Appendix 6 : The Mis-Use of Liberal Theologians

 

 

 

The purpose of this page is look at the quality of support that Richard looks to when he looks for support about the Bible.

 

1. A Glimpse at Distant History

 

To the uneducated, ‘church' may just be a bunch of people living today who have somehow cobbled together a vague bunch of ideas about God. Nothing could be further from the truth.

 

About two thousand years ago, an historical figure, Jesus Christ, lived in the area we call Palestine or Israel. When he died, what he did and said was taught by and to his followers and eventually written down, first in small pieces and then in collections. Various of his followers wrote letters to different churches (as the followers grew in numbers, so they spread across the world and wherever groups met locally, they formed a local ‘church'.)

 

Leaders of the early church were not simply appointed by other believers, but were those who clearly had the wisdom and power of God with them. In every generation there were these men, many of whom wrote about the central beliefs of Christianity – about Jesus, who he was, and what he taught, and the implications of that. These writings supported what came to be known as the ‘canon of Scripture' the books of our New Testament that were agreed by the early church leaders to be authoritative and credible records.

 

Throughout the life and beliefs of the church was this sure knowledge, and experience of God in what are usually called divinely supernatural or miraculous ways. Wherever the church was strong this sure knowledge AND experience of the power of God was a key element of its life. The life and experience of the Church over the two thousand years of church history has not always been so strong or clear cut.

    

  

2. Tradition and Heresy

 

When we speak of tradition we tend to mean the beliefs and normal experience of the Church as described above. Throughout its history it has struggled against heresy, beliefs contrary to those found particularly in the New Testament. The first three hundred years of the life of the Church was a constant battle against such false teachings and that has continued in differing measures throughout the period of church history.

 

E.J.Young in his An Introduction to the Old Testament wrote:

“During the first two centuries of the Christian era there is no recorded instance of criticism that is hostile to the Bible among the Church fathers or in the Orthodox Church itself. The Apostolic Fathers and the subsequent Ante-Nicene Fathers, in so far as they expressed themselves on the subject, believed Moses to be the author of the Pentateuch, and the Old Testament to be a divine book. Such instances of hostile criticism are as extant from this period come either from groups that were considered to be heretical or from the external pagan world. Furthermore, this criticism reflected certain philosophical presuppositions and is of a decidedly biased and unscientific nature.”

 

Through the ‘Dark Ages' of history, the life of the church was largely far from vibrant although there were always pockets of life still obvious. In the sixteenth century Martin Luther was a key figure in bringing about what is often called the Protestant Reformation, which was a return to the belief in the importance and significance of the Scriptures as God's word for His Church.

 

During the 14th to 17th centuries the Western world was also going through what is referred to as the Renaissance, a time of cultural development which affected all areas of thinking, during which rationalistic humanism rose in influence.

For those who would like to consider further what went on in the early church we recommend you go to our Apologetics pages and look under 'Questions about the Early Church'. If you would like to do that, please CLICK HERE

  

3. The Advent of Liberal Theology

 

At the end of the 18th century and through the 19th there came a way of theological thinking, touched by rationalistic humanism, which was very different from the traditional schools of theology seen throughout previous history, and which continued into the early part of the 20th century. So-called liberal theologians tend to stand out in church life today as being few and far between and their churches tend to dwindle.

 

This school of thinking no longer accepted the Bible as an accurate historical record of the life of Christ and the early church and the teachings that came from them, but started from a humanistic rational starting place which denied the miraculous and indeed the presence and work of God. It is interesting to note that wherever this approach has been held, the life has gone out of the church and churches diminished. The heart of liberal theology is anti-supernaturalism.

The impact of this way of thinking was well captured by Frank Morison in the 1930's in his book, Who Moved the Stone, possibly one of the best apologetics of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In his opening chapter he wrote:

If you will carry your mind back in imagination to the late 'nineties you will find in the prevailing intellectual attitude of that period the key to much of my thought. It is true that the absurd cult which denied even the historical existence of Jesus had ceased to carry weight. But the work of the Higher Critics—particularly the German critics—had succeeded in spreading a very prevalent impression among students that the particular form in which the narrative of His life and death had come down to us was unreliable, and that one of the four records was nothing other than a brilliant apologetic written many years, and perhaps many decades, after the first generation had passed away.

