History of Modern Biblical Criticism

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The modern biblical criticism is mainly due to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment back. The emergence of critical sciences that were not directly committed to religion, such as Comparative history , for example , quickly led to arguments with the clerical authorities. Thomas Hobbes , Richard Simon , and especially Baruch Spinoza published texts critical of the Bible in the 17th century. Spinoza said e.g. For example, the Bible was written by simple people, full of errors and contradictions, largely inauthentic, and the Christianity based on it is a temporary phenomenon.

Historical background

The increasing availability of translated Bibles also gave laypeople the opportunity to study the Bible. Some encountered contradictions within the Bible and between the Bible and other ancient traditions. Archaeologists, historians, and other comparative scientists tried to use research to prove the correctness or inaccuracy of the Bible. The results did not always match the researchers' intentions. Historical sources were found whose information contradicted information in the Bible; for example chronologies of the Egyptian dynasties, which went back far before the assumed time of the flood (e.g. that of Manetho ). Criticism also grew from the scientific side. Robert Hooke published a theory of the disappearance of species with a view to the fossils , which contradicted the biblical plan of creation - which eventually led to the theory of evolution of Charles Darwin .

This biblical criticism, based on the ideas of the Enlightenment and secularization, contributed to the fact that the Christian religion was sometimes called into question. It was during this time that a will of the cleric Abbé Meslier that was critical of religion was found . His criticism of religion went further than that of other religious critics of his time: it culminated in resolute atheism . Many of the essential arguments critical of the Bible can already be found in Mesler's work, e.g. B. the reference to many contradictions in the Bible, which he used as an opportunity to describe the Bible as a book written by people with fraudulent intent.

18th century

These points of view increased in the course of the Enlightenment and parallel to criticism of the church and religion in the course of the 18th century. Georges Minois calls the 18th century the "century of disbelief".

The list of prominent biblical and religious critics includes many well-known names of the Enlightenment, e. B. D'Holbach , Voltaire , La Mettrie , Diderot . According to the motto of the Enlightenment, one used one's own intellect increasingly in such a way that one did not simply accept the church doctrine, but demanded evidence, read the Bible with a critical eye and measured the church teaching against it. Critical arguments have been used to challenge all of church doctrine and authority and the Christian religion, including the existence of God .

However, many did not take the step to atheism and instead turned to deism , which Minois wrote was “a waiting position for people who can no longer accept Christianity [...] but who [...] still need a god “From this perspective, deism is a position that rejects the Bible or other revelations as a religious source, while at the same time clinging to belief in a deity. It is an attempt to reconcile belief in a God with the very critical reason with which belief in the God of the Bible was believed to be incompatible. It is also an attempt to evade a moral vacuum or a meaninglessness seen in atheism (see also Kant and Fichte ).

19th century

In the 19th century - in the wake of the French Revolution  - openly atheistic models of society emerged that partly separated religion from the state and partly wanted to replace religion entirely with reason and science . In this climate, the Catholic Church reacted with defiant isolation; it insisted without compromising on dogmas and traditions, including the teaching of the divine inspiration of the Bible (e.g. at Vaticanum I with the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius ). In Protestantism , on the other hand, biblical exegesis was carried out under the premises of the historical-critical method ( David Friedrich Strauss ), which Catholic theologians often suspected as a work of destruction on the Bible (e.g. Lamennais ).

Minois describes the resulting dilemma for exegesis, in his view: “A cruel dilemma: either to accept the criticism of the Bible (ie the historical-critical method) and to declare the Bible to be an ordinary subject of study […] at the risk of doing so to kill the supernatural element [...] which leads to unbelief; or to adhere strictly to the holy and inspired character […], […] and thus to accept all the inconsistencies that scorn reason and intelligence, at the risk of discouraging those […] who do not get through to sacrifice their reason. ”In short, Minois claims a dilemma between reason and clinging to the inspired character of the Bible.

