I've been studying Catholicism in an effort to decide if I want to convert or not. In the course of my studies I was given a Catholic study Bible. It has an enormous reader's guide in the front, almost the half the size of the book. I've been working my way through it. Today I get to JEPD, and to Catholics, literary analysis is a perfectly acceptable approach to Scripture for students and theologians, and I find myself really angry.
I went to a fairly prominent if not terribly academic evangelical university. As part of everyone's course work we were required to take either introductory or advanced classes on the Old Testament, the New Testament and Theology. I was put in the advanced group, and my professor for Old Testament was the then president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He was the best Evangelicalism had to offer. Every day we came in after reading our assignments from Cragie's Old Testament, and we'd shred the higher critical approach. We'd be shocked and amazed that such people could in any way consider themselves people of faith. I did very well in the class. A pre-med student and I set the curve and we set it high.
Two years later I took Literary Criticism, and suddenly the tools and ideas we'd roundly condemned and censured as destructive to the faith were now to be embraced and put into practice with vigor. While no one else seemed to find a problem with subjecting Mrs. Dalloway to critiques we wouldn't even consider applying to Scripture problematic, I couldn't do it. The underlying tension between don't think at all here, think intensely there was too much, and I had to withdraw from the class. No one recognized it as a crisis of conscience. The closest they came was considering if the professor was teaching heresy.
Now here I am again facing ye olde JEPD problem and I don't know where to take it. I don't know how to feel, and I don't know who to ask to explain this one to me. What do you do with a thinking Evangelical?
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2 comments:
While contemplating JEDP, please consider the example of Rick Warren. He wrote two books. (Or so some fundamentalists would like to claim, but higher critical techniques shall disprove.) The vocabulary and the style of "The Purpose-Driven Church" differs to an almost unrecognizable degree from that of "The Purpose-Driven Life." No doubt, some post-captivity scribe redacted Mr. Warren's scribbled notes to assemble the second work.
You may not like Rick Warren's sort of industrialized / systematized formula for building a church, but his writing, when seen thru the lit crit lens, illustrates the point my profs at Cedarville made about JEDP
Thank you for confirming that there really does exist this bias against the critical approach to Scripture. I was worried that perhaps I was just not paying as close attention as I should have in my classes, but your comments bolstered my memory.
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