God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
In their studies, students at conservative colleges and seminaries are introduced to the methods and conclusions of critical biblical scholarship. These conclusions often produce a disconcerting challenge to the faith students came to explore. A few embrace the skeptical stance, resulting in a “secular” response. Many display a “traditional” response, rejecting biblical criticism as a threat to biblical authority and a faulty result of Enlightenment thinking. Between these two poles, is there a third way? Can evangelical students and scholars incorporate the insights of biblical criticism and at the same time maintain a high view of Scripture and a vital faith?
Kenton Sparks has wrestled with these questions as a student, pastor, and scholar. In God’s Word in Human Words, he argues that the insights from historical and biblical criticism can indeed be valuable to evangelicals and may even yield a new set of solutions to seemingly intractable problems in biblical studies while avoiding pat answers. This constructive response to biblical criticism takes seriously both the divine and the human aspects of the Bible and acknowledges the diversity that exists in the biblical texts. The discussion is substantive, thorough, and even controversial, as the author offers challenges to the evangelical status quo.
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- Considers the possibility that historical criticism might offer a relatively accurate portrait of Scripture
- Explores various epistemological and hermeneutical issues that are basic to the discussion of historical criticism
- Seeks to fashion a theologically and spiritually healthy response to modern biblical criticism
- Epistemology and Hermeneutics
- Historical Criticism and Assyriology
- The Problem of Biblical Criticism
- “Traditional” Responses to Biblical Criticism
- Constructive Responses to Biblical Criticism
- The Genres of Human Discourse
- The Genres of Divine Discourse
- The Context of the Whole and Biblical Interpretation
- Negotiating the Context of the Whole
- Biblical Criticism and Christian Theology
Charitable, well-argued, and clear. It is likely to define the debate about the Bible among evangelicals for the foreseeable future. No seminary professor and student can afford to neglect this book.
--Kevin T. Bauder, Religious Studies Review
This is a fine survey of the issues that historical criticism raises for an evangelical understanding of Scripture and a useful survey of options in approaching those issues.
--John Goldingay, David Allan Hubbard Professor of Old Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary
This important volume provides a bridge between critical scholarship and traditional views on Scripture. Sparks’s aim is to present a reasoned and sometimes impassioned insider look at evangelical approaches to biblical scholarship. In the process of surveying the flash points created by modern critical scholarship, he champions practical realism as an approach that provides a more productive middle ground between traditionalist views of authorship and dating of the text, which depend on harmonization or forced interpretations, and the antirealists of postmodern scholarship, who disregard historical context or the original audience. Both evangelicals and nonevangelicals will benefit from this very frank discussion of the history and possible future for biblical scholarship.
Victor H. Matthews, associate dean, College of Humanities and Public Affairs, Missouri State University
- Title: God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship
- Author: Kenton L. Sparks
- Publisher: Baker Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2008
- Pages: 416
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Resource ID: LLS:GDSWRDHMNWRDS
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2021-06-30T19:24:41Z