This view of things turned many Christians away from the faith, especially in the 19th century (e.g. Ernest Renan , Friedrich Engels , David Friedrich Strauss , Friedrich Nietzsche , Franz Overbeck ); today she continues to work (e.g. Gerd Lüdemann ). On the other hand, attitudes have developed that insist all the more decisively on the authority of the Bible as the “ word of God ” (see, among others, Dialectical Theology , Karl Barth ; Evangelicalism , Christian Fundamentalism , Eta Linnemann ).

The 19th century also marks the beginning of a criticism of the Bible - and, more generally, a criticism of religion - from a psychological point of view. Great psychologists have also dealt with religion in one form or another. The points of view are inconsistent, but a number of psychologists can be counted among the Bible critics. Psychological approaches have since found their way into theology and philosophy, but the psychology of religion has also established a branch of its own. In part, this psychological biblical criticism tries to interpret the biblical texts in a positive sense as symbolic , which implicitly denies a literal reading of the Bible (e.g. Eugen Drewermann ), but in some cases reference is made to the content of the Bible and its consequences that are worthy of criticism from a psychological point of view, and rejected the Bible for this reason (e.g. Buggle).

Forms of contemporary biblical criticism and counter-criticism

Modern biblical criticism can take several forms. The spectrum ranges from open disparagement to caricature , satire , irony , indirect criticism in a novel or simile form, direct criticism in prose form to scientific treatises for a specialized audience.

The counter-position or counter-criticism to biblical criticism is (Christian) apologetics . It is the defense, especially the scientific justification of doctrines of faith, in other words that part of theology in which one deals with the scientific-rational safeguarding of the faith. In Catholic theology today this area is mostly called fundamental theology .

literature

  • Ulrich Wilckens : Critique of the Biblical Criticism. How the Bible can become Holy Scripture again . Neukirchener Verlag, Neukirchen-Vluyn 2012, Part I: The history of historical-critical exegesis (pp. 15–115).
  • Georges Minois: History of Atheism. From the beginning to the present . Verlag Hermann Böhlaus successor, Weimar, ISBN 3-7400-1104-1
  • Bart D. Ehrman: Copied, misquoted and misunderstood. How the Bible came to be what it is . Gütersloher publishing house, ISBN 978-3-579-06450-5

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Georges Minois : The History of Atheism ; P. 290
  2. ↑ Minois: “It is far more disturbing that sincere believers who think they are doing right now also enter the arena; they begin to find anomalies and confuse everything. The comparative story turns out to be particularly delicate. For example, what to make of the list of Egyptian dynasties? The one who met Manethon, priest of Heliopolis, in the 3rd century BC. BC, contained rulers in constant succession since an epoch long before the Flood, about which no word is said; another, even older, chronicle spanned more than thirty-six thousand years. […] Soon there are as many opinions as chronologies: Father Antonio Foresti counted seventy dates of creation, between a minimum of 3740 and a maximum of 6984 BC. Chr. "; from: History of Atheism, p. 290 f)
  3. ↑ Meslier: “It is clear and obvious that it is abuse, error, deception, lies and deceit to present purely human laws and institutions as supernatural and divine institutions; But now it is certain that all religions that exist in the world are nothing but purely human inventions. ”And:“ It is now clear and unambiguous that the supposedly holy and divine books mentioned above are nothing special in themselves Contain signs of divine inspiration, nor any feature of education, knowledge, wisdom, holiness or any other perfection that could only be said to come from God. ”Quoted from Hartmut Krauss: The Testament of Abbé Meslier
  4. ↑ G. Minois, p. 307
  5. ↑ G. Minois, p. 391
  6. ↑ G. Minois, p. 523
  7. ↑ Prominent examples here are e.g. B. Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung , there are also many psychologists among contemporary Bible critics, e. B. Franz Buggle and Gerhard Vinnai .
  8. ↑ See e.g. B. Friedrich Schleiermacher , William James , or nowadays Eugen Drewermann. However, the relationship between theology and psychology is still characterized by tensions, which can be seen exemplarily in Drewermann's résumé.