Via Media Podcast, Episode 19 The Limits of Biblical Criticism Osvaldo Padilla September 12, 2019 https://www.beesondivinity.com/the-institute-of-anglican-studies/podcast/2019/the-limits-of-biblical-criticism Announcer: The Institute of Anglican Studies at Beeson Divinity School welcomes you to Via Media, a podcast exploring the religious and theological worlds from an Anglican perspective. Here is your host Gerald McDermott. McDermott: Welcome to the Via Media. We’re starting a series today called “How To Read the Bible.” I’ll be interviewing various scholars and Anglican leaders, trying to answer that question from a variety of perspectives. And today I’m really excited to have my New Testament scholar colleague with us. His name is Osvaldo Padilla. He’s professor of New Testament and Greek here at Beeson Divinity School. Now, Ozzie, my colleague and friend, grew up in the Dominican Republic, has pastored Hispanic churches, earned his PhD at the University of Aberdeen, over across the pond, in Great Britain. He’s taught New Testament and Greek at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; and for the last eleven years here at Beeson Divinity School. Now, Ozzie, Dr. Padilla, has published a number of books, he’s published a book on Acts of the Apostles for Cambridge University Press. He did another book on Acts of the Apostles with Intervarsity Press. He’s working on a book now on the incarnation as atonement. He is helping to edit a book titled “The New Testament in Color,” that deals with the New Testament and the influence of culture. He’s written many articles on the Hispanic church, on New Testament historiography, on the question of inerrancy of the Bible. Questions about speeches in Luke/Acts and more. So, welcome, Ozzie. Dr. Padilla: Thank you, Gerry. It’s a pleasure to be with you. Looking forward to our conversation today. Dr. McDermott: Well, thank you. So, my questions to you, Ozzie, have to do with ... because of your expertise. If you can help us, as Anglicans, on this Anglican podcast called Via Media – to help us as we read the Bible with questions about historical criticism in the background. You have wrestled with biblical criticism, historical criticism, for probably twenty years. So, let me start out my questioning, Ozzie, by asking you: What is biblical criticism? Dr. Padilla: Yes, I agree with you that we must deal with this issue and I like to tell our students at Beeson that at some point or another, preferably during their seminary time, it’s good to at least begin to wrestle with what biblical criticism, or higher criticism, might mean. In some ways criticism is not ... when we speak about biblical criticism, the word “criticism” doesn’t mean critical as such. But it simply means to ask questions of the biblical text, even hard questions. On the other hand there is a type of biblical criticism that is critical of the Bible in the sense that it takes a posture of judgment over the Bible. I think we can develop this further as we talk. So, I think when people hear the word “criticism” they immediately think “critical.” That is not necessarily the case with biblical criticism. Yet there is higher criticism that is indeed critical in a negative way of the Bible. McDermott: So, you’re making a distinction, as is often made between lower and higher biblical criticism, and you say higher criticism assumes a posture of standing over the Bible in judgment of the Bible? Dr. Padilla: Yes. I think in biblical studies, in the present, the vocabulary of lower and higher criticism is not used as often as it was in the 20th century. For example, in his presidential address to the society of biblical literature in 1947, E C Caldwell, from the University of Chicago spoke of lower and higher criticism. Today I think there is a tendency to speak of either the grammatical historical approach to the Bible and then on the other hand higher criticism. So, in many ways evangelicals and Orthodox Christians practice that grammatical historical criticism or, if you will, lower criticism. This kind of criticism generally refers to the study of the text in its linguistic and historical setting. In a sense, therefore, most Orthodox seminaries and divinity schools teach lower criticism. As a student, if you were to come, for example, to Beeson you would have to learn Hebrew and Greek because those are the original languages of the Bible. Also you would have to learn the basics of textual criticism in order to detect corrupt readings that have crept into the Hebrew and Greek text throughout the centuries. Another example of lower criticism is the study of the historical context of the Old and the New Testament. For example, you will understand the Book of Genesis if you learn the ancient near eastern context in which it was produced. That will give you a much better understanding. For the New Testament, say the Book of Acts or Revelation, your reading will be enriched if you know something about Roman history, society, and geography. So, that is lower criticism and that is something that most evangelical and orthodox seminaries and divinity schools will teach the students. But note the following: The goal of lower criticism is not to determine the veracity of the Bible. Rather, it is to help you become a better, that is a more precise, reader of the Bible; precisely because the Bible matters. Since we believe it is God’s authoritative word, we better make sure we comprehend what it’s saying – for our lives and our ministries really are built on it. Higher criticism, on the other hand, is a much more ideological approach to the Bible. How so? Higher criticism comes to the biblical text with the attitude of judgment. We have learned, some higher critics would tell us, the nature of reality from other fields outside of the Bible. For example, philosophy, psychology, social theory – and so when we come to the scriptures we come ... maybe not explicitly, but we come to question the judgments ... the truth claims of the Bible. For many higher critics who are also churchgoers, they may study the Bible in order ultimately to translate the message into categories that are acceptable to modern people. On the one hand, these higher critics don’t want to do away with the Bible because it is of such cultural importance to their particular nation, but on the other hand they simply cannot accept many of the Bible’s truth claims. For example, the Trinity, the deity of Jesus Christ, miracles, and so on. So, what they do is translate or we may use the term “apply” the Bible in such a way that its truth claims are modified to fit our own sense of possibility or reality. So, rather than coming to scripture with our heads bowed, as it were, ready to hear a word from God and under his final authority, many in higher criticism – I would say most – come to the Bible not to sit under the text, but to sit above the text. McDermott: Let me give you an example of what I experienced of that, Ozzie. I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the early ‘70s and I did my major in New Testament and early Christian literature. All my courses in my major were at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. I was usually the only undergrad in the classes, and my fellow students were in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. They were all men back then, there weren’t any female students. And I remember our Introduction to New Testament course, the main text was of course the New Testament, but the secondary text was by Willi Marxsen. Dr. Padilla: Oh, yes. McDermott: Post-Bultmannian who just assumed that there was no bodily resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection of Jesus was only in the minds of his disciples. And the whole discussion of the gospels just presumed that. That the gospels talk about a bodily resurrection, but it can’t possibly be true, so let’s try to figure out what really did happen. That was my first startling and discouraging introduction to higher criticism. I had just had a conversion experience. Dr. Padilla: Wow. McDermott: So, it really threw me for a loop. Dr. Padilla: Yeah, that’s ... I don’t think you’re the only student who has gone through that. It’s difficult. To speak in a different way of what you’re saying I’d like to think of higher criticism as coming with a very strong philosophical ideology to the text. So, for example, the idea may be that there is no transcendent revelation and therefore truth or revelation, God’s revelation, is not going to be found as you read the biblical text, but it’s going to be found behind the biblical text. So, a lot of higher critics, they would read the Bible not to see, not to read the final form of the Bible, but rather to get behind the Bible to its production, because they believe that truth – whatever that is – is immanent to human existence rather than a transcendent revelation. So, rather than following the example of the Church throughout the centuries and believing that God has revealed himself in holy scripture, they think that such a thing is not the case and so what do we do? We excavate and we go behind the Bible to find out who wrote the Bible and find out what the belief of those people were. They believed that many of those people were religious geniuses. So, what we want to find out is what were their thoughts? That’s very different from trying to read the Bible to hear the word of God in the final text. McDermott: Yeah, because don’t you think, Professor Padilla, that for many of these earlier critics and present day critics, ultimate reality has already shown itself through nature and reason? And I, I’m speaking in the person of some of these critics, already know what God is or if there is a God and how God manifests himself? And so I come to the biblical text with my ideas of whether there’s a god and what this god is like, and read the biblical text – not seeking truth, but bringing my own view of truth to the text and sorting out the text to find out what parts of the text agree with what I already know to be the truth. And those parts that don’t agree, well, they must be from this false religious experience of these ancient people. Dr. Padilla: That’s an excellent description, I think, of what happens and what higher critics do. Related to that is the fact that when you read the Bible like that you destroy the unity of the Bible. I think that is perhaps the most destructive result of an unbending higher critical approach to the Bible, is the dissolution of its unity. Christians have always insisted that the Old and New Testaments be read as one divinely inspired book with Jesus Christ as the center. Higher criticism, on the other hand, concentrating primarily on the humanity of the Bible, which is to say the historical aspects behind the biblical text, have attempted to dissolve this unity and this has resulted in the near destruction of the Church. Especially in the