<> Ask the Pastor The Rev. Walter Snyder Q: Lately I have been reading some articles in magazines about a form of teaching called either Form Criticism or Higher Criticism. I have been studying the characteristics involved with each and find them very appalling. I wanted to know your opinion on these criticisms and if you would tell the rest of your readers in laymen's terms what the criticisms are and how they came to be. A: Before continuing, I must acknowledge my source, Pastor Andrew Spallek of Springfield, Missouri, who helped to provide an answer short enough to fit in this space. I had a good three page answer, but the Newsboy likes me to keep the column a bit shorter. Criticism doesn't necessarily mean "tearing down," but involves analysis of a document. "Higher criticism" is any approach to the Scriptures that treats them on par with human documents, subject to error and "tinkering." It would include source criticism and form criticism. For example, the higher critic would treat the Bible in the same way that a Shakespeare scholar would treat the Bard's plays and poetry. Exactly how the critic goes about this gets us to the various categories and subcategories of criticism. Maybe a better comparison is that between source and form criticism. Source criticism involves which Synoptic Gospel (Matthew, Mark, or Luke) came first, who borrowed from whom, and so on. It led to theories of now-unknown documents such as Q, L, Ur-Markus, Proto-Luke, etc., as original sources for our current Gospels. Perhaps a case could be made for the possibility of something like Q. Still, it's amazing that any reasonable person can buy into the complex theories which have invented these other documents. None have left any independent manuscript evidence. This is like saying that Shakespeare borrowed from many older stories, but we have no copies of any of these sources, so you'll have to take our word for it. Form criticism is a catchall term incorporating the various types of criticism (including historical criticism) that arose as a reaction to the weaknesses of source criticism. These critics try to determine what was "original" and what was added by later tradition (i.e., what did Jesus really say, what was added by the evangelist, what was added by the later religious community?) Under this heading falls Rudolph Bultmann's "demythologization." This branch of Biblical criticism led to current efforts to remove the "taint" of the supernatural from the Bible, leaving little but a blurred historical record which was used to justify a certain moral code. Bultmann's *New Testament Theology* bases his entire line of thought on a few presuppositions listed on the opening pages. No effort is made to justify these presuppositions. We are apparently to accept them because, after all, he is Bultmann! Essential to form critics is the establishment of the *sitz(e) im leben*, the life-situation of a document's authors and editors. Under form criticism would come redaction criticism and historical criticism. There is little real difference among the brands of form criticism. Pastor Spallek said he has "great difficulty distinguishing one from another," a problem I share with him. Very often they are lumped under the name "historical criticism." Returning to Shakespeare, you might ask, "What king was he trying to butter up?" or, "What was the agenda of those who gathered these plays together, and how did they change the documents to match their agenda?" To summarize, source criticism asks who came first and who borrowed from whom. It doesn't try to answer why something was changed or who changed it. It doesn't particularly care from where a source came. This snowballed and led to a travesty where subsequent scholars added ever more layers of hypothesized "source documents" until finally many realized the mess that had been created. Form criticism reacted to this. It sought to supplement the basic source theories by constructing motives for redacting (editing and changing) the text and then "proving" that redaction had taken place by applying the very motives they had constructed! The Jesus Seminar people are an example of this to an extreme. We'll continue next week with an examination of better methods of reading and studying the Bible. Remember to "Ask the Pastor" your questions at P.O. Box 1080, Jasper, Texas, 75951; E-mail xrysostom@aol.com; or catch me around town. Walter Snyder is the pastor of St. Paul and Faith Lutheran Churches, Jasper and Woodville and coauthor of the book "What Do Lutherans Believe? A Study Guide in Christian Teachings for Adults." Copyright (c) 1996 by Walter P. Snyder Permission is granted by author to reproduce or retransmit this by any means, provided that its content is not altered, that this notice of copyright and permission is included, and that no financial gain is realized.