I can lay no claim to being a Biblical scholar.
I am, primarily, a follower of Jesus Christ and a practitioner of Christian spirituality and faith, and not an academic. I have a passionate love affair with The Holy Bible, the sacred text(s), of my tradition.
I have a Masters Theology degree from a mainline seminary and a Religious Studies Bachelors degree – which, bound together, root much of my learning and formation toward scripture around the ‘modernist’ approaches of so called textual criticism (which is concerned with the identification of textual variants) and historical criticism (which is concerned with the origins and contexts of ancient texts). These ‘critical’ approaches have been the centre and norm in most established seminaries since the mid-to-late 19th century.
Source, Form, Redaction, Textual, Genre, Authorship, Contextual.
These words were invoked in every single class I took on the Hebrew (‘Old Testament’) or Christian (‘New Testament’) scriptures, as well as in the Religious Studies courses I took on the history of the sacred and ancient Jewish and Christian texts; canonized and deuterocanonical, both. I will concede that historical and textual criticisms have enriched my understanding of the texts.
Even so, I’ve become increasingly aware that, like the liberal theological project as a whole, much of the 19th and 20th century emphasis on textual and historical criticisms in theological education and formation is coming to an abrupt and, I would suggest, necessary conclusion.
With this, I’m grateful for the words of the Hebrew Bible scholar Kathleen O’Connor who, reflecting at her retirement on her own pedagogy, noted this:
[My] students did not care about many things I learned in graduate school, about origins of biblical texts, history of composition, oral traditions, questions of authorship, or JEPD. Much of my graduate school material seemed abstract, abstruse, and ivory-towerish. What they wanted, what they searched for, was meaning, life, hope for their communities.[1] [emphasis mine]
Though O’Connor is referring to her students, I’m certain that the ambivalence toward the 19th and 20th century textual and historical critical project is even greater in the pews.
It’s almost as if we religious ‘experts’ are trying to spend all our time answering questions that few are really asking. It’s not that questions are bad or wrong, it’s just that they don’t really matter to the daily lives of most people.
Those 19th and 20th century literalisms (as O’Connor calls them, below) make little sense in an age of polycrisis[2]; that is, at a time of ecological collapse, epidemics of addictions and isolation, the advent of AI, the ecclesial shipwreck, the coloniality of secularism and neo-liberalism, and not-so-creeping populist fascism wed to the violent scapegoating of the ‘other’ – such as immigrants, the poor, Muslims and trans folk.
Like liberalism as a whole, these literalisms, like the mainline and evangelical churches that are shaped by them, have no teeth to address the urgent spiritual, social and political needs of these dangerous and violent days.
O’Connor, reflecting on the work of the Jewish Religious Studies scholar Tikva Frymer-Kensky[3] invokes what is, for me, a helpful idea; that is placing the mystery of meaning over that of seeking to discover the meaning of the mystery:
[Frymer-Kensky] said that what engaged her attention was not the “meaning of mystery but the mystery of meaning”… Her words have become a kind of mantra [for me] because they break open the choking grasp of literalisms of many kinds, not only ones surrounding notions of biblical inspiration that students often bring with them but also of the iron reign of historical criticisms in search of the one true meaning, of philological determinisms, and of critical theories of various sorts that treat the text as if it were a math problem or a template for analysis. Her words make interpretation itself a religious experience, and this is why I love them.[4]
I’m no reactive fundamentalist who opposes textual and historical critical methodologies. I welcome the insights of higher and lower criticism, science and rationality. I’ll concede that historical source theories like JEPD or Q can have their place as speculative hypotheses as a small part of a far broader conversation, as postulating on authorship, dating, philology or to place a text into its historical context (such as, say, first century Judaism within the Roman Empire) can help untangle very problematic and dangerously toxic reads of the text. This scholarship can be good work.
At the same time, I have witnessed that the emphases – dare I say the hegemonies – of historical and textual critical approaches in the academy, including in the seminary – have become a problem for the depth, life and health of the grassroots church. The inner-Methodist in me suggests that we do need more experience to temper the hegemonic primacy of reason and historicity.
This is because that primacy has locked us into an Enlightenment rigidity and search for the One. True. Historical. Meaning. This ultimately doesn’t serve the fullness of the multiple dimensions of the experience of faith. Though helpful for the realm of the mind (which is good), these approaches are not, in themselves, adequate for the formation of holistically embodied disciples of Jesus Christ.
For over a century and a half, we have fooled ourselves that they could.
Again, O’Connor notes:
…the documentary hypothesis is helpful for obvious reasons both to Enlightenment thinkers and to people for whom sola scriptura is a major theological principle, as it explains so many problems in the text. But my predominantly Catholic students were not given to sola scriptura nor were they much concerned about authorship as literal dictation… My challenge was to show why the Bible mattered at all.[5]
Feminist critics have rightly pointed out that, with very few exceptions, the scholars who have shaped historical and textual criticisms in the 19th century and 20th century were, for the educated, cisgendered men of European descent (with – and please do forgive the cheap shot – predictably harsh-sounding names like “Schleiermacher”, “Funk” “Borg” “Feuerbach” and “Kloppenburg”). The majority of these men and most of their colleagues were – again, predictably – white male Protestants operating in an exclusive ivory echo chamber.
