Chapter 5

Differences between Biblical Interpretation and Science

The similarities between the historical-critical revolution and revolutions in natural science might make us wonder whether sheer obtuseness has prevented evangelicals from accepting the whole historical-critical package. But the very existence of a significant amount of hold-out from the historical-critical method means something. There is a reason for this hold-out, however illogical and irrational it may appear to be to people who adhere to the reigning method.

17. What counts as superior biblical interpretation?

We may discover the answer by following out the logic of Kuhn's analysis of scientific revolutions. Kuhn does not merely say that a revolution happens when a new disciplinary matrix displaces an old one. He shows why and how this takes place in a community of scientists. First, a growing number of anomalies arise that are seen as important, and a growing number of researchers devote their energies to solving the anomalies within the existing disciplinary matrix. As attention is concentrated on anomalies, more and more are discovered. If repeated attempts to deal with the anomalies produce less than satisfactory solutions, some researchers begin to explore more radical alternatives. Variants of the disciplinary matrix arise. Then some researcher, typically one new to the field, finds a fundamentally new way of looking at some of the anomalies. Even though this new way is incompatible with parts of the reigning disciplinary matrix, it seems to have some promise. As it is worked out into a full-blown theory, it eventually proves superior in explaining the anomalies, is able to explain most of the phenomena explained by the old theory, and above all suggests a whole pattern of research that shows promise of uncovering and explaining large bodies of additional phenomena unanticipated by the old theory. When the new theory begins to show itself superior in this way, more and more scientists in the field get on the bandwagon.

However, Kuhn notes that in the earlier stages of the revolution, the new theory may not allow quantitative explanation any better than the old. Copernicus's sun-centered astronomy did not at first provide quantitative predictions any more accurate than Ptolemy's. At the beginning it is not easy to decide what is a superior approach, because people are trying to guess how well the alternative approaches will solve problems in the future. Typically there is no one point in time when one can say that now, and not before, the new theory is decisively proved and the old one refuted.¹

Now let us apply this to the revolution introduced by the historical-critical method. Was this method, as a disciplinary matrix, superior to the older approach of reading the Bible as a harmonious source of doctrine? In what way was it superior? What problems did it promise to solve better?

Its proponents might have said the following. (1) It offered the promise of superseding the old doctrinal disputes by providing an objective standard for interpretation. (2) It abandoned belief in the supernatural, which was an embarrassment in the age of reason. (3) It promised to explain, rather than gloss over, differences, tensions, and "contradictions" between parallel passages. (4) It promised to give insight into the history of each text's origin. This last point is particularly important, because the cultural atmosphere was moving toward the view that in human affairs, historical explanation was the correct, satisfying type of explanation to seek.²

Point (2) and, in part, point (4) touch on philosophical and cultural influences that did not affect all biblical interpreters equally. Similar philosophical influences can be found during scientific revolutions. In times of extraordinary science, people's evaluations of anomalies and alternative theories are often influenced by philosophy and other cultural forces.

Point (2) made the historical-critical method inferior, not superior, from the standpoint of theologians who were firmly committed to the supernatural. But why were some people firmly committed to the supernatural, and why should this commitment be any different than firm commitments that some scientists have to elements within the old, prerevolutionary disciplinary matrix?

Here we touch on at least one important difference between natural science and biblical interpretation. Biblical interpretation has things to say more directly about human life and about the life of the individual practicing interpreter as a whole person. Religious commitments are some of the deepest commitments that people have. People have emotional investments in their religion that often exceed the investments they have in a vocational interest such as doing research or doing science. Hence, they resist giving up these commitments.

How, then, do we rate the relative potentials of various different approaches to studying the Bible? Evidently one factor in our evaluation should be a requirement that biblical interpretation say something about what we should believe, and not merely do research on the Bible and on ancient religion. The historical-critical method, within the twentieth century, has now come under criticism from within for its failure to produce from its researches anything preachable. Many opponents as well as a few proponents of the historical-critical revolution saw this from the beginning.³

The requirement, then, that research on the Bible eventually connect with the needs of the church was a requirement unlike the requirements within a discipline of natural science. For that reason, of course, more radical representatives of the historical-critical method called for a complete separation from the church in order to achieve scientific status. But too many biblical scholars were interested in the Bible partly because of its personal, existential value. The pure separation may have been an ideal for the historical-critical method, but it was never achieved.

18. Experience of God: a fundamental difference between biblical interpretation and science

But we have still not penetrated quite to the heart of the matter. The Bible claims to be what God says.⁴ Within the precritical disciplinary matrix, people heard God speaking to them as they read the Bible. All of the Bible testified that what God said could be trusted, and that it ought to be trusted even in situations that seemed to throw doubts on it. God was the Lord. Obedience to him, including trusting what he said, was a supreme religious duty. Whenever conflicts arose, "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). This ruled out sifting, criticizing, doubting, or contradicting any part of what the Bible said. Moreover, it ruled out rejecting miracles or the supernatural aspects of the world, to which the Bible clearly testified. In a word, it ruled out the historical-critical method from the beginning. Conversely, the historical-critical method ruled out true biblical religion from its beginning.

