The pros and cons of biblical criticism

Under the auspices of modernity all knowledge is thought to be contained in truth claims that must be judged according to what we know of the world. For example, since miracles do not happen in our time it is unlikely that they happened in biblical time. The result is that faith becomes impossible because much of biblical narrative is simply cancelled.

It is interesting that Karl Barth felt that he had to write on angels, to the surprise of the demythologisers. He did this because angels play a large part in biblical narrative and could not be ignored. It was not enough to simply write them off because they did not coincide with what we know of the world. In talking on this task he was not trying to argue about the existence of heavenly beings but how humanity could be open to the transcendent, that which could not be encapsulated by our understanding of how the world is.

The logic of natural science dominates our understanding of what is true and what is not and is the reason that some commentators to these pages are indignant that theological statements are not so tested. In this they are thoroughly modern. But, as has been argued again and again in these pages, such a scheme means that we lose human “being” itself, which is another way of referring to the death of the soul.

This is why modernity is the enemy of faith, not because it exposes faith as irrational but because it cripples the imagination, that enemy of “clear and distinct ideas.” When the human mind is dominated by what is perceived as the factual we become enveloped in a great grey cloud that blocks out the light that our forefathers (and mothers) knew to be essential to life.