
undoubtedly reflects the church’s controversy with heretical groups, and yet this can only help in a
subsidiary way to explain particular emphases or the exclusion of certain works like the Marcionite
epistles. Isidore Frank has suggested that the Johannine logos theology forms a material principle for
the selection or exclusion of works in the Muratorianum,282 but this kind of theological sophistication
can only be read into the relatively simple statements of the canon.
In the end we must conclude that the author of the Muratorian canon relies primarily on tradition.
“In practice,” says Campenhausen, “the crucial factor is clearly the usage and judgment of the one true
Church, spread throughout the world.” The place of theological or historical criteria is more to defend
the practice of the “catholic” church than to establish the practice. This is similar to what we
encountered with Irenaeus, except that the definiteness of Irenaeus in regard to the fourfold Gospel has
now expanded to a much larger body of literature.
Two writers of the early third century—the Roman presbyter Hippolytus (c. 170–236) and the
North African apologist Tertullian (c. 160–225)—though providing no canonical list, use the New
Testament in such a way as to suggest that their view of it was close to that of Canon Muratori.
Hippolytus cites or alludes to all of the books of the present canon with the exception of Jude,
Philemon, and 2 and 3 John. He does not regard Hebrews as Pauline, but neither does he neglect to use
it in his writings.285
Tertullian proposes apostolicity as the criterion of canonicity. Against the Marcionites he writes:
I lay it down to begin with that the documents of the gospel have the apostles for their authors, and that this
task of promulgating the gospel was imposed upon them by our Lord himself. If they also have for their
authors apostolic men, yet these stand not alone, but as companions of apostles or followers of apostles.
On this basis, Tertullian recognizes the canonicity of Mark, Luke, and Acts along with most of the
other New Testament writings. Only James, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John find no definite citation in his
works. The Epistle to the Hebrews is referred to by Tertullian as the work of Barnabas, Paul’s
associate. Though it could by way of this apostolic connection qualify as Scripture, Tertullian is quite
tentative in ascribing to it the full authority of the apostolic writings.288 Nevertheless, it stands apart
from The Shepherd of Hermas, which Tertullian disparages as an “apocryphal” book. The Shepherd is
rejected on the ground that it was not recognized in the churches in earlier times. Tertullian appeals to
traditional usage and to the apostolic churches to determine which writings are apostolic. Flesseman-
van Leer concludes, “Thus the authority of the Church is necessary to decide which books are
canonical, though certainly it is not the church which makes them so. Only their apostolicity makes
them canonical.”291
I. THE ALEXANDRIANS
A somewhat different picture is offered by Tertullian’s contemporary Clement of Alexandria (c.
150–215). Clement is the first to use the term “testament” (diathēkē), in a literary sense not only in
reference to the Old “Testament” but also to the New “Testament” writings. Moreover, the New
Testament is decidedly more prominent in his citations from Scripture.293 According to Eusebius,
Clement wrote brief commentaries on all of the canonical books, including those that were (in
Eusebius’ classification) disputed: the Epistle of Jude, the remaining Catholic Epistles, The Epistle of
Barnabas, and The Apocalypse of Peter. Hebrews was acknowledged by Clement as originally written
by Paul, but translated into Greek by Luke.
In spite of this, it is difficult to draw any conclusions on Clement’s view of the shape of the New
Testament. He provides no list of authoritative books and, like the rest of his contemporaries, never
uses the word “canon” in this sense. Clement’s theological method and appeal to authorities is
thoroughly eclectic. If he cites the New Testament more than the Old, he refers to non-Christian works
more frequently than either Testament. Again, while he appears to recognize a (limited) fourfold
Gospel canon, Clement is not adverse to citing various apocryphal Gospels.296 His understanding of the
universal working of the Logos, borrowed in part from Justin, allows him to view a wide range of
literature as a source of insight to elaborate the truths of Christian faith. The spirit is quite different
from what we found in the West; Clement is far from asking Tertullian’s rhetorical question, “What has
Jerusalem to do with Athens?” In accord with this, “he by no means treats his biblical quotations in a
separate category of their own. At every step they are entwined with the words of classical
philosophers and poets, with heathen oracles and wisdom sayings.”298 Clement’s breadth of vision, for
better or for worse, prohibits any sharp discrimination of canonical and noncanonical writings. If he
worked with such categories, he has not made them plain.
Clement’s illustrious successor at the catechetical school of Alexandria was Origen (c. 185–254),
the greatest biblical scholar of antiquity. There are obvious similarities between Origen and Clement.
Origen is explicit that only four Gospels are to be received as authoritative for the church. He
recognizes as well Acts, the thirteen letters of Paul, Hebrews—Pauline in thought but not in literary
style—one epistle of Peter and perhaps a second that is disputed, the Apocalypse of John together with
an epistle by the same author and perhaps two more of his letters, although these two are contested. 301
Beyond these it seems probable that Origen accepted as inspired most, if not all, of the rest of the New
Testament, along with a few works that were ultimately excluded (notably The Shepherd of Hermas
and The Epistle of Barnabas). The attempt of some conservative scholars to find in Origen a New
Testament canon limited to just the present twenty-seven books seems doomed to failure.303 R. P. C.
Hanson contrasts Origen with his predecessor:
We can say without qualification that he regards the Canon of the Gospels as closed in a more final sense
than did Clement, and that he displays a greater desire for definiteness than he, and a more sensitive
appreciation of the possibilities of documents being spurious. But fundamentally Origen’s attitude to the
Canon is the same as Clement’s; he will accept as Christian evidence any material that he finds convincing
or appealing. Neither of them shows any signs of being conscious of the existence of a list of canonical
works, apart from the list of four Gospels recognized as more authoritative than any others. Clement’s
promiscuous acceptance of any work, no matter how doubtful its relevance to the Christian dispensation,
which appealed to his curious and comprehensive intellect is in Origen’s case modified by the accuracy of a
scholar and the experience of a traveller. But that is all.
But if the canonical outlook at Alexandria was looser and broader than that which obtained in some
other sectors of the church, it was nevertheless not wildly divergent. And while Origen’s “canon” may
well have been slightly larger than the presently acknowledged New Testament books, it was probably
as close to the mark as the more restrictive “canons” of contemporaries like Tertullian or Hippolytus. In
any case, the shape of the canon would not undergo any significant variations from this point onward,
as is shown by a comparison of Origen’s position with that of Eusebius in the next century.
Calvin also rejected the Romanist interpretation of Augustine’s words. Augustine did not mean to
teach that faith in the Scriptures was dependent on the judgment of the church. The words of
Augustine, Calvin argues, have reference not to Christians, but to non-Christians: “He is simply
teaching that there would be no certainty of the gospel for unbelievers to win them to Christ if the
consensus of the church did not impel them.”
This debate had implications for both sides relative to an understanding of the canon. For Roman
Catholic theologians, not only the correct interpretation of Scripture but the shape and content of the
canon were guaranteed by the infallibility of the church. The Reformers sensed here a threat to the
principle of sola scriptura and denied that the church had the power to determine canonicity. It was
God who established the canon; the role of the church was merely to witness to what God had already
established. Nor was the church infallible in its role as witness. Luther, as we saw earlier, felt free to
question the canonical status of the antilegomena, and other Lutheran theologians followed his
example. Martin Chemnitz, for example, held that though the antilegomena ought not to be rejected,
“no dogma ought therefore to be drawn out of these books which does not have reliable and clear
foundations in other canonical books.” Thus, for Chemnitz, the antilegomena are not canonical in the
pure sense. Later Lutheran dogmaticians generally (but not universally) 311 accepted the traditional
twenty-seven books of the New Testament, while Reformed theologians were from the beginning less
questioning in regard to the shape of the received canon.
