Thursday, October 9, 2014

Michael F. Bird on “Believing Criticism"

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.