Accordingly, it’s no wonder they took the Enlightenment-soaked rationalist textual-historical approaches that they did.
One 20th-century group of now defunct almost entirely white, North American, male scholars (25:1 male-identifying to female-identifying) even went so far as to emulate the Masons in using coloured beads to assign ‘points’ to what texts they, as ‘experts’ felt were authentic[8].
If I’m sounding like I think that I’m above it all, I must confess that I, too, am infected by this emphasis, even if I never fully caught what (another white male scholar and critic of the critical, Bishop N.T. Wright) calls ‘the Q-disease’.
Even yet, I confess that my brain is wired as a cradle protestant; a tradition that spawned from the advent of the printing press, where ‘the word’ is the key sacrament and excessive Bibliophilia is rampant. Mine is a tradition which accepts the myth of the academic-robe-wearing educated expert as embodied in the ideal of the white European male scholar (or clergy) and its related hyper-emphasis on reason over embodiment.
I am shaped in a tradition whose notion of ‘sola scriptura’ forced my own modernist ancestors to choose between the two sides of an untenable coin of modernist literalisms; be those liberal or fundamentalist.
My undergrad degree was a double major in English Literature and Religious Studies at an Ivy League-styled school, so I, too, tend to ‘back-read’ sacred texts based on my culturally presumed (and faux-neutral) understandings and lenses of culture, genre, context, syntax, style – and the like.
Like these critical schools of thought and practice, I have too often seen myself as standing above the ‘life of faith’ like some kind of armchair anthropologist. I further confess that I have take pleasure in the masturbatory-like joy of scriptural engagement as akin to ‘solving’ a puzzle or math question or as a ‘template for analysis’; all while thumbing my nose at more ‘mystical’ ‘experiential’ ‘folk’ or ‘pietistic’ approaches to engagement with the sacred texts.
Still, I fear that the historical and textual critical approaches, alone, really do miss the whole point, at least when it comes to the fullness of formation in a life of faith. In my own journey, I’ve found that modernist literalisms can hardly feed the hunger for the depth of adventure, wonder and mystery (in the best sense of the word – like that of a mystery novel!) that I’ve come to experience in a profound relational engagement with the Divine Triune God as revealed in living, breathing texts as well as in the interrelationality of God’s living, breathing beloved community and cosmos.
I’d suggest that this misdirection of emphasis is one reason why so many of the pews in the churches whose leaders are formed primarily in these modern approaches are increasingly empty. Again, we thought that we had the answers / it was the questions we had wrong (if I can quote early U2 here [from 11 O’Clock Tick Tock, 1980]).
Walking through and then beyond the rational approaches that shaped me in my academic engagement with the sacred texts, I’ve found myself drawn to the more allegorical readings of the Patristics, the intense embodiment of the Desert Mothers and Fathers and some of the primitive Monastics, the contemplative-imaginative worlds of the Ignatians, the rhythms and chanted Psaltery of the Benedictines, the embodied eco-cosmologies of the Franciscans, the wild worlds of the medieval mystics, the multi-layered meanings of the poets, the experiential revivalistic realms of the early Methodists – and even the Spirit-filled sects of the Pentecostals and the intensity of the North American Black Church.
Those expressions, of course, are hardly the ones encouraged by the academic formation of clergy and church leadership by ‘the guild’ which wishes to ensure a thoroughly (modernist) educated clergy. All alternatives are suspect, and, at best, to be observed or tolerated – even if they increasingly make up the vast majority of the world’s active Christians.
I certainly don’t want to bemoan those who, like me, have found a widening of ‘faith seeking understanding’ through historical and/or textual critical methods. Even O’Connor rightly points out that these approaches can break the infantile and simplistic approaches to inspiration that exist on the more fundamentalist side of the coin.
For generations ending with my parent’s generation, the Baby Boomers, I can imagine that textual and historical criticism was a way of engaging the (so-called) Enlightenment; science and modern rational thought in a way that they found faithful and which opened them from something constricting and untenable. Earlier on, back in the 19th century, as criticism took hold in the upper eschelons of mainline church leadership, I can imagine that it safeguarded around the dangers of hyper-emotionalism and unchecked charismatic leadership in some more revivalistic or folk traditions.
Expositing on hypotheses such as Q or JEPD (as examples) or debating authorship was a helpful way for earlier generations to adopt some of the jewels of the Enlightenment while clinging to and reinventing their faith.
And, sure, more power to them in that.
At the same time, I’m told that each generation must faithfully reinterpret and reinvent the tradition as its own.
Now, I suggest, is the time for something other than the primacy of historical and textual approaches.
I need to be firm that these methodologies, though fine correctives – and perhaps even still helpful for academics – have, by at large, outlived their usefulness in Christian formation – and need now be relegated to their rightful place in the life of Christ’s Beloved Community.
