WHOSE AUTHORITY?

The epistemic authority of the Bible is contested by most of your lecturers. Depending on your course of study, you are likely to encounter casual critics, higher critics, intellectual hypocrites and others who approach the Bible from a cultural perspective.

CASUAL CRITICS
Direct casual attacks on the Bible usually come from prejudiced scholars, atheists, humanists and others who resent various aspects of your Christian faith. Generally, this group of critics are militant in their opposition to the Lord Jesus Christ. They are open enemies of the gospel. Casual critics of the Bible are sometimes pedestrian in their approach.  Many of them have not seriously studied the Bible first hand. They rely on the views of other prejudiced scholars. Listening or reading carefully, you can easily identify the patterns of their criticism that often reflect superficiality, biases and faulty logic.

HIGHER CRITICS
Higher criticism doesn’t mean either of two things. First it has nothing to do with advanced or objective critical analysis of biblical stories and messages. Secondly, the term doesn’t refer to the historic process of careful evaluation of ancient manuscripts in order to determine, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the ones that qualify as parts of the Bible.

Higher criticism is an intellectual approach to the Bible which starts with an assumption that the Bible is not an inspired documentation of God’s self-revelation to all humanity. Higher critics are not prepared to concede any form of supernaturalism in the events, accounts, themes, styles and messages contained in the texts of the Bible.

Their methods follow logically from a rejection of supernatural contents or influences in biblical texts. Higher critics see the Bible as no more than a piece of literature, and insist that it  must be studied as such, understood as such and improved as such.  From this position, they proceed with various literary methods to analyze biblical texts. They question authenticity, authorship, dates, contexts and motives of  biblical texts. They interpret these texts in terms of tradition,  stories, legends, myths, socio-historical contexts and experiences of specific human authors.

It is easy to identify higher critics in the intellectual world. All higher critics share one thing in common. They don’t have a genuine personal relationship of commitment with the Lord Jesus Christ. Some higher critics have a form of religion but they deny the practical power of faith in Christ Jesus.

Understand the issues raised by higher critics from the standpoint of their true motivation. They see a necessity to strip the Bible of its authority and overwhelming influence in personal and social morality. Their aim is to repackage and reinterpret biblical texts in materialistic and humanistic terms that are adaptable to any moral climate. This anti-Christian  motivation invalidates any claim of objectivity in most conclusions that higher critics reach about the Bible.

CULTURAL CRITICS
Lastly, there are  scholars who advocate perspectives that locate the Bible in specific cultures.  Practically this means that they interpret the Bible primarily on the authority of  the cultural background of peoples. This cultural approach is not in agreement with the true Christian understanding of the relationship between humanity and God. It transfers your allegiance from the Bible  to dominant cultures, thus making  a nonsense of the universality of the truth claims of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Don’t be fooled by the pretences of these cultural advocates.  Many of them don’t believe that Jesus Christ died for all humanity. They don’t believe that Jesus Christ really is the way, the truth and the life. Some of them don’t believe that you should communicate the gospel to others. They don’t persuade other people to repent from their false beliefs and turn to Jesus as the only Saviour of the  world.  Their culture-specific view of the Bible is part of their lack of personal and genuine commitment to the Lord.

Followers of Christ Jesus use  biblical standards to understand and evaluate beliefs, lifestyle and behaviour in all places and at all times. This means that the committed Christian assigns final authority to the Bible in all matters of faith and practical living. The Bible is the epistemic starting point for the true believer. It is also the ultimate validatory authority for all issues about morality, politics, economics and human behaviour in every culture of the world. The Christian assesses similarities and differences in world cultures by the extent to which they agree with or differ from foundational truths of the Bible. The Christian approves cultural values that the Bible approves and rejects cultural values that are condemned by the Bible.

INTELLECTUAL HYPOCRITES
Complicated forms of attacks on the Bible come from a group of intellectuals that are best described as  hypocrites. These include some famous personalities who may command respect as theologians,  authors,  teachers and pastors. They are characterized by intellectual sophistry and spiritual compromise. With carefully crafted language, they pretend to accept the authority of the Bible and its implications for practical living. In reality though, they don’t demonstrate any serious allegiance to the Bible. They hide behind intellectual analysis to advocate an understanding of the Bible that suits their anti-Biblical beliefs. These hypocrites use their strong influences to present a fragmented picture of truth, deny biblical  miracles and exaggerate the so-called discrepancies in books of the Bible.

We can expand on some of these sleights. First, they fragment the idea of truth in order to be accommodated in the prevailing non-Christian intellectual culture. They subtly introduce unnecessary tensions between truth from nature and truth of the Bible. Their favourite  line of argument is that the Bible deals with only spiritual truths while the rest of nature speaks a practical and preferred language for understanding reality.

Another way they fragment truth is to place exaggerated emphasis on the fact that the Bible is not a textbook. Of course there is a good sense in which the Bible cannot be handled exactly the same way as other textbooks in all your  courses. You won’t find mathematical formulae and scientific procedure in the Bible the way they are presented  in your textbooks. This  is quite obvious to everyone.  However, the Bible contains truth principles for every discipline of knowledge. Hypocrites don’t accept this. They would rather suggest to you that the truth of the Bible is different from the “truths” of various disciplines of knowledge. If you fall for this error of epistemic pluralism, you will find yourself easily accepting  several  other propositions that deny the lordship of Jesus Christ in various branches of learning.

Secondly, these hypocrites deny biblical miracles. If God is God, then what we see as the Bible is a showcase of His miraculous disclosure of Himself to us as human beings. Specific miracles in the Bible are an integral part of the package of this divine self-revelation. Hypocrites don’t see things this way. They deny God the prerogative to set aside the laws of nature anytime, anywhere and for any purposes of His choice. They wrongly assume that  a miracle must fit into our human rationality. Their approach is to judge the miraculous only  by the extent to which such events  agree with demonstrable laws of nature.

Lastly, intellectual hypocrites magnify alleged difficulties in Biblical texts. They approach passages of the Bible with the same naturalistic  assumptions used by higher critics. They totally discount the supernatural dimension and believe that their literary techniques and compromises can improve the texts of the Bible. These enemies of the gospel are quick to cite isolated cases of numerical inconsistencies, linguistic limitations and translation ambiguities as evidence against the supernatural authority of the Bible.

IMPLICATIONS FOR YOUR STUDIES
Contrary to the misconceptions raised by critics, the Bible is true and clear in its message to humanity. Christians approach its difficult passages  with the honest principle that what we don’t currently understand cannot contradict what we know clearly in the Bible. No difficult passage invalidates any fundamental truth claim of the Bible. There is no ambiguity in the Bible about creation, the fall in Adam, salvation in Christ Jesus and eternity. The Bile is clear about  how we can be reconciled to God and how we should live faithfully for the Lord in this world. The Christian approach is simple obedience and commitment to what God has revealed to us in this phase of eternity. We accept that the secrets of the Lord belong to Him, and that He reveals only what He sees necessary for us to know in order to please Him in this life.

Thorough knowledge of the Bible is a formidable strength that Satan can’t stand in a Christian student Invest your interest in knowing the Bible. With the explosion of technology, there is no excuse for not having the Bible in various media formats. Load it in your computer, walkman, iPod, MP3 or cellular phone. Enjoy reading, discovering and obeying the Bible as a Christian student. Learn to work out the implications of biblical principles for what and how you study in various courses.

See Part 1 of this article: The Bible in Your Intellectual Work.