I

THE PREVIOUS DECADE FEATURED a renewed and robust debate within our tradition about how evangelical theology should relate to modern biblical studies. Books from the “progressive” side of the debate included those by Noll, Marshall, Enns, McGowan, and Sparks.1 Two of these focused especially on biblical criticism. The first was by Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, and the second was God’s Word and Human Words, written by yours truly. Pete’s book was excellent. As for my contribution, I would not make any grand claims about it. The book had its strengths and weaknesses, and if I wrote it today I would frame the discussion differently and alter my tack on certain issues.2 When one compares my book with that of Enns, the most obvious similarity is our shared commitment to the full humanity of Scripture. God’s book is historically and culturally contingent just like other books written by human beings. That is the main point. And if we take this point seriously, the result is a different way of construing biblical interpretation and of the theological reflection that flows from it.

Enns and I had somewhat different objectives, however. Enns wanted to help evangelicals read the Bible more responsibly. While I certainly shared this concern, I was also interested in creating some theological “elbow room” for evangelicals who wanted to participate more seriously in the larger guild of biblical scholarship. It is difficult to be a good scholar if one is committed to (or must live within the bounds of) the doctrine of inerrancy and the things that naturally come with it. Biological evolution and critical judgments about the Bible have been matters of “public knowledge” for quite a while. This public knowledge should be assumed rather than resisted by responsible evangelical scholarship.

The book under review, edited by Hays and Ansberry, is written by a cadre of younger scholars and so reflects a natural extension of the work done by Enns and Sparks. The scholars who’ve contributed to it—ten in all—attempt in each essay to work out some version of “believing criticism,” which integrates responsible, historically grounded readings of the Bible with a theological commitment to its status as God’s word. Candid, open, frank, and honest, the essays are an authentic departure from the older, defensive style of evangelicals in the last generation and, though the older approach is implicitly criticized, the essays reflects a deep respect for the evangelical tradition and for Scripture. Before I say anything else about the book, I want to commend the editors and contributors for their solid grasp of the scholarship, their open-minded theological reflection, and especially for their social courage. I will say more about this last point at the conclusion of my review.

I’ve suggested that Hays/Ansberry reflects a kind of “next step” on the heels of work done by evangelicals during the last decade. That a group of young evangelical scholars should stake out any public position in favor of the “historical criticism” is, so far as I recall, unprecedented within the history of evangelical scholarship. It is a welcomed development. Nevertheless, there is much in this book that harks back to the older approaches. Most of the authors are still reflexively protective of the human authors of Scripture, so that “inerrancy” and “infallibility,” while seldom used as words, implicitly shape the discussions. The book is framed by introductory and concluding essays (chs. 1 and 9), between which a series of articles tackle the traditional “flashpoints” of conflict between evangelical theology and historical criticism. My review focuses primarily on these “flashpoint” essays (chs. 2–8).

II

The first of the essays, “Adam and the Fall” (ch. 2), more or less sets the pattern for those to follow. The authors, Hays and Herring, assert that Adam was not a literal human individual and then labor to explain how Christian orthodoxy can subsist without this primal forefather. They admit that the doctrines of original sin and guilt necessarily fall with Adam but tell us that these doctrines are in fact quite foreign to both Genesis itself and to Paul’s later reflections on Adam in Romans 5 (to which I say, “Bravo!”). Now Hays and Herring are not naïve about the potential implications. They certainly realize that Paul assumed wrongly that Adam was an historical person, but for this they have an answer: “We do not panic that the Bible is ‘untrue’ because we appreciate that, even though the authors articulate these assumptions, the point of their writing is not to affirm, endorse or propagate these assumptions” (42). In other words, Paul did not affirm or propagate a belief in the historical Adam; he merely assumed this as a matter of Jewish tradition. Readers may recognize this as a very common argument in the repertoire of conservative biblical scholarship.

I must admit, I’m surprised to see this argument in such a progressive essay. Who among us would say that the meaning and significance of our own verbal discourse should be abstracted from our assumptions? This is a strange way to read any text, and a strange way to read the Bible. Far better that we admit it: Early Jews and Christians, and countless others after them, thought that Adam and Eve were literal individuals . . . and they were wrong. Scripture’s authority is not grounded in inerrant human authors. It is grounded in the God’s authority, by whom the errant, imperfect authors of Scripture were called as literary witnesses.

Chapter 3, “The Exodus,” is even more “traditional” it terms of its evangelical stance. While Ansberry admits quite openly that evidence for the exodus is lacking and that the historical event, whatever it may have been, was more modest than described in the Bible, he insists the something historical must lie at the core of the tradition. He writes: “If Yahweh never intervened on Israel’s behalf to deliver her from Egypt, then the nation’s identity as the elect people of God is deprived of its foundation . . . Thus, it is not entirely sufficient to claim that the exodus narrative paints an ahistorical yet theologically accurate portrait of Yahweh’s character and Israel’s identity.” This is essentially the same stance taken by traditional inerrantists like James Hoffmeier. If the exodus is not historical, biblical authority collapses with it.

Although I would agree for historical reasons that something of substance probably stands behind the exodus tradition, I cannot agree with the theological assertion that, in the case of the exodus, our faith hangs in the historical balance. Let us suppose (for the sake of discussion) that the early Israelites, as they began to understand their special relationship with Yahweh, expressed an understanding of this relationship by composing fictional narratives about an exodus. Would Israel in this case be any less “elect” than if the exodus actually happened in space and time? I’d say not. In fact, obviously not. That Ansberry does not entertain this option suggests that he still holds, however tenuously, to the old evangelical belief that biblical viewpoints that are expressed in historical narrative necessarily subsist in and depend on events that roughly mirror the narrative. Here is my question: Given that Ansberry realizes clearly there is a significant gap between the narrative claims of Exodus and the actual events, what’s the point of dogmatically asserting that an historical exodus is foundational for Christian theology? In my opinion we should avoid, as much as possible, making any explicit or implicit demand that confessing Christians should believe in historical events for which we’ve little or nothing of the expected evidence.

As I see it, Ansberry’s article with Hwang (ch. 4) is theologically more progressive. In an essay entitled “No Covenant Before the Exile? The Deuteronomic Torah and Israel’s Covenant Theology,” the authors accept as a matter of apparent fact that Moses did not write Deuteronomy. Given that Deuteronomy presents itself quite explicitly as the work of Moses, the authors ask: “Can a fraudulent, pseudepigraphic document function as a reliable repository of theological truth? From a modern perspective, this question has usually been answered in the negative. But, from an ancient perspective, things were not so simple.”

While Ansberry and Hwang clearly accept the standard critical viewpoint, their rhetoric from this point forward is decidedly traditional. Rather than admit that ancient authors often claimed to be someone they weren’t in order to gain the trust of readers, Ansberry and Wang instead argue that Deuteronomy represents an acceptable, legitimate case of pseudephigrapha. Their claim is grounded in the fact that authorship was in antiquity conceived of quite differently from what obtains in our own day, in a way that supposedly makes the attribution of Deuteronomy to Moses “traditional” rather than literal. The obvious result (though this is not spelled out) is that the human authors and editors of Deuteronomy were people of integrity rather than literary charlatans. One could easily describe this kind of pseudonymous composition as inerrant.

