Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America

Prior to publishing his general survey on the history of christianity in the United States and Canada, Mark Noll established himself as a reputable scholar by publishing some thoughtful monographs. In 1986 he published Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers), "a historical essay on evangelical interaction with critical Bible scholarship in America over roughly the last century" (p. 1). As Kent Harold Richards notes, in his introduction to this volume, "Although the Bible emerged from a world distant in time and ethos, it has no rival as a founding document that shapes life in North America" (p. xii). It has fueled our cultural and political, as well as religious, life as a people. So how we understand the Scripture and its inspiration has truly infinite ramifications. Throughout most of Church history, Christians generally took the Bible as God's Word, fully inspired, historically accurate, clearly understandable in plain propositional language. Early in the 19th century, however, especially in German universities under Hegel's historicizing influence, the Bible came under critical scrutiny and attack. Scholarly battles in Europe, however, hardly intruded into the American churches until well after the Civil War. Thereafter, a few American academicians, often trained in German universities, secured positions in prestigious schools (such as New York's Union Seminary, or Cincinnati's Lane Theological Seminary), and began espousing such notions as the multiple authorship of the Pentateuch and the post-apostolic composition of many New Testament documents. Such critical positions, however, elicited sturdy resistance from some of the finest biblical scholars in this country, several of whom were quartered in the halls of Princeton Theological Seminary. As Charles Hodge and Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield announced: "'The historical faith of the Church has always been, that all the affirmations of Scripture of all kinds, whether of spiritual doctrine or duty, or of physical or historical fact, or of psychological or philosophical principle, are without any error when the ipsissima verba of the original autographs are ascertained and interpreted in their natural and intended sense'" (p. 19). In Noll's judgment, conservatives such as Hodge and Warfield possessed what too many of their successors have lacked: scholarly depth and credibility. Certainly they brought to their task firm presuppositions, as do all scholars. But they considered themselves "critical" scholars, open to new evidence, willing to change their minds, able to listen to the European critics' arguments. Thus, in doing battle for the Word, they took to the field adequately prepared and capably armed, accounting themselves worthy knights of the faith, successfully "maintaining the positions articulated in this exchange, and in maintaining them with academic rigor" (p. 27).