I. Introduction

Let me begin by thanking you for the invitation to speak here this afternoon. I thank you in particular because I feel at home here. The Reformed Fellowship represents a very significant organization in the life of the Christian Reformed Church. It represents, I believe, this church’s tradition, this church’s majority membership, and this church’s orthodox wing; and so it represents what I have wished to be identified with since my earliest years as a young student when I was a member of the Grandville Ave. Christian Reformed Church of this city. There I was raised on the solid food of Dr. Ymen Peter DeJong and somewhat later and. somewhat more intensively on the Reformed preaching of my good friend, the Rev. John Piersma. I should not fail to mention that with these brethren I am a Frisian, and that resistance to the growing process of erosion in the CRC permeates my being like blood flows through my body. I remember that it was different once, and I dare say better, and there is no way that I am able to shake that impression.

Today the CRC has a strong institution and organization at the top. Because that top has been taken possession of by what I shall today call the Mind of Common Grace (Dr. Henry Stab gave it the self-congratulatory designation of “the Positive Mind”). The CRC is being severed from its moorings and increasingly accommodated to the dominant mind of the mainline Protestant denominations in the US and of the World Council of Churches. This fact is evident in many areas of the church’s life, and so it is also evident in the church’s use and abuse of the Bible.

I shall deal briefly this afternoon with two major matters. First, on the basis of my recent book, Interpreting the Bible in Theology and the Church, I wish to address how I think the Bible ought to be read (how it most often has been and is being read in the life of the believing community). Second, I wish to comment on how Scripture is increasingly being read historically critically by leaders of the church, though without any malice aforethought. I shall conclude my remarks by asking why this shift has taken place in the CRC.

II. How to Read the Bible

First, then, something about the major, positive thesis of my book: Let me throw out three terms to describe how the Bible ought to be read. These three terms are “Naively,” “Canonically,” and “Literally.”

1. Naively

The first term is “naively.” I believe that the Bible belongs to the church, to the body of Christ in the world, wherever and however represented. The Bible was never meant to be analyzed as an object of scientific inquiry; that is, to get at its meaning, expert processes are not necessary. This is so because the bible is a story, a rather simple story at that. Moreover, it is a story realistically told from beginning to end. There is something genuinely old-fashioned about it, for unlike most of the things we read today, including novels, the Bible’s narrative is straightforward and painstaking. It does not exploit sex, violence, power, money, intrigue, or any of the other subjects that we moderns consider de rigueur, strictly required to be sophisticated. The Bible treats its subject matter in a matter-of-fact way as the natural occurrences that constitute it. Its characters are ordinary people, real acquaintances, easily identifiable as historical personages.

Similarly, the story line of the Bible is a story line of events in ordinary history. The events recorded are simply presented as those that, when taken together, constitute the true meaning of human life as a whole. The Bible’s story is like the story a novel tells, or that a narrative relates. One might say that the Bible’s message is a historicized fiction or a fictionalized history, except that the word “fiction” leaves the impression of untruth. In the case of Scripture we would add that the Bible’s narrative is the true story about God and His relationship to man from the beginning of history to its end. By that story of the real meaning of the whole we are to live, plot our lives, and understand the significance of everything else that transpires. Man was made to live by story and this is the one that tells it the way it is. Hence, people ought to read it directly as such.

2. Canonically

Second, the Bible is meant to be read “canonically.” What is the canon? The canon is the revelation of the Word ofGod in the Bible construed as a whole by the believing community. The Bible must hence be read first and foremost for the whole message it narrates; the Bible not only contains books and various parts but is itself a book. It must be read accordingly.

Furthermore, the church reads the Bible’s parts as harmonious, from the vantage point of the whole, and always primarily in relation to one another. Scripture sheds light on itself and is thus best read when read in connection with itself. Scripture interprets Scripture; Scripture is perspicacious; no framework or ou tside knowledge need be brought to bear on the Bible to unlock its sense. Scripture is sufficient unto itself and is therefore best read internally and on its own terms.

