Red Flag!

While reading "The Sermon not the Mount" by Dale C. Allison, I came across something that did not settle well with me.

"Perhaps the best thing to do here is to recognize the humanity of our text. We have gotten used to the fact, established by the historical-critical method, that the Bible is not a coherent whole but a collection of diverse documents by various authors with different opinions on a multitude of subjects." (pg. 70)

I began wondering what Allison was getting it. What did he mean? Three questions came to mind.

1) Is Allison using "humanity" referring to the authorship of its books or is he denying the belief of divine inspiration?

2)What is this "historical-critical method" he refers to but does not explain?

3)Is not the Bible inerrant? How does Allison propose that it is not “coherent”?

I googled "historical-critical method". I found an essay written by a Harold S. Martin titled The Bible’s Deadly Ememy: The Historical Critical Method of Interpretation. (http://www.brfwitness.org/Articles/1993v28n1b.htm) I am not holding his essay as a define-all but his idea of what this method is and does was shocking and quite disturbing.

Here is an excerpt from Martin’s essay.

Some of the primary assumptions held by most scholars who use the historical-critical approach to Bible interpretation are these:

1) The books of the Bible may not have been written by the persons to whom tradition (or the Bible text itself) assigns them.

2) Certain passages in the Bible could have been interpolated (altered or corrupted) by someone other than the author.

3) Some statements ascribed to Jesus may be the writer's idea of what Jesus might have said, rather than a record of His actual literal words.

4) A number of Scriptural statements are the result of cultural conditioning, rather than a definite word from God.

5) The Bible is the result of an evolutionary process; early Christians used pre-scientific depictions of reality in formulating their beliefs, and so today one must use critical reason to decide what is reality in the Bible and what cannot be reality. (To scholars this process is known as "demythologization.")

If you'd like to look into this term demythologization, then the person who you'll need to look at is a historical critical theologian by the name of Rudolf Bultmann.

In conclusion to the five presuppositions which Martin provides he writes, “The presuppositions of the historical-critic lead to devastating results. Instead of objectivity, there is almost unrestrained subjectivity. Final authority regarding what is true, according to the historical-critics, is determined by the trained, informed, critical intellect. And so Scripture is subordinated to human reason. The historical-critical method humanizes the Bible and downgrades the concept of divine authorship. The method is frequently used to radically change the traditional understanding of Bible truth.”

If final authority is dependent on human reason then we as finite beings are putting a question mark where God intended there to be a period. We are bringing God down and lifting humankind up in a form of humanistic gnosticism. I stand convicted that the Bible is the Word of God. Its authority is not dependent on whether or not we believe it to contain authority.