Michael F. Bird on “Believing
criticism.”
I have been making my way through a
new book by Michael F. Bird, The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus (Eerdmans, 2014). Thus far, it is a very
stimulating read, and I appreciate the discussions of oral traditions and their
reliability in antiquity and the nature of the Gospels (e.g. their relationship
to eye-witness accounts [cf. Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eye-witnesses]).
There is a very nice quote on page
100 of Bird’s book on what he labels “Believing Criticism,” which I think is
appropriate, not just for believers in the Bible and the importance of
(scholarly) critical engagement with the texts, but could also be said, from a
believing Latter-day Saint perspective, about the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and
Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price:
This
approach treats Scripture as the inspired and veracious Word of God, but
contends that we do Scripture the greatest service when we commit ourselves to
studying it in the light of the context and processes through which God gave it
to us. Scripture is trustworthy because of God’s faithfulness to his own Word
and authoritative because the Holy Spirit speaks to us through it. Nonetheless,
God has seen fit to use human language, human authors, and even human processes
as the means by which he has given his inscripturated revelation to humanity.
To understand the substance of Scripture means wrestling with its humanity, the
human face of God’s speech to us in his Word. That requires that we can freely
engage subjects such as how the text of the Gospels was transmitted (text
criticism), sources that the Evangelists used (source criticism), when and
where were the Gospels written (historical criticism), why the Gospels were written
(literary criticism), what kind of literature they are (genre criticism), how
the Evangelists edited and adapted their sources (redaction criticism), how the
story in its current shape creates meaning (narrative criticism), how the stories
of Jesus interacted with cultural values and modes of discourse
(social-scientific criticism), and how the Gospels came to be accepted as the
four official stories of Jesus sanctioned by the early churches (canonical
criticism). These are the legitimate inquiries, not in spite of but precisely
in light of the faith communities who cherished the Gospels as testimonies of
Jesus Christ.