In addition, canonical reading is the reading that seeks to take full advantage of the fact that the Bible comes to us from God, its single Author. Naturally God used means, human means, earthly means. to execute His authorship; God works no other way in the world than in congenial harmony with, in and through His creatures. We should let this confession affect our hermeneutical theory beyond letting it stand as a pious introductory acknowledgment. And letting it so function lead s us to say that the overall canonical sense of Scripture’s story is the primary level of its meaning. not what the Bible’s individual human authors meant by what they wrote in the situation of the text’s origin. The canonical sense takes precedence over the historical, sometimes even going so far as to upset it rather brutally. The canonical sense, the sense intended by the Bible’s single author, God, takes precedence over the subordinate historical level of meaning. Only in this way, moreover, can the church’s response to Scripture be considered normative even for the scientific study of the Bible that takes place in the Christian community.

   

3. Literally

Thirdly. and finally, the Bible must be interpreted “literally.” In other words, the Bible must be interpreted for what it says the way it says it; the Bible must be interpreted for the message it intends to convey, the best w ay of getting at which is the very form in which the text says it. Every identifiable block of Scripture is given to say something; what it is given to message is its literal sense. So parables, for example. have a literal sense, without their characters being real persons and their circumstances actual historical situations. When the latter is thought to be the case, I would say that the parable is being misinterpreted literalistically. Written texts have an immediate value or sense on the face of them. Novels do, even though we often know next to nothing about their authors or situations of origin. In the case of Scripture, that sense is the text’s present sense, the sense as it applies to us in our own situation. In the case of Scripture that sense is the sense as intended by the only One of Scripture’s Authors who is present and alive today, guaranteeing the normativity of the present logical sense of what is said in the way in which it is said. To make the historical sense, some hidden genesis of meaning, the essential sense is, functionally, to discard and take no advantage of the confession that God is the Author of Scripture. It is to turn that confession into a pious platitude, good for one’s Board of Trustees to hear, but having no real pay-off for one’s interpretation of the Bible.

It is with these thoughts in mind, among others, that I would make the claim that to be read as it ought, Scripture must be read naively, canonically. and literally.

Ill. The Bible and Higher Criticism in the CRC Today

I turn now to the phenomenon of increased sympathy for an historical critical reading of Scripture in the CRC. First, I shall illustrate that this is happening, and. second, I shall try to say something about why we can expect more of the same in the future in the CRC.

First, then, about the fact of increased use of higher criticism in the CRC, without any malice aforethought on the part of its practitioners, I refer you, by way of illustration, to the first minority report on “headship” of the Synod of 1984. Let me emphasize that I do not speak against the authors as persons, but rather critically against the method itself and its bad consequences.

An interesting general mode of argumentation is present in this report. Where previously it was thought in the Reformed tradition that the church should confess or do that for which there can be found only compelling biblical grounds. This report recommends opening all of the ecclesiastical offices to women on the ground that the traditional Scripture used to close the offices to women need not be taken the way in which it has been in the past. There seems to be not only an untroubled acceptance of the claim that Scripture is unclear, but an attempt to take advantage of this as well. We are told that there is no compelling biblical argument against opening the offices, the assumption being that we must decide this matter and others like it on another than biblical basis. Throughout the report we are left with the impression that the matter of who is eligible for officeholding in the church is of the kind about which the Bible could not possibly give us a clinching conviction. The reason for this absence of compelling biblical grounds is the fact that multiple readings of the crucial texts are possible on the basis of the meaning of these passages in their historical context.

A specific example from the report itself will illustrate this procedure, as well as lead us on to make an additional point. The authors’ handling of I Tim. 2:11–15 is of special interest. Commenting on the words “Let a women learn in silence in all submissiveness,” and “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over man; she is to keep silent,” the authors query whether this is really a “permanent prohibition.” Calling attention to the Diana cult in the background, the authors conclude that since these words have a specific historical sense in the Ephesian and other churches, the traditional understanding “need not be the only way to hear these words.” Historical information about the Diana cult is needed clearly to see the meaning, to see that Paul was reacting to myths circulating at the time, often being propagated by women in the congregation. Thus the report argues that the meaning is not immediately clear to later readers; and, once it has become clear, it can be seen that Paul’s words pertained to “that situation and time.” Moreover, since we now know the historical sense, the prohibition saying, “I permit no women to teach’” can be read to mean “I am not now permitting them to teach.” By means of an historical analysis, a passage can thus be made to mean nearly the exact opposite of what it says.