While the conclusions are not impossible, I see at least two significant problems in their thesis. First, although the ancients certainly viewed authorship through lenses different from our own (notice how many ancient authors chose to remain anonymous), the lenses did not legitimize false claims of authorship as a matter of course. In antiquity as in our own day, “pious frauds” were deemed legitimate by some (especially those who wrote them) and not by others (especially those who disagreed). Secondly, and more to the point, the biblical account of the discovery of the Josiah’s law book, a book that either was or included Deuteronomy, must have been a “sham” of some sort. Nothing in either the story itself (2 Kgs 22) or in the larger written history of Israel suggests that anyone had ever laid an eye on Deuteronomy before the late Judean monarchy. How can we believe that the book was lost in the days of the Judges (2 Kgs 23:22), before the temple was built, only to resurface centuries later as a long-lost book in the temple archives? This scenario stretches our credulity. Far more likely, given similar ancient scenarios (see Römer), is that the authors of Deuteronomy wrote the book during or not long before Josiah’s reign and passed it off as the words of Israel’s ancient lawgiver, Moses.3 We can assume that the authors found this literary move acceptable, but this would not mean that it was acceptable in every ancient point of view . . . nor in God’s point of view. We must remember always that what humans intend as evil remains evil, even if God intends it for good (Gen 50:20). The pious ruse that produced Deuteronomy presents us with an ethical conundrum rather than a fully legitimate literary strategy. I suspect that Ansberry and Hwang don’t recognize this because they are committed in some way to the inerrancy or infallibility of Scripture’s human authors.

Chapter 5, “Problems with Prophecy,” is the same story with a different tune. Here the authors (Warhurst, Tarrer, and Hays) tackle the age-old problem of unfulfilled prophecy. The poster children here are Daniel, who predicted that the eschaton would arrive in the days of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (second century BCE), and Ezekiel, who predicted that Tyre would be destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, never to rise again. As we all know, Daniel got it wrong. And Ezekiel himself admitted that the prophecy failed, as any modern traveler can confirm with a visit to the still thriving city of Tyre. But let us set these problems to one side for the time being. One biblical answer to this problem, prominent in the books of Joel and Jonah, is that God sometimes delays or cancels the fulfillment of his prophetic word. The authors of this article are quite warm to this theology and from it reason that “prophecy is concerned primarily with the broader outworking of God’s will” and thus may be fulfilled “in terms different, more expansive, more wonderful than what was revealed” (100). The optimism of the Warhurst, Tarrer, and Hays is fueled by Ezekiel’s aforementioned admission that his prophecy had failed, an authentic and transparent confession that the authors take as an endorsement for delayed or unfulfilled prophecies. So Ezekiel is “right,” even as he is “wrong.” That’s the idea.

But surely one will ask: Does an admission of failure mean that one has not failed? I don’t see how that can be right. If Ezekiel’s confession means anything theologically, it would be that God does his work through prophets who sometimes fail rather than through perfect prophets. What message could be more encouraging for those engaged in serving Jesus? I’m not sure why the essay’s authors do not consider this option, but they seem transfixed at one point with Deuteronomy’s rule for prophetic authenticity, namely, that the predictions of true prophets are always fulfilled. I will simply say that the rigid interpretation of prophecy that Warhurst, Tarrer, and Hays wish to overcome is precisely the view of Deuteronomy, so they’re unwittingly laboring against themselves. Once inerrancy is rejected, we are no longer forced to harmonize Deuteronomy’s law with Ezekiel’s confession. No human is perfect, prophet or otherwise. That’s just the way it is.

Chapter 6, “Pseudepigraphy and the Canon,” is not so different from chapter 4, which addressed the pseudonymous character of Deuteronomy. In this case the net is spread more broadly and addresses the issue as it pertains to the Pentateuch, Isaiah, John’s gospel, and Paul’s disputed letters. As in chapter 4, the authors (Ansberry, Strine, Klink, and Lincicum) admit that pseudonymous literature is found in the Bible and argue that the ostensible theological difficulties can be overcome. While I agree wholeheartedly on both counts, several claims made in the article are either grounded in or defend misguided notions of biblical inerrancy and infallibility.

First, an effort is made (in the case of the Pentateuch) to shift the locus of authority from the human authors of Scripture to the text itself and also to the Holy Spirit. The appeal of this approach is that we can ignore (I assume) any sticky questions about the ostensible human authors of the Bible. Here is how Ansberry et al. expressed it: “If Israelite literature is an expression of a collective tradition, it appears that the content of the material—rather than the ‘author’—constitutes the locus of authority. Put theologically, the work of the Holy Spirit in the composition and canonization of the text serves as the locus of authority, not the putative author(s)” (130–31).

There is sophistication here, but the claims strike me as conceptually muddled. To say that the locus of authority is “the content of the material” and also the “Holy Spirit,” as if the Spirit and text are two sides of the same coin, cannot be right. The content is human discourse and, even if inspired by the Holy Spirit, reflects the thoughts and ideas from particular human authors and editors, however anonymous, rather than the words of an elusive and many splendored “community.” While I agree that in the end we want to hear what the Spirit is saying, it seems to me that we must first attend to and hear something from the human authors. One can of course dispense with these human authors, and this is sometimes done in certain kinds of postmodern interpretation, but the result has nothing to do with historically sensitive readings of Scripture. We end up instead with an epiphenomenal “spirit word” that uses the old human discourse to occasion some other message for modern readers of the text. In this scenario, who would care what ancient Israelite theologians thought and believed? Certainly Ansberry et al. do not intend this outcome, but it is a natural outcome if one takes the human authors out of the picture.

Secondly, the authors claim that the “problem” of biblical pseudonymity is easily resolved if evangelicals will allow the phenomena of Scripture itself, rather than our preconceived notions about it, to dictate our theology of Scripture. They expressed this noble idea this way: “To claim that pseudepigraphy is irreconcilable with infallibility can arguably only result in subjecting Scripture to our own autonomous standard of perfection, instead of seeking the perfection Scripture has in a historically a posteriori act of discipleship.”

I agree wholeheartedly. We should discern the nature of Scripture from what God has actually given us rather than insist that God’s book must be of a certain sort. But Ansberry et al. seem to have missed their own point here. Precisely because Scripture includes pseudonymous literature, it reveals itself to be something other than the infallible word that Ansberry believes it to be. So, while the historical critical stance of the essay is far more open than is common within evangelical scholarship, the essay retains that old tendency to tell God what Scripture must be . . . namely, inerrant or infallible.

Third, in a posture that I find problematic, the authors seem willing to allow for theological diversity in Scripture so long as it doesn’t go too far (whatever that means). Notice how they respond to potential theological differences between Paul and the pseudonymous letters written in his name: “Ultimately, it may be fair to draw a distinction between the historical Paul and the canonical Paul, but to allow this distinction to yawn into an ugly ditch can only mean a disobedient refusal to hear the full testimony of Scripture from its canonical form; the potentially idolatrous enthusiasm for the early must not usurp the receptive posture necessary to receive the witness of the full canonical Paul.”

This is strong, ominous language, akin to what we’ve come to expect from conservative fundamentalism. To be honest, it does not match the tone of the rest of the essay, nor does it work as a matter of theology. I would ask: At what point do the obvious differences between Paul and “Paul” become an “ugly ditch”? Consider gender equality, for instance. Here the differences between Paul and pseudo-Paul are pretty obvious. Whereas Paul was an advocate for equality (e.g., Gal 3:28), the author(s) of the Pastoral Epistles, and also the editor who added 1 Cor 14:34–35 to Paul’s letter, were much less supportive.4 I would side with Paul over pseudo-Paul on this issue. Does this constitute on my part a “disobedient refusal to hear the full testimony of Scripture?” I don’t see how that follows from my straightforward exegetical observations. As for the threat of “an idolatrous enthusiasm for the early,” this would only be true if one always sides with Paul over pseudo-Paul. In my own case, I’d say the Pastorals have a clearer understanding of the delayed Parousia and a concomitantly better grasp of the institutional needs of the faith than Paul did.

Why do the authors take this cautious stance on the Pauline corpus? My sense is that Ansberry et al. are looking for a way to “rein in” the centripetal effects of historical criticism. They will tolerate theological differences so long as the extremes are avoided. While I understand the evangelical sentiments here, alas, that’s not how it works. The biblical authors and editors were different people from different times and places. They take us where they take us, and we must weigh out the voices, sometimes harmonious and sometimes discordant, in our effort to hear what the Spirit is finally saying to the churches.

