Theological Streams on the Status of the Bible

Koot van Wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Visiting Professor

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint Lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

20 March 2011

The Word of God is the Bible and the Bible is the Word of God. It is that simple. But not for everyone. What language is the Word of God? Is it only Hebrew and Greek? The answer is yes but it can also be translations that express a concept 100% the same as in Hebrew or Greek. Nothing less. Is it possible to translate Hebrew into English or German or Coptic or Latin or any other language 100% the same as the original? For 96% of the content of the Hebrew and Greek Bible that is possible but there are still loopholes regarding etymology [since scholars did not realize that because Moses was educated in the University of Egypt between 1510-1490 that he was highly schooled in Middle Egyptian and Accadian and could have been trilingual when composing the book of Job in the wilderness of Midian hiding from Thutmosis III his youngest rival in the palace]. But do we have the complete Bible, what about the variants between the ancient translations like Old Latin, Vulgate, Greek in all their forms, Origen, Acquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, Coptic, Syriac, Targums Aramaic, Armenian, Arabic, Ethiopic? Which quantity of content contain the "correct" full text of the Word of God?

The answer is again very simple. The Hebrew and Greek text of the New Testament is the very word of God and is 100% the Word of God. It is the norm for judging any translation and any incompleteness, incorrect translation, omission, addition will have to be judge from that angle. That is what Textual Analysis does which is the opposite approach of modern Textual Criticism [which is anormative and eclectic in methods]. See our method of approach to the Bible is not with a hermeneutics of suspicion as was done in the 18th century [2] period, but with a hermeneutics of affirmation which was done during the orthodoxy [1] period.

Modern Theologians are found to adhere to one of the four streams outlined in the diagram [1] Orthodoxy, [2] Modernism, [3] Neo-Orthodoxy and [4] Post-Modernism.

Orthodoxy

Faith and the Word of God as literally embodied in the text of the Hebrew and Greek was at play and meaningful for Orthodoxy. It was the view of God's remnant through the ages ever since Adam and Eve. It was the view of the Catholic Augustine, the Reformers Luther and Calvin. We will cite selectively from the citations in the article by Kenneth S. Kantzer, "The Authority of the Bible," in Readings in Christian Theology Vol. 1 The Living God (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1973, 8th print 1989), 153-175.

Says Augustine (393):

". . . these canonical writings . . . are free from error" in his letter to the older Jerome with whom he had a serious dispute over the condition of the correct translation of the Bible in Latin (see The Confessions and Letters of St. Augustine, 1886-1889: 350).

Says Luther (1520):

"Holy Scriptures cannot err" ("Vom Missbrauch der Messe" in Dr. Martin Luthers polemische deutsche Schriften, editor Johann Konrad Armischer [Erlangen: Carl Heyder, 1833], xxviii, page 35).

Says Calvin (1530):

"pure word of God," and the "infallible rule of His Holy truth" (Institutes of the Christian Religion III, 166; II, 402; Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews [1855]: xxi).

Modernism

The faith position of the men and women of God in the centuries before the 18th century of our era, were beacons for us to follow, lighthouses. Then came the sceptics operating with a hermeneutics of suspicion and no longer with a hermeneutics of affirmation. They found everything wrong in the Bible: disharmony, contradictions, miracles that are impossible, wonders that is too good to be true, and suddenly everything was myths, legends, stories, fables, non-historical, and unfit to be believed. Ludwig Feuerbach, Gottschalt Lessing. Paul Ricoeur said that the hermeneutics of suspicion was designed by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. In reality hermeneutics of suspicion binds together all the other wrong streams in [2], [3] and [4]. Karl Barth, for example, belongs to [3] Neo-Orthodoxy, but he said about Modernism [2] and Ludwig Feuerbach, "We . . . need be afraid of no Feuerbach" (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics Vol. IV, part 3 [1961]: 85).

Says Hendrick van Loon:

"The Old Testament was a national Jewish scrapbook. It contained stories and legends and genealogies and love poems and songs, classified and arranged and re-classified and rearranged without any regard for chronological order or literary perfection" (Van Loon, Story of the Bible [London: Vision Press, Ltd., 1952], 277).

Says Millar Burrows:

"The Bible is full of things which to an intelligent educated person of today are either quite incredible or at least highly questionable. . . The protracted struggle of theology to defend the inerrancy of the Bible against the findings of astronomy, geology, and biology has been a series of retreats ending in a defeat which has led all wise theologians to move to a better position" (An Outline of Biblical Theology [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1946], pp. 9, 44).