But upon what ground could the Protestants base their confidence? That the authority of Scripture
was self-authenticating (autopistos) and sealed to the hearts of God’s people by the witness of the Holy
Spirit alone was the Reformers’ general position. However, among Lutheran and Reformed
theologians, this witness was generally appealed to more to affirm the overall authority of the Bible
than to validate the specific contents of the canon. For the latter point, appeal was made to God’s
overriding providence. Calvin, in treating the question of certain lost letters of Paul, affirmed that
those which the Lord judged to be necessary for his church have been selected by his providence for
everlasting remembrance. Let us rest assured, that what is left is enough for us, and that the smallness of the
remaining number is not the result of accident; but that the body of Scripture, which is in our possession, has
been adjusted by the wonderful counsel of God.
In a similar fashion the nineteenth-century Reformed theologian Louis Gaussen could point to “the
marvelous, universal, immovable unanimity with which all the churches of the world for the last
fourteen or fifteen centuries continue to present to us one and the same Greek Testament” as evidence
“that a concealed but almighty hand has been here interposed, and that the Head of the church watches
in silence over the new Oracles as he has watched over the old, preserving them from age to age against
the folly of men.” So conservative Protestant theologians stressed that the canonicity of the biblical
writings derived not from any human decision but from the fact that their authors were inspired. Only
in the context of inspiration were Protestants willing to examine the history of the canon. Thus,
Princeton theologian Archibald Alexander wrote, “The appeal to testimony, therefore, is not to obtain
the judgment of the Church, that these books were canonical; but to ascertain the fact, that they are
indeed the productions of the apostles, to whom our Lord promised plenary inspiration.”315
2. The Enlightenment
The contemporary discussion of the canon is indebted at least as much to the critical scholarship of
the Enlightenment as to the theological controversies of the Reformation. While the form of the
Enlightenment varied from one country to another and its immediate impact on the church is still being
assessed by historians, there is no question that the rationalistic criticism of the Scriptures that arose
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was to set much of the agenda for modern biblical
scholarship.
Johann Salomo Semler (1725–91) has been called by some the founder of the historical-critical
study of the New Testament. Semler’s four volume Treatise on the Free Investigation of the Canon
(1771–75) was a sharp attack upon the orthodox doctrine of Scripture, which, while not the first, was
one of the most important in its influence upon subsequent understanding of the canon. For Semler, not
all of the Bible is inspired or authoritative; indeed, the fundamental evil in theology is the equation of
“Scripture” and “Word of God”:
Holy Scripture and the Word of God are clearly to be distinguished, for we know the difference. If one has
not previously been aware of this, that is no prohibition that keeps us from making the distinction. To Holy
Scripture (using the particular historical expression that originated among the Jews) belong Ruth, Esther, the
Song of Songs, etc., but not all the books that are called holy belong to the Word of God, which at all times
makes all men wise unto salvation.
The corollary of Semler’s distinction between Scripture and Word of God is that the shape of the
canon is to be explained on purely historical grounds. The canonical books are those that were chosen
by the early church to be used for public lections and instructions. But since the canon has no divine
sanction, it is appropriate for any Christian to undertake a “free investigation” of the historical
credentials of the biblical books in order to determine their religious value.
Thus, for Semler and the many who have followed the same path, the canon as a whole is rejected,
and at best what remains is some part of the biblical message, some abiding core of truth among the
accidental historical and cultural trappings. To detect this core, one must find a standard, or canon, for
the existing canon. Semler wished to retain from Scripture whatever contributed to moral improvement.
But the problem of this approach is the subjectivism both of the choice of this particular inner canon as
well as its application to the biblical materials. Modern historical-critical scholarship, which by and
large accepts Semler’s presuppositions, has failed to reach any consensus on the shape or content of the
“canon within the canon.” Gerhard Maier has fairly observed that Semler’s legacy has “culminated in a
universal Christian sickness.”
1. James Barr
Oxford professor James Barr is chosen as a major representative of the historical-critical tradition.
He is antagonistic to the doctrine of Scripture held by “Protestant orthodoxy” and “Fundamentalism”
and recently has become quite critical of the “canon criticism” of Brevard Childs. He believes the work
of Childs “can be understood as very much an attempt to dispose of the Enlightenment, to destroy its
values and drive out its way of dealing with biblical materials.”323 Integral to the historical-critical
outlook is freedom—freedom to follow critical methods wherever they may lead. Such freedom is
grounded not only in the secular outlook of the Enlightenment but also in the religious notion of
freedom deriving from the Lutheran Reformation. Thus, the Christian scholar is free to pursue the task
of biblical criticism, and in this way the Protestant principle of “the plain sense of Scripture” leads
directly to Wellhausen.
Barr appeals to Scripture itself to deny Protestant orthodoxy’s understanding of the canon. He
contends first that earliest Christianity was not concerned to be a religion of a book:
The idea of a near-absolute scriptural control of faith is a quite foreign conception, based on a quite different
construct of problems, and read into the New Testament statements about Old Testament scripture by a later
generation, especially Protestant Orthodoxy, for which the concept of scriptural control of religion and
doctrine was of absolute importance.
Moreover, the notions of “Scripture” and “canon” are not the same. The idea of Scripture is that of
certain writings held to be sacred and authoritative. Canon, on the other hand, entails the idea that these
writings should be defined and limited, something that took place long after the biblical period. “These
considerations,” Barr concludes “are … fatal to the notion that the idea of the canon is of first-rate
importance for biblical Christianity. Scripture is essential, but canon is not.”327
The shape of the canon is entirely the result of human decision. Such decisions are undoubtedly
fallible, for Barr will allow no “special intervention” by God in the scriptural or canonical process. This
stands in full agreement with his larger conception of the Bible:
My account of the formation of the biblical tradition is an account of a human work. It is man’s statement of
his beliefs, the events he has experienced, the stories he has been told, and so on. It has long been customary
to align the Bible with concepts like Word of God, or revelation, and one effect of this has been to align the
Bible with a movement from God to man. It is man who developed the biblical tradition and man who
decided when it might be suitably fixed and made canonical. If one wants to use the Word-of-God type of
language, the proper term for the Bible would be Word of Israel, Word of some leading early Christians.
Barr allows that the church is entitled to change the canon should it desire to do so. Yet, from a
practical standpoint, he thinks it most unlikely that such changes would ever be made, because
… formation of scripture, and canonization of scripture, are processes which were characteristic of a certain
time, a certain stage in the life of the people of God. We are in fact no longer in that stage; it is a matter of
history to us, and even historically we are not too well informed of the arguments and categories which were
employed—especially so, I would say, in the Jewish (as distinct from the Christian) process of scripture
formation.
One may ask, finally, what is Barr’s conception of the authority of the Bible? The answer is none
too clear. He holds that “the status of the Bible is something implied in the structure of Christian (and
of Jewish) faith. This seems to be the basis for all involvement with the Bible: it is a corollary of the
faith, something implied by the basic constituents of faith.” The Bible is this corollary of the faith
because it embodies “the classic model for the understanding of God,” a model first articulated in the
Old Testament and then reformulated and reaffirmed in connection with Jesus Christ. Being a Christian
means believing in “the God who has manifested himself in a way that has some sort of unique and
specific expression in the Bible.”333 One ought not to approach the Bible as “a true book which
contains true information about God and about various other persons and past events.” The concern of
the Bible is rather to mediate an encounter with Jesus Christ—in this sense it “is able to speak to us as a
message that reaches us from God.”335 The basis of Scripture’s authority “lies in its efficacy in the
faith-relation between men and God.” But Barr remains vague on what this might mean. It does not
mean that the Bible functions as a comprehensive ethical or doctrinal norm. Rather, Scripture functions
as part of the larger Christian vision for the church and society. Here it serves a critical role:
It questions what people think, it queries the basis of their judgments, it asks whether the tradition which
modern men form is really in continuity with its biblical origins. It is through this critical checking and
questioning role that the Bible exercises its authority: the Bible queries the tradition of its own interpretation.