Chapter 7 explores the long-standing debates about “the historical Jesus.” The authors, Daling and Hays, are utterly transparent in their discussion of some hotly debated issues, especially the historicity of the virgin birth and resurrection. Affirming strongly the former, they nonetheless admit the historical challenges of the virgin birth. Why are the earliest witnesses to the gospel, Paul and Mark, apparently unaware of this miraculous conception, and why do our earliest testimonies to this miracle, in Matthew and Luke, differ so much in the details of their birth narratives? One could reason from this evidence that the virgin birth was a product of theological reflection rather than historical testimony, just as later theological reflection resulted in an Immaculate Conception of Mary. To put this in the authors’ own words: “Within the framework of historical-critical inquiry, the account of the virgin birth does not seem as likely to be a fact of history as, for example, the claims that Jesus was an exorcist or a teacher” (171). Again, the authors affirm and suggest no other theological option to the virgin birth. But they are clearly up for the discussion, which is refreshing when we consider this: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of our favorite evangelical heros, very much doubted that Mary was a virgin.5 Perhaps faith in and obedience to Christ are possible even among the “heretics.” I’ll return to this theme directly.

While Daling and Hays give only an inch (and hardly that) on the virgin birth, they give more slack on the resurrection, at least as traditionally construed among evangelicals. At issue are those scholars who interpret the postmortem meetings of Jesus with his disciples as “objective visions” rather than tangible, physical encounters. Advocates of this view take an agnostic view of the empty tomb but believe that God indeed provided the disciples with impressions of their resurrected Lord. The view should be distinguished carefully from “subjective visions” that are initiated by the human mind rather than God. Daling and Hays reject outright the subjective vision position and ultimately reject the objective vision theory, but in the end they finally accept the latter as a legitimate (if mistaken) expression of orthodoxy. They write: “. . . advocates of an ‘objective vision’ remain within the stream of orthodox Christian tradition, construed in its broadest terms. That bare assertion, that whatever the disciples witnessed, they did so because God had acted decisively towards the crucified Jesus, is just enough to remain orthodox. It may be the edge of a precipice between hope and heresy, and it provides little by way of historical margins to buttress the faith, but it’s enough” (179).

I applaud the inclusive spirit and intellectual openness reflected in this stance but would express it differently. If orthodoxy has affirmed anything consistently, it is that Jesus Christ physically resurrected and left behind an empty tomb. When Daling and Hays include the advocates of “objective vision” among the orthodox, it seems to me that they’re actually promoting a shift in either the standards of orthodoxy or in our application of the creedal standards. This strikes me as obvious. But perhaps this issue is (or should be) beside the point.

Orthodoxy and heresy are often employed as ecclesial and soteriological ciphers, as if a dissenting view on said issue should land one outside of the church and, eventually, in hell. What if this is the wrong theological game to play? What if loving God and neighbor is much more important as a standard of Christian commitment than particular doctrinal affirmations? What if “heretical” Samaritans are in a much better place with God than the “orthodox” priests and Levites who ignore their neighbor in need? What if cooperation and fellowship should be grounded in love and friendship rather than theological ratiocination? What if God’s grace extends much further than the “visible church”? The point is not that discursive theology and doctrinal affirmation are unimportant. Rational reflection helps us better distinguish ethical success from failure and theology that promotes love from what hinders it. But in the inevitable dialectic between rational reflection and lived engagement, affection and engagement provide better footing for theological reflection than the other way around. Abstract intellectual games centered on categories like orthodoxy and heresy are quite foreign to the teachings and ministry of Jesus.

The final “flashpoint” chapter (ch. 8) addresses the perennial question of how we should understand the “Paul of Acts” in relation to Paul as depicted in his own letters. As in the previous essays, Kuecker and Liebengood are prepared to admit that critical scholars are at least partly right. The lives of Paul offered in the two strands of tradition do not cohere rigidly in terms of either biography or theology. Whether the gap between these is large or small depends, they tell us, on one’s interpretative assumptions rather than on the texts themselves. As they see it, much that we perceive as different in the two accounts is explained by generic considerations. Paul wrote letters for fairly specific occasions whereas the author of Acts wrote history for a general audience. Contextual conditions confronting the two authors were also different given that Acts was written several decades after Paul’s letters. For these reasons and others, Kuecker and Liebengood suggest that evangelicals should lower their expectation for agreement in the sources and embrace instead an “acceptable dissonance” in them (201). The question is not, they tell us, whether the two Paul’s are in all respects alike. The question is whether “Luke’s Paul and the Paul of the epistles bear witness to the same Messiah Jesus who pours out the Spirit and makes known the Father” (202, italics original).

Of course I agree with this last sentiment. Paul and the author of Acts were on the same team as followers of Jesus and evangelists among the gentiles. The author of Acts would not have written of Paul were things otherwise. But as Kuecker/Liebengood insinuate with their appeal for an “acceptable dissonance,” being on the same team does not mean that Acts and Paul agreed on all points. Consider how evangelicals in our own day portray Bonhoeffer and C. S. Lewis as members of their guild.6 Do they not realize that Bonhoeffer was a theological liberal, and that Lewis believed in evolution, denied inerrancy, viewed Joshua’s conquest as evil genocide, and included non-Christians among those to be saved?7 I’d suggest that similar gaps are visible when we compare Paul with “Acts Paul.” Acts has appropriated Paul as a spokesperson for its theological agendas. Did the author of Acts realize that his Paul had different views of natural theology, the Jewish law, Christology and eschatology from the real Paul? Hard to say. But the differences are obvious.

As we open the door to historical and theological diversity in the Bible—which, in my opinion, is what every thoughtful reader of Scripture should do—we must realize that the resulting dissonance cannot be controlled in a way that makes it “acceptable” rather than “unacceptable.” What could be more dissonant than Joshua’s command to kill Canaan’s children “without mercy” and the command of Jesus to love our enemies? We must accept these dissonant extremes, for they are factual realities and, more importantly, reflect the human story. Each of us harbors within us a dissonant capacity for good and ill, such as incited Luther (another evangelical hero) to write “A Mighty Fortress” and also to pen his agenda for persecuting and killing Jews. The essay of Kuecke and Liebengood, like most in this collection, criticizes but still stands within a tradition that’s afraid to face the whole truth about Holy Scripture . . . that whatever we make of its divine origins, it is a thoroughly human book.

III

I wrote God’s Word in Human Words to advance our evangelical engagement with modern biblical studies. While I’ve expressed some theological and philosophical disagreements with the authors and editors of Hays/Ansberry, it’s fair to say that their book manages to provide plenty of theological space for this broader engagement. Adam was not a literal individual. Moses did not write the Pentateuch. Isaiah was written by more than one prophet. Daniel’s prophecies are Hellenistic-era compositions. Some of “Paul’s letters” were not written by Paul. Traditional doctrines of the virgin birth and resurrection are fair game for discussion and, to an extent, for revision. Wow! How far we’ve come! Healthy academic theology must be ready to embrace the facts of “public knowledge” and to openly discuss any and all issues. In these respects, Hays/Ansberry represents the new face of evangelical biblical scholarship. I can only say “thank you” to the young scholars who’ve contributed to this book. I’d only suggest that, generally speaking, they’re still moored to some of the evangelical assumptions that have historically hindered mature theological reflection.

I mentioned at the outset that the authors and editors should be commended for their social courage. Evangelicals are notoriously poor managers of theological debate and dissent. “Heretics” have no rights, and love is sacrificed readily in the name of “doctrinal purity” . . . as if love is not itself the very foundation of doctrine. My prayer is that these young scholars, who’ve written from a deep respect for God, Scripture, and the evangelical tradition, will be treated well by the evangelical family and the institutions in which they serve.

