How are Bible believers to ‘keep their heads’ during trends of biblical criticism?
This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 2008.
With regards to your question relating to biblical criticism and our approach to it as believers in the inspiration of Scripture:
My first answer is that as believers we surely do believe in the historicity of Christ: his birth, his ministry, his death, resurrection and ascension. We believe, likewise, in the historicity of the stories told us in the Old Testament. We must welcome, therefore, rigorous scholarship on the question of historicity.
Now, it is the fact that much of the biblical criticism that has been practised in this last two centuries is not genuine historical criticism. It is criticism based on modernistic philosophy. This is nowadays demonstrable, and indeed has been well demonstrated by, for instance, K. A. Kitchen in his book on The Reliability of the Old Testament. Kitchen is an expert in Egyptian and many other ancient languages. He is highly knowledgeable on the questions of archaeology and history, and time and time again in his volume he points out that the older historical criticism of the Old Testament was practised at a time when the archaeological facts were not known. Up-to-date knowledge of these facts shows the older criticism to be built on inadequate foundations.
Moreover, in the Old Testament and then in the New, a lot of criticism has been based on what was claimed to be literary canons of criticism. But in this more modern age, even unbelievers are coming to see that the literary criticism practised by the older critics was, from a literary point of view, nonsensical. One thinks here of the modern Israeli scholar Steinberg, on the narrative books of the Old Testament.
Since God in his word has made great use of narrative in order to speak to us, we therefore ought to begin by letting God, who inspired the narrative writers, speak to us through what he caused them to write. And that will involve simple, straightforward reading of the text. Also, for those who can do it, all these other considerations of thought flow and structure and patterning, and so forth.
Meanwhile, a very healthy distrust of unbelieving criticism is well justified.
Yours sincerely,