As a friend of mine likes to say: these a young man’s drug. They are ineffective in offering meaning, hope or even an adequate depth of engagement for the common good in today’s polycrisis.
With that, I’d suggest that the best place for historical and textual criticisms is as a beautifully illuminating footnote in what is emerging. I would go further to say that ‘the guild’ needs to engage and embody a diversity of ancient and emerging approaches to scriptural engagement beyond what has been for the last era.
O’Connor notes:
[My] students pushed me to think about how my critical knowledge might work theologically for them, to show that the text is a product of the people, that it emerges from experiences of God over centuries of struggle, that inspiration itself involved a quasi-democratic set of transmissions from generations of ordinary people who told stories in families, clans, and tribes, stories that others wrote down and changed in the face of new struggles, and that this is what pastors, preachers, teachers, missioners, and believers have always done. I began to insist that the Bible arose from the people and belongs to the people, so let us together give it back to the people.[6]
Among the many things that I’ve learned in my relationship with Indigenous folk and communities, it’s how orality, how story can faithfully transmit spiritual reality. In my experience of those communities, there is little need to place dates, context, authorship – or have some kind of literal accuracy or authenticity in these pursuits. There is a sheer trust in the transmission, the tradition (through elders and storytellers) – and in the story itself. It is something to be engaged, lived, breathed – and no need to dissect by experts through a historical or textual lens.
I don’t want to suggest that a strictly oral- and story-focused lens – in contrast to the textual-historical critical emphases of the 19th-20th centuries – is the be-all corrective of the heady ‘sins’ of my forebears. I suspect that even that can lead to just another distraction from the need for invoking meaning, life, and hope for communities[7]. The Spirit-filled life of engagement of the text is far more dynamic and mystery-ridden than that.
At the same time, I’d fear that the Eurocentric and North American, educated, (mostly) male, (mostly) Protestant scholars have engaged in an ideological project continues to demean the competence and reliability of oral cultures. In their quest for the historical and insistence on the primacy of the textual, in their insistence that the transmission from person-to-person, generation-to-generation is like a bad game of telephone where degradation and distortion are unavoidable and thus must be analysed and categorized as ‘authentic’ by the so-called experts – some even with coloured beads – they inadvertently risk demeaning orality.
I, for one, call BS on all that.
The Euro-colonial modernist historical and textual critical theological projects, incubated in modern form through 19th century German scholarship (not coincidentally, in my estimation) just before the rise of the Nazi project and at the height of the church engagement with ‘progressivist’ impulses such as eugenics and projects to ‘educate and civilise’ through so-called Indian Residential Schools. They have sought to diminish the authenticity of other modes of engagement and transmission and the wisdom and oral traditions.
Put bluntly, it has become a project of white supremacy which has prioritised the supposed historicity (even when dubiously proven or hypothetical) and hyperrationality as the primary basis for engagement with sacred texts over the experiences of diverse global peoples and ways of being.
Within the Christian tradition, there is a counter-rationally that places a trust in the Holy Spirit to safeguard all of this engagement. Built into the texts are a disarmament of the myth of the expert. As such, there is nothing to fear. This Spirit uses all engagement – rational, emotional, mystical and otherwise to shape the ‘religious experience’ toward a primal love of God and neighbour through a faithful, nuanced, open-handed, open-hearted, embodied, dynamic reading of the texts in broad and diverse intercultural, global community. This is a wild and uncontrollable thing.
In spite of my misgivings about it’s hegemony, I do believe that that historical and textual criticism has and can continue inform that world of wildness, as long as it doesn’t claim superiority or exclusivity in it.
So, with that, I’ll end on that which must not be forgetten: love – and leave the final words, once again, to O’Connor:
My scholarship and my teaching are meagre efforts to invite others into this love, into the mystery of meaning, to lead, to provoke, and to coax them to love the biblical texts and to find there words for life, words to say in return that invite others into the mystery of meaning, into the mystery of relationship with the Divine.[9]
[1] O’Connor, Kathleen –“The Mystery of Meaning” in Theological Education – Volume 46, Number 1 2010 – Association of Theological Schools, Pittsburgh, PA – https://www.ats.edu/files/galleries/2010-theological-education-v46-n1.pdf (retrieved May 2026) – I’m grateful to the scholar and colleague of O’Connor, Anna Carter Florence for introducing this work to the Pacific Mountain Regional Council of the United Church of Canada “Seeds of Hope” AGM gathering in June 2026.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrisis
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikva_Frymer-Kensky
[4] O’Connor, Ibid.
[5] O’Connor, Ibid.
[6] O’Connor, Ibid. I might also note here that O’Connor’s own hermenutic engages a lens of trauma – which might add yet another dimension to this conversation.
[7] With the words of Indigenous elders in my heart, I’d personally take a side with James Dunn’s take on reliable orality over the Q hypothesis any day. Having said that, I’m acutely aware that this is all still a primarily white, educated male, Eurocentric conversation.
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar
[9] O’Connor, Ibid.