A Critique of Liberal Scholarship - Part 1 - Can liberal scholarship lead to a loss of faith?
This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1991.
Editor's note: This article is one part of a multi-part series which David Gooding wrote to critique in a scholarly way some of the work of a number of liberal scholars. The series comprises:
- Can following liberal scholarship lead to a loss of faith?
- Following liberal scholarship can lead to biased research
- Observations on Herman Hendrickx's 'The Accounts of the Resurrection'
- Observations on the interpretation of parables given by liberal scholars
- A critique of Jeremias's interpretation of the parable of the Pounds (Luke 19:11–27)
- A critique of Joachim Jeremias's interpretation of Mark 4
- A critique of Haenchen's attempt to use Acts 1:9–11 as support for the theory of the delayed Parousia
- A critique of Jeremias's interpretation of the parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge (Luke 18:1–8)
- A critique of Beare's interpretation of the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31)
This first article is included to demonstrate how David Gooding approaches scholarship issues pastorally. Here, he is responding initially to the friend of someone who has been influenced by liberal scholars. In the subsequent articles, David Gooding is responding directly to the person.
Thank you for sending on to me the papers that your friend has written, setting out his reasons why he cannot believe Scripture. I am certainly prepared to do everything I can to help.
You say in your letter that, according to him, he has 'lost his faith' both in the Lord and in the inspiration of the Scriptures. That implies, does it not, that he did once have faith in the Lord and in Scripture? I wonder would he be willing to write to me direct and tell me a number of things about himself:
How did he first come to have faith in the Lord? Was he brought up in a Christian home? Did he accept Christianity as a child without much personal thought, or did he first come to faith as an adult, and how and by what means?
Sometimes when people say they have lost their faith, the faith they are talking about was never really first-hand for them, but rather a faith imbibed over the course of years through associations with a Christian family or a Christian church. Losing that kind of faith is sometimes a very good thing, for it leads someone to search for the reality of God and his self-revelation in Christ.
On the other hand, your friend may have come to faith through some very personal and perhaps very strong experience. The two situations are of course very different; and it would help me to help him if he could tell me a little of his own spiritual pilgrimage.
Would he agree to tell me how he came to lose his faith? He has written out some of his reasons for his present state of unbelief. I would be interested to know not simply about these present doubts but how he came to lose his faith.
Was it simply by reading the works of some of the scholars that he mentions, such as Professor Joachim Jeremias? Or was it that other and quite different kinds of experience had already begun to trouble him, and he was already beginning to question the truth of Christianity when he came across the writings of these aforesaid scholars?
The difficulties he puts forward are intellectual; but it sometimes happens that intellectual difficulties are only part of the reason why people lose their faith. I met and heard Professor Joachim Jeremias and, of course, I know and have used his writings. On at least one occasion in the past, in lecturing to the public in my own university, I was obliged to point out the serious defects in his literary analysis of the Gospels and, in particular, in the parables of the Lord.
All that, however, can be discussed later. The thing I find a little surprising is that, while he allows Joachim Jeremias to put forward his case in detail, the defence your friend puts in the mouth of the evangelicals is pathetically thin. I cannot think that your friend is deliberately suppressing all that he knows about evangelical and conservative scholarship in order to make the conservative case appear thin. It seems to me that he cannot know of the massive works of conservative scholarship published by conservative scholars of equal reputation to Joachim Jeremias.
On the other hand, I cannot think that your friend would have surrendered his faith so easily in the face of the tendentious pronouncements of the liberal scholars he quotes if he had known of the massive scholarship of the conservatives. So I am in a bit of a quandary, and that is why I would ask your friend to write and fill me in with a little more detail about himself. He has obviously read quite a lot of the works of liberal scholars like Jeremias. Are the names of scholars like D. A. Carson, J. I. Packer, F. F. Bruce, Craig Blomberg, Donald Wiseman, K. A. Kitchen, A. H. Millard, etc. known to him? And has he read their writings as extensively as those of the liberals?
And finally, could he tell me when he first began to lose his faith? The liberal scholars whom he quotes, particularly those like Jeremias, are now somewhat out of date in the world of scholarship. To quote just one detail: the old theory among the liberals, that the Gospel of John was written perhaps at the end of the first century AD has become an increasingly contested view. It is no longer true to say, as your friend writes, that almost all scholars agree that John's Gospel was written late, perhaps in the late first century. One very famous scholar, the late Bishop J. A. T. Robinson, was so liberal a theologian that he did not even believe in a personal God. Yet before he died he published a book in which he claimed that all the New Testament books were written before 70 AD—and he was certainly not trying to defend the inspiration of holy Scripture!
So, then, I shall be very happy to make acquaintance with your friend, even though it has to be for the present by correspondence. I hope one day that we shall be able to meet.
The Lord's blessing be on you,