In summary, Barr’s notion of the canon is thoroughly within the parameters of historical-critical
orthodoxy. Scripture is understood in naturalistic terms as a purely human production; much more is
this true of the canon. But in denying any special divine intervention in the giving of Scripture, Barr
attacks the root of any substantial notion of revelation or authority. The problem is not merely that the
Bible is not for him revelation or the Word of God. The problem is whether Barr can consistently go on
to speak of God manifesting himself to human beings in any way, since presumably any revelation
involves some sort of “special intervention”—unless God has become purely immanent in the world
process.
But, in fact, Barr holds that the Bible “is able to speak to us a message that reaches us from God.”
Yet, given his presuppositions, we are entitled to ask what this can mean. Moreover, if the Bible itself
is not a divine revelation, it is hard to see how Barr can maintain any sense of biblical authority.
Evidently he struggles with the problem, for this issue is the foggiest part of his discussion. When Barr
says that Scripture serves a critical role, he means that it acts as a foil for our own or the church’s
interpretation. The Bible is not an absolute standard, nor does it provide a comprehensive norm. While
he is not happy with the expression “a canon within the canon,” the reason is more semantic than
principial; for “if the term is to be used, reasonably good supports and precedents for such an interior
canon can be found.”339 That he does not specify such a canon suggests either an unwillingness or an
inability to address the question of authority precisely.
Barr’s sharp distinction between Scripture and canon is also problematic. By drawing the
distinction sharply he is able to conclude that canon is a late idea, not of primary importance to
Christianity. While I have argued previously that Scripture and canon are not identical ideas, it seems
that Barr unduly separates them. But if Scripture does communicate a divine word to mankind—which
Barr does not allow—then it would be natural and even imperative for God’s people to distinguish that
word from all other merely human words. And if this is the case, then the idea of canon would take on
much more importance for biblical Christianity.
2. Brevard Childs
Representative of quite a different approach to the canon is Brevard Childs, the best-known
advocate of the hermeneutics of “canon criticism.” In a series of major publications, he has defended
the thesis that “the canon of the church is the most appropriate context from which to do Biblical
Theology.” Childs is sharply critical of many of the effects of historical criticism upon the study of the
Old Testament. Historical-critical introduction since Eichorn has been more concerned to reconstruct a
history of Israel’s religious and literary development than to analyze the canonical text itself. Further,
critical scholars have failed to understand the inner dynamics of the process of canon formation and the
dialectical relationship between the developing canon and the religious consciousness of the Israelite
community.342 The authoritative Scripture gave a distinctive shape to the people of God; but, on the
other hand, those Scriptures were themselves shaped by the process of ordering and selection within the
congregation. In his most recent work, Childs directs a similar critique against the practitioners of New
Testament introduction:
It is assumed by many that the formation of a canon is a late, ecclesiastical activity, external to the biblical
literature itself, which was subsequently imposed on the writings. Many of the questions which pose a
polarity between the New Testament’s real historical development and its ecclesiastical function, or between
its genuine meaning and the sense later ascribed to it by clerics, reflect this basic confusion. Rather, it is
crucial to see that the issue of canon turns on the authoritative role played by particular traditions for a
community of faith and practice. Canon consciousness thus arose at the inception of the Christian church and
lies deep within the New Testament literature itself.
Canon criticism focuses attention on the final form of the biblical text. This text describes and
defines the history of the encounter between God and His people in a way “which became normative
for all successive generations of this community of faith.… It is only in the final form of the biblical
text in which the normative history has reached an end that the full effect of this revelatory history can
be perceived.” Childs is, therefore, critical of those who, like James Barr, see the canon only as a late
development without hermeneutical significance.346 He is also opposed to approaches like that of James
Dunn that identify various levels of canonical authority as a function of differing historical contexts:
“The function of a normative canon is to encompass the significance of the [canonical] process within
the contours of a normative text, and the multi-layered text thus becomes the vehicle for the theological
witness to the gospel.” So also Childs rejects the idea of “a canon within the canon” on the ground that
the Scriptures as a whole must be the starting point for any exegesis.348
The history of the formation of the canonical text is for Childs a thoroughly human one. The canon
did not fall from heaven, and we must not suppose that the decisions of the church were infallible,
though there is a stable core of writings that ought not to be changed. Thus, there can be no return to a
traditional, pre-Enlightenment understanding of the canon; one cannot bypass two hundred years of
critical research.350
On the other hand Childs wishes to maintain a theological as well as historical understanding of the
canon.
There is an analogy between the human and divine side of the Bible and the historical and theological
aspects of the canon. The fact that the church confessed its faith in the divine origin of its Scripture in a
thoroughly time-conditioned fashion can be readily acknowledged. But the theological issue at stake is the
rightness of the claim for divine authority to which the church responded in setting aside certain writings as
Scripture.
The canon is authoritative because through this human word the living Lord continues to address His
people; this can be understood only in the context of faith. Childs does not explain exactly how the
divine and human elements are related. He will say only that the canonical method
… does run counter to two extreme theological positions. It is incompatible with a position on the far right
which would stress the divine initiative in such a way as to rule out any theological significance to the
response to the divine Word by the people of God. It is equally incompatible with a position on the far
theological left, which would understand the formation of the Bible in purely naturalistic terms, such as
Israel’s search for self-identity, or a process within nature under which God is subsumed.
Childs presents a learned and stimulating treatment of the canon. He has an admirable ability to
synthesize a wide range of material and present it with clarity. He has identified the weakness of the
traditional historical-critical approach to Scripture. His rejection of a “canon within the canon” is
sound, as is also his concern to draw a more integral connection between Scripture and canon than that
found in James Barr. His focus on the final form of the text provides a helpful corrective to overly
atomistic exegesis and to that form of interpretation scored by Karl Barth when he wrote that “recent
commentators confine themselves to an interpretation of the text which seems to me to be no
commentary at all, but merely the first step towards the commentary.”
The reference to Barth is not without significance to assessing the position of Childs, for the great
neoorthodox theologian and Childs present virtually the same position on Scripture and canon. While
both affirm the divine authority of Scripture, they repeatedly stress the human and time-conditioned
character of Scripture. Theology cannot return to a pre-Enlightenment stance—which means, on the
one hand, that deference must be given to the broad lines of historical-critical orthodoxy and, on the
other hand, that one cannot straightforwardly simply identify Scripture with the divine word.
Thus, while there is much that is refreshing and useful in Childs, I suspect that his uneasy synthesis
of historical criticism with affirmations of canonical authority will not command wide assent.
3. Nicolaus Appel
A major voice in the contemporary discussion of the canon is that of Roman Catholic theologian
Nicolaus Appel. He articulates a conservative Catholic understanding of canon formation—primarily
the New Testament—in dialogue with a cross section of Protestant scholarship.
