Textual Adventism: Cutting the Higher Critical Knot

This morning I discarded some "truth-filled" literature. The booklet included warnings that neglecting the truth it contained "places the soul in greater jeopardy than does any other sin of indifference and neglect."

The booklet from the "Universal Publishing Assn." was filled with closely reasoned allegorical interpretation of the Bible. (Origin of Alexandria would have been proud.) If I accepted a few of its starting premises regarding the typological meaning of nearly everything in the Bible, the conclusions were not all that outlandish. But if you stepped back from the particular points being made on each page, you could see that it was flimsy house of cards. As a pastor I have learned that people who engage in this approach to the Bible seldom have sweet, harmonious relationships with their spouses or children. Their spiritual life is characterized nearly always by fear and anxiety and usually by a miserable judgmentalism.

So I tossed the booklet "At the Eleventh Hour" into the recycling bin. Sometimes you have to just cut through the foolish. There is no benefit in trying to analyze silliness point by point. (This applies to equally to evangelical dispensationalism and to Adventist endtime chart making.)

Fundamentalist apocalyptic allegorizing is not the only approach to "Bible interpretation" that is best tossed in the recycling bin. The same applies to much of "source criticsm." If you read the Old Testament analytically, it's obvious there are different sources behind the text as we have it today. Genesis One and Two are not a smooth integrated whole. They are two different stories. The books of Samuel have places where it's obvious the author has brought together information or stories from different sources without smoothing out all the differences that were in the earlier versions.

HOWEVER . . .

When you read the attempts by source critics to be ever more precise in their assignment of this sentence or phrase (or even single word) to a particular "pre-biblical" source you realize they are building a house of cards no more worthy of respect than the apocalyptic speculations of endtime enthusiasts.

The reality is we do not have ANY of the putative sources that lie behind the actual biblical text. The notion that the text as we have it was assembled by committees or communities is laughable. That is not how great literature is written. The various Bible books as we have them were produced by authors. Those authors were not idiots. When Moses--or whoever it was that wrote Genesis--included Genesis One and Genesis Two in his book, he was not unaware of the differences between the two stories. He deliberately included both stories with their differences. He intended his readers to get the message that came from including both stories in his book. We get no closer to some "original" meaning by over emphasizing the differences than we do by pretending there are no differences. The writer intended for us to get the meaning that comes from the interaction of the two different tellings of the creation story.

While some critical commentators try to get at the "real meaning" of the Bible by exploring a never-ending regression of bits of "source material," a much wiser approach is to simply take the text as we have it and read this "text in our hand" for its meaning as a whole.

The same holds true for the New Testament. The Jesus Seminar's theatrical pronouncements about the authenticity of various passages in the gospels is just that--theater. There is not a shred of documentary evidence behind their speculations. "Q" does not exist. Of course, there is good evidence that the stories and teachings of Jesus as we have them in the New Testament were affected by the passage of time and the experience of the church between the days of Jesus and the date of its writing? But ALL conclusions about the precise relationship of that history to the words of the New Testament is mere speculation, the assured results of scholarship notwithstanding.

As with the OT so with the NT, often the best way to deal with "source criticism" is to toss it in the recycling bin and just read the text as we have it.

This is much easier to do if we are not saddled with "Bible and Bible Only" or "Bible Inerrancy" theories. Instead of getting stuck on the insurmountable difficulties created by outlandish claims regarding inerrancy, inspiration and infallibility, we simply use the Bible for its intended purpose--the cultivation of intimacy with God, moral purpose and spiritual and ethical insight.

Veneration of the Bible is not the great purpose of Christian life. We do not practice bibliolatry.

Scholarly respectability is illegitimate as a goal for a preacher or spiritual teacher. Our goal must be helping people connect with God and lead moral, healthy lives (understood in the broadest sense of social, spiritual, physical, mental life).

The Bible is a peerless tool for the pursuit of that goal. When that goal is obscured by fundamentalist or academic speculation, use the recycling bin.