Re: [asa] JDEP

*"Propped up by the theory of evolution, it exists solely to undermine the
authority of the Word of God."*

It bothers me to no end that AIG and its fellow travelers attribute the rise
of higher criticism and the documentary hypothesis to the "theory of
evolution." The roots of higher criticism predate Darwin and the theory
flowered around the same time as Darwinism. (Good Wiki here on the
documentary hypothesis, including some bibliographic references pro and
con: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis)

A more fair statement is that higher criticism and Darwinism are both
children of the Enlightenment. They bear a family resemblance because they
both share Enlightenment rationalistic presuppositions against the
supernatural. It seems to me that you're right, then, in a sense, to call
higher criticism a sort of "methodoligical naturalism" towards the Biblical
text. But AIG is wrong, IMHO, to attribute higher criticism to Darwinism.

Aside from that, even on its own terms, the empirical support for the
documentary hypothesis and other aspects of higher criticism often is thin.
There also are mediating positions on things like Mosaic authorship of the
Pentatuch -- for example, the notion of an "author" in the ANE context may
include someone who collects, codifies and copies external sources as well
as an "original" writer.

But more interesting to me, higher criticism also seems to illustrate the
dillemmas resulting from rationalistic anti-supernatural
presuppositions. If we believe God has revealed Himself in the Biblical
text, why should we presume that revelation bears only human
characteristics? This is the flip side of the "incarnational" view of
revelation: scripture has human characteristics because God revealed
himself through human writers, but it also has divine characteristics
because it is indeed *God's* revelation. It seems absurd to approach this
kind of text with the presumption that anything with the "appearance" of
divinity, like a prophetic statement apparently later fullfilled, must have
another "natural" explanation (such as the influence of a later editor or
redactor).

Query for the anti-ID folks here (honest query, not "fighting
words"): should scripture be approached with the presumption that its
apparently supernatural aspects have "natural" or "human" explanations? If
not, why should we presume differently concerning "general" revelation?

On 8/31/06, Brent Foster <bdffoster@charter.net> wrote:
> My latest read is "Who Wrote the Bible" by R. E. Friedman. It covers the
JDEP, or documentary theory of Old Testament authorship. I'm curious what
the folks around here think about the theory in general and this book/author
if anyone is familiar. I havn't read much in the genre of biblical
scolarship. I've read some books by F. F. Bruce but that's about it. I'm
struck by the difference in the degree of proof or evidence that appears to
be required to support a theory in the in the realm of theology vs. science.
Friedman seems to draw conclusions with amazing certainty from information
in the text that may only seem to suggest a certain inferrence. But I do see
a similarity of methodology with science. I think critics of JDEP can
rightly say that much is based on the assumption that fullfilled prophesy is
out of the question. In other words if an author is aware of an event that
happened at a certain time, then the text must have been written after that
time. But is this not !
> just methodoligical naturalism? Or is it philosophical naturalism?
>
> Here's what AIG had to say about JDEP, in the concluding remarks from one
of their online articles:
>
> "On the other hand there is no historical evidence, and no spiritual or
theological basis whatsoever for the deceptive JEDP hypothesis. Its teaching
is completely false; the 'scholarship' that promotes it is totally spurious.
Propped up by the theory of evolution, it exists solely to undermine the
authority of the Word of God."
>
> Whatever problems we may have with JDEP it's just wrong to say that there
is no evidence or any basis at all for it. This is the same load of garbage
they write about every theory they don't like.
>
> Brent
>
>
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Received on Thu Aug 31 14:46:49 2006