Many theologians accept that it is not plausible to dismiss what is called the ‘higher criticism’ altogether, but try to limit its efficacy. This article discusses a number of their ways of doing so.

Dale B. Martin, Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University, puts aside what he calls the ‘modern hegemony’ of biblical criticism first by opposing ‘the commonsensical but mistaken idea that texts simply have meaning as a property within themselves, that texts dispense their meaning themselves’.Footnote ¹ It is of course quite true that ideas can be no more than suggested by words, and that those who hear or read the words have to reconstruct as best they can the underlying ideas; and this can be done only on the basis of their own ideas, which depend on their own mental capacity and experiences. If author and reader differ greatly from each other in these respects, the latter will have considerable difficulty in reconstructing the ideas of the former. Second, Martin notes that words may suggest ideas that never entered the mind of their author, and that there may be a variety of interpretations of his words even though he may have meant nothing at all.Footnote ² Martin seems to suppose that these two observations, both of which indicate a far from rigorous link between words and ideas, suffice to establish that, quite apart from what an author may have meant, many interpretations of his words are not only possible, but also of real value.

Such views are prevalent in much of today's literary criticism, for which it is a commonplace that a work of literature has what is called ‘a life of its own’, in that readers can find meanings in it that were not intended by the author. It is not hard to see why such a view has become popular. It enables the critics to find beauties in almost any kind of prose or verse which, for whatever reason, they wish to admire. The more uncertain the meaning of the words in a novel or poem is held to be, the greater the scope they have for their interpretations. Any extravagances in these are seldom exposed to severe scrutiny, since the professional lives of critics are often so arranged that they have to deal only with fellow practitioners or with trainees (students). They live in what Douglas Hewitt called ‘a large self-contained empire which does not need to export its wares to common readers’.Footnote ³ And they are often driven to quite fanciful interpretations, since, over time, sensible originality about established classics becomes progressively more difficult, and yet the critics of today feel they have to do more than merely repeat the insights of their predecessors.

It is, then, not for nothing that Martin holds that students of theology ‘need training in literary and textual theory’.Footnote ⁴ Likewise, Mark Oakley, Parish Priest of a London church, believes that today's church must free itself from ‘the curse of literalism’ and become ‘a poetic church’, poetry being the ‘language of paradox, polyvalence and ambiguity’.Footnote ⁵ Ambiguity is what he stresses most, and here his debt to modern literary criticism is obvious. ‘The machinations of ambiguity’ says William Empson at the beginning of his influential Seven Types of Ambiguity, ‘are among the very roots of poetry’. Similarly, John Polkinghorne, who resigned his Cambridge Chair of theoretical physics to become an Anglican priest, holds that the Bible ‘must be acknowledged as being polysemous, having multi-layered meaning capable of mediating many messages to its readers’. He calls the Bible ‘the supreme Christian classic’ in the sense that any literary classic – he instances Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians – ‘has something fresh to say to each inquirer’.Footnote ⁶

One way in which such views have proved theologically useful is that they have helped to sustain the traditional Christian view that many passages in the Old Testament which have nothing to do with Jesus may nevertheless be read as in some way referring to him. Thus Joseph Ratzinger, the present Pope Benedict XVI, holds that both the Old and the New Testaments should be read with a ‘Christological hermeneutic’, on the ground that ‘any human utterance of a certain weight contains more than the author may have been immediately aware of at the time’.Footnote ⁷

The literary theorists to whom these theologians are beholden suppose that there is a clear distinction between the plain prose or ‘rational’ meaning of a word or phrase and what they call its ‘overtones’ – although in fact what they call the rational meaning is made up of associations. We may profitably distinguish between those associations likely to be common between author and reader – such there must be, otherwise there would be no common language – and those which are peculiar to one reader and may result only from his protracted reflection. It is these latter that are commonly called ‘overtones’, and Empson is typical of the modern interpreter of poetry who, by a process which seems to be borrowed from the psychoanalysts, explores such of his own associations and pretends that these are somehow present in the recipient's mind when he hears or reads the poem. Hence he claims – commenting on Shakespeare's twenty-third sonnet – that the poetic effect is produced, or at least enhanced, by ‘a sort of ambiguity, in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind’. Of course, most words are apt to excite in the hearer's mind a variety of thoughts and memories if time is allowed for their revival. But a word or phrase does not have any more associations when it occurs in verse rather than in prose. The associations are in our minds, and may or may not be evoked.