protestant main line denominations. McDermott: Yeah. Now, Dr. Padilla, have you changed your mind about some of these things over the course of your scholarly career? Dr. Padilla: You know, by God’s grace, even before I became a believer I think being raised in the Hispanic culture, there was a great deal of respect for the Bible. Then when I became a believer my belief in scripture was even stronger that this was the word of God. So, there has never been a change from, say, not believing and then coming back to believing in the Bible again. Rather, I think that the biggest change of mine for myself, and this has happened through the years, has been a rejection of the idea that biblical studies, Old Testament / New Testament studies, must keep theology ... and when I say “theology” I mean good theology. I mean, the orthodox theology of the Church. But I’ve come to reject the idea that biblical studies must keep theology at arm’s length, because theology will poison the “pure” meaning of the text. Also, I reject the idea that theology must only come at the end of the scientific, so-called scientific exegetical work. So, the idea oftentimes that I learn ... now, I don’t know if this is what my teachers were saying or what I understood my teachers to be saying (laughs). So, at least this is what I understood, that first you do the hard work of the Greek and the parsing, the history of the text and so on. Theology? Don’t think about it too much. Only after you’ve done all the hard work of biblical criticism and so on, then you bring the theology. I think, however, and by the way, I think this is something that is often taught in evangelical seminaries, and I think it is the result of modernity and a lack of grasp of that. This is a mistake because the biblical text is already theological; being the result of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. If the Bible is God’s Word written, how can it not be read theologically? Even from the beginning. So, I think that the best work in biblical studies today is being done by theological exegetes. So, Gerry, to try to complete the answer to your question, whereas as I used to exegete with the great Christian creeds in the drawer of my desk, as it were, now when I exegete the creeds sit on my desk. McDermott: Now, I think you told me once, Ozzie, that you came to some of these conclusions when you were doing some of your studies over in Britain. Dr. Padilla: Yes. Reading Karl Barth, and other authors, opened my eyes. Authors like Vanhoozer, for example, ... he is very important in my theological development ... helped me to see that it was higher criticism, that push for a reading of the Bible that was “purely historical.” And that actually throughout the ages biblical exegetes studied the Bible with the creeds as providing a framework to help them understand. So, that was very, very important. I think that many evangelical seminaries, I said this previously a little bit but I think that in the name of a misunderstanding of sola scriptura, teach their students to be totally “objective” through an exegesis. Lest they read theology into the text. Now, we can always read our theology into the text and we have to be careful, especially when we have bad theology, but this is precisely ... this idea that you must do away with any creeds when you exegete ... I think this is precisely the kind of purely historical approach that characterizes higher criticism. McDermott: And don’t these higher critics, in their insistence on putting the creeds off to the side, presume that they are so purely objective that they have no presuppositions that they bring to the text? Dr. Padilla: Yes. That is the irony. That is the great irony. And in fact, Gerry, I would say this: one of the most important conclusions in the last ten to twenty years of biblical studies, especially in Europe, has been the recognition that higher criticism is actually not objective. And a lot of the scholars who are saying this are actually former higher critics. So, I’ll give you an example. There’s a New Testament theologian in Germany, Ulrich Wilckens, who taught for many years at the University of Berlin and Hamburg, in Germany. He used to teach his students the higher critical approach to the Bible. But then as time went on he began to realize that higher criticism was not really objective. But actually was quite dogmatic with its philosophy and its understanding of truth and transcendence and so on. So, he has now written a seven volume New Testament theology book. And the seventh volume of that work is entitled ... Let me see if I can put it from German to English ... “Criticism of Bible Criticism.” So, I think it’s fascinating that many scholars today who are not in any way orthodox or evangelicals are saying, hey, look, higher criticism is not objective, it is not purely scientific, and I would say that’s the case in Europe in many ways and is slowly being recognized in some of the universities in America. But not as quickly as I would like. McDermott: Yeah, I remember when I was taking these classes at the University of Chicago Divinity School. My professors would give the impression that they were bringing no presuppositions to the text and yet it was as clear as day, to me a 19, 20 year old, then 21 year old, that they brought an anti supernaturalist bias to the text. So, they immediately ruled out any miracle stories in the gospels as simply coming out of the Early Church and