For Appel, the fundamental difference between Protestant and Roman Catholic theology is found in
their respective formulations of the doctrine of the Incarnation. The Reformation position is that of
“solus Christus,” which means that “in Jesus Christ and in him alone the Divine has become man, in
him alone the revelation of God appears to us, in him alone God speaks to us.” Everyone stands in a
direct, personal relationship to Christ, unmediated by human beings or the church. The Reformation
sola Scriptura corresponds precisely to this notion of faith, “for through the word of Scripture alone
can man meet Jesus Christ directly.” The Bible, therefore, may also function independently of the
church, for Protestants conceive of a direct witness of the Holy Spirit to the hearts of believers, a
witness that attests to the word of Scripture and is in turn dependent on Scripture.
But Reformation individualism faces a problem relative to the canon. The rise of historical criticism
in the Enlightenment has focused attention on the human dynamics that entered into the production of
Scripture and canon. How is this human element to be reconciled with the doctrine of Scripture as the
Word of God testified to by the Holy Spirit? Are the traditionally established limits of the canon still to
be accepted, even if the criteria used by the early church seem now naive or unworkable? Or if the
traditional canon is retained, must not Protestant principles be surrounded with uncertainty and a
consciousness of the church’s fallibility even in the recognition of the canon? Such questions have
initiated a crisis in Protestantism that to the present day remains unsolved.
By contrast to the Reformation view, the Roman Catholic Church recognizes the “Christus totus.”
Protestants limit the Incarnation strictly to the man Jesus Christ, but the Roman church confesses not
only the mystery of the God-man but also “the mystery of the emanation of the divine in the whole of
humanity, especially in the Church of Christ.” For this reason, Christ and the church stand in greater
unity for Rome than for the Reformation. Likewise, Scripture and the primitive church form a unity. It
is not to be denied that Christ speaks to individual believers by the Word and by the Spirit, but He does
so in conjunction with the witness of His body, the church.360
Appel recognizes the historical process that marks the formation of the canon. While some older
Catholic writers posit a direct revelation given through the apostles in reference to the limits of the
canon, Appel sees the canon as an ecclesiastical decision made in the postapostolic age. In this period
the church came to a deeper consciousness of the importance of a canon and to a true insight into the
shape and boundaries of this canon. This was a human and historical process that came about only
gradually in the midst of struggle and uncertainty.362
On the other hand, the growing canonical consciousness of the church must not be viewed merely
as a profane historical process, for the testimony of the Holy Spirit in the faith of the church means that
there is a theological dimension to the history of the canon. “The Spirit guides the Church into all the
truth, including the truth of the profession of the canon.” For Appel, it is appropriate to speak with the
Reformers of the autopistia of the Scriptures and, thus, of the canon. The Bible attests to its own
authority because the Spirit bears witness in and through the words of Scripture. The process by which
the church in history became conscious of the canon may be described as a growth of Scripture’s
autopistia under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But the Spirit does not witness to the canonicity of
particular books; so there is a genuine process of recognition. On the other hand, the Spirit does attest
to the truth of the gospel and, thus, to the evangelical content of the writings.365 The recognition of the
canon is, therefore, an expression of faith.
The Church, confidently surrendering to Jesus Christ, professed its faith in the mysterious character of these
books exclusively. As people of God, the Church knew and experienced itself bound to the Lord and
received this personal relationship in accordance with the structures of the apostolic Church as they were
“written.”
The Spirit who leads the body of Christ to confess this particular canon works infallibly to
guarantee the correct consensus of the church in the recognition process. This consensus bears more
than “mere historical certainty,” and as a result “the boundaries of the canon are no longer revisable.
The Spirit’s witness does not bear or need reform or revision.”
Thus, the crucial issue for Appel is the nature of the church. The church as the body of Christ,
understood in a much more literal sense than by Protestants, is the vehicle of the Holy Spirit. What the
Spirit does He does infallibly, and this includes leading the church to recognize the canon. Only on the
ground of an infallibly guided church can there be a sure canon. Protestants are left with uncertainty
regarding the canon, for they cannot draw infallible limits without being untrue to their fundamental
theological principles.
Much of Appel’s discussion is excellent. Conservative Protestants will appreciate his forthright
affirmation of the infallible authority of Scripture and his rejection of any “canon within the canon.” So
also they will agree that the growth of the canon was not merely a profane historical process but
included a theological dimension as well.
The major point of criticism, however, arises precisely over the assessment of this theological
dimension. Protestants, who reject the doctrine of ecclesiastical infallibility in other matters, will likely
dissent from the opinion that the witness of the Spirit guarantees the infallibility of the church’s
recognition of the canon. And in fact, one might question whether Appel himself can consistently
maintain such a position once he has so clearly affirmed that the canon is the result of a historical
process marked by “doubt,” “struggle,” “uncertainty and hesitation,” and regional differences within
the church. Specifically, we must ask, when did the witness of the Spirit in and through the church
become infallible? Surely the uncertainty of parts of the church about particular books suggests that
this infallibility was not always operative.
Appel himself seems to sense the problem, for he raises the question: “Does this human struggle for
certitude also have a theological meaning? In other words, does this human struggle tell us something
about the essence of the canon itself?” In the end, Appel’s answer is merely that “an accurate
investigation of the reasons why certain writings labored under difficulties is of interest for the study of
dogma and its development.”371 But has he then faced the full implications of the historical process?
4. Herman Ridderbos
The New Testament scholar Herman Ridderbos is representative of those theologians who discuss
the canon—here specifically the New Testament canon—from the perspective of salvation history.
This perspective is thoroughly Christological, for it maintains that the canon is properly understood
only when seen in its connectedness with God’s once-for-all redemptive action in Jesus Christ. As
Ridderbos explains,
… the authority of God is in no wise limited to his mighty works in Jesus Christ, but … it also extends to
their proclamation in the words and writings of those who have been especially appointed as the authorized
bearers and instruments of divine revelation. The written tradition established by the apostles, in analogy
with the writings of the Old Testament, thereby acquires the significance of being the foundation and
standard of the future church.
There are both positive and negative entailments to a redemptive-historical understanding of the
canon. Positively, it should be recognized that (1) in adopting a precise collection as authoritative, the
church acted in accord with the facts of salvation history, namely, that Christ gave His disciples
authority to serve as the foundation and “canon” of the primitive church. The priority is to be given to
the action of Christ, however, not to the decision of the church: “the canon in its redemptive historical
sense is not the product of the church; rather the church itself is the product of the canon.” Moreover,
given the foundational and unrepeatable character of the writing of the apostles, it is clear that (2) the
canon is in principle closed. Finally, the redemptive historical position of the canon necessitates that (3)
this canon should be preserved for the church in written form. The Roman Catholic attempt to retain an
oral tradition alongside the written can only lead to a relativizing of the New Testament canon.375
Negatively, Ridderbos argues against Harnack that (1) the growth of the recognition of the canon is
not foreign to the character of earliest Christianity. According to Harnack, the church’s original
authority was charismatic. Later, as that authority took on an apostolic-institutional character, the canon
was formed; thus was the Spirit “driven into a book.” Yet, in the light of salvation history, the church
never knew any authority but that which was founded on apostolic traditions. (2) Salvation history also
speaks to the question of a canon within the canon. Luther’s principle of canonicity (“whether it
preaches Christ”) effectively points to the intention of Christ in establishing the canon but must not be
employed as a criterion of canonicity. What it means “to preach Christ” can be answered only in terms
of the canon itself. (3) The redemptive-historical understanding of the canon is also opposed to a
merely actualistic notion of canonicity (whereby the New Testament’s authority consists only in the
fact that the church continues to hear in these writings the word of God). To focus on the subjective
reception of Scripture in this exclusive way undermines the objective validity of the canon.