Martin and Polkinghorne are well aware that we cannot make texts mean anything, and that there must be safeguards against arbitrary exegesis. They both invoke ‘the guidance of the Holy Spirit’ to prevent us from reading Scripture to reinforce what Martin calls ‘some kind of Christian bubble we already live in’.Footnote ⁸ When we are invited to accept materials or machines, we can distinguish between the expert and the quack by means of practical results. In literary criticism and theology, practical test of the expert is hard to come by, but surely more is needed for authentication than an appeal to ‘the Spirit’. When Martin declares that ‘what makes an interpretation right or wrong has to do with complex expectations deriving from Christian values, beliefs, doctrines and ethics’,Footnote ⁹ he is really conceding that he is prepared to take a text in scripture to mean what fits well with an overall outlook that has been formed quite independently of it, so that a passage can mean what it suggests to someone who comes to it with his own predilections. Some of his examples show clearly that this is where he stands, as when, having noted that some New Testament authors include passages that ‘sound so un-Trinitarian that they would have been treated as heretics in later ages’, he nevertheless insists that such historical facts should not ‘dissuade Christians from reading the Bible in Trinitarian terms’.Footnote ¹⁰

Bart Ehrman, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, like Martin, does not find acceptance of the findings of historical criticism incompatible with affirmation of Christianity, and his own agnosticism is based on his wrestlings with the age-old problem of why, if there is an all-powerful and loving God, there is so much undeserved suffering. He quotes Hume's remark that ‘Epicurus's old questions are yet unanswered: Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence, then, evil?’Footnote ¹¹

Ehrman thinks it strange that so many pastors who have imbibed historical criticism as students ‘so rarely teach their congregations this information, but insist on approaching the Bible devotionally’. He finds it natural enough that they do this in the pulpit, ‘where a devotional approach would be expected’; but need they extend this approach to their ‘adult-education classes’? We might think that, if they did not so extend it, they would find themselves questioning in their classrooms what they had been affirming in their pulpits. But Ehrman denies that this need be so, and finds that his and his colleagues' Bible students, once they have ‘acknowledged that different parts of the Bible have different (even contrasting) things to say on important topics’, can go on to ‘evaluate these different biblical messages’ and see which ones are particularly germane to ‘American Christians living in the twenty-first century’.Footnote ¹² Such ‘picking and choosing’ has often been condemned as arbitrary; but Ehrman is surely right to say that ‘everyone already picks and chooses what they want to accept in the Bible’. I would suggest as examples that, notwithstanding Jesus's teaching, we do not live in perfect confidence that God will always supply us with food and clothing (Mt. 6: 25–31); nor do we follow the injunctions to hate (Lk.14: 26) or abandon (Mt. 19: 29) our families in order to be Jesus's disciple; nor is non-resistance to evil (Mt. 5: 39) acceptable to us.

Nevertheless, the question arises as to how far picking and choosing may be carried if those doing it can be deemed to be still within Christianity. The New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann has faced this problem in a series of books. He initially claimed that, even if we cannot accept that Jesus rose from the dead, we can still be Christians, because ‘before Easter, everything that was finally recognised after Easter’ – in particular ‘the experience of the unlimited grace of God which Peter had had in personal acquaintance with Jesus’ – ‘was already present’.Footnote ¹³ But he has come to repudiate this claim, and to concede that, without the resurrection, what is left is ‘too little historically to build a Christianity on’, namely a Jesus who ‘drove out demons like a magician’, and whose teaching was ‘a mistake, since the messianic kingdom did not materialize’.Footnote ¹⁴ In this context he makes clear that he has no time for the ‘intellectual obfuscation’ of those educated Christians who ‘think it important to maintain the confession of the resurrection regardless of what may be understood by it’. In the Preface to the American edition of this 1998 book, he notes that hardly any of his theological colleagues at Göttingen believe traditional Christian doctrines, and succeed in attaching themselves to this tradition only by ‘symbolic interpretation and other interpretive skills… Very few expect, for example, the return of Christ in judgment.’ Indeed, the sharp dichotomy between the loving mercy of God and Jesus in the present and their implacable severity as future judges has never been satisfactorily accounted for; and so the literal sense of this judgmental item in the creed, together with any literal understanding of the somewhat marginal doctrine of Jesus's virginal conception, are more readily surrendered than the central doctrine of his resurrection. Hence we find that, according to Dr. Jeffrey John, Dean of St. Albans Cathedral, the resurrection is ‘historical fact’,Footnote ¹⁵ whereas ‘born of the virgin Mary’ ‘must be regarded as doubtful biological history’ and really ‘intends only to affirm that Jesus was uniquely born by God's will and act’.Footnote ¹⁶ And ‘he will come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead’ does not embody ‘failed apocalyptic expectations’, but is no more than ‘a way of saying… that whatever happens will happen with God's care, and that he is both the origin and the goal of what he created in love’.Footnote ¹⁷