IN 1878, JULIUS WELLHAUSEN wrote in his Prolegomena zur Geschicte Israels that the Torah was “no literary unity, and no simple historical quantity.”1 The frequent textual inconsistencies and historical discrepancies catalogued by Higher Critics presented difficulties that were not imaginary “but actual,” Wellhausen insisted, “and urgent.” More than a century after the publication of Wellhausen’s Prolegomena, however, this urgency seems largely to have fallen out of vogue. But while source divisions and the synoptic problem no longer animate theological discourse as they did in the days of Barth or Bultmann, these concerns remain urgent to many of my undergraduates—particularly those who identify as “evangelicals.” To these students it seems obvious that the acceptance of something like the Documentary Hypothesis would have consequences for theological reflection; or that the recognition of the signs of literary craft in the composition of the gospels or the adaptations of Babylonian creation myths ought to inform their understanding of revelation. They are caught, as I was at their age, between two faces of evangelicalism. On the one hand, they feel bound by commitments to those dogmatic claims that structure membership in this community—inerrancy prominently among them; on the other, they share an earnestness about the practice of reading Scripture, a sense that these texts ought persistently to reform and renew the way a person thinks, the way they perceive the world. These students feel the anxious theological weight of historical criticism more acutely than their peers (or indeed, than many of their instructors) precisely because it has the potential to pit these two faces of their tradition against one another.

The essays collected together in Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism are directed towards students like my own. These essays thoughtfully illuminate many of the challenges that historical criticism presents, asking their readers to suspend modern categories of authorship, historiography, or prophecy that might have previously conditioned their judgments about the Bible’s authority in order to explore how historical research might inform rather than threaten faith. There is much to admire and much to learn in these essays, and they are an excellent reminder of the fact that evangelicals seem uniquely poised to respond to the charge of Wellhausen and many biblical scholars after him to reflect theologically on the changing face of the biblical text. While questions about the serious theological ramifications of modern biblical scholarship have fallen from the purview of mainstream Christian theology, these debates are certainly not dead among evangelical scholars or the wider evangelical community. And this book represents an auspicious turn in that conversation from the more antagonistic postures toward biblical criticism that once characterized evangelical books on this subject, like the weathered red paperback I can see on my bookshelf that reads (in apocalyptic font) The Battle for the Bible.2

Over the last several decades, evangelicals have often been caricatured for their selective plundering of the sciences—dismissing the value of history or archaeology when they challenge established orthodoxies, or else claiming them as substantive evidence of those orthodoxies they are said to confirm. This book promises a different mode of engagement with historical science—a model of “critical faith” that is “rooted in Christian orthodoxy, marked by a receptivity to truth wherever it may be found, and open to the revision of traditional assumptions or beliefs in light of that truth.”3 But there is a tension here, in this definition and in this text—a tension that mirrors the two faces of the tradition I spoke of above—between a rootedness in orthodoxy and a willingness to follow truth (or Scripture) wherever it might lead.

At their best, these essays lend weight and depth to historical critical concerns, and challenge prior interpretive frameworks or accounts of inspiration with close attention to both historical critical scholarship and biblical texts. The chapter on pseudepigraphy, for example, carefully builds a case for the reconsideration the category of authorship and its relationship to authority, using historical critical tools to explore ancient accounts of authorship and to understand better how biblical authors themselves located authority and inspiration in various documents.

But I worry that often, in their admirable efforts to commend engagement with modern biblical scholarship to the wider evangelical community, these essays still blunt the challenges of historical criticism, subjugate them to doctrinal concerns, or take seriously only that which would demand the slightest of modifications to evangelical dogma. Indeed, the defense and fortification of that dogma in light of the historical critical project seems to be a central theme of this text. The authors insist, again and again, that “historical criticism need not imperil any of the fundamental dogmatic tenets of Christianity,” or that challenges to Mosaic authorship “need not pose a threat to Christian orthodoxy” or that even if we called the historicity of Genesis 2–3 into question, we would still be able to retain our understanding of original sin, and thus “Christian theological orthodoxy would not be undermined.” I think an alternative title to this book might have read: “Historical Criticism: It’s Not So Challenging After All.”

Take for example Christopher Ansberry’s chapter on the historicity of the exodus. Here, Ansberry considers the increasingly popular view that the events of the Israelites’ mass migration out of Egypt are largely fictional, stating, “this chapter will reflect on the theological implications of historical-critical proposals regarding the exodus in order to determine whether they are compatible with Christian faith.”4 In other words, the aim of this chapter is not to consider how historical critical insights might change the way we read the exodus narratives, nor to sharpen our sense of what we are looking at when we watch the Israelites cross the Red Sea. Rather, this chapter seeks to determine a way of reckoning with the issues that modern biblical scholars have illuminated—the paucity of evidence for a historical exodus—in a way that will not threaten Christian orthodoxy, a mode of interpretation that will prove “compatible with Christian faith.”

Ansberry begins by laying out brief summaries of maximalist and minimalist approaches to biblical historiography. The former holds to the historical veracity of the exodus “in time and space” based on the Bible’s own witness while the latter disputes the historicity of the event on the grounds that there is no external evidence whatsoever to support such a mass migration. Ansberry admits that “no direct evidence has been recovered to substantiate the details of the biblical account,” but he determines that the minimalist approach yields “problematic results” and thus must be rejected. These results are deemed problematic not based on a critique of the historical methodology behind them—though that argument could certainly be made—but instead on dogmatic grounds. Ansberry explains that “without some sort of ‘exodus’ through divine intervention, the grounds for Israel’s election, identity, and unique relationship with Y—h are bogus” and therefore also “the Christian hopes of release from spiritual bondage and the ‘Babylon’ of this present age are diminished, thinned, and attenuated.”5

Ansberry then turns to a discussion of cultural memory—framing the exodus history as a dynamic process of communal narration by which past events have been creatively redescribed and recombined in order to provide a foundation for communal practices and corporate identity. He explains, “As a narrative representation of the past, the exodus account seeks to answer questions of signification (‘What does this mean?’), rather than modern questions of historical veracity (‘Did this really happen in this fashion’?).”6 We might expect this to signal a transition to an exploratory discussion of signification, a close engagement with biblical texts and a look at how historical criticism might challenge us to consider the way that the Exodus cycle mingles fiction with fact. Instead, the remainder of this chapter is dedicated to a dogmatic argument on the need to retain a kernel of historical truth for the exodus event.7 While in the end, Ansberry is remarkably willing for this kernel to take a wide variety of forms (various smaller migrations or a metaphorical escape from “Egyptian hegemony” in Canaan), his aims are clearly apologetic.8 A widened sense of what might stand behind the exodus narrative seems of secondary importance to the author’s efforts to champion a vague understanding of the historical reality of the exodus as a triumphant remedy to an otherwise “nihilistic view of history.”9 In the end, one is left with the impression that this engagement with historical criticism was less a real challenge and more an occasion to bolster and reinforce evangelical doctrine in the face of what might have previously seemed threatening—an occasion to participate in what Ansberry straightforwardly calls at the end of his essay a “defence of the faith.”10

It is not entirely clear to me that the best way to persuade students and seminarians of the virtues of historical criticism is to dogmatize away the serious difficulties these scholars raise to the ways we have long read and thought about Scripture, or our traditions. I worry that we risk forfeiting the possibility that historical criticism might truly critique and enliven our reading practices and sharpen and our theology if the challenges of these critical perspectives only serve as means for us to make slight readjustments and shore up the authority of our own dogmatic claims.

