The Problem with Reading Scripture as Protestants

Below is a brief article by a Protestant that I found very interesting and thought provoking.  I'd love to read your reactions to this article.

The Challenge of Reading the Bible Today: 

Can the Bible be read both Critically and Religiously? 

Jewish, Catholic and Protestant Perspectives 

University of Pennsylvania, October 25, 2010 

“Can the Bible be read religiously and critically?” That is the question, and I get to talk 

about the Protestant perspective. Which is tough, because Protestantism is as big as the 

sky in Montana. You have everything from American young earth creationists to 

German liberal Lutherans to Chinese Pentecostals to Korean hyper-Calvinists. There is 

certainly no one “Protestant perspective” on anything, let alone the Bible and higher 

criticism. 

But for our purposes, I can think of three general groups of Protestants. The first two are 

not relevant. On one end of the spectrum are Fundamentalists. They are not asking the 

question we are asking today, because they essentially reject higher criticism as an 

enemy to the faith. Then there are Protestants at the other end of the spectrum entirely. 

They also are not asking the question we are asking, but for the opposite reason. They 

don’t expect as much from the Bible to inform their faith, so there is little pressure, if 

any, to ask how a religious reading of scripture can co-exist with higher criticism.

The Protestants I have in mind today make up a very large and a diverse middle group. 

This group feels the tension; they get it. They are committed to “taking the Bible 

seriously” but they also sense that the modern study of the Bible is a real challenge that 

has to be dealt with one way or another. That recognition may be on a very 

sophisticated, learned level, or it may be more occasional: someone watches a History 

Channel special on the Bible or takes a course at Penn, and what they hear makes a lot 

of sense, but it is VERY different from what they are used to hearing. And so the 

familiar struggle begins between a Bible they once knew and the Bible they are now 

getting to know. 

So, for these Protestants, can they read the Bible religiously and critically? Yes, and in 

fact it must...but...they may have to be willing to make some adjustments, give up 

some things that don’t work very well. That is a very hard thing to do. 

If your faith is rooted in a sacred book, which is a fundamental Protestant conviction—a 

book where God speaks to you—then higher criticism is bound to create some trouble. 

Higher criticism says in effect: “Yes, I know you and your tradition have always 

thought ‘X’ about the Bible but now we know better—it’s really ‘not X’ or ‘Y.’” Genesis—is 

not history but myth; Abraham—is not a man but a legend; Moses—if he even lived, did 

not write the Pentateuch; Exodus and conquest narratives—at best distorted histories, if 

not simply fabrications, same with the Gospels and Acts—and on and on. 

This is the tension of higher criticism, it is felt acutely in Protestantism, and here’s why 

—this is where we get to the distinctly Protestant problem of religious faith and higher 

criticism: in Protestantism the Bible is pressed into the role of supreme religious authority. Of 

the three perspectives represented here, Protestantism in particular needs a very 

different kind of Bible than the one higher criticism delivers. That is a problem because 

Protestants like being Protestants and higher criticism, well, it’s not going anywhere 

either. 

My comments today are going to be largely diagnostic. I want to focus on the reasons 

why Protestants have the particular problem they do with higher criticism, and then 

offer some brief suggestions about how to move beyond the impasse. I attribute the 

Protestant dis-ease to three factors: (1) the Reformation concept of sola Scriptura, (2) 

Protestant identity coming out of the 19th century, and (3) the very nature of the 

Christian Bible. 

Sola Scriptura 

The reason Protestant faith and higher criticism are in such conflict today is actually 

built into the very nature of Protestantism. The clarion call of the Reformers was “sola 

Scriptura,” meaning scripture and scripture alone is God’s word, the church’s final 

authority on all matters pertaining to faith and life. For many, this phrase is the very 

heart of Protestantism. 

Higher criticism messes with that. Protestants locate authority in a book. To function 

authoritatively, it has to be clear and consistent—higher criticism introduces ambiguity and 

diversity in the Bible. It has to be somehow truthful, trustworthy, functionally without at 

least major blunders—higher criticism points out errors and contradictions. It is hard for 

the Bible to function as a final authority if it’s got so many problems. Higher criticism 

calls into question the core Protestant conviction of sola Scriptura. 

