WM 317: Article Review: Has Evolution Changed Your Bible?

JTR

Thoughts on James Orr, Theistic Evolution, Miracles, and Intellectual Respectability

Image:  James Orr (1844-1913)

I’ve been reading this week through James Orr’s Revelation and Inspiration (New York:  Scribner’s, 1910). Orr (1844-1913) was a Scottish Presbyterian, a contemporary of B. B. Warfield (1851-1921), known, like Warfield, for his critique of the theological liberalism of his day and his defense of traditional views on the Bible and Christianity.  Orr contributed the articles “The Virgin Birth of Christ” and “Science and Christian Faith” to the famed series, The Fundamentals:  A Testimony to the Truth (1910-1915).

As with Warfield, however, I am struck not only by Orr’s critique of liberalism and skepticism but also by some of the concessions he is willing to make in order to maintain the relevance of Christianity in the “modern” world.

On one hand, Orr can offer a sharp critique of Wilhelm Bousett (1865-1920) and the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule in their “evolutionary” view of the development of religion, including their denial of special revelation and the inspiration of the Christian Scriptures (see pp. 31-39) or Hume’s rejection of miracle (see pp. 109-130).

On the other hand, he sometimes cedes much to the modernists.  Like Warfield, he essentially accepts biological evolution and does not see it as being in conflict with the Christian worldview. So he writes, “the theory of evolution, now commonly accepted in principle, has undergone modifications which remove most of the aspects of conflict between it and the theistic and Christian view of the world” (p. 161).  Orr appears to have been in the vanguard of the theistic evolution position.  When it comes to prophetic actions and miracles in the Bible, Orr suggests some might have been the result of “a visionary element” rather than an actual event (p. 100).  Those who seek a “parabolic interpretation” of Jonah’s  three days and nights in the belly of the fish, Orr suggests,  might consider that it happened “in vision” (p. 101).

This dilemma persists among evangelicals who desire to defend traditional views of Scripture’s reliability but who also desire to intellectual respectability in eyes of the secular world. The question is whether or not this can ever really be done without compromise.

JTR

Markan Priority, The Modern Critical Text, and Evolution

Here’s one more follow up from David Black’s Why Four Gospels? (Energion, 2001, 2010):

In reflecting on how the theory of Markan priority managed to overturn the pre-critical view of Matthean priority and how it has tenatiously held sway in the scholarly community since the 1800s, Black observes:

The stubborn adherence to Markan priority in the face of all its weaknesses compels one to conclude that it has been regarded almost unconsciously as a dogma of scholarship over against the claims of the church to control the dogmatic interpretation of the Scriptures, for the critics seek always to offer an alternative explanation to that of church tradition and belief (pp. 42-43).

With this quote also comes an intriguing footnote which references W. R. Farmer’s The Synoptic Problem (1964).  Black recalls Farmer’s suggestion that the nineteenth century theory of Markan priority was accompanied and influenced by the rise of evolutionary thought (p. 43, note 25):

He notes that defenders of Markan priority were influenced by theological positions and “that ‘extra-scientific’ or ‘non-scientific’ factors exercised a deep influence in the development of a fundamentally misleading and false consensus” (190).  While rejecting a conscious connection between Markan priority and evolutionary social theory, he nevertheless concludes “that the Marcan hypothesis exhibited features which commended itself to men who were disposed to place their trust in the capacity of science to foster the development of human progress” (179).

Indeed, the theory of Markan priority is based on the assumption that the shortest Gospel (Mark) would be the most primitive and that Matthew and Luke would have expanded and added to their Markan source as the Gospel tradition evolved.  It also operates on the assumption that modern "scientific" methodology would allow researchers to uncover the origins of the Synoptic tradition and their primitive sources (Mark and Q). 

A similar suggestion might be made regarding the overthrow of the traditional original language text of Scripture in the nineteenth century in favor of the modern critical text.  It was based on the similar assumption that the lectio brevior (“shorter reading”) is the more primitive (original) and that the ecclesiastical text evolved through harmonization and expansion.  Scholars, then, using "scientific" methodology may recover the original text.  Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859, Holzmann’s Die synoptischen Evangelien in 1863, and Wescott and Hort’s The New Testament in the Original Greek in 1881.  Can it be that we are still dealing with the lingering influence of nineteenth century evolutionary thought in textual and Gospel studies?

JTR