Dr. John has no time for the ultra-radical theologians such as Don Cupitt, Hugh Dawes and Anthony Freeman, whose views I have discussed in my 2004 book Can We Trust the New Testament? I can understand his impatient dismissal of them as ‘at bottom good old-fashioned empirical atheists’ who ‘want to practise atheism within the language and liturgy of the church’.Footnote ¹⁸ But his unflattering allusion here to what he calls ‘old-fashioned empiricism’ shows that much of today's religious apologetic is informed by hostility to the empirical tradition of the Enlightenment, a hostility exemplified in Tina Beattie's 2007 book. Writing as Professor of Catholic Studies at Roehampton University, she deplores undue concentration on ‘questions of evidence, proof and rationality’. which, she suggests, is ‘a very English brand of commonsense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste’.Footnote ¹⁹ Against this, she argues that

When she says that ‘Western science is just one particular way of interpreting the world’,Footnote ²¹ it would seem from all that I have quoted from her that she regards science as restricted to what can be identified as a tangible object, and weighed and measured. But there is surely ‘evidence’ enough of, for instance, love, indifference or hostility on the part of one's partner or associates from their behaviour (and of their ‘goodness’ or villainy likewise), and one would have to be very obtuse not to discern it. To say that there is love or goodness in someone's behaviour or beauty in music or poetry or in the features of a face is of course not to speak of an ingredient that can be isolated and transferred from one object to another. Beauty may be compared to a different kind of property – to the symmetry of a crystal, the viscosity of a fluid, the virulence of a poison; and the study of such properties is just as ‘scientific’ as the study of more tangible ones. People of the same race do not differ much in their ideas of human beauty; and as to music, poetry and the other arts, it is not impossible to determine factors in any one of these capable of exciting a certain emotional response – not universally but in some community or definable group of people. Such inquiries are certainly scientific, for science is investigation of how conditions and events are correlated. It is not a method limited to restricted spheres of nature, and I can see no justification for the somewhat vague claim that ‘the modern mind-set must yield to more holistic ways of being and knowing’.Footnote ²² When Professor Beattie assigns to religion rather than to science such questions as ‘how do we situate ourselves as creatures of language, feeling and consciousness in a world of such vulnerability and beauty’,Footnote ²³ we may appropriately bear in mind that subjects such as the psychological effects of art, the nature and origin of language, and the origin and destiny of man and of the universe around him, are among those which have been drawn only relatively recently into the domain of scientific inquiry, and that subjects such as these are those in which primitive ideas tend to persist, and in which the influence of religious authority has lasted longest.

Part of what Beattie says is an understandable reaction against the absurd claim that ‘science and progress go hand in hand as forces for good, while religion is always and everywhere an obstacle in their path’.Footnote ²⁴ It is obvious enough that scientific knowledge puts increased power not only into the hands of humane persons, but also into those of ambitious and unscrupulous ones. As for religion, she justly observes that sometimes it ‘provides a space of resistance and shelter for those who are forgotten or abandoned by science’,Footnote ²⁵ although it is relevant to note that fantastic beliefs may persist because of their tranquilizing value and the absence of ready means of disproof. But when she alleges that 'scientific rationalism' makes ‘claims to knowledge beyond the scope of its own authority’,Footnote ²⁶ she is voicing her view that the mandate of science is very restricted, and perhaps also failing to do full justice to the fact that many scientists recognize that their ideas are essentially provisional and that the claims of science are under constant revision.