One of the great ironies of sola Scriptura is that it helped produce disunity among 

Christians rather than the unity of all gathered around this authoritative word. Sola 

Scriptura tried to solve one problem and created another. Once you say “we will only 

listen to what God says in the Bible,” you are bound to pay close attention to what the 

Bible says—for yourself. Luther even translated the Bible into German to make sure 

more people could do just that. But when you read the Bible, as any decently trained 

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seminarian can tell you, you start seeing the ambiguities and tensions. You begin to see 

that it’s not all that easy to understand what the Bible is authoritatively saying. 

But if the Bible is your final authority, it is vital, central, that you get it right. That’s one 

reason why the Reformation quickly splintered over formerly settled issues like infant 

baptism or the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Lo and behold, the authoritative 

word of God is not clear. And so you had Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and 

others, all claiming to provide that clarity, to get it right. That is why Protestants 

continue to form new churches and denominations, this is why they establish insulated 

Bible colleges, vigilant seminaries, and, more than once in history, why they kill or 

mistreat those they disagree with. This is God’s book. He is speaking to you through it. 

A lot—everything—is at stake in how you handle this authoritative text. 

Sola Scriptura might have been a good idea at the time, but it is hard to implement, as 

the history of Protestantism has shown. Nevertheless, the Bible as sole and supreme 

authority continues to be a deep impulse of Protestant ideology. Higher-criticism, which 

introduces novel readings and extra-biblical information, is seen to undermine that 

authority. And so it remains a common foe or at least a very distant and awkward 

conversation partner. 

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Protestant Identity in the 19th Century 

The 19th century as a whole gave sola Scriptura Protestants fits. Picture the scene. First 

you had the enthronement of an older 17th-18th century European higher criticism, now 

making its way to America, challenging all sorts of traditional beliefs about the Bible. 

That was bad enough. But during that century you also had the rise of biblical 

archaeology. Among the more alarming finds was Mesopotamian creation and flood 

stories that were clearly mythic but that also looked uncomfortably similar to the stories 

in Genesis. These two factors did a good job of undermining the Bible as a source of 

history. 

Let that sink in. Traditional notions of the Bible were turned upside down. The law of 

Moses was written not at the beginning of Israel’s history as Israel’s national 

foundation, but 1000 years later as an afterthought. If that is right, that pretty much 

screws up the entire history of Israel that the authoritative Bible presents. Then 

archaeology showed that the Bible looks like pagan literature. Genesis is a story, myth, 

just like the origins stories of the much older Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, 

Egyptians, and Canaanites. 

If your faith rests on a Bible where God speaks, these were crushing blows that created 

great angst. And if that weren’t enough on everyone’s plate, you have science: geology 

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showing that the earth is far older than Genesis allows—so, again, the Bible is wrong. 

And then of course you have Darwin bird watching in the Galapagos Islands and 

decides we all came from monkeys. The truthfulness and accuracy of the Bible was 

disintegrating before their eyes. 

We can’t overstate how traumatic all this was. What do biblical authority and sola 

Scriptura even mean? People were frightened. The dominoes were unraveling down the 

slippery slope. Where was all this heading? Can we trust the Bible?—which is the same as 

asking Can we trust God? 

If we want to understand the uneasy relationship between Protestant faith and higher 

criticism today, we need to understand what was set in motion in the 19th century. For 

many, these older higher critical conflicts are not over—they are actually perpetuated. A 

large measure of current Protestant religious identity was forged during that moment. 

Many Protestants today are the ecclesiastical children of these conflicts that have been 

faithfully handed down—the conflict is part of their DNA, their culture, their source of 

identity, their narrative. 

To ask them “how can we read the Bible religiously and critically” is to ask them to 

rewrite that narrative. And rewriting one’s narrative is always a threat, especially if that 

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narrative includes very clear ideas about matters of ultimate significance, such as: the 

nature of universe and your place in it, God, eternal life, etc., etc. If you want conflict, 

challenge a group’s totalizing narrative. The Protestant tensions with higher criticism 

are as much about social-location issue as anything. 

It is a common refrain: “If we allow that, if we go down that road, we are denying our 

past and therefore cease being who we are.” To dialogue with higher criticism means 

being a traitor, defecting to the enemy, and the social pressures are enormous. Their 

very existence is a response to higher criticism, not a partnership. Continuing the conflict 

is a badge of honor for some, a sign of fidelity to the tradition—and therefore to God 

himself.  

Until a new social narrative is written—which is happening and which is why there is 

some volatility in these circles—conflict will continue. 