This negative view of the Word of God characterize Modernism. It is Rationalism at its best. By the early twentieth century, the views of Modernism has spread throughout the world and entered almost all seminaries.

Says Emil Brunner of the problem of Modernism:

"that what Modernism teaches, under the label of Christianity, a religion that has nothing in common with Christianity except a few words, and that those words cover concepts which are irreconcilable with the content of Christian faith" (The Theology of Crisis [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929], 9).

Karl Barth and Modernism

Karl Barth relates in his preface to the book of Romans, that in his early days he was standing in the pulpit with a brain full of Modernism and a message empty and just filled with his own ideas, opinions and thoughts. Then he began to think that the Protestant Refomers were better than himself.

Says Barth:

"Our grandfathers, after all, were right, when they struggled so desperately for the truth that there is revelation in the Bible and our fathers were right when the guarded warily against being drawn out upon the shaky scaffolding of religious self-expression" (The Word of God and the Word of Man [1935]: 44, 50). But going back to the Bible, Barth only went back to what he perceived as the "strange new world within the Bible". This return was not to Orthodoxy [1] but to what became known as Neo-Orthodoxy [3].

Neo-Orthodoxy

Neo-Orthodoxy is the role of conservative liberals who insist that the Bible should have a place but denied that it was without errors. Although this school criticize Modernism [2] or Liberalism or Rationalism, it still criticize also Orthodoxy [1] and wish to fuse the two into a [3] stream, known as Neo-Orthodoxy.

Says Emile Brunner:

"I myself am an adherent of a rather radical school of Biblical criticism which for example, does not accept the Gospel of John as an historical source and finds much to be objected to in many parts of the synoptic gospels . . . the theology of the apostles is not an absolute entity but is presented in a series of different types of doctrines which differ considerably from one another . . ." (The Theology of Crisis, page 41; Christian Doctrine of God [1949]: 12).

Says Karl Barth:

"Where the Bible is held up as a collection of authoritative documents and witnesses, the human element must be denied or overlooked. The human features of the Bible must then become a shame, and man is called upon for a sacrifice of the intellect" (Das Christliche Verständnis der Offenbarung [München: Chr. Kaiser, 1948], 29).

Says Karl Barth about biblical errors:

"The prophets and apostles even as such, even in their office, even in their function as witnesses, even in the action of writing down their testimonies were really historically, and therefore in their deeds, sinful, and in their spoken and written word capable of error and actually erring men like us all" (Kirchliche Dogmatik, I, page 587).

One cannot miss the fusion in Karl Barth's view of Orthodoxy and Modernism and that is what Neo-Orthodoxy came about to be.

1. that the Bible is not a science book and should not be used for comparison or for that purpose

2. that the Bible should not be always taken literally but free reign should be given to figurative meanings.

3. that the Bible which is a human product cannot be infallible.

4. that historical-criticism should still be used to analyse the Bible.

5. It is not content or doctrines that are important in the Bible but a Person, Jesus Christ.

6. The Bible content is like a modern day sermon, full of errors also.

As Kenneth Kantzer reacted against Neo-Orthodoxy, we can also say:

"A tough-minded, even literal, adherence to every least fact provided by the data of revelation is the only possible foundation for clear and effective thinking about God and man's relationship to God" (The Word for This Century [1960] op. cit. Erickson 1973, 1989: 161).

Barthians in the Dutch Calvinistic tradition are:

K. H. Miskotte; H. Berkhof; G. C. van Niftrik; G. C. Berkhouwer; H. J. Adriaanse; E. P. Meijering; H. M. Kuitert; A. van Beek; C. van der Kooi; L. J. van den Brom; O. Noordmans; A. A. van Ruler. Other ones are H. N. Ridderbos; H. Baarlink; and G. C. van Hertog.

Post-Modernism

Says Hans W. Frei:

". . .a good interpretation of a text is one that has 'breathing space' that is to say, one in which no hermeneutic finally allows you to resolve the text - there is something that is left to bother, something that is wrong, something that is not yet interpreted" ("Conflicts in interpretation: Resolution, Armistice, or Co-existence?" in Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays , ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993]: 162).

With post-modernism [4] has the case of faithful imagination (see Garrett Green, Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination: The Crisis of interpretation at the end of Modernity [Cambridge University Press, 2000]).

Green found that

". . . Nietzsche can be seen both as the culmination of the modern version and the originator of the postmodern successor [of post-modern hermeneutics]" (Green 2000: 187).