Professor Beattie's desire that familiar reasoning processes be sometimes replaced by alternative ‘ways of being and knowing’ is widely shared. Alvin Plantinga, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, who dismisses the higher criticism as ‘fundamentally an Enlightenment project’, claims that God can be known without inference or argument by means of ‘a kind of faculty or cognitive mechanism’ other than reason, a ‘sense of divinity’ which affords a natural knowledge of God.Footnote ²⁷ But this ‘original noetic equipment’ given to us by ‘the Maker’ has been impaired by human sin. To counter this distortion God has vouchsafed us ‘the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit’ which produces in us ‘the gift of faith’. And by virtue both of the Spirit and of faith ‘we see that the teachings of Scripture’ – particularly ‘the main lines of the Christian gospel as set forth in Scripture’ – ‘are true’.Footnote ²⁸ Biblical critics, he complains, arbitrarily discount both faith and the Spirit as sources of warranted knowledge.Footnote ²⁹ We have seen above the convenience of introducing ‘the Spirit’ to authenticate what is desired, and in my 2004 book I was able to show that this has long been a ploy to discount the negative findings of historical criticism.Footnote ³⁰

More widely known than Plantinga is Karen Armstrong, who is described on the dust cover of her 2009 book as ‘one of the world's leading commentators on religious affairs’. She distinguishes mythos from logos as two different ways of acquiring knowledge. The question of the value of myth has become very prominent in recent religious apologetic. Now that the mythical character of much of the Bible has become too obvious to be denied, the idea has become popular that myth is an important form of religious truth. Logos (reason), the tool of science, enables us to cope effectively with the external world, but, she says, ‘could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggles'.Footnote ³¹ (This quest for ‘ultimate meaning’ reflects a widespread unwillingness to allow that the cosmos is indifferent to human interests). To find what is ultimate people turned to myth. Religion ‘was never supposed to provide answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason’. Its task, ‘closely allied to that of art, was to help us to live creatively, peacefully and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations, and problems that we could not solve: mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life’.Footnote ³² But theologians ‘began to adopt the criteria of science’ and as a result ‘the mythoi of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally and historically verifiable, and forced into a style of thinking that was alien to them’. Christians were then ‘taught to regard the truths of religion as well within the grasp of their minds and to treat the plain sense of scripture as factual’. But by the late nineteenth century ‘this attitude was becoming more and more difficult to maintain’.Footnote ³³ Certainly, to take scripture as attesting historical fact had become difficult, and hence the need for an alternative attitude to it. According to Armstrong, ‘the texts of the New Testament… were not primarily concerned with factual accuracy’, hence ‘we know very little about the historical Jesus’.Footnote ³⁴ She means that much in these texts was never meant to be understood literally. Atheists of today, she complains, ‘read scripture in an entirely literal manner and seem never to have heard of the long tradition of allegoric or Talmudic interpretation’.Footnote ³⁵ On an earlier page she recognizes that Christians applied allegory particularly to the Old Testament in order to extract a Christian meaning from it – a technique very useful when ‘the ancient biblical ethos’ appeared ‘somewhat alien’ to them.Footnote ³⁶ I would suggest, as an example, Psalm 137, where Jews exiled from Jerusalem by their Babylonian captors long for vengeance against Babylon, the devastator of their beloved city: ‘Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the rock’. It was no doubt edifying to be able to interpret the ‘little ones’ not as Babylonian children, but as the sins of Christians, and Christ as the ‘rock’ against which they should be dashed.

Armstrong is well aware that the Old and New Testament are replete with incompatible stories, and obviously thinks that, because ‘the final redactors felt no qualms’ about including them all, they ‘were not supposed to be factual’. Hence sceptics are foolish to ‘point derisively to the obvious discrepancies’ in, for instance, the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, which are not historical records but ‘exercises in creative midrash; their object was to show that Jesus’s coming was foretold in the Hebrew scriptures'.Footnote ³⁷ This was indeed one of their objects, but it was not an alternative to representing the incidents of his life as historical facts! It was obviously essential for the evangelists, as for the authors of the Qumran scrolls, that – I quote from H.C. Kee's recent study of Christian origins – there was ‘discernable correspondence between what the scriptures announced and what was actually occurring’, that ‘observable history’ demonstrated ‘the fulfilment of what God had announced beforehand through his prophets’.Footnote ³⁸

In 1921 the Old Testament scholar H.P. Smith argued, more plausibly than Armstrong, that it was what he called religious conservatism, and certainly not a renunciation of facticity, that so often led to the inclusion of contradictory material. He gave, as Old Testament examples, the two creation stories in Genesis and the two accounts of Saul's coronation in Samuel. On the two latter, he commented:

As to the two creation stories, Smith says that it is quite probable that the author of the more sophisticated of them ‘would have been willing to see his account displace the other. But again, religious conservatism, for which we cannot be too grateful, refused to let either one perish, and combined them’.Footnote ³⁹

The Old Testament includes many such ‘doublets’, where the same story is told twice, but in each case significantly differently. A more recent Old Testament scholar, R.E. Friedman, has suggested that both may have been so well known that it was simply not possible to get away with excluding one or the other.Footnote ⁴⁰ As I show in my 2009 book,Footnote ⁴¹ there are numerous examples of one New Testament writer ‘correcting’ an earlier account because he supposed that it had got the facts somewhat wrong. And as one or other of the two accounts was valued in some influential early Christian community, ultimately both had to be accepted into the canon.