Wilhelm Herrmann—a colleague of Julius Wellhausen’s, who taught theology for many years at the University of Marburg—was himself an advocate for the benefits of historical criticism in work of theological reflection. Herrmann argued that the ongoing work of historical-critical scholarship provides a continuous occasion for the renewing of our minds in our searching of the Scriptures, that it has the capacity to make the familiar wonderfully strange again. But he warns that “we lose this advantage entirely if historical research is made to serve the ends of apologetics instead of remaining true to its own laws.”11 The impression given in many places in this collection is that the results of historical research ought to be considered from a defensive posture, and taken on if and only if they do not force us to reconsider too dramatically those things which we have always thought to be true of God, or of the story of God’s involvement with his people.

The challenges that are dismissed over and again in these essays are also presented mainly as challenges to orthodoxy, and not to reading and interpretation. How might historical research not simply widen the field of the historical referent behind the exodus event, but actually change the way evangelicals read and interpret these narratives? How might points of “slippage between the way that the Bible describes historical events and the way those events actually occurred in time and space” not simply be acknowledged and dogmatically negotiated, but interpreted in their own right?12 How might the recognition of these points of slippage become not only permissible within readjusted dogmatic frameworks but beneficial to the work of biblical interpretation? How might what we once would have called “errors” become themselves sources of meaning and revelation? Perhaps these questions stray too close to the one dogmatic issue that this book declares in its second sentence it will not address. “This is not a book about inerrancy,” Christopher H. Hays writes, though perhaps it ought to be. And this may account, in some respects, for why this book’s engagement with historical criticism hovers at the level of dogma and rarely touches down to the implications of these proposals on the actual texts before us.

I have long been a staunch defender of the merits of historical criticism, and I always hope that my students will come to see it as a kind of Socratic teacher—an invigorating challenge to old forms of thought and ways of reading that might help them to think and reflect theologically in new ways. Historical criticism provides an occasion to pause over narrative discrepancies or historical slippages and ask “But what is revelation?” Is it the bare facts of history, or their literary representation, or the sanctification over time and through tradition of so many fallible voices and fallible thoughts that God nonetheless saw fit to employ? “The task of the evangelical biblical scholar,” Hays wisely reminds us, “must not be to peddle pious truisms but to make plain the witness of scripture on its own uncomfortable terms.”13 To do this honestly, with the full weight of historical criticism’s challenges and with respect to that other face of evangelical life, it may be time to talk again about inerrancy.

I AM GRATEFUL FOR Hays and Ansberry’s attempts to articulate the need for a sensitive and theologically thoughtful engagement with historical critical scholarship. To reject the findings of such work or refuse to engage would be to purposely remain in ignorance in the face of some fairly compelling evidence and strikes me as particularly unhelpful for evangelical scholarship. As the book demonstrates with a range of texts, problems, and approaches, there are ways in which the results of historical-critical scholars can be the basis for a greatly enriched understanding. In this response I would like to look in particular at an issue emerging from the essay “No Covenant Before the Exile? The Deuteronomic Torah: Mosaic Authorship.”

Partly because the question of Mosaic authorship is one of the first stumbling blocks that beginner students encounter and partly because my research in Paul’s letter to the Romans led me to see that the Apostle Paul has appropriated “Moses” in a way that I recognised from the essay, this short response will extend the work done in the book into the Paul’s reception of “Moses” and therefore extend some of the conclusions about authorship, authority, tradition, and reception. If evangelicals have responded to historical-critical scholarship’s conclusions that canonical Deuteronomy is exilic or post-exilic by attempting “to shield the document from the force of such reconstructions”1 this is a proposal to lay bare the Deuteronomistic Moses and see some of the results.

First a brief look of the historical-critical state of play. In a section on the provenance of the Deuteronomic Torah, Ansberry and Hwang set out the grounds for and against a pre-exilic and then an exilic/post-exilic Urdeuteronomium using internal and external evidence. As the study moves on to look particularly at compositional history, three basic categories are proposed. The first is that the core of Deuteronomy (4:45—26:19; perhaps also 28:1–69) was composed in Josiah’s reforms and a later writer(s) incorporated new material along with old, pre-Deuteronomic material in the exilic period. The second is that Deuteronomy evolved in several editions. Unlike the first proposal, this removes key material (5–11; 6:18—18.21) from the core of the text and situates those chapters in the exilic period. The third is for dating layers of redaction, with the earliest version of Deuteronomy in a post-586 setting. As the authors put it, “Even if the core of the document is situated sometime in the pre-exilic period, this core is generally agreed to have been expanded in the exilic and post-exilic periods to produce the canonical form of Deuteronomy.”2

So historical-critical work on Deuteronomy has seriously problematized issues of dating and authorial ascriptions of parts of Deuteronomy to Moses have been rejected. Where do we go from there? One option is to ignore such conclusions. Another is to engage with the findings of the historical critics working at uncovering redactional layers of Deuteronomy or attempting to establish its relationship with 2 Kings 22–23, to give just two examples. If we have to move on from Mosaic authorship, and it is my view that we do, what kind of integrity does Deuteronomy have and where does authority lie? In fact, out of the challenges that historical-critical scholarship presents to the provenance and therefore authority of the text some rather creative and positive implications for Moses and the authority of Moses emerge, shedding significant light on the nature of Scripture and authority.

Hindy Najman has been developing ideas around rewritten bible and authority and has proposed the idea of “Mosaic Discourse” to express a range of texts which invoke Moses as authoritative for interpretations of Mosaic law and tradition.3 In Seconding Sinai, Najman sets out four aspects of Mosaic discourse: 1. It claims the authority of older texts in the tradition by reinterpreting them in an authoritative way. 2. The new text describes itself as an authentic expression of the Torah of Moses. 3. It is said to be a re-presentation of the revelation at Sinai—with an emphasis is on an access to revelation through a re-creation of the Sinai experience, so that even in destruction and exile the strategy “emphasises the presentness of the Sinai event.”4 4. The new text is said to be associated with or produced by Moses, a claim that “serves to authorise the new interpretations as divine revelation or dictation and as prophecy or inspired interpretation.”5 According to Najman’s proposal, authority is based in the person of Moses and ongoing authoritative interpretations are made in Moses’ name. And according to this claim, the book of Dueteronomy is the origin of the Mosaic discourse.

Turning to the text of Deuteronomy, one striking feature is the way in which the Sinai event is relativized; Moses addresses his audience on the plains of Moab as if they are those who themselves experienced Sinai: “The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. Not with our fathers did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us alive here this day” (5:2–3). On the face of it, that clearly is not true! Yet here we have the Mosaic discourse at work; the authority of Moses and the Sinai event is reinterpreted as Deuteronomy declares the day an historic day of covenant making, exhorting the people as though they stand before the Lord at Horeb (4:10, 15; 9:10; 18:16). In the words of David Allen “The text is a re-presentation, a ‘deutero-nomos’ that translates the events geographically to the Moabite plain, chronologically to the close of the wilderness period, (and subsequently to (post)-exilic generations) and in terms of audience to those who could not themselves have been witnesses to the events (cf. Deut 2:16).”6 There are many more examples of Deuteronomy functioning as the basis for the Mosaic discourse. Does knowing Deuteronomy’s re-presentation of Moses and re-statement of Moses’ authority alter our perception of the authority of the text?

According to Najman, this approach becomes increasingly important in Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. So subsequently, when Paul places Christ in the wilderness with the Israelites (1 Cor 10:4), claims that the Corinthian’s Israelite “ancestors” serve as an example for them (1 Cor 10:6), or states that the Israelites at Sinai “put Christ to the test” (1 Cor 10:9), I would argue that he is not being disingenuous or merely clever. Moreover, when he appropriates the Sinai covenant motif and its renewals for Christ believers (Rom 9:25–26, cf. Hos 2:23b–c and 1:10 b–c) or compares and contrasts his own ministry in the new covenant with that of Moses (Exod 32–34 in 2 Cor 3) he is not proof texting or looking for a handy authority figure.7 No, Paul’s instructions and claims to authority even within the communities of Corinth and Rome should map on to Moses’ authority, because authority resides in Moses. Paul is being faithful to the tradition of appropriating Mosaic discourse. And he is working backwards as well as forwards.