That Christ Himself as witnessed to by the apostles forms the ground of the canon is an a priori that
must be received by faith. But, viewed as the canon of Christ, the canon cannot automatically be
equated with our concrete collection of twenty-seven writings. Doubts exist about the apostolicity of
particular writings of the present canon, and there is no a posteriori justification, whether by scientific
investigation or certification by another external authority (Rome), that can eliminate all uncertainties.
Some Protestants have also come close to a doctrine of ecclesiastical infallibility regarding the
recognition of the canon by positing a special enduement of the Holy Spirit, a special providence of
God, or an extension of the concept of inspiration to guide the canonization process. Ridderbos,
however, rejects all of these approaches. There is no escaping the fallibility of the church, even in
connection with the recognition of the canon. Faith and history must be held in tension:
The absoluteness of the canon is not to be separated from the relativity of history. It is true, however, that we
shall have to view the history of the canon in the light of this a priori of faith; and we shall view it as a
history in which not only the power of human sin and error, but, above all, Christ’s promise works itself out,
in order to build and to establish His church upon the testimony of the apostles.
Concerning the actual history of the canon, Ridderbos makes several observations. First, he notes
that the church prior to the end of the fourth century made no formal decisions on the shape or content
of the canon, nor did it devise specific criteria to establish canonicity. The canon functioned more as a
presupposition—at first largely unconscious—for the life of the early church. In this light, Ridderbos
rejects the idea that the canon is merely a reaction to Marcion or to the Montanists; rather, both of these
challenges only served to awaken the church’s self-consciousness of its true origins.
Second, the apostolic authority of the majority of the twenty-seven books was never questioned,
and the differences that arose over the antilegomena should be seen in proper perspective. Compared to
the conflicts that arose with Marcion and the Montanists, the debates over the limits of the canon were
secondary and caused little distress. It is true that a variety of factors influenced the reception or
rejection of the antilegomena, but ultimately two were decisive for acceptance. The first was growing
ecumenical unity that showed the local and provincial character of many of the objections to particular
books. Second was the overriding influence of the larger core of received books; no book was accepted
whose content was seen to contradict the witness of the larger collection.
The history of the canon, therefore, testifies to the great assurance with which the church received
the canon; this is true in some sense even with respect to the antilegomena. Such assurance is indicative
of the very nature of the canonical process.
The Church has dealt in this situation as does one who knows and points to a certain person as father and
mother. Such a knowledge rests not on demonstration but upon direct experience; it is most closely
connected with one’s own identity. In this and no other way must we picture the knowledge and the
“decision” of the Church concerning the canon. They have a direct character and flow forth out of the very
existence of the Church itself.
In this way the history of the canon a posteriori supports the salvation-historical a priori. Yet it
remains a confession of faith that the canon of the New Testament corresponds exactly to Christ’s
canon, for their identity cannot be absolutely established by historical study.
To summarize, Ridderbos consistently rejects the possibility that the church could or did establish
its own canon. Christ alone and His appointed witnesses constitute the canon. The church can only
point to this canon as that which lies at the foundation of its existence. Moreover, the reception of the
canon by the church is a fallible reception. However, in the end, Ridderbos acknowledges (in faith) that
the empirical canon coincides with the canon of Christ.
Ridderbos provides one of the most important studies of the theology of the canon. His stress on the
redemptive-historical rootedness of the New Testament canon is both theologically and historically
sound. The main question that arises concerning Ridderbos is the sharpness with which he
distinguishes the canon of Christ from the empirical canon recognized by the church and rejects “every
attempt to find an a posteriori element to justify the canon.”
While one may agree that “no historical argument, no recognition of the authority of the church, no
appeal to the consensus of history can replace even to a small extent, the element of faith necessary in
the recognition of the canon,” certain issues are confused here. First, Ridderbos too easily lumps
Protestant appeals to divine providence in guiding the church’s recognition of the canon together with
Roman Catholic claims to ecclesiastical infallibility. To be sure, there is a formal similarity, but
materially there is a great difference in the theological program here at work (as Appel clearly sees).
Second, Ridderbos’s strongly presuppositional apologetic for the canon sets too rigid an antithesis
between historical evidence and faith. The appeal by many conservative Protestants to the history of the
canon is not a denial of faith but a recognition that faith is rooted in history and thus is not without
evidence. Happily, Ridderbos himself makes some appeal to the confirmatory witness of history, and in
that sense he seems to transcend the dichotomy that he has drawn.
V. CONCLUSION
The preceding pages have surveyed the contemporary historical and theological discussions relative
to the canon. In what follows I shall summarize my own position, restricting my comments largely to
the New Testament canon, although a number of the conclusions will hold for the Old Testament as
well.
The account of the canon given by liberal Protestantism is unacceptable. Where the canon is seen to
be purely and simply a consequence of the church’s decision, with no divine or apostolic sanction, the
results are disastrous. While many nice things may still be affirmed about the Bible—its uniqueness, its
traditional prominence and influence in the Christian tradition, its proximity to the original revelatory
events, etc.—in the end it remains no more than the fallible witness of a fallible church. It is this that
constitutes the ongoing crisis of modern Protestantism, rightly critiqued by Gerhard Maier and
Nicolaus Appel.
Moreover, the view of critical orthodoxy lacks sufficient historical evidence. The early church
fathers show no consciousness that they are acting to establish the canon. Indeed, the basic shape of the
New Testament canon was securely fixed long before any fourth-century councils declared themselves
on the matter. The obvious a posteriori character of the arguments used by Irenaeus and his successors
to defend particular aspects of the New Testament canon calls into question what it means to say that
the church “chose” or “established” the canon. The apparently spontaneous development of the (New
Testament) canon suggests that it is more appropriate to speak of a recognition rather than a selection
of the New Testament books, and the same interpretation can be extended to the recognition of the Old
Testament.
There is a general consensus among recent interpreters that the idea of canon is a theological
construct that must be distinguished from the idea of “Scripture.” Canon suggests the ideas of
delimitation and selection that are not necessarily included in the term “Scripture.” Modern canon
studies are quite conscious of the human elements—the doubts, the debates, and the delays—of the
canonical process. “Canon,” according to recent scholarship, is an idea that has arisen subsequent to the
idea of “Scripture.” As a developed theological construct, therefore, canon belongs not to the apostolic
period so much as to the postapostolic period. I have no quarrel with this basic interpretation; there
seems to be no other way to deal with the patristic materials. So, too, our discussion of the Old
Testament canon showed that the idea of a closed canon appears only when Judaism had recognized
that the period of classical prophecy was over.
This position has important consequences for many conservative Protestant and Evangelical
treatments of the canon. Frequently the ideas of canon, Scripture, and apostolic authority have been
lumped together in a rather undifferentiated mass in which it is assumed that if one of these is present
the others must be also. Thus, if it can be shown that the early church acknowledged apostolic
authority, it is assumed that this proves that it also possessed rather complete ideas of New Testament
Scripture and of canon. Something of this approach lies behind B. B. Warfield’s statement that “the
canon of the New Testament was completed when the last authoritative book was given to any church
by the apostles” and that “the principle of canonicity was not apostolic authorship, but imposition by
the apostles as ‘law.’ ” Now if Warfield by this statement intends merely to point to the objective
aspect of canonical authority—what Ridderbos calls the redemptive-historical ground of the canon—I
am quite in agreement with the statement. However, if Warfield means (as I believe he does) that the
early church received the New Testament writings from the apostles with a consciousness that these
documents had an inspired status that was fully parallel to the graphai of the Old Testament, I dissent.
