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Articles

Ludwig Wittgenstein & Postmodern Biblical Scholarship

Van Harvey wants the facts.

Christian intellectuals have responded in diverse ways to what some secularists believe to be the Achilles heel of the Christian faith; namely, that Biblical scholarship has revealed how untrustworthy the New Testament narratives could be about Jesus, and how little is known for certain about his life and his message. The secularist asks, ‘How can one be asked to be a Christian on such historically uncertain grounds?’ Orthodox Christian apologists have tended to dismiss this skeptical scholarship as the product of non-believing positivistic historians, who simply reject the supernaturalistic elements of the Gospels out of hand. But secularists found this response less and less compelling as it became increasingly evident that many of the scholars in the forefront of the thinking that has come to these skeptical conclusions are Christian. Consequently another, more sophisticated, Christian apologetic has emerged, which has attempted to save the New Testament picture of Jesus without embracing the supernaturalistic elements in it. The sophistication of this apologetic lies in turning the argument about the negative results of Biblical scholarship into a debate about hermeneutics.

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