Like most other young men, deeply immersed in other things, I had no means of verifying or forming an in­dependent judgment upon these statements, but the fact that almost every word of the Gospels was just then the subject of high wrangling and dispute did very largely colour the thought of the time, and I suppose I could hardly escape its influence.

But there was one aspect of the subject which touched me closely. I had already begun to take a deep interest in physical science, and one did not have to go very far in those days to discover that scientific thought was obstinately and even dogmatically opposed to what are called the miraculous elements in the Gospels. Very often the few things the textual critics had left standing, Science proceeded to undermine. Personally I did not attach anything like the same weight to the conclusions of the textual critics that I did to this fundamental matter of the miraculous. It seemed to me that purely documentary criticism might be mistaken, but that the laws of the Universe should go back on themselves in a quite arbitrary and inconsequential manner seemed very improbable.

Had not Huxley himself declared in a peculiarly final way that ‘miracles do not happen', while Matthew Arnold, with his gospel of ‘Sweet Reasonableness', had spent a great deal of his time in trying to evolve a non-miraculous Christianity?

Such was the influence of the unbelieving rationalists of those years who swayed a generation by their amazingly (as seen in hindsight from this point of history) unscientific thinking. It is such thinking that Richard relies on so heavily. But we need to think some more about this:

    

  

4. Anti-Supernaturalism

 

Josh McDowell in his excellent research work, The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict, not only covers the subject of the criticism of these liberal scholars but gives an entire chapter to “The Presupposition of Anti-Supernaturalism,” which we recommend anyone wanting to understand this subject to read.

 

“A presupposition is something assumed or supposed in advance.

 

“We will define anti-supernaturalism as disbelief either in God's existence or in His intervention in the natural order of the universe. In the Pentateuch it is explicitly stated no less than 235 times that either God “spoke” to Moses or God “commanded” Moses to do something. Prior to his investigation, a critic with an anti-supernaturalism bias (presupposition) would immediately reject these accounts as unhistorical."

(my emphases)

 

We could quote much of McDowell's excellent work but would prefer you read it yourself. Simply here we observe that these theologians started from a point from which there could only be one conclusion – the Bible is man's thoughts. Now that is not a scientific approach, but it is the support that Richard leans on in The God Delusion whenever he is criticising the Bible.

 

He is quoting unbelieving theologians who start from the basis that there is no God or that God cannot intervene in His creation. They are not, therefore, reliable witnesses.

   

If you would like to consider further the subject of presuppositions, we recommend you go to our Apologetics pages and look under the early questions about thinking. If you would like to do that, please CLICK HERE

   

5. Reliable Scholarship

 

If we left this subject here the point would have been made but would have been incomplete. I have at various times in my notes on the book commented on the immense volume of work of scholarship that IS reliable that has come out in the latter half of the twentieth century and which Richard and others would do well to observe.

 

Putting it in the simplest language possible, these are men (and occasionally women) who have thoroughly investigated and studied the nature and trustworthiness of ancient writings, the validity of the Biblical documents, the culture of the Biblical period and the nature and viability of the beliefs that accompany the Bible when read as it is written without any deductions.

 

My initial intent here was to cite well-know names but the moment I do that I am sure to miss our key names, for there are so many, scholars who have devoted their lives to open, frank, investigation of the highest order, men of the highest integrity.

 

If you would like to consider further why the Bible is reliable, we recommend you go to our Apologetics pages and look under 'Questions about the Bible'. If you would like to do that, please CLICK HERE

 

A Concluding Comment

 

Contrary to what Richard believes, those of us who study the Bible and teach it, are not afraid to ask questions and indeed we encourage the asking of questions of the Bible, its nature, its origin and its content.

 

Although many of us, no doubt, will have started out with a presupposition that there is a God, there are numbers who didn't but have come to that position by serious investigation. The Bible scholar has no need to fear the truth.

 

The closed minds of anti-supernaturalists, such as Richard, appear to prevent them from examining the immense wealth of serious scholarship that shows that belief in God is far from a delusion.

 

Their fear of examining these things suggest that they are the ones who are deluded and the sad thing is that there are so many people who either have this fear or are just too lazy to investigate, and so remain in their cells of ignorance chanting their mantras in the belief that others will join them in their life of uninformed prejudice, relying only on those who think the same!  YOU can do better than that!