Genesis and Evangelicals: Summary of Lecture at Messiah College
I realize I have not posted for a while. I’ve been busy watching the Yankees limp to the end of the season and their Stadium to non-existence. It’s been a rough summer.
I left off in the middle of a series of posts on responses to some general criticisms of I&I. I will continue that series very shortly, but first I wanted to make some brief comments on the topic of Genesis and Evangelicals.
On September 16, I spoke at Messiah College, invited by Professor Ted Davis, Distinguished Professor of the History of Science. Ted is also the vice president of the Central PA Forum for Religion and Science. The audience was made up of many members of this organization, plus faculty and students. All in all, I had a wonderful time and I was thankful for the opportunity to address this group.
Specifically, I was asked to address issues concerning Genesis from a biblical scholar’s point of view that scientists would benefit from. Now, at first, I was somewhat alarmed that I would be addressing a group like this on such a topic, since my work doesn’t come within a million parsecs of science. Like many people, I am very interested in scientific models of origins, what happened the first 10-43 seconds after the Big Bang, etc., etc. But I am not a scientist, I do not play one on TV, and I didn’t even stay at a Holiday Inn Express that night.
So, I took an approach that I think was found to be helpful and that I very much felt comfortable with. I lectured on three issues, all of which either developed or came to fruition during the nineteenth century, that significantly affected our understanding of Genesis. These three issues are summarized well by three names: Julius Wellhausen, George Smith, and Charles Darwin. The three names mentioned above represent three significant factors that come into play in the nineteenth century, all three of which have affected and continue to affect traditional views on Genesis.
I won’t recreate that lecture here (it was an hour long, I spoke only from sparse notes, not a manuscript; plus it was recorded), but it might be interesting for some of you if I give a synopsis of the major points.
First, Wellhausen’s influence is well known in the world of biblical scholarship, and even beyond. His genius was not so much innovative as it was synthetic: his Documentary Hypothesis was the culmination of over 100 years of activity where the question of the authorship of the Pentateuch was being investigated.
Wellhausen’s influence has been essentially two-fold. First, he crystallized source criticism in a form in which it is still largely found today, although not without some very important developments and qualifications. Regardless of these changes, it is not an exaggeration to say that Wellhausen has been the most influential OT scholar in the modern era. I have heard some quip that OT scholarship since Wellhausen has been a “footnote” on his work. This may be overstating a bit, but the point still holds, that both agreement and disagreement with Wellhausen require thorough interaction with, if not his own views, then at least with the views of the generations of scholars who came after him.
The issue here is not the strengths and weaknesses of Wellhausen’s synthesis, but simply a historical retrospective on his influence, and the trauma it caused. He is best known for dividing the Pentateuch into four sources, known by the letters JEDP (in that order), but his work is far more important than just a literary exercise. His real contribution (getting to the second point) is that his literary hypothesis led him to formulate an historical hypothesis, namely, that the law was a post-exilic rather than a pre-monarchic phenomenon.
This last view has been seriously nuanced in subsequent scholarship, but a general insight has maintained its influence. The Pentateuch is a post-exilic phenomenon—not that it was written from scratch then, but that the Pentateuch we have reflects significantly the times in which it was compiled. This is now a fairly common position among Evangelical scholars, not because of a softening of resolve, but because this model helps explain numerous elements of the Pentateuch that remain unexplained in older models.
The lesson, then, for Evangelicals is simply the recognition that within the Pentateuch, we see not a document written more or less at one time and place, but a document that reflects a history of transmission and reception. The Bible reflects development over time. This is no longer as controversial as it once was, but the paradigm shift is one that should not be lightly glanced over.
George Smith represents another nineteenth century issue: biblical archaeology. He is known for his work in translating what came to be known to us as Enuma Elish, the famous Mesopotamian creation story that immediately drew the attention of biblical scholars for its similarities to Genesis. Rarely do scholars talk today about the Bible’s dependence on this ancient text, but that is hardly the point. The conceptual overlap between them (without minimizing the clear differences) indicates that Genesis 1 fits very well in the ancient context of creation stories, which are often times referred to today as “myth.”
This is an electric term for many, and is unfortunately routinely misunderstood, but the term itself is not important. The larger issue that biblical archaeology raises is the importance of understanding something of ancient literary genres for how we handle Scripture, which is itself an ancient document.
This was a challenge very different from that represented by Wellhausen. His theory was driven by an analysis of internal evidence, i.e., a creative handling of the biblical data in an attempt to account for why the Pentateuch looks the way it does. It met with strong resistance and left itself open to equally creative counter-arguments (even though these counter-arguments essentially failed to account for the diverse data that led to Wellhausen’s theory in the first place).
But what Smith represented was very different. He dealt with outside evidence to which the Bible was inevitably compared, thus stimulating a “comparative religions” approach to studying Israel’s history. This was evidence that was not so easy to neutralize. Of course, the evidence needed to be interpreted and models needed to be debated that did the best job of explaining the evidence. But what is curious is that conservative scholars had little constructive to say about this evidence. Mainstream scholarship was quite willing to discuss how this new evidence affected older paradigms, and so you have, for example, the “pan-Babylonianism” of the nineteenth century, where Mesopotamian culture was (mistakenly) claimed to be the potential explanation for much of the Bible. This was a proactive model. Conservatism was more often than not reactionary.
So, both Wellhausen and Smith presented significant challenges to traditional views of Genesis. As if that were not enough, Darwin added yet another level of difficulty: a scientific paradigm of human origins that could not be squared with the story in Genesis. Of course, this is the well-known development of the evolutionary hypothesis, which first made its way to the public sphere with the Scopes trail and has received recent attention in the Intelligent Design debate.
I am well above my pay grade when I begin discussing this issue. (For a wonderful and constructive online resource, see science.drvinson.net). My point here is simply to state what is certainly obvious to everyone, that scientific inquiry into origins of the world, of humanity, and the flood, put the biblical stories in Genesis 1-11 into a conversation that many people find it difficult to have.
In brief, with the three factors mentioned, challenges to Genesis have come from within Genesis itself (Wellhausen), from the world in which the Israelites lived (Smith), and from scientific models concerning the origin of the universe, our earth, and the human species that do not square with biblical models (Darwin).
After discussing these three factors, I came to what was the heart of the lecture, at least as far as I am concerned. Evangelicals would benefit immensely by Evangelical scholars sitting down and discussing these issues with a deliberateness and intentionality that, in my view, has been missing. Too often fear reigns, or a desperate clinging to the safe and familiar haven of tradition.
There are no doubt wonderful and gifted Evangelical scholars working in all three areas, but we have yet to move beyond the uneasy relationship between Christian faith and serious modern developments in human thought. What is needed is a synthesis of Christian faith and developments in human thought that draws out the implications of the latter upon the former, and make overtures as to what adjustments need to be made. Another way of putting it is to articulate what we really have a right to expect from Scripture. This is a complex but needed area of discussion.
Well, that’s the heart of it. The actual lecture was peppered with some concrete examples and recycled jokes. (My former students who came to listen sat in embarrassed, stunned silence.) The visit to Messiah was topped off by a chance to speak on Genesis to the class “Issues in Science and Religion” team taught by several of the science faculty, including Ted Davis. I was honored to be asked to speak and I had a wonderful time.