the authors of the gospels trying to make some point for the sake of their own power claims in the early Christian communities. Jesus didn’t really do these things. He did things and they dressed it up as miracles. He really didn’t say most of the things he said, particularly when he made claims to be the Messiah, or in John, God. He couldn’t possibly have done these things. He might have claimed these things, but we all know he was simply a divine figure, perhaps, or a very good moral teacher, but he couldn’t possibly have claimed to be God, he wasn’t that dumb. And he wasn’t that much of a pretentious religious leader. And I remember thinking, as this 19 year old, you are bringing these presuppositions into the text because of your own biases. And yet you claim to be purely objective in your reading of the text. Dr. Padilla: The sad thing is that a lot of students who come from confessional settings, or have had a conversion to the Lord, go to universities and some divinity schools and hear that, and actually believe it. That higher criticism is objective and all scientific. And end up turning their back, sadly, on the orthodox teaching of the scripture. McDermott: So, at some point you had a change of mind about this, I remember you were telling me, and you actually saw the virtue of reading the text as a biblical scholar with the creeds in mind. Dr. Padilla: Yes. Part of that is the fact that I used to read the Bible in a very individualistic way. The idea was that because the Bible alone is the Word of God and is the final authority I could, as an intelligent, even spirit-filled believer ... that kind of language ... I could just sit down and read the Bible and find truth there. But what I realized is that, yes, the Bible is the Word of God, it is our final authority to be sure. We can read it and should read it for devotionally, on our own, but also we have to read it together with the Church. Because the Holy Spirit, we believe, has been guiding the Church as it studies and reads scripture. There is a very interesting example of this in the ... we talked about this, Gerry, a little bit earlier, the Socinian heresy that was going on in the 17th century, would that be correct? McDermott: Mm hmm (Affirmative). Yes. Dr. Padilla: And there is a very ... there’s a fascinating writing that was discovered by William [Frecka 00:24:42] in which this individual was desiring to read the Bible as an individual, not be affected as he thought by the creeds or by theology or any of that, he just wanted to be a pure reading of the Bible. Listen to this testimony of this person and I think it sounds a lot like what some modern Christians are taught. He says, “Where upon resolving to know that by myself, which I could not by others, without either knowing of Arianism, Socinianism, or Platonism, I took the following course. I took the New Testament, where I convinced this truth was to be found revealed,” and by the way, he’s talking about the Trinity as the truth revealed. “If anywhere and reading it with attention I collected every text relating to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, into an imperial sheet of paper; for neither lacking giddy tradition, nor the tricks of wrestling single text, I thought that this could be the only way to find the truth by, if any. Now, God as my witness, that when I did thus, I could not buy fall into Arianism. Not that I then knew what name my opinion had, but sometime after meeting with books I saw the difference of Arianism and Socinianism and found that I was not singular in my sentiments, but that the world had thought the same before me.” So, here’s an individual who was taught: read the Bible by yourself to find truth. Don’t let the creeds of the Church “infect your reading,” and he ends up becoming an Arian in his understanding of Jesus Christ. Very dangerous. McDermott: Ozzie, We’ve talked about how higher criticism can be dogmatic and full of ideological presuppositions. Are there ways, however, in which an orthodox person can benefit from wrestling with higher criticism? Dr. Padilla: I think so. I think you do have to wrestle with it. You know? Higher criticism emphasized the human aspects of the Bible to the detriment of its ultimate divine source. Inadvertently, however, it helped in reminding us that the biblical writers were not omniscient when they wrote. They were not divinized in the process of writing scripture. They did not become little gods when they wrote the Bible. So, the biblical writers used very human things such as literary genres to communicate. And understanding those genres is invaluable in Bible study. Also, I would say that higher criticism, without meaning to I think, in showing the humanity of the Bible it keeps us from flattening the biblical message, which is more like a symphony of instruments than a single instrument. So, for example, John wrote a different kind of gospel than the synoptics. And I suspect that part of that had to do with his personality and what God was doing in John’s life at the time. It’s okay to let John be John, or James be James. It is actually fundamentalism that insists in flat uniformity. Thereby I think making the Bible difficult to believe. McDermott: Hmm. Well, that’s very helpful. Thank you. It used to bother me, not only in grad school but also in my undergraduate New Testament courses at Chicago, that it was assumed that only the 20th century or, well, since the enlightenment and the 