Lecture 1: Criticism and the Theology of the Reformation
Paraphrasing 'The Old Testament in the Jewish Church'
This is a paraphrase of a lecture by Free Church Minister and Hebrew scholar William Robertson Smith, delivered as part of a series in the first months of 1881 to around eighteen hundred people in either Glasgow or Edinburgh (the lectures took place in both cities). The lectures were combined into a book, ‘The Old Testament in the Jewish Church: A Course of Lectures on Biblical Criticism’. The material in these lectures represents a moment in time when conservative Christian scholarship in Scotland had not yet formed a consensus on how to approach critical study of the Bible, and in my mind Smith’s defence of biblical criticism remains more thoroughly Protestant and Reformed than much discussion in contemporary circles that embrace those adjectives. I am paraphrasing these lectures because I think you might enjoy them, and because I can’t stop thinking about them. I’m pretty sure this isn’t plagiarism or copyright infringement, but if you think I’m going to get sued then please let me know. The original book can be found for free online here, in pdf format: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Old_Testament_in_the_Jewish_Church/XOk4AAAAMAAJ?hl=en
I agreed to give this lecture series not because I want to start a fight but because I was asked for information. I’m not interested in imposing my private ideas on the world, I’m here to lay out as clearly as I can the facts of a well-established branch of historical science: biblical criticism. Biblical criticism is a branch of history, or of historical science, and my aim is to convince you all that it is a necessary and worthwhile branch, and that it should be valued by anyone who dives deep into the Bible and into its religion.
Only a fool would pretend that this is not a controversial topic. Like every other science that covers a topic of general interest, biblical criticism winds up proposing theories that puncture popular beliefs. If normal Bible-readers, unfamiliar with scientific study of the Bible, could easily adjust to new ideas in biblical criticism, this would not be evidence of enlightenment but of indifference. Controversy implies real belief.
As a rule, our deepest convictions are not scientific, in the sense that they are not produced by logic or study. We learn by experience, and if we can articulate our beliefs well enough to deal with what comes our way then we’re happy. Because of this muddiness in our thinking, we are not good at dealing with new theories or new situations. The really important – and really true – bits of our beliefs are tied up with unfounded opinions, misunderstood theories, and unverifiable facts. We keep our treasures of conviction in jars of clay, and we forget that it’s the contents, not the container, that is worth keeping.
The essence of the individual Christian’s belief in the authority and truth of the Bible is this: in the Bible, God speaks to my soul. This belief does not – cannot – depend on any other evidence. No worthy arguments from tradition, no firm affirmations from our parents, no testimony from any other believer, ancient or modern, can transform God’s word to them into God’s word to me. Belief, faith, personal conviction – whatever you want to call that thing that replaces plausible evidence with divine certainty – comes from the Holy Spirit testifying to our hearts through the Word of God. But that Word is still a written word. Like any other written thing it has a past, it has a history.
The way we read this book and understand it depends more than anything else on human teaching. The Bible is God’s book, but the Bible as read and understood by any individual is God’s book plus a big dose of human interpretation. In normal Bible-reading, these two things – the divine book and the human interpretation – are not obvious to us. Normally, we are aware when we come across a passage that is obscure or confusing, and we know not to put much weight on our understanding of that passage. Most of the time we feel that we are not doing any interpreting, we are just reading, and we are confident that we would spot any ‘interpretation’ if it occurred. But the influence of human interpretation goes much further than a few obscure passages. Our most basic and commonplace ideas about the history and contents of the Bible – all of it, not just the obviously weird bits – are shaped by things we learned from other humans, who learned them from other humans. First we forget this, then we start to think that God’s witness to the truth of his Word is actually a witness to our interpretation of his Word, and we claim divine authority for opinions that belong firmly in the realm of normal discussion and can be proved (or disproved) using historical evidence. We think that the grace of God that we’ve found in Scripture depends on our particular interpretation of Scripture, and that if anyone challenges it they risk eliminating the God of grace from his own book.
Many Bible readers never find intellectual or spiritual reasons to deal with this mistake, to grapple with the blend of essential and accidental, of human theory and divine truth, which are wrapped up together in current interpretations of Scripture. Others, however, especially those called to scholarly and systematic study of Scripture, come face to face with hard facts which lead them to rely on new theories, theories which the average reader will find frivolous and unnecessary.
