CCBlogs thinking critically, living faithfully

John Shuck's blog

Nothing is more devastating to revealed religion than the historical-critical study of its texts. This study brings the texts down to earth. We discover that the Bible is a collection of documents written and revised by human beings.

This hit home when I took the Old Testament survey course in seminary. This collection of texts theologically understood as Word of God were, in actuality, the words of human beings. I searched for "God" in them and the most I could find was what the various authors wrote about their ideas of what they called "God."

This changes things dramatically at least in principle. However, this takes a long time at the personal level for this realization to roost. At the institutional level, it takes much, much longer. The effects of the historical-method on religious texts are far-reaching. Is it even meaningful to speak of "God" with any sense of realism when "God" becomes a literary character in a human drama?
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