The Idolatry of Biblical Criticism

It has often been stated that we project our desires onto the text. As is evident in the “carnivalesque” interpretations of Theodore Jennings and others, what we find is in large part dictated by what we look for. But what about, rather than conforming the Bible to our desires, conforming our desires to the Bible? This is of course a somewhat silly question in modern academia. But it is worth asking ourselves why that is. I believe that the Bible has been discounted as authoritative or normative in large part because higher biblical criticism and postmodernism have rendered the text’s plain sense untrustworthy in our eyes. But we continue to read and value it. So we must now make it trustworthy, by creating interpretations that we place (or in some cases, force) onto the text. And this is, essentially, the same as making ourselves trustworthy. But this of course means that it is no longer the Bible, but we who are responsible for the construction and propagation of moral and spiritual norms and/or truths. It is our interpretations of the text that become valid, meaningful, or normative, and so ultimately ourselves. We become our own Gods.

So by accepting the text as intrinsically untrustworthy, we come to a dilemma: either we continue to hold to a religion which we will call Christianity, but which is in reality self-worship, or we discard the Bible as anything other than a historical-cultural document, interesting as such but not spiritually significant. The problem with modern biblical criticism is this: we are dancing around an equivocation. Let us either be bold and discard the trappings of the community of faith which we continually attempt to redefine or undermine, or let us be courageous and hold to the trustworthiness and authority of the Bible, but most of all let us be honest, and not claim to be doing one when we are clearly doing the other.