The Modern Christian Scholars Fight Back

Telling the story of Christianity with sociological, political and psychological explanations is what many modern Christians object to most. Christianity is stripped of its spirituality and explained as a social science experiment. For those familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures the same objection is raised with the book of Esther. In Esther (the Masoretic/Hebrew version) the name of God is never invoked. It is simply the story of a Jew living in a foreign court saving her people from genocide by the use of guile, intelligence, and reasoning. It is Judaism without Divinity. Like this story, Christianity explained by modern social science is a religion stripped of its spirituality.

Modern religious scholarship resembles the Book of Esther, examining the biblical message, stories and characters without the assumption of God's existence. When theologians counter this perspective the result is often a logical dead end. The assertion of the "miraculous" generally builds a wall between theological belief and the scientific study of the Bible.

A good example of this is the dating of the New Testament Gospels. Nearly all scholastic viewpoints put the dates of the Gospels into the 70's, 80's, and 90's. The starting point is the unmistakable reference to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, which is recorded in the Gospel of Mark. Knowledge of the Temple's destruction puts an absolute date of the Gospel to no earlier than the year 70; unless; as Christians assert, it wasn't knowledge but prophecy and prediction. This allows for Mark to be writing in the 50's and 60's and finalizing his Gospel right after Peter's death around the year 65. From these assumptions on outward, the differing views become irreconcilable. There is some internal and external evidence for the dating of Mark but this evidence is always viewed through the prism of one of the two basic assumptions.

There are areas; though, where the wall between divinity and secular study does not block the path to better understanding. Among these areas are two characterizations made by secular scholars that Christian theologians and followers find the most objectionable. The first is the study of Jesus as a man without divine attributes. It is the portrayal of Jesus without the "Christ" part. The second is the portrayal of early Christianity without the assumption of divine inspiration.