Witness the following nightmare. Mom and Dad, you scrimp and save for years to give your kids a good college education. You also invest even more time nurturing the faith of your children. With tears of pride (and perhaps, a second mortgage on your house), you happily send your first child off to school. But after the first year, that child’s faith is shattered, and the college sends you a bill, a BIG bill.

Not an uncommon scenario. In fact, it’s becoming more and more common. What happened to your child? Drugs? Promiscuity? Atheist Pride Rallies? 

No. He or she just took a religion class.  Perhaps, the Introduction to the New Testament class you cheerfully suggested.

Sound even more far-fetched now? How could someone lose faith through studying the New Testament?

Very easily, depending upon with whom and how it is studied.

Let’s take an example, a well-known example since in this case the “whom” is Bart Ehrman, New York Times best-selling author of Misquoting Jesus and James A. Gray Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Now we stress that we are not picking on Dr. Ehrman, because there are hundreds of professors just like him teaching in Religious Studies and Theology Departments all over America. Ehrman is just more visible than most, hence a good case for the paradigm.

Ehrman is, by his own admission, a happy agnostic.  “An atheist is someone who absolutely says, there is no God,” explains Ehrman in a recent article (“The Happy Agnostic”) in the UNC alumni magazine. “The agnostic says, I don’t know if there’s a God or not. Lately, I’ve been calling myself a happy agnostic.  For me, life is good. If everybody had my life, there’d be no problem with suffering. I make a lot of money, I have a fantastic job, I’ve got a great wife, my kids are fantastic, life’s great! I’m happy, but I don’t know if God exists or not. And if God does exist, I don’t think the God I used to believe in exists.” 

Whether he was always this happy, he was not always an agnostic. When he was fifteen years old he had (in his own words) “a bona fide born-again experience.” Soon enough, he was off to the Moody Bible Institute, then Wheaton College, and finally Princeton Theological Seminary.

He went into Moody a born-again Christian, and came out of Princeton Theological Seminary an agnostic.  Not through neglecting the study of the New Testament, but through his ongoing, and ever more intense study of the New Testament.  And that brings us from the “whom” to the “how.”

Ehrman lost his faith, not because of the New Testament itself, but how he studied it—by the most advanced methods in the academic field of scriptural scholarship. Or, the historical-critical method, for short.

As Wilfred Cantwell Smith noted over thirty years ago, biblical studies programs “are on the whole calculated to turn a fundamentalist into a liberal.”  By that, Smith meant that biblical studies programs, based upon the modern historical-critical method, seem to be intrinsically designed to remove fervent Evangelical faith and replace it with just the kind of cool-headed agnosticism Ehrman so publicly displays.

And teaches.  Ehrman teaches enormous undergraduate classes at UNC, lecturing to 350 impressionable undergraduates in his Introduction to New Testament Literature class. If you sent your son or daughter to UNC, Chapel Hill, and pushed them into taking an introductory course on the New Testament, they would be sitting right there.

But again, we aren’t picking on UNC or Bart Ehrman. Both he and UNC are one among many. And the reason is, again, not the “madness” of Bart Ehrman—who is quite sane, very intelligent, and most charming—but the method, the historical-critical method itself.  Whatever it is, and whatever its merits, this approach to the study of Scripture acts like an acid poured on the Bible that quickly eats away its authority.

What is the historical-critical method? We might do better to ask first of all, where did it come from?  If we trace its pedigree, we find ourselves, not among the faithful, but among those who were deeply antagonistic to the faith.  Pick up nearly any History of Biblical Scholarship, and you’ll find that the “fathers” most often mentioned to be Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, John Toland, Charles Blount, and Matthew Tindal: an atheist, two pantheists, and two deists.

A bit more suspicious now?  In each, we find a pronounced antagonism to Christianity.  But given that they lived in predominantly Christian societies during the latter half of the 17th and early 18th centuries, they had to keep their antagonism muted, or better, disguised.  But that does not mean that they were passive, otherwise they wouldn’t be counted as collective fathers of modern historical-critical scholarship. Indeed, they were quite active, and part of their activity was the attack on scripture through a new approach to scripture.