Consider for example the way that scholarly study differs from ordinary practical Bible-use. A normal reader will pick up their Bible, open it to a passage, and focus on the immediate spiritual benefit that it gives to them. Often this might be a single word or phrase, leaping off the page into the heart. In general, the real fruit of this kind of Bible reading isn’t so much about any systematic knowledge or understanding, it’s about the privilege of stepping out of the chaos of the world and entering the pure, holy atmosphere where the God of love shows himself to the human heart. In that place, the newest believer sits side by side with a psalmist, a prophet, or an apostle, and all of them together hear the words of divine promise and are lifted up in the response of faith. Far be it from me to say anything critical about this use of Scripture. This is the way that Scripture proves itself to be the pure and perfect Word of God, a lamp to the feet and light to the path for every Christian.
On the other hand, however, this kind of study is by nature imperfect. There are plenty of verses in Scripture that don’t lead to this kind of spiritual encounter with God, and as a result are basically excluded from normal Bible reading. I know that many humble and faithful people try to hide this fact by deriving some kind of lesson from passages which seem entirely unspiritual. And there is plenty of precedent for this, it is in fact nothing more than a modern version of the ‘topical exegesis’ that dominated the Old Catholic and Medieval Church. The ancient fathers of the faith laid down the principle that anything in Scripture which seems useless or irrelevant should be interpreted via typology or figurative application. In principle, Protestants are opposed to this sort of thing, but in practice we still get around lots of difficulties by imposing things onto hard passages which don’t actually come from those passages. This might get us over an immediate difficulty, but it doesn’t solve the problem. Let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment: there are many things in the Bible which, in our normal reading, give us no benefit. It might be the genealogies in Chronicles, the descriptions of Solomon’s temple, most of Ezekiel, the rituals in the Pentateuch, etc. These passages have no devotional use, and are basically blank pages except when it comes to scholarly study. The same is true for lots of the poetic or prophetic books, where the language is obscure and the train of thought impossible to follow. Faced with these passages even the greatest scholars, equipped with every weapon of philology and archaeology and history, will try to avoid signing their name to any specific interpretation. These difficulties are not confined to small corners of the Bible, they run right the way through, and demand the attention of anyone who wants to understand Scripture as a whole.
So, after all this, we are brought to the issue in front of us. If we want, we can reduce our study of Scripture to only what is immediately edifying. We can skim and skip and dodge around every confusing or boring passage, ignoring every difficulty that doesn’t quickly resolve itself into a practical lesson or spiritual morsel. This style of reading is full of personal benefits, and raises no intellectual problems. But neither does it do justice to the whole of God’s Word. It confines every reader to a spiritual life that is individualistic, as the only spiritual benefits the Bible offers are those we are already equipped to handle, according to our own depth of spiritual experience. Reading in this way produces plenty of one kind of truth, but entirely sidelines lots of other kinds of truth, and leads the individual reader to simply impose their own preconceived ideas onto unfamiliar passages. No single person’s spiritual life is big enough, mature enough, or general enough to fit neatly onto what the Bible contains. The Church aims to be universal and holistic in its teaching and doctrine, and because of this it cannot be bound by any one person’s view of things, or even to a great multitude of views – coming as they do from fallible and imperfect people. What the Church strives to hold onto is the combination of views embodied in the experience of the inspired writers of the Bible. The Church wants the whole meaning of every prophet, every psalmist, every apostle, and she cannot get this by harvesting immediately-available applications from random chapter of Scripture. She must take up each section of the Bible as a whole, learn the position of its writer, and follow out the progression of its thought to the last detail. In this process, the Church – or the theologians who serve in it – must not be put off by finding things that are strange, foreign, or at first glance straight-up unedifying. We cannot let our flawed understanding of things be the standard by which we measure God’s interactions with ancient believers. Systematic study must, first of all, do justice to the text. When this is done well, the practical application will flow naturally from it.
Prior to the Reformation, the only respected theological study was the study of dogma. Normal believers’ lives were thought to be nourished by Sacraments, not by Scripture. The ‘experimental’ use of Scripture, cherished by Protestants, was not seen as one of the main reasons for God to have given us the Bible. Rather, the Bible was given to provide prooftexts for theologians, and the real object of faith was the doctrine of the Church, expressed in the creeds. Christ was necessary for believers, but he was held out to them in the Mass, not in Scripture. The Bible was a source of knowledge for the mysterious doctrine of revelation, but the Sacraments were the true means of grace.