17th and the 18th century, that Christians started to become critical readers of the Bible. That there was no biblical criticism ever done before the enlightenment or the 19th and 20th century, or outside of Germany. It was only the Germans who are able to read the Bible critically. But then as I got older I started to read the Fathers, and I started to see now wait a minute, they weren’t so uncritical. They did their own kind of biblical criticism. Can you talk about that at all? Dr. Padilla: Yes. A little bit. I mostly refer to you in that area. (laughs) But I agree with you. I think that the Fathers, the Church Fathers, were so careful in their reading of scripture. They were very sophisticated, extremely sophisticated, dealing with a particular construction of the understanding of the universe; so Platonic that they were deconstructing as they were reading and writing. For example, Athanasius, I think, is very helpful in the way that he understands objectivity. Whereas we may ... a lot of people understand objectivity today as being critical, keeping things at arm’s length that you’re studying. I think Athanasius understood objectivity as approaching an object and studying that object that depends on the nature of that very object. So, to be objective in studying God you have to let God himself tell you how he wants to be approached. That is a very different type of understanding of objectivity that we often hear today. But I think it’s correct. And that is extremely helpful. McDermott: It is indeed, thank you. Now, some years ago, Ozzie, you transitioned from the Baptist Church community to an Anglican Church community. How has this affected your reading of the Bible and your biblical scholarship? Dr. Padilla: Yeah. It was ... I had some very good years in the Baptist communion and love the belief in scripture of that community and the emphasis on missions and going out to win people for Christ. But for me personally I wanted to experience a church where we took more serious the traditions of the Church. And so when I went to an Anglican Church first in Great Britain and I began to read the liturgy and then understand that some of those liturgies went back to the very Early Church, and then as we read the Nicene Creed in the church and the Apostles Creed in the church, it really dawned on me that Christianity wasn’t born ... (laughs) ... sorry, I don’t mean this to be a joke, but it dawned on me that Christianity wasn’t born in North America in the 19th century. But that believers have been studying the Bible and worshipping God, thinking carefully about theology, for many, many centuries. And we became Anglicans. My wife, Kristen, and I; and one of the gifts of Anglicanism is precisely the avoidance of the kind of thing that I just quoted. But rather it helps to read in community. I think there are many things that I love about being an Anglican, but the other thing is what you learn during worship about the unity of the Bible, contrary to what many people think, in Anglican worship services the Bible is read a lot. We read from the Old Testament. We read from the gospels. We read from the epistles. With the lectionary it is done in such a way- McDermott: Psalms. Dr. Padilla: Yep, Psalms, exactly. The lectionary is put together in such a way that one text links up with the other, and what that does is to help you see the unity of the Bible with Jesus Christ as the center. So, being an Anglican has, of course, had an effect on my Christian life, but it has also had an effect on myself as a biblical exegete. McDermott: Ozzie, I betcha some of our listeners today are going to want to follow you and follow your writings. Where can they find your writings? Or how would you direct them to get started reading some of your work? Dr. Padilla: Well, thank you, that’s very kind of you. Well, you know, I wrote this one work on the Book of Acts, as you mentioned earlier, published by IVP. And in that book I tried to take an orthodox approach to the Book of Acts that in many ways interacts with higher critical conclusions. So, if you’re interested in Acts and how some people have criticized the Book of Acts, that may be a work that you would want to consult. A little bit more scholarly, there’s an article that is coming out with the Bulletin of Biblical Research where I talk about Henry Joel Cadbury, one of the greatest or most well known biblical scholars of America, who taught at Harvard for many years. What I do in that article is to show how despite trying to portray this objective scientific persona, Henry Cadbury’s scholarship on the Book of Acts was actually very dogmatic in a philosophical and naturalist way. I’m also now working on a commentary on the pastoral epistles. I’m nearing Titus now and that’s going to be coming out with the Tyndale New Testament Commentary series. I hope that commentary would help pastors, especially, in the preaching of the Word. McDermott: Ozzie, thank you very much for being with us today. And we thank all of our listening audience for joining in today with the Via Media. Announcer: You've been listening to Via Media with host Gerald McDermott, the director of The Institute of Anglican Study Studies at Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. The Institute of Anglican Studies trains men and women for Anglican ministry, and seeks to educate the public in the riches of the Anglican tradition. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Via Media.