As Ned B. Stonehouse recognizes, “… this view lacks specific confirmation from the available
evidence and, moreover, cannot account for the diversity with respect to the limits of the New
Testament which prevailed for decades and even for centuries.” The seeming reluctance at an early
period to designate the apostolic writings as “Scripture,” the undifferentiating appeal to oral or written
tradition, and the uncertainty over the status of certain books demand some adjustments in the
traditional Evangelical approach.
Increasingly, modern students of the canon recognize not only the fact of historical process in the
formation of the canon but also the genuine connections between the developed canon and the origins
of the biblical literature. Specifically, they realize that the words and deeds of Jesus interpreted to the
community by the apostles form the ultimate standard or “canon” for the nascent church. In this sense
the developed canon is not only apostolic but fundamentally Christological or salvation-historical, as
Ridderbos has correctly emphasized. The oral and written apostolic witness to Christ was that from
which the primitive church drew its life. The process by which the written form of that witness rose to
increasing prominence and was gradually defined in the canonical understanding of the church was
both natural and spontaneous. The process was, to a great extent, underway before the Christian
community was aware of its implications. From this perspective the sharp reaction of the Fathers to
Marcion and the Gnostics is to be seen, not as a de novo selection of an alternative canon, but rather as
a making explicit of what had always been implicit in the life of the church. Here again Ridderbos’s
analogy is apt: “the Church has dealt in this situation as one who knows and points to a certain person
as father and mother.” Such knowledge rests not “on demonstration but upon direct experience.”
What does this imply for criteria of canonicity? Broadly stated, the church regarded apostolicity as
the qualifying factor for canonical recognition; however, this apostolicity should be understood not
strictly in terms of authorship but in terms of content and chronology. That which was canon must
embody the apostolic tradition, and this tradition was to be discerned in the most primitive documents:
“the normative testimonies must derive from the period closest to Christ, namely that of Christian
origins, the age of the apostles and their disciples.”390 The recognition of this apostolicity, moreover,
was based primarily on the tradition of the church. Those books that had functioned authoritatively for
earlier Christians were received as an authentic apostolic tradition. In turn, those documents were used
in a negative way to exclude works of later vintage or varying doctrinal content, as happened, for
example, in case of The Gospel of Peter.
The importance of traditional usage provides a partial explanation for the debate that surrounded
the antilegomena. The tradition could not be expected to give a uniformly full witness to all of the
biblical books. In this situation, certain books might be questioned on their relative lack of explicit
testimony, not on the grounds of their doctrinal content. For example, some of the doubts over James
and 2 and 3 John can be understood in this light. Obviously, it is not a sufficient answer for all
questions surrounding the antilegomena; theological factors also played a part, conspicuously in
connection with Revelation393 and perhaps also with Hebrews. Logistical factors also influenced
canonical development; restricted geographical circulation hindered the ecumenical recognition of
some books more than others.
To what extent are the decisions of the early church permanently binding on subsequent
generations? Should the canon be regarded as closed or still open? For example, should the church
seriously consider a document like The Gospel of Thomas as a candidate for admission to the New
Testament?
To this I respond first that the canon is in principle closed. This is affirmed (following Ridderbos)
on the basis of the salvation-historical context of the New Testament canon. Christ and the apostolic
tradition constitute the eschatological fullness of divine revelation. The canon, therefore, is limited to
those documents that the church experienced as foundational to its own existence. This foundation is
temporally limited. Dating this limit is not so important as the fact that the church recognized there was
such a limit and therefore made a qualitative distinction between the age of the apostles and the age of
the church. This insight remains valid today.
Moreover, the Christian community of the second century was in a better position than the church
of the later centuries to acknowledge the documents that de facto constituted the ground of its
existence. The fact that the arguments used to defend the canonicity of certain books appear inadequate
to some streams of modern scholarship does not necessarily disqualify the particular books in view
since, as already noted, these arguments were generally a posteriori. The determining factor was usage,
that is, the church’s recognition of its own origins. This provides also an answer to the question of a
“lost” apostolic document. Should such a document be found, would it be appropriate to include it in
the canon? On the basis of what we have just said about usage, the answer will be no. The question
here is not one of authenticity (although one wonders how agreement could ever be reached on such a
question). The issue is rather that such a document certainly has not functioned for the church as
foundational; therefore, it would be inappropriate to move beyond that foundation.
However, the closed status and enduring validity of the present canon is affirmed not merely on the
ground of the close proximity of the second-century church to the original revelatory events or upon
that community’s supposedly clearer historical memory. The binding nature of the canon—binding
here in the theological sense of “divinely authoritative”—is based upon the conviction that the canon
acknowledged by the church is nothing other than the redemptive-historical canon given by Jesus
Christ through the apostles and those whom the church recognized as “apostolic men.” The truth of this
conviction cannot be demonstrated unambiguously from historical analysis of the canonical process but
is founded upon the presupposition of divine sovereignty in human history and the life of the church.
Stonehouse observes:
Although it is highly important that this historical process be studied and analyzed as a part of our effort to
comprehend the implications of the Church’s doctrine of Scripture, we also insist that the comprehension of
the whole development depends on a recognition of divine control of history and of the special guidance of
the Spirit of God.
Ridderbos objects to any such a posteriori justification of the canon, and yet his appeal to the a
priori of faith in reference to the New Testament canon seems only to shift the emphasis from faith in
the providence of God and the leading of the Spirit to faith in the salvation-historical roots of the
canon. But need these elements be placed in antithesis? Is not the a priori of faith a conviction that the
God who spoke decisively to His people “in a Son” (Heb 1:2) has acted to preserve the message once
given?
The objection of Ridderbos seems to derive from a fear that any appeal to a special providence or to
the Spirit’s leading for the recognition of the canon will eventuate in affirming the infallibility of the
church, as in Roman Catholicism. A similar concern has led many Protestants to affirm a theoretically
open canon. Yet the problem may not be so great as it appears at first. The idea of canon in its fully
developed sense of a limited collection of documents uniquely authoritative for the life of the church is
a theological Gestalt, or model, that parallels other major doctrines of the Christian community. As
John Montgomery notes, “absolute certainty, both in science and theology, rests only with the data (for
the former, natural phenomena; for the latter, scriptural affirmations).” But the shape and limits of the
canon are not scriptural affirmations. Therefore, if Montgomery is correct—and I believe he is—we
cannot claim absolute empirical certainty for our canonical model. On the other hand, Montgomery
allows that there are varying levels of certainty within theological formulations and that “some
formulations are so well attested by the data that they acquire a practically (though not a theoretically)
‘certain’ status.”
It seems to me that the church’s formulation of the canon falls within Montgomery’s “practically
certain” category. There is no claim here to ecclesiastical infallibility in the strict sense, yet there is
great assurance to be drawn from the widespread judgment of the early Christians that this group of
writings comprises the authoritative teachings of the apostles. Oscar Cullmann speaks of “the
astonishing historical and theological assurance with which the Church proceeded when it settled on
the fourfold canon.” Perhaps. But if the church’s decision grew out of its direct experience with the
foundational, normative, and life-sustaining character of these writings, is it really so astonishing? The
early Christians believed that they knew where to find the canon of Christ and the apostles. Today we
still so believe.
Abbreviations for Works Cited
ANF The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 10 vols.
(Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1885–96; reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1950)
AUSS Andrews University Seminary Studies
BA The Biblical Archaeologist
BAGD Walter Bauer, William F. Arndt, F. Wilbur Gingrich, and Frederick W. Danker,
A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1979)
BETS Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society
Bib Biblica
BJRL Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
BS Bibliotheca Sacra
BT The Bible Translator
BTB Biblical Theology Bulletin
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
CQ Classical Quarterly
CTM Concordia Theological Monthly
DBSup Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplement, (Paris: Letourney, 1957)
EBC The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein, 12 vols. (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 1976–)
EQ The Evangelical Quarterly
ExpT The Expository Times
GOR Greek Orthodox Review
GCS Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller de ersten drei Jahrhunderte, 40 vols.
(Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1897–)
GTJ Grace Theological Journal
H&T History and Theology
HE Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica
HeyJ Heythrop Journal
HTR The Harvard Theological Review
Int Interpretation
IRM International Review of Mission
JAAR Journal of the American Academy of Religion
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JBR Journal of Bible and Religion
JETS Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
JPH Journal of Presbyterian History
JQR Jewish Quarterly Review
JR Journal of Religion
JRT Journal of Religious Thought
JSNT Journal for the Study of the New Testament
JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
JTS Journal of Theological Studies
McCQ McCormick Quarterly
NovT Novum Testamentum
NPNF1 The Nicene and Post-Nicéne Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, 1st ser., 14 vols. (repr.
ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979)
NPNF2 The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 2d ser.,
14 vols. (repr. ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975)
NTS New Testament Studies
PEQ Palestine Exploration Quarterly
PG Patrologia graeca, ed. J. P. Migne, 162 vols. (Paris: Lutetiae, 1857–66)
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association
PRS Perspectives in Religious Studies
RB Revue Biblique
RBén Revue bénédictine
RTR The Reformed Theological Review
SC Sources chrétiennes (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1940–)
SE Studia Evangelica
SJT The Scottish Journal of Theology
SNT Studien zum Neuen Testament
SWJT Southwestern Journal of Theology
TB Tyndale Bulletin
TDNT Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard
Friedrich, 10 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964–76)
TJ Trinity Journal
TP Theologie and Philosophie
TS Theological Studies
TSFB Theological Students Fellowship Bulletin
TU Texte und Untersuchungen
USQR Union Seminary Quarterly Review
VC Vigiliae Christianae
WTJ The Westminster Theological Journal
Index of Subjects
Accommodation: as recently treated, 26–28; its relation to alleged error in Scripture, 27–28, 266,
419n.137, 420n.155
Adduction. See Logic
Aesthetic Theology, 374n.5
Allegorization. See New Testament Use of the Old Testament
Audience Criticism: New Testament examples, 153–54; Old Testament example, 164; relation to
harmonization, 142
Authority: of the biblical text itself, 37–38; crisis of, 8; declining influence of biblical authority in the
churches, 46–48; multifaceted nature of, 94; its relation to literary genre, 81–82; of Scripture in
Barth’s thought, 222–24, 275–94
Baconianism, 17
Biblical Atomism, 65
Biblical Positivism, 65
Biblical Theology: its aversion to propositions, 54–55; its linguistic abuses, 53–54; ruled out by
“ordinary” language, 85. See also New Biblical Theology
Canon: Alexandrian, 307–8, 340–42; and Apocrypha, 308–10; in apostolic fathers, 323–28; approaches
to, 345–55; and the cessation of prophecy, 312–14; closing of the New Testament canon, 315–18;
controversy over, 328–31; critical synthesis concerning, 356–60; and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 310–12;
definition of, 300–301; in the Enlightenment, 344–45; formation of New Testament canon, 318–23;
and Irenaeus, 334–37; in Josephus and Philo, 303–5; and Justin Martyr, 333–34, 439n.240; and
literary genre, 82; and Marcion, 331–33, 438n.215; and the new hermeneutic, 43–44; in the New
Testament, 305–7; Old Testament canon, 301–15; in the Reformation, 342–44, 432n.117; spread of
notion of, 337–40; treatments of, 299–300, 300–303. See also Canon Criticism
Canon Criticism: confusion of context, 380n.161; and discussions of canon, 44, 348–50, 381n.179; and
sensus plenior, 204–9
Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics, 64, 68–69
Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, 68
Common Sense Realism. See Scottish Common Sense Realism
Concursive Theory: criticism of, 45; and sensus plenior, 203–4; and theodicy, 45
Contextualization: its relation to the new hermeneutic, 41–42; its relation to confessional statements,
42–43
Copernican Theory and biblical authority, 14–15
Council of Trent, 250
Cultural Conventions: and informal generalizations, 115; and speech arts, 91–92
Deduction. See Logic
Discourse Acts, 90–92, 93
Distanciation, its importance to interpretation, 41
Enlightenment: its alleged influence in evoking “Fundamentalist” creation of the doctrine of inerrancy,
244–65; elusive definition of, 246–49; and English influence on the Continent, 366n.36;
misconceptions of its impact on the doctrine of Scripture, 241–69; its treatment of canon, 344–45
Epistemology: and the correspondence theory of truth, 382n.193; and fideism, 44–45; and
foundationalism, 44–45; and the Holy Spirit’s internal witness, 229–35; and miracles, 373n.154; in
the natural sciences, 41; and the new hermeneutic, 38–45; and propositions, 37–38
Evangelicals: their abandonment of biblical authority, 47–48; their approach to “propositions,” 55–56,
56–59, 66–67; their exegetical distortions, 21–22; their fragmentation, 6–8; their growth, 6, 46; and
Scripture, 5–6; Scripture as viewed by British Evangelicals, 366nn.34, 35
Faith and Practice: as the Reformation understood it, 5; as a restrictive criterion, 14–15, 102–3
Form Criticism: and harmonization, 142; New Testament examples, 151–53; Old Testament example,
164
Fundamentalism: its alleged creation of the doctrine of inerrancy, 244–46; its connection with
Evangelicalism, 10, 412n.22, 421n.168
Genre. See Literary Genre
Gnosticism, 328–31, 335–37
Harmonization: of the “additive” type, 144–45, 160–61, 165–66, and apparently contradictory
passages, 149–51; legitimacy and limits of, 139–74; and literary genre, 144–45; of parallel
documents, 34; problems and diverse definitions of, 139–41; in the study of Arrian’s and Plutarch’s
lives of Alexander, 169–73; in the study of Josephus, 166–69; and sub-categories, 141–45; wise use
of, 34
Hegelian Dialectic at Tübingen, 123
Hermeneutical Circle, 38–39. See also New Hermeneutic
Historical Reconstruction: of biblically described events, 110–12; and the burden of proof, 132; of first-
century Christianity, 121–31; of first-century Pharisaism, 112–21; and historical objectivity, 128–
30; need for and dangers of, 109–32; and related misunderstandings between conservative and
nonconservatives, 130–32; and the slant of an evangelist, 116; uncertainty of, 111
Historiography: its agenda, 19–20; and the burden of proof, 18–20; dependence on restricted
“paradigms,” 14–15; of the Enlightenment, 241–46; 267–72; and historical skepticism, 390n.34;
revisionist, 10–20. 365n.23, 368n.60, 511–12nn.19–22. See also Historical Reconstruction
Holy Spirit: diversity in His involvement with the Scriptures, 217; inspiration and internal witness in
contemporary theology, 222–23; His internal witness, 219–35, 409–10n.60; His internal witness
and Scripture’s self-attestation, 407n.27; objects of His internal witness, 225–29; the rationality of
His internal witness, 229–35; and revelation and inspiration, 217–29; the sovereignty of, 223–24,
225; His witness as understood in Protestant orthodoxy, 220–21
Hyperbole and historical reconstruction, 115
Illocutionary Act. See Speech Act
Imagination: its role in reading Scripture, 75–78; in tension with reason, 378n.119