The Reformation changed all of this, and brought the Bible as a means of grace to the forefront. Some accuse them of simply swapping an infallible Bible in place of an infallible Church, but this is nonsense. What really happened was a change in the entire understanding of what faith is, what the plan and purpose of God’s revelation is, and of how the means of grace functioned.
Saving faith, said Luther, is not mere intellectual agreement with a system of doctrine – it is personal trust on God in Christ, taking God’s promise of redeeming love personally. God’s grace is the manifestation of this redeeming love, and the means of grace are what God uses to bring this love to our ears and hearts. All means of grace, all sacraments, are only valuable if they bring us a personal word from God, the word contained in the gospel message and made incarnate in Jesus. Therefore, the Bible’s value is not as a source of theology, it is that the Bible contains the entire message of God’s love, of God as my God. Luther, filled with the light of this conception of Scripture, mocked theologians who treated the Bible like a storehouse of proof texts. The Bible is a living thing. The Middle Ages cared only for doctrinal mysteries, and where these were absent it saw only dead history, which Luther complained ‘had simply taken place and concerned men no more’. ‘Not so!’ said the Reformers. That history is not dead, it is the story of God and his people, and the heart of love he opened to them is still open to us. The great pre-eminence of Bible history is that, in it, God speaks. He speaks not in the language of doctrine but of personal grace, which we have a right to embrace as personal, as for-us.
In a word, the Bible is a book of ‘experimental religion’ (in the sense of being about religious experience). In it, the relationship of God and his people is described, right up to its full revelation in Jesus Christ. There is no part of God’s message to the believer which the Bible does not present, in living form, by showing how holy men of old received the message as light in the darkness, as comfort to their souls. Therefore, to make this message our own, we don’t need church tradition or authorised exegesis. What we need is to place ourselves side by side with the writers. With the psalmist, the prophet, the apostle. We must enter sympathy with them, feel our sin and need as they felt them, and receive from God – as those writers received them – the words of divine love. This is what makes the Bible perspicacious (i.e. understandable) and precious to everyone who is taught by the Spirit.
These ideas exploded within the church with all the force of a new discovery. It was nothing less than the resurrection of the living Word, buried for centuries under the rubble of false interpretation. We modern readers acknowledge our debt to these Reformers, but we do not always understand the gift we have been given, this open Bible in front of us. It’s typical to think that the Reformation removed restrictions on translation and availability, and that’s partly true, but there were in fact translations into common languages prior to Luther, and preaching from the Word was commonly done by the Friars. The real power of Luther’s work was not that he made it possible for laity to read the Bible, but that he made it impossible for them not to read it. We are not children of the Reformation simply because we have Bibles in our hands and appeal to its authority; Luther’s opponents did the same, forcefully. But to them it was a book of abstract doctrine, and to him it was a testament of God’s words of love to the saints of the past, and of their faithful response to him. This view makes all of biblical study entirely different, and we are not Luther’s children unless we share it.
The Bible, according to the Reformation, is a history of redemption, from fall to ascension to the coming of the Spirit into the Church. But it is not merely a description of events. It is an inner history, a chronicle of God’s relationship with man. God’s grace is told to us, by the psalmists and prophets, in the specific way each writer encountered it. The way we encounter God’s word, applied personally to our hearts by the Spirit, is the same way it was encountered by the biblical writers. Thus, the record of revelation becomes the autobiography of the Church, the story of God’s relationship with humans.
Therefore, the first task of the Reformed theologian is not to transform Bible truths into doctrines. It is to follow the inner history, the religious life described by the Bible. He must study every word of Scripture, and study it in relation to the life of the writer and the writer’s encounter with God. Only in this way can he hope to uncover the riches of God’s grace in the Word. God never wasted a word, never spoke to a person in a way that wasn’t perfectly fitted to the moment and to the man. Without this context, it is not the same Word.
The goodness of God is revealed in the wealth of material he has given to us in this task, the task of historical exegesis. Vast parts of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, seem lacking in spiritual value, and the rational temptation is to ditch them. On the other hand, an equally immature approach valorises these passages as spiritual gems on par with the beatitudes or the psalms. Both views are wrong, and both make the same mistake. Both have forgotten that the Bible, as a history of God’s word to man, must contain enough ordinary (boring) life in it to make it possible for us to enter the mind of the ancient writer, and to receive God’s Word as they received it. It is context. Unlike the New Testament, which comes to us amongst a wealth of contemporary literature, the Old Testament stands alone in its context, with no contemporary literature at all except those books accepted into the canon.