Besides taking for granted that the historical sense is the essential, determinative one against which all others must be checked, the authors also reflect another dubious historical critical prejudice in their work, one which they, by the way, do not in turn subject to historical criticism. The fact that an utterance had a specific historical meaning in its situation of origin does not mean that it does not have that meaning now, in the present situation of the reader. Yet that is often, functionally, what establishing a passage’s historical sense comes down to in the mind of the historical critical interpreter. “That’s what it meant then, but now . . . etc., etc.”

However, just because I learned historically, that is, from my parents (they told me so, among the other historical circumstances that influenced me) that murder is wrong, does not mean that the prohibition against it is merely their opinion rather than a divine mandate or a permanent prohibition. General truth, God’s truth, never becomes known except in and through some specific historical form. A change in historical circumstances between our times and Paul’s does not make the prohibition inapplicable. It merely means that the manner of applying it may differ.

IV. Higher Criticism and the Mind of Common Grace in the CRC Today

Why this uncritical use of so-called historical critical methods and assumptions? I fear that, in the area of biblical studies in the CRC tradition, this is the outgrowth of what I earlier called the Mind of Common Grace. The Mind of Common Grace sensitizes people only to the so-called moments of truth in contemporary academic and cultural developments. The first question that occurs to representatives of this mind is what “good things” modern historical criticism has brought to light. As immigrants, we continue to crave acceptance by and participation in the mainline culture that surrounds us. We need to look for possibilities of cooperation and adaptation. So the Mind of Common Grace causes the practitioners of higher criticism to become desensitized to the exact spiritual and religious meaning of historical criticism in the situation of its origin in western intellectual history. The Mind of Common Grace causes us to lose sight of the dynamic, historical element in the events that happen around us. We thus acquire an abstract view of the world and of what is happening in it, in ironic contrast to the very historical methods we have now come to advocate.

A prime example of this is present in Dr. Harry Boer’s little book entitled Above the Battle? The Bible and Its Critics. How does Boer evaluate the phenomenon of historical criticism? Ironically, purely structurally and purely a-historically, like a veteran scholastic. He advocates it not by testing its actual spirit and direction and the actual havoc it has produced in the modern centuries but by giving us, of all things, a dictionary definition of it. To Boer historical criticism is merely a formal discipline, a certain tool or method that it would naturally be obscurantist to reject. To Boer, criticism’s essence is “the spirit of rational, scientific analysis uninfluenced, in so far as that is humanly possible, by dogmatic presuppositions” (p. 18). Or, again, in Boer’s own words: “The discipline as a technical academic activity is neutral” (p. 50).

The Mind of Common Grace, of accommodation to the existing culture in the academy, out of the desperate immigrant desire to be accepted, obscures the concrete, dynamic element in the actual phenomenon of higher criticism in the modern period. The Mind of Common Grace blurs the element of conflict with and antithesis in modern scholarship. In this way it is left with so-called “good points” or “moments of truth” that it now lets stand for the whole and the real meaning of the phenomenon in question. How convenient for persons who are eager to flee their narrow Dutch past to embrace the academically prestigious in mainstream ecclesiastical culture!

Will we see more of this kind of legitimation and explicit use of criticism in the future? There is, I believe, no way to prevent it, since the Mind of Common Grace has become the dominant mind of the CRC’s leadership. Though the Mind of the Antithesis won a battle over higher criticism in the CRC in 1922, it lost the war in 1924, at least in the higher educational institutions of the CRC. Such massive trends are hard to reverse, especially now that the CRC has become a strong organization at the top. Every effort to counter the erosion will be foiled by the deadliest means available to the establishment, namely institutional procedures, which are both more locked-up than they used to be and much more complex than before. To challenge the dominant Mind of Common Grace, we will need to think in terms of alternative institutions, and that, I believe, will be the trend of the future in a church whose organizational structure is becoming increasingly separated from and alien to the people it is supposed to serve and represent.

Henry Vander Goot is a professor of Religion and Theology at Colvin College. This address was presented at the afternoon session of the Reformed Fellowship’s annual meeting at Kelloggsville CRC, Grand Rapids. on October 10, 1985.