Two things must be noticed about this process. First, the Bible made supreme claims about its own authority. People adhering to biblical religion had religious and emotional investments in it in ways formally similar to the emotional investments of non-Christians in non-Christian religions, and the investments of Enlightenment secularists in humanism or rationalism. But biblical religion (and ultimately non-Christian religions and secularist idolatries as well) requires supreme loyalty and supreme emotional commitment. Hence, the refusal to give up one's religion, seen from the outside as stubbornness in the face of facts, is from the inside loyalty in the face of temptation to treason. By their very nature supreme loyalties or basic commitments are supreme. They do not tolerate rivals.⁵ The Bible requires adherents to biblical religion, if necessary, not merely to suffer intellectual puzzlement and dissatisfaction at not having key answers, scorn for being unscholarly, or loss of vocation by being ostracized, but to submit even to torture and death for the sake of being loyal to God. In short, the commitments to biblical religion are more serious than any scientific commitment could be.

Second, people really did hear God speaking in the Bible. Or (as a sceptic would say) they thought that they did. The historical-critical method ignored from the outset the heart of the Bible, because it ignored, and in effect denied, this experience. But not everyone who read the Bible had this same experience. Different people, looking at the same Bible, "heard" different things. Naturally this produced a division within scholarship. Scholars who heard God refused to follow the historical-critical method. Whatever its other advantages, the historical-critical method had a crucial disadvantage: it falsified the whole nature of the field to be investigated. Scholars who did not hear God embraced the historical-critical method because, whatever its current unsolved problems, it approached the Bible at last without the old dogmatic commitments.

Of course, things were a bit more complex. People who once thought that the Bible was God's word and that they heard God speaking to them in its words sometimes, under the influence of the debate, later came to reinterpret their experience. People who once did not hear God in the Bible sometimes, under the same influences, later came to realize that he was speaking those words.

What do we make of this situation? I agree with the explanation found in the Bible itself. Two forces, two persuasive powers, are at war with one another in human hearts.⁶ Sometimes the forces exert themselves in the clamor of popular debate, sometimes in the cultural atmosphere and world view of a society, sometimes in the careful arguments of scholars, sometimes in the appeals of orators, and sometimes in the quietness of an individual alone, weighing his own desires and hunches. God the Holy Spirit is one force, testifying to the truth. The sinfulness of the human heart is the other force, desiring to be like God, to reach its conclusions independent of all other authority. And this sinfulness is the platform for the seductions of Satan and his preternatural assistant demons.

Some, but not all, come to new birth by the Holy Spirit. When their hearts are enlightened, they see and hear in a way that other people, bound in sin, do not see and hear. In principle, this may affect all of life, because all of life belongs to God. But obviously some areas and aspects of life touch more closely on people's obedience to God or to Satan. Studies of humanity are, on the average, closer to the issues of the heart than studies of subhuman nature. Studies of the Bible, the word of God, are, on the average, closer to the heart of the matter than studies of economics or sociology.

19. Kuhn's relevance in the midst of the differences

It would seem, then, that biblical interpretation is different from natural sciences. Some of its differences it shares with social sciences, or with any kind of research that would direct itself to some aspect of human experience. Other differences arise because it touches on basic commitments and on the heart of the spiritual conflict in this world.

These are differences, I say. And yet Kuhn uncannily describes the situation in a scientific revolution in a way reminiscent of religious conversion. Revolutions are "changes of world view," which "cause scientists to see the world of their research-engagement differently."⁷ To demonstrate this claim, Kuhn finds it useful to distinguish between "stimuli," the physical forces impinging on the human body, and "sensations," what we are actually aware of.⁸ The stimuli are the same, but the sensations are the same only for people who have had the same upbringing and education. Changes in world view affect the manner in which we interpret the stimuli. To this observation I might add that most people, myself included, do not experience sensations either, if this word connotes in a narrow way bits of experience associated each with a single sensory apparatus, cleanly isolated from everything else. Only people influenced by an empiricist world view learn to isolate sense bits from a holistic human experience of wholes. Other people, outside of this world view, know that we experience a world. We experience God as well, since created things testify to him (Rom. 1:21, Ps. 19:1-6).

Whatever one might say about world views in general (and it is worth reflecting on Kuhn's views on this subject), Kuhn's observations fit the situation introduced with the rise of the historical-critical method. Practitioners of the method and opponents of the method did not see the same thing when they examined the Bible. One saw a human product of social evolution of religious ideas. The other saw God speaking. Their methods of investigation were correspondingly different.

Actually, the situation is still more complex than what I have described. In the history of interpretation there are not merely two interpretive positions, one a thorough-going historical-critical method and the other a thorough-going approach to the Bible on the basis of believing all its claims because of its divine authority. Many people struggled to find intermediate positions that accepted the historical-critical method as one means of attaining a more accurate knowledge of a uniquely "inspired" but fallible biblical message. Others claimed to follow the historical-critical method whole-heartedly, but introduced extra religious or philosophical assumptions of their own. Others in the fundamentalist camp maintained the full authority of the Bible but denied the profitability of scholarly reflection. In a sense the anomalies generated by the Enlightenment crisis of Christian faith and autonomous reason generated not two disciplinary matrices but a whole spectrum.