The kind of systematic study I’m talking about is actually instinctive for every intelligent reader. Every believer grasps words of promise, of blessing, of warning, putting himself in the position of the first hearer of the Word. The diligent reader quickly learns that the benefit he gets from these passages is in proportion to his ability to place himself alongside the writer of the passage. But systematic study must go above and beyond this instinctive approach. To feast on the Bible’s riches, we must grasp the full range of systematic study, learning its principles and applying them carefully. Let’s do that.
In the Bible, God and man meet. The way they relate in Scripture is the way they relate everywhere. This is the key to every puzzling passage about the divine and human sides of the Bible that gets readers worked up. Many refer to the human side of the Bible as if it were dangerous, and ought to be kept out of sight in case it makes us forget that the Bible is the Word of God. There is an assumption that the Bible will only be spiritually good for us if we focus on its divine side. This is just the Medieval view reheated. If the whole value of God’s revelation is in abstract doctrines, directed to the mind not to the heart, then any idea of a human influence in the Bible is disturbing. But if the Bible presents the personal interactions of God with man, it is absolutely essential to look at the human side. The prophets and psalmists were not passive channels for divine doctrine to pour through. God didn’t just speak through them, he spoke to them. They had an intelligent share in the divine discourse, and we can’t understand God’s Word without the human element any more than we could understand a telephone conversation by listening to only one end of the line. To suppress the human side of the Bible, in the interests of preserving the divine Word, is as foolish as trying to report a conversation between a father and child by leaving out everything the child said or did.
The first criterion for whether an interpretation of the Bible is good is whether or not it gives proper status to the human element. Does it deal with the character and feelings of each person who was part of the divine drama? This is really the whole business of scholarly exegesis. The highest achievement of study and research is to put the reader in the position of the person who heard God’s word in the first place. This is basically what the Westminster Confession teaches, when it says that our assurance of the truth and authority of Scripture comes from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by the Word in our hearts.
Here, it should be obvious, we reach a practical decision. The principles of the Reformation demand that we study the Bible in a way pre-Reformation believers did not. We must study Scripture historically. The Bible itself has a history. It wasn’t written all at once, or by one author. It’s made up of different books, different bits and pieces given to the Church at different times. Our job is to identify these pieces, study them one by one, and understand in each case the writer’s encounter with the divine Word. Our ability to perceive God’s mind is directly proportionate to our success in this historical task. We must try to follow his dialogue with man from text to text. Rather than picking up random pieces of Bible and skimming them for devotional content, we must learn to understand God’s word in its natural sequence. Let it be said clearly, there is nothing arbitrary or accidental about God’s revelation. He may have spoken, as Hebrews says, ‘in many times and in many ways’, but never without purpose. The method of revelation was a method of education. He spoke to Israel as one speaks to impressionable children, bit by bit, little by little, so that each part could be understood and make the hearers responsible for what they heard. If we follow this course of study, we too can become like children hearing the Word of the Father, but for this I repeat that we must put ourselves alongside the Word’s first hearers. What was obvious to them may not be obvious to us. God spoke to men, and his speech is like all speech in that it was designed to communicate to a particular audience, a particular context. When two people talk, if a third person joins the conversation they are confused until they listen for a while and learn the necessary context for what they hear, and so it is with the Bible. This is where historical study comes in. God’s mind is unchangeable, his love is unchangeable, and his purposes are unchangeable. The variety of Scripture demonstrates the variety of mankind to whom God has spoken, and it is with this variety that we must familiarise ourselves. The Bible is a record of the history of grace. We must read it as such, patiently, not giving up when our study seems pointless, continuing in the footsteps of the biblical writers, learning to see their needs, hopes, failures and sins, and hear with their ears the divine words of comfort and assurance. The Bible’s beauty is that it both invites and rewards this kind of reading. Its mazes and riddles and genealogies and endless diversity are an inexhaustible mine of the richest historical value, and in it we can work happily, always drawing closer to the supreme love and wisdom of Him who speaks there.