And that approach, gathering steam and sophistication over the following three centuries, is the same one that is taught to professors-to-be in graduate school, and hence, to impressionable undergraduates in turn.

And that is why you just may want to be a little more careful about where you send your son or daughter, and what courses they take.

All this is not to suggest that a kind of fundamentalist retreat is called for. In fact, quite the opposite is needed. To neutralize the acids of the historical-critical method, a more sophisticated historical and critical method is needed, one that takes account of the legitimate wheat of the method, but is wise enough to separate the chaff.

In the next email in this series, we’ll start an examination of the historical-critical method itself.

Resources on Literary Criticism

Same evidence - different conclusions

Is Ehrman determined to find reasons not to believe?

New Testament scholar, Daniel B. Wallace, reviews Misquoting Jesus by meeting Professor Ehrman on his own turf. Wallace carefully examines Ehrman's reasoning and challenges his conclusions.

One lesson we must learn from Misquoting Jesus is that those in ministry need to close the gap between the church and the academy. We have to educate believers. Instead of trying to isolate laypeople from critical scholarship, we need to insulate them. They need to be ready for the barrage, because it is coming. The intentional dumbing down of the church for the sake of filling more pews will ultimately lead to defection from Christ. Ehrman is to be thanked for giving us a wake-up call.

Daniel B. Wallace

William Lane Craig and Bart Ehrman debate "Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?"

"In preparing for this debate, I had quite a surprise. I was amazed to discover how much our life stories are alike: as slightly marginalized teenage boys with some passing acquaintance with Christianity, both of our lives were turned upside down when at the age of 15 or 16 we each experienced a spiritual rebirth through personal faith in Christ. Eager to serve him, we both attended the same college in Illinois, Wheaton College, where we both even studied Greek under the same professor. After graduation we both went on to pursue doctoral studies.

Thereafter our paths radically diverged. I received a fellowship from the German government to study the resurrection of Jesus under the direction of Wolfhart Pannenberg and Ferdinand Hahn at the University of Munich and at Cambridge University. As a result of my studies, I became even more convinced of the historical credibility of that event. Of course, ever since my conversion, I believed in the resurrection of Jesus on the basis of my personal experience, and I still think this experiential approach to the resurrection is a perfectly valid way to knowing that Christ has risen. It's the way that most Christians today know that Jesus is risen and alive. But as a result of my studies, I came to see that a remarkably good case can be made for Jesus' resurrection historically as well, and I hope to show tonight that the resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation of certain well-established facts about Jesus.

Sadly, Dr. Ehrman came to radically different conclusions as a result of his studies. In his most recent book he poignantly describes how he came to lose his teenage faith. I'm not sure, based on Dr. Ehrman's writings, whether he still believes in Jesus' resurrection or not. He never denies it. But he does deny that there can be historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection. He maintains that there cannot be historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection. Now this is a very bold claim, and so naturally I was interested to see what argument he would offer for its justification. I was stunned to discover that the philosophical argument he gives for this claim is an old argument against the identification of miracles which I had studied during my doctoral research and which is regarded by most philosophers today as demonstrably fallacious. So as not to steal Dr. Ehrman's thunder, I'll wait until he's presented his argument before I show where the fallacy lies."

The Happy Agnostic

"Students whose beliefs mirror Ehrman's own when he was a teenager do struggle with the implications of what they hear in class. Every semester there's a student who bursts into tears. Others press evangelical literature upon Ehrman and express concern for the welfare of his soul."

Carolina Alumni Review

Misquoting Jesus has led me back to a fresh study of the New Testament and early Christian writers, a study that has revealed early orthodox Christians' scrupulous fidelity in copying the New Testament text. It also has brought into clearer focus the New Testament writers' disciplined freedom in using the Old Testament. Whereas Ehrman's journey in textual criticism has led him to increasing skepticism, my own has brought me to increased confidence in the New Testament documents and in the central figure to whom they bear witness.

The Christian Century

Send your letter to the editor to feedback@tothesource.org.