Induction. See Logic
Inerrancy: in Barth’s view, 293–94; definition of, 30–31; and literary phenomena in the Bible, 30–31;
and propositions, 58–59; in recent historiography, 241–46; as a subset of infallibility, 94
Infallibility: believed by most Christians up to the early part of the Enlightenment, 250–57; history of
the term, 101–2; its meaning related to achievement of the purposes of illocutionary forces, 94–103;
and “natural philosophy,” 257–64; as related to biblical sentences but not propositions, 58–59
Inspiration: and the confusion with the internal witness of the Spirit in contemporary theology, 222–23;
current definitions of: 29–30; not entailing dictation, 29–30, 187; distinction between its results and
its mode, 29–30; work of the Holy Spirit in, 217–19
International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, 7, 364n.9
Jamnia hypothesis, 301–3
Justification by faith, 380n.172
Language: “ordinary,” 85–92; its relation to life, 82–84
Language-games: diverse kinds of, 83–84; and speech act, 90. See also Speech Act
Legalism: difficult definition of, 117–20; and Pharisaism, 118–20
Literary Criticism: and the doctrine of Scripture, 31–35; rhetorical criticism, 32–33; and structuralism,
375n.14. See also Literary Genre
Literary Genre: of Acts, 371n.119; and alleged (im)morality of forms, 74; and authorial intent, 79–80;
and authority, 81–82, diversity of in Scripture, 69, 78–79; of an epistle, 36; of a gospel, 35–36,
381n.183; and harmonization, 144–45; importance of identifying inductively, 93; and
interpretation, 35–38, 78–85; and life, 82–84; nature of, 380n.162; purposes of, 80–81, 82–83; and
revelation, 81; and speech acts, 90–92; and truth, 68–75, 80–85. See also New Biblical Theology
Literature: “ordinary,” 85–92. See also Literary Genre
Locutionary Act. See Speech Act
Logic: deduction allegedly abused by inerrantists, 179–80; the importance of induction, 179–80; its
role in formulating a doctrine of Scripture, 24–25
Metaphor, value of, 78–79
Midrash, 35–36, 74, 193, 400–401n.54. See also New Testament Use of the Old Testament
Mishnah: date of, 116; nature of the history in, 116–17
Myth: and literary genre, 76–77; as providing a taste of history, 77
Narrative. See Literary Genre
Neologians, 264–67
New Biblical Theology: its aversion to propositions, 54–55; its dependence on literary forms, 54, 69–
70, 71–72. See also Biblical Theology
New Hermeneutic: its appeal to paradigmatic dependency, 39–40; its connection with
contextualization, 41–42; and epistemology, 38–45; lateness of Evangelicals’ contribution, 39; its
rejection of positivism, 40–41; its relation to the New Testament use of the Old, 186–87
New Testament Use of the Old Testament: adopting Jewish exegetical methods, 192–95; and
allegorical exegesis, 181–83; and alternative points of view, 190–91; in application to new
situations, 189–90; and the distinction between appropriation techniques and hermeneutical axioms,
194; and the distinction between “meaning” and “significance,” 199–201; fideistic approaches of,
184–85; and “fulfillment” language, 191–92; and inerrancy, 209–11; and promise-fulfillment, 196;
in Reformation thought, 183; and rejection of the Old Testament, 181; and “scientific” exegesis,
183–84; and sensus plenior, 201–4; and subjectivity of meaning, 186–87; and theologically
controlled exegesis, 198–201; and typology, 195–98; using Old Testament language as a vehicle of
expression, 188–89
Nonconservatives, the increasing discussion of Scripture by, 6–7; passim
Paradigmatic Dependency: in the New Hermeneutic, 39–40. See also Historiography
Performatives. See Speech Act
Perlocutionary Act. See Speech Act
Pesher, 193, 400–401n.54. See also New Testament Use of the Old Testament
Pharisaism: historical reconstruction of, 112–21; and legalism, 117–20
Plenary Inspiration, 11–14
Poetry: its functions, 76–78; and paraphrase, 69–73; and the real world, 69–71
Positivism and epistemology, 40–42
Presuppositions: and historical reconstruction, 123–25; need for sharper awareness of, 131; and the
Tübingen School, 123–55
Princetonians: their courage, 408n.41; and reliance on induction, 17–18, 24–25; and Scottish Common
Sense Realism, 16–18, 411n.19
Prophecy: cessation of in relation to canon, 312–14; as one paradigm of revelation, 81
Propositional revelation: dangers of, 63–64; difficulties in the expression, 56–60
Propositions: aversion to, 54–55; and biblical sentences, 58–59, 60–62; differentiated from other
notions, 376n.52; and epistemology, 38; and Evangelicals, 55–56, 56–58; ordinary and
philosophical senses of, 60; and the “picture-theory,” 66–67; and poetry, 69–70; and revelation, 36–
37, 56; and statements, 61–62; and truth, 56, 57, 72; and verbal inspiration, 57–58
Prozbul, 119–20
Pseudonymity as a literary form, 74
Qumran: and the canon, 310–12; and canonicity of Daniel, 429n.76; exegesis of, 194, 308
Redaction Criticism: and harmonization, 143–44, 390n.35; New Testament examples of, 155–60; Old
Testament examples of, 165; stylistic redaction, 156–58; theological redaction, 158–60
Reductionism in the definition of theological terms, 25–26
Reformation, the: and accommodation, 27; and canon, 342–44; and Scripture, 5
Retroduction. See Logic
Revelation: Barthian view of, 58–59; and discourse acts, 90–92, 93; and reason, 416n.95
Roman Catholicism: and apologetics regarding the Bible following the Council of Trent, 250–52, 254–
55; and canon, 350–52; and Scripture, 8–9, 364nn.13, 16, 379n.143; and sensus plenior, 201–2. See
also Vatican II
Science: and the Bible, 14–15; at its rise and in discussion over biblical authority, 257–64
Scottish Common Sense Realism: its antecedents, 367n.47; and fundamentalism, 15–16, 411n.19; its
origins and influence, 15–18, 368n.52
Sensus Plenior: and canon criticism, 204–9; and concursive theory, 203–4; its meaning as understood
in Roman Catholicism, 201–2; and Scripture’s appeal to Scripture, 43, 179–211. See also New
Testament Use of the Old Testament
Sentences: their referents, 65; and speech acts, 86–90; and Wittgenstein, 65–67. See also Propositions;
Speech Act
Sociology and New Testament interpretation, 33–34
Son of Man, 207
Source Criticism: and harmonization, 142–43; New Testament examples of, 154–55; Old Testament
examples of, 164–65
Speech Act: as a theory of language, 86–92; commissive, 94; expressive, 94; successful or not, 95–103
Spirit. See Holy Spirit
Statements. See Propositions
Textual Criticism: and harmonization, 141; New Testament examples of, 145–47; Old Testament
example of, 162–63
Theology: as defined by Barth, 287–89; as “ordinary literature” analysis of the Bible, 104, 381n.180;
not a substitute for Scripture, 104
Torah, written and oral, 120–21
Translation and the problems of harmonization, 147–49
Truth: conception of, 95–103; definition of, 35–36; and language-games, 381n.177; and literary forms,
69; pragmatic theory of, 97–98; and successful speech acts, 96–98. See also Literary Genre;
Propositions; Sentences
Tübingen School, 122–25, 386n.47, 387nn.59, 60; and the response of J. B. Lightfoot, 125–28
Typology: dependent on canon, 402n.68; as an interpretative key, 183, 184, 195–98, 399n.24. See also
Sensus Plenior
Vatican II and Scripture, 8–9, 242
Verbal Inspiration, 11–14
Westminster Assembly, 411n.11
Word Studies, abuses of, 53–54