Since Deuteronomy presents the literary paradigm for Mosaic discourse, the ongoing, present, participation in the Sinai event, regardless of one’s geographic or chronological position, it is the obvious place for Paul to go for authorisation of the incorporation of the gentiles into this covenant-making tradition and into the people of God. And all of this backed up by the authority of Moses, demonstrating that in Paul’s time it was still possible to produce texts that participated in the Mosaic discourse. Paul stands in the interpretative tradition, invoking Moses for the ongoing work of God.8 Clark Pinnock in The Scripture Principal has a has a broad and dynamic proposal for authority that goes someway towards explaining how such a corporate project might function when he says that it becomes apparent that “inspiration is not one single activity but a broader superintendence over a process of Scripture making that is not simple but complex . . . We are not privileged to observe how, in hidden and mysterious ways the Spirit worked alongside the human agents in the creative literary work, but we can plainly see what was done.”9

Historical criticism alerts us to the complicated relationship between Deuteronomy’s claim for Mosaic authority and the fact that it is likely to have been composed or largely redacted in the exilic or post-exilic period. This short response has highlighted the idea of Moses’ authority being carried forward enthusiastically and with integrity in authoritative interpretations. And Deuteronomy is a text with an inbuilt requirement that it be interpreted for the next generation. We can see this in Paul’s reception of Deuteronomy and the Mosaic discourse; he is being true to the nature of the text when he makes use of the motif of Deuteronomic covenant renewal, the promises to the Fathers, the covenant blessings and curses and the wilderness tradition, when he appropriates them for the life of Christ believers. As we are open to the findings of historical criticism, we also need to be open to rethinking authority in a different sense. It is quite apparent that the authors of Deuteronomy intended the book to be used in this way. Moreover, given the prevalence of Deuteronomy in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity, it appears that many other interpreters of Scripture who went before us agreed.

EVANGELICAL FAITH AND THE Challenge of Historical Criticism. One can always argue about whether the titles of volumes actually correspond to the content. I do not want to do that. Rather, I want to note that this title informs readers that this volume enters into an arena that is often marked by sharp polemic, uncharitable interpretive habits, and deep anxieties around the perceived stakes involved in the discussion. To the authors and editors great credit they admirably avoid all of these. Although there are twelve different contributors to the various parts of this volume, the tone is measured throughout. The contributors treat their respective tasks with both seriousness and clarity. Moreover, one gets the impression that this volume arises from the contributors’ hard won personal struggles both as scholars and teachers. Finally, despite the large numbers of contributors the book has its own internal coherence. This is a volume one can engage.

To begin I would like to probe the larger framework within which the contributors offer their specific chapters. The introduction contains three sentences filled with italics for emphasis. These are not the only things worth reading in the introduction. Nevertheless, taken together they account for some of the animating forces and hoped for results of this volume. Here they are excised from their context:

1) “Consequently, this book discusses the theological challenges that confront the biblical interpreter who engages with historical criticism” (5).

2) “As such, it is the goal of the present volume to illustrate that historical criticism need not imperil any of the fundamental dogmatic tenets of Christianity” (5).

3) “But the crucial question which this book hopes to pose is: to what degree do the enscripturated events, attributions and expectations need to have occurred as described in order to maintain the integrity of evangelical Christian theology?” (13).

My view is that the first of these sentences raises a hope on which the volume fails to deliver. This is not a volume that deals with theology very much at all. Further, there is little discussion of or even recognition that there are a large number of volumes that do address these theological matters. In addition, this volume is not really interested in historical criticism in its current fragmented state.1 It is mostly interested the judgments that biblical scholars offer about the historicity of various aspects of the Bible.

The second sentence is certainly one I agree with, but it would require a much more fulsome engagement with all of the practices that might go under the name of historical criticism in order to illustrate its point.

The final sentence is really “the crucial question this book hopes to pose.” It is where the various contributions expend the majority of their effort. Matters of historicity, rather than a more general account of historical criticism, drive this volume. Even so, this sentence also raises some difficulties. First, although the introduction offers a limited and generous definition of evangelicalism taken from the Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology, without some sort of magisterial body or some unifying creedal statement, it seems impossible to render judgments about whether and how any particular claim affects the “integrity of evangelical Christian theology.” Nevertheless, this theoretical problem does not have much impact on the specific chapters of the volume. This is because most of the contributors operate, either in practice or explicitly, with a more generalized account of Christianity as represented by the creeds of Nicea and Chalcedon.

There is also a larger difficulty here. In various evangelical contexts I have been, and even in my home context in a Jesuit university, one from time to time encounters the view that if Scripture is inaccurate in any of its parts, if all of the “events, attributions and expectations” in Scripture did not happen, then Christianity (or at least someone’s faith) is in peril. This is a high stakes affair that requires pastoral and pedagogical wisdom to address each case as it comes. Nevertheless, at a conceptual level one must ultimately address this view by bringing students to a new and better theological understanding of the nature, purposes, and ends of Scripture within the divine economy. If one does not get to this point, if one instead focuses on getting the students to understand ancient literary, generic, and historiographic conventions so that they can bring the right set of historical expectations to Scripture, one has just kicked the can down the road. Eventually, some historical problem will arise in some form that cannot be addressed with these new historically sophisticated tools.

A theological account of Scripture must be theoretically primary, even if the process for arriving at it is indirect. This volume does not really attempt such an account. Perhaps this is because such an account would involve an engagement with “inerrancy” in ways that would defeat the larger rhetorical aims of the book. There are some hints and gestures toward this type of theological account in the introduction. For example, John Webster’s dogmatic work on Scripture is mentioned, but not taken up in a way that provides a theological account of Scripture. In addition, there are other volumes that do this and some would even do this in a way that many would count to be “evangelical.” There is little, if any, engagement with them here.

All of this is to say, that I would not introduce students to this book until the necessary theological groundwork was in place. With that in place, however, these chapters become much more useful. By the end of the chapters on Gen 2–3 and Exodus (chapters 2 and 3 of the volume), most of the themes and issues of the whole volume have already made an appearance. I say this not to diminish the achievements of later chapters, but to account for my focus on these two. Chapter 2 takes on Adam and the fall. Here one gets introduced to some issues of source criticism and the conventions of ancient Near Eastern notions of historicity. The aim here is, at least in the first instance, to get readers to recognize that these texts may not address the questions we want to address to them. Hence, one should not judge these texts to be historically deficient in doing something they never sought to do. This is an important caution. At the same time, Christians sometimes must address questions to Scripture that the initial authors or editors of a text never thought to answer. Christians confidently do this because of the theological conviction that in Scripture God has graciously provided a crucial resource that they need to journey back to their true home in God. Some recognition of this necessity would have been useful in this and other chapters.

The chapter on the exodus begins by citing G. E. Wright’s conviction that at least for evangelicals it is crucial that the events in the Bible actually took place. This is because the events are the medium of divine revelation. It goes on to note the obvious consequences for a faith founded on this conviction if it turns out that the events transpired in other ways or not at all. To my mind, this claim invites a sustained theological argument that shifts the burden of mediating revelation from the events to the text. That would then reconfigure the relationships between believers and the events discussed in Scripture in ways that might alter a believer’s relationship to various historical questions. That never really happens. Instead we are offered a very generous account of the scholarly state of play on the whether some sort of exodus from Egypt took place. It appears that neither the minimalist camp which denies any sort of exodus nor the maximalist camp really wins the day. The data are equivocal, indirect, and inconclusive.