Let me get to the point. In all this long description of the task I have not used the dreaded word ‘criticism’. But that is what I have described. Historical criticism is not confined to the Bible, it applies to every ancient literature. The careful study of ancient documents is simply the careful sifting of their origins and meaning in light of history. The first principle of criticism is that each book bears the stamp of its origins, it is a fragment of ancient life, and to understand it we must treat it as a living thing. It is a piece of the author’s life, of his very soul, and we will not understand it unless we think ourselves into his time and place. People talk as if the critic’s sole aim was to disprove popular beliefs, to show that books were not written by the authors whose names are on the front page. But the true critic doesn’t destroy, he builds up. He is an interpreter, with a wider vision than mere grammars and dictionaries. Not content with mere repetition of an author’s words, he tries to sympathise with his very thoughts, to understand those thoughts as part of the author’s life and times. In comparison with this goal, the occasional destruction of some traditional opinion is trivial.
Ancient books, brought to us from a time long before the printing press, are bound to have complex histories. Some exist only in imperfect copies, made by ignorant scribes in dingy medieval cells. Some were disfigured by arrogant editors. Many disappeared from common knowledge, and resurfaced only once their origins and value were forgotten. When these nameless scrolls were brought back into the light, some half-informed reader would likely give them new title pages of their own creation, handing them down as perfectly preserved originals. Alternatively, original interpretations might be lost in the fog of time, and new mistaken ones popularised. As if this were not enough, history has also gifted us hundreds of pure forgeries, whether they be apocryphal books or Sibylline oracles or something else. In the face of these problems, historical criticism cannot risk trusting the traditional view. We must review doubtful titles, purge interpolations, expose forgeries. But is it not clear that we do this from a love of the truth? A book that is truly old, truly valuable, has nothing to fear from the critic. His work can only add to its worth and increase its authority.
In other words, the critic must retrace the steps by which ancient books come down to us. He must find out where it came from and who wrote it, and connect up every link in the chain that ties it from our time to its own. This is exactly what Protestant principles urge us to do with the various pieces of the Bible. We must go step by step, tracing its history back to the origins of each individual fragment. This demands the use of every available tool. Every fact is welcome, whether it come from Jewish tradition, ancient manuscripts, or close study of the text itself. There’s no need to lay down strict rules of procedure, we can get on fine with the ordinary rules of evidence and common sense. The Bible’s transmission is not supernatural, it is not a strange miracle. It comes to us by ordinary means, supervised by Providence, like all ancient books. Once we trace each fragment back to its origins, we must study it and let it speak for itself. Religious and scholarly study are not in conflict here. They have the same goal, and the more our study fulfils the demands of historical scholarship the more it will satisfy religious scholars also.
I’m well aware of the response to this argument. “We don’t object to any amount of historical study”, they say, “but the kind of study being produced is nonsense. It’s based on anti-supernatural assumptions, rationalist assumptions, and it thinks anything the Bible says about God speaking with humans is a lie”. To these people, I have a simple reply: you haven’t heard any of my conclusions yet. All I am doing here is laying down a method. That method, I have demonstrated, is fully aligned with Reformed doctrine. You and I in this room agree that the method is a good one. Therefore let us go and apply it, and if during the application you spot me making rationalist assumptions, I expect you to say so. If you can show me where I exclude the possibility of divine action in history, I will take it all back.
But on the other hand, you must remember that all truth is one. The God who gave us the Bible also gave us reason and scholarship. The meaning of Scripture is not measured by preconceived ideas, it is the result of legitimate research. There’s only one thing I’m sure of at the start of this process: the Bible does speak to the heart of man, in words that can only come from God. No historical study can disprove this conviction or make God’s words to me any less precious. These words are so clear that no change in context can make them obscure, they are true and trustworthy in every age. Historical study may help us see the circumstances in which they were written, but these plain, heartfelt truths speak for themselves. They rest on their own worth. No amount of context can make black white or white black, even if the whole picture can be hugely improved by attention to harmony and contrast.
So it is with the Bible. These great truths, spoken to every believer’s heart, the eternally unchanging words of salvation, the clear voice of God’s love, so tender and personal and simple that a child can understand it – these are the words which must abide in us. They prove their worth in every century, regardless of scientific study. We who love truth will not tremble in the face of work that promises to bring us closer to the fullness of God’s truth. Our faith is firmly fixed on the things that cannot be moved, and we do not doubt that in the end every success in biblical criticism must make God’s great scheme of grace appear more beautiful and more glorious.