The Nature of the Christian Bible 

There is a third point I’d like to raise briefly that is even more fundamental than the 

previous two. It has to with the nature of the Christian Bible itself. 

A few years back, one of my doctoral professors, the noted Jewish biblical scholar Jon 

Levenson, wrote an article on Judaism and biblical theology. In it he commented on the 

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overarching difference between how Jews and Christians view the Bible. It struck a 

chord with me that still resounds. He said, “For Jews, the Bible is a problem to be 

solved; for Christians it is a message to be proclaimed.” This is an important distinction 

that helps explain why Protestants have an uneasy relationship with higher criticism. 

Not to oversimplify, but the history of Jewish interpretation of the Bible is notoriously 

comfortable with problems in the Bible. The Jewish Bible is not flat but complex, 

containing many peaks and valleys, gaps and gashes. Jewish interpretation understands 

this and works with it. That is because connecting with God through scripture is a 

journey, a conversation, an argument, a struggle. Hence, higher criticism—although still 

a challenge—is less of a problem, at least insofar as it , too, points out the peaks and 

valleys, gaps and gashes of the Bible. 

For Protestants—and I should broaden this to all Christians—the Bible is not there to set 

us on an exegetical adventure where we discover God in the problems. It is there to 

proclaim what God has done in Christ. The Bible is a grand narrative that as a whole tells 

ultimately ONE story with a climax: the crucified and risen Son of God. The NT authors 

model this on virtually every page: they go to great lengths to explain how Jesus of 

Nazareth completes Israel’s story and gives it coherence. Taken as a whole, the Christian 

Bible has a point—a message to be proclaimed.

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If the Bible is a message to be proclaimed, one can see why higher criticism would be an 

issue. Higher criticism does not unify the Bible but breaks it down into its various and 

conflicting messages. This impulse impedes Christian proclamation, and so accounts at 

least for part of the problem. 

Way Forward 

Some brief thoughts. If I were elected the Protestant President, here is what I would say. 

This middle group of Protestants—shaped by sola Scriptura and deep sociological 

factors—must try to create a culture where critical self-reflection is valued rather than 

being a threat. They must take steps to come to peace with the Bible as it is, not as it has 

been for their tradition. 

There are higher critical insights that disturb familiar theological categories. Perhaps it 

is time to revisit those categories instead of defending them. Protecting boundaries— 

although always tempting—may not be the best way to preserve faith. There is actually 

more at stake by not thinking synthetically and creatively about some longstanding 

higher critical issues (top on the list: Hebrew Bible and history and the NT and 

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midrash). Stubbornly defending tradition ironically damages that tradition and those in 

it. Willingness to change and adapt is actually necessary to preserve any identity. 

Such re-examination will likely mean looking outside of the Protestant story to see what 

wisdom can be modeled by how other faith traditions handle higher criticism. For 

example, picking up on Levenson’s quote, what if Protestants would learn to be 

comfortable with a more dialogical approach to engaging the Bible rather than “getting 

it right”—where God is encountered in the conversation of reading rather than treating 

the Bible as a sourcebook of infallible information. 

When Protestants sing hymns in church about the Bible, it is indicative of the problem. 

The Bible is not the center of the Christian faith: God is. And there is more to knowing 

and encountering this God than carefully reading a book, even an inspired one. 

I think there is much Protestants can learn from some contemplative traditions that 

have been part of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. Needing to get 

the Bible right, and fretting over whether one is getting it right, and what God thinks of 

us should we get it wrong, stem from spiritual and emotional dysfunction, not health; 

from a false and wounded self, not mature piety. Spiritual masters, not only of 

Christianity but of other faiths, are quick to remind us that living in your head and 

controlling others and God through a text hinder communion with God and spiritual 

growth. It is a great Protestant irony that one’s devotion to scripture can wind up being 

a spiritual barrier. 

The way forward may be a willingness on the part of Protestants to evaluate how well 

things are working and to make changes where necessary. Some might say that such a 

program would compromise the very Protestant spirit. I disagree. I think it calls upon 

the true spirit of the Reformation, but now turned inward, not simply on the enemy 

lurking outside of the walls. Critical self-evaluation is the first step to answering the 

question before us in the affirmative. The Protestant predicament, however, is that it 

may also be the hardest step to take. Where all this is headed is beyond me but will 

certainly be interesting to watch unfold.