Nevertheless, one of the overriding concerns of this volume comes to clear expression here in this chapter on Exodus. The concern here is that if the events narrated in Exodus (or elsewhere in Scripture, presumably) do not find some historical foothold then Israel’s identity, Christian identity, God’s character, and believers’ faith and hope could be set adrift. Of course, this raises the question of how much of a foothold is enough?

I would also like to suggest that for the theological issues around identity, God’s character, and believers’ hope, historical footholds are not sufficient. Historical investigation could in theory falsify Christian and Jewish claims. Historical investigation cannot establish a basis for Christian doctrine or hope. Let us assume that we found irrefutable historical evidence establishing that a large number of Israelites left Egypt on a clearly specifiable day, traveling through the route laid out in Exodus. Such evidence would not be sufficient to sustain Jewish or Christian faith or hope. This is because faith and hope are not primarily founded on the events, but on the conviction that it was God who did it. That conviction cannot be historically demonstrated one way or another.

Unless the theological claims about God’s action (mediated by the words of Exodus) lies at the base of one’s understanding of these events, then the exodus, even on the maximalists’ account, is simply a very large slave revolt. Of course, if there were no exodus at all, then that could falsify some doctrines or convictions. That possibility may be sufficient reason for evangelicals to engage in such historical investigations, but such engagement on its own cannot provide the basis for faith, hope, or love.

The volume also contains chapters on the provenance and compositional history of Deuteronomy as well as well as the more general chapter on pseudepigraphy. These are sandwiched around a chapter on prophecy and its relationships to the events covered in those prophecies. There are also chapters on Jesus and Paul. These authors, again, are generous in their accounts of the critical landscape. Although, this attitude is a strength of the volume as a whole, I wonder if the authors might have offered some sharper criticisms about the strength of specific historical claims, about the nature of the evidence, about the methods we have for evaluating that evidence, about the level of speculation that is often involved in scholarly judgments, and about the need to proportion assent to evidence. That is, perhaps there is a need to be a bit more critical about the claims of historical critics. This might work to undermine the contributors’ larger aims of encouraging evangelical involvement in these various critical practices. Nevertheless, biblical scholarship seems to be entering a period where many “assured results” are being probed and questioned on scholarly grounds. It is an exciting time from a scholarly perspective and that is worth noting too.

Throughout these chapters one gets the message that the results of various historical reconstructions are not catastrophic for “the integrity of evangelical Christian theology.” At the same time, this reality should serve as a call for deeper evangelical engagement with the practices of professional biblical scholars. This may well be true. Apart from a larger theological account of Scripture within the divine economy, however, one gets the impression that much of this engagement could simply become a defensive shoring up of potentially problematic claims about the relationships between particular convictions and specific events related in Scripture. Moreover, as the careers of numerous evangelical scholars show, there are often differing views between scholars and university presidents and boards about what is catastrophic for evangelical theology.

Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to the argument for such engagement that is offered in the conclusion to the chapter on the historical Jesus. The authors make the claim for the need to engage in at least some of these historical investigations. “To forego active engagement would be to abandon the title of ‘expert’ to many scholars whose views the orthodox academic finds deeply objectionable, thereby to leave the laity of our congregations unnecessarily vulnerable to the extremes of unchecked historical caricatures” (181). As someone who often speaks to congregations who have had exposure to the work of John Dominic Crossan, I can only say, Amen.

The volume concludes with a plea for evangelical scholars to be faithful critics with a critical faith. The editors recognize that scholars will bring a variety of interpretive concerns to bear on the Bible. Historical-critical interests and theological interests along with others are welcome. At this point, however, I would like to raise a larger question with regard to the practices of professional biblical scholars and how these are related to the theological concerns scholars may wish to bring to Scripture.

If you were to pick up a journal in the field of biblical studies or to attend a professional conference of biblical scholars, two things would strike you. First, the material under discussion is both exceedingly diverse and complex. Secondly, those who are fully participating in the discussions and debates are able to address the diversity and complexity relatively well. What I mean is they are able to figure out where the critical issues lie; they can make judgments about the weight and relevance of particular claims; they can come to a conclusion which they can defend, revise, or abandon in the light of new evidence or superior arguments. This shows that these scholars have been more or less well formed to be particular types of readers. It is simply the case that you cannot successfully and proficiently enter into these professional discussions and debates without prior formation. Those with PhDs in biblical studies recognize this.

Alternatively, the academic formation of professional biblical scholars is generally weakest when it comes to theological matters and how to bring theological concerns to bear on scriptural interpretation. If, as the contributors to this volume argue, evangelical biblical scholars should bring both historical and theological concerns to bear on Scripture, how are they to be formed to read theologically? How are they to manage the relationships between these two different types of reading? How are conflicts discerned? How are resolutions negotiated? How does one establish priorities between these two ways of reading? My point is not to claim that the historical and the theological will always be in conflict. Neither is one easily reducible to the other. Rather, I simply want to recognize that the type of balance advocated in this volume does not happen naturally. It requires just as much formation on the theological side as the historical side. Currently, however, only one of these sides receives much attention in most graduate programs in biblical studies. I suggest that addressing this issue should rise to the top of any set of priorities evangelical scholars would want to set for themselves if they were to move forward in the light of the proposals in this book. The fact that these chapters are marked by an irenic tone, a generosity of perspective, and an openness to engagement should be a good indication that such progress is possible.

EVANGELICALS HAVE WRESTLED WITH the challenges raised by the methods and conclusions of higher criticism for a long time. The recent book, Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism (Baker Academic, 2013), edited by C. Hays and C. Ansberry continues that conversation with a collection of essays targeting conservative members of the church who remain suspicious of historical criticism in particular. Nine chapters covering a wide swath of historical-critical concerns in both the Old and the New Testaments intend to show that accepting the results of historical-critical investigation will not necessarily undermine the gospel, evangelical faith, or orthodox Christian doctrine. It will be interesting to see how convincing their arguments prove to be among their conservative, target audience.

I know that I have one long-standing question about historical criticism that is still waiting for an answer. What is historical criticism, exactly? The assortment of methodologies dealt with by the various authors in this collection is another example of the ill-defined character of this discipline. Once the basic question of definition has been asked, we ought then to ask: what is the appropriate relationship between Christian faith and historical evidence? Is the task at hand primarily one of illuminating Scripture or of providing evidence for the reasonableness of faith?

I confess that the exact definition and methodology of historical criticism has always eluded me, and I do not think it is only because I can be a bit dim-witted. The term is slippery, regularly being used to denote a variety of different methodological tools as if they were interchangeable. Here are some of the apparent “meanings” that I have identified (both in this book and in others), proceeding from the least to the most controversial applications.

1. In its most innocent form, historical criticism is nearly synonymous with the grammatical-historical method of biblical exegesis. Investigating the details of historical context, cultural background, and the linguistic content of a written text are essential to an accurate understanding of any Scripture passage, and are often presented as the sine qua non of an historical-critical reading of the Bible. For example, reading the Gospels’ portrait of Jesus in light of the diverse messianic expectations known to exist in Second Temple Judaism would be an example of this application of historical criticism, where it serves the non-controversial purposes of reading and understanding Scripture more accurately (see chapter 7, “The Historical Jesus”).

2. Identifying internal evidence for the evolutionary, editorial development of a biblical book or passage is also sometimes described as historical criticism. Chapter 4, entitled “No Covenant Before the Exile? The Deuteronomic Torah and Israel’s Covenant Theology,” illustrates this use of the term in its discussion of the book of Deuteronomy and the various attempts to determine whether it is a pre- or a post-exilic document. To the extent that investigators draw on historical information external to the biblical text, this is obviously an exercise in historical analysis, but insofar as the analysis becomes wholly internal, comparing one supposed layer of textual tradition with another, the analysis morphs into a purely literary enterprise and is best described (I think) as a form of literary or tradition criticism. Speculating on the compositional history of a text by analyzing internal evidence alone is a very different process from interpreting a text in the light of external evidence, material or otherwise. So why do we continue to label both of them as historical criticism?

3. Another sense of historical criticism, closely related to #2 above, involves speculating about the compositional/editorial history of a text when it is read through the lens of a particular literary theory serving as a template for interpretation. The classic example of this is the application of the Documentary Hypothesis (the JEDP theory), or one of its many reformulations, concerning the Pentateuch. This, too, is more literary than historical criticism since there is no real external, historical evidence to be had in this debate. The Documentary Hypothesis is only historical in the sense that it offers the hypothetical “history” of a collection of texts constructed on the basis of a prior theoretical reconstruction of its sources, tradents, and original Sitz im Leben. This approach may emulate the scientific method insofar as it tries to offer an all-encompassing, explanatory hypothesis that best accounts for the available, textual evidence. But, for this same reason, it is also a (viciously) circular argument that can easily leave critics trapped in their own methodological straightjacket. The theory determines our reading of the evidence which continues to bolster the explanatory power of the theory. Round and round we go. However, repetition alone is not an argument unless one seeks to convince via boredom. Nor does this logical circle necessarily justify the reigning theory so much as it may testify to the need for a paradigm shift in the way we approach the evidence, allowing for a new theory to emerge.

4. The most commonly understood task of historical criticism involves comparing the historical claims of Scripture against extra-biblical records and archaeological evidence related to the biblical story in order to evaluate the historical reliability of the biblical narrative and perhaps to rewrite the story where “needed.” Revisiting the stories of the exodus and the Israelite conquest of Canaan in light of the relevant archaeological discoveries, much of which appears to conflict with the accounts laid out in Exodus and Joshua, are examples of this brand of historical criticism, as demonstrated in chapter 3, entitled “The Exodus: Fact, Fiction or Both?” This is also the point at which more conservative readers of Scripture will begin to feel most uncomfortable, for now extra-biblical information is not being used to illuminate Scripture (as in #1 above) but to judge or to contradict it.

5. Adjudicating questions of pseudepigraphic authorship is, perhaps, best categorized as a subset of #3 above. Chapter 6, “Pseudepigraphy and the Canon,” is an example of this type of exercise, at least in its discussion of Paul’s writings and the debate over the so-called deutero-Pauline letters. A theory of false attribution (i.e., the Apostle Paul did not actually write those books, despite his name being attached to them) is proposed (presumably, though see below) on the basis of textual observations made throughout a collection of writings fit to a theory of development. The logic in this type of analysis shares the same circularity described above in connection with the Documentary Hypothesis. Do the facts fit and therefore validate the theory? Or does the theory predetermine the interpretation of the facts? Can a different sort of relationship be imagined between these facts and an alternative, historical reconstruction?

I honestly do not understand why the authorship of John’s gospel is included in the discussion of pseudepigraphy found in chapter 6. Since none of the Gospels make any explicit claims to authorship—such as, “I, John, am writing this to you”—analyzing the internal or external evidence concerning alternative authorships has nothing to do with false claims about authorial origins. None of the canonical Gospels, therefore, can be labeled as examples of pseudepigrapha. Thus, with this observation we arrive at the outer edges of these confusing, multiple definitions of historical criticism. Perhaps the authors have included pseudepigraphy under the umbrella of historical criticism because it also requires judging a text in light of an historical reconstruction—in this case, it is a theory about authorship rather than compositional development.

In any case, my questions remain. Is the “historical” component in historical criticism referring to the posited literary development supposedly found within a text when it is viewed through the correct hypothetical lens? In other words, are we talking about composition history?

Or is the historical component in historical criticism found through the empirical data of world history when that information is placed alongside the historical evidence found in the Bible? In which case, historical criticism is about using external evidence to evaluate the historical claims of Scripture.

Or is historical criticism to be so broadly defined that it includes any study of any type of historical question that has any bearing on Scripture, no matter how theoretical or detached from external, empirical evidence?

I ask these questions, at the risk of sound like a nit-picking prig, because the discipline of historical criticism has always struck me as being terribly undisciplined in this regard, presenting itself as such a fuzzy, ill-defined beast that once you grab a hold of it you are never quite sure what you are grabbing onto, much less where it wants to take you.

Of course, anyone who maintains the historical basis of the Christian faith has to engage some brand of historical method, but we cannot afford to forget the historicist foundation stones of modern historical criticism. As codified by Ernst Troeltsch these non-negotiable principles of acceptable historical method include (1) skepticism (don’t be naïve; if it does not happen today, it did not happen then), (2) correlation (events occur as links in the chain of imminent, historical causation; there is no transcendent, divine causality), and (3) analogy (all historical events are similar to each other; there is no such thing as an utterly unique, inexplicable event). Any discussion of historical criticism and its usefulness to evangelical faith cannot ignore the epistemological limitations imposed by Troeltsch’s methodological triumvirate. At what point must the evangelical Bible reader part company with Troeltsch’s reining trio? Surely, such a departure must happen eventually? When it does occur, what are the criteria for parting ways at that particular juncture and not somewhere else? If we have accepted the working constraints of correlation and analogy up to “this” particular point (whatever historical point that may be), then what would ever compel us to shed those constraints and why? By what criteria, other than personal, idiosyncratic preferences, do we make such historical and hermeneutical judgments? None of these questions are addressed in this book.

More questions also need to be asked about the continued dominance of some rather dubious theories over the domain of historical criticism. Let us not forget, for instance, that J. Wellhausen’s famous JEDP theory was built from the earlier work of W. M. L. De Wette, whose own research had drawn deeply from the pools of German Romanticism and the all-pervasive anti-Judaism of his day.1 Both De Wette and Wellhausen described Judaism as a lamentable “degeneration” from earlier Mosaic religion. The supposedly objective and scientific late dating of Priestly material, then, was the result of nineteenth-century religious romanticism crossbred with European anti-Semitism; the odd progeny now holding court and making judgment over the Pentateuchal account of Israelite history.

Similarly, contemporary discussions of Pauline pseudepigrapha trace their lineage to the work of F. C. Baur who was also deeply influenced by German Romanticism. But it was Baur’s infatuation with Hegelian philosophy and Hegel’s argument for the universal unfolding of historical dialectic that was most influential in his identification of only some of Paul’s letters as genuinely Pauline and others as pseudepigrapha. The so-called Pauline pseudepigrapha is primarily the fruit of Baur’s commitment to fitting the New Testament canon into his theory of Hegelian dialectic as illustrated in early church history.

I recognize that one runs the risk of falling into the trap of the genetic fallacy when pointing out the flawed origins of critical theories. But the point is not simply to dismiss all theories proffered by flawed, culturally conditioned scholars (so much for the rest of us!). The point is to call attention to specific, pervasive, and enduring legacies where the power of prejudice over observation continues to shape (one might say misshape?) academic discourse. I contend that anyone who wants to argue for theories like the Documentary Hypothesis or the pseudepigraphal status of the Pastoral Letters today ought to include an explanation of how their own position is not reflective of the historical, philosophical, and religious prejudices that were formative influences in the theory’s creation. Without some deliberate intervention, missiles launched from skewed foundations tend always to fly off course.

Without this minimal level of methodological self-consciousness, apologetical appeals to such scholarly virtues as “critical faith” and “faithful criticism” that go on to produce “assured results” and “historical insights” will only continue to serve as linguistic placeholders substituting for the more obviously (though, perhaps, unwittingly) intended sense of “interpretive theorizing,” “theoretical conjecture,” and “personal opinion.”

It is certainly good for Christian faith to be informed. It is important, even necessary, for Christian faith to be honest in the face of historical difficulties and challenges. But Christian faith never needs to submit itself to the standards of reasonableness that rule over the academy. Despite their protests to the contrary, I fear that this is exactly what the authors of Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism have done.