It is obvious enough that human reason, in the sense of inferences from evidence, cannot solve problems when the evidence is insufficient, or the inferences too complex for even the best of minds. It is surely because of these perceived limitations that the doctrine that there are other sources of knowledge than empirical investigation is about as old as human speculation, and is why today we hear so much about ‘intuitive’, ‘holistic’ and ‘poetic’ forms of knowledge. The idea of intuition as some capacity to obtain knowledge immediately, without the aid of any process of inference, not infrequently serves as a basis for attractive theories about ethics, art and religion. Hence Armstrong speaks up for ‘ways of arriving at more intuitive knowledge’ than reasoning affords.Footnote ⁴² Enlightenment philosophers, she complains, ‘insisted that individuals must reason for themselves, and yet they were only permitted to think in accordance with the scientific method. Other more intuitive ways of arriving at different kinds of truth were… belittled’. This could only be to the detriment of theology, which is one of ‘the more intuitive disciplines’.Footnote ⁴³

Englefield, in his discussion of intuition, pointed out that immediate understanding occurs again and again in cases of perception, and no one supposes that anything mysterious or independent of previous experience is involved: ‘When we see the face of a familiar friend, we know immediately who it is. When we smell a certain acrid odour we know at once that something is burning. Certain other smells impossible to describe in any other way inform us at once of the presence of fish, onions, petrol, turpentine, alcohol, or beer’. A situation

Armstrong's understanding of intuition is linked with her view of God as ‘utterly transcendent’, a term which, drawing on its etymology, she defines as meaning ‘that which “climbs beyond” known reality and cannot be categorised’.Footnote ⁴⁵ God can be known only by such knowledge as is achieved when the mind directs the body ‘in a way that bypasses conscious logical deliberation’. It is of course true that we all come to do complex things – walking, speaking, digesting our food – with no awareness of how it is done or knowledge of the underlying mechanisms. Sometimes trial and error, even what Armstrong calls ‘constant dedicated practice’ is involved, as when we learn to play a musical instrument. The requisite intense concentration on the skill being learnt precludes any attention to our own mind: ‘self-forgetfulness’ is complete, and she supposes that we have thereby stepped outside our own ego. The intense satisfaction that the acquisition of such skills brings enables performers to feel ‘lifted beyond the confines of self’. In this way, ‘a musician can lose herself in her own music, a dancer becomes inseparable from the dance, and a skier feels entirely at one with himself and the external world’. This is ‘what the Greeks called ekstasis, a “stepping outside the norm”’. This feeling of oneness of the self and the world means that the performers have discovered – this is the crucial step in her argument – ‘a transcendent dimension of life that was not simply an external reality “out there”, but was identical with the deepest level of their being’, a ‘reality which they call God, Dao, Brahman, or Nirvana’. Experience of this reality illustrates man's ‘ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Some of our experiences we are indeed unable to classify (‘categorize’) as examples of a knowable and nameable class, as illustrations of some ‘concept’. But it is surely putting a strain on psychological theory to suppose that anything supernatural need be thereby involved.

Armstrong infers from all this that religion should consist of behaviour rather than doctrine. Pressing the analogy with the acquiring of musical skills, she says it was an ‘important insight’, now largely lost, that ‘God exceeded our thoughts and concepts and could only be known by dedicated practice’. All faith systems ‘have been at pains to show that the ultimate cannot be adequately expressed in any theoretical system, however august’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Hence one should not weigh up the teachings of a religion before ‘embarking on a religious way of life’, for their truth or falsehood will be discovered only by translating them into ‘ritual and ethical action’. She is well aware that in ancient times, religion consisted not so much in assent to specific doctrines, but in correct worship of the gods. ‘People re-enacted their myths in stylized ceremonies that worked aesthetically upon participants and, like any work of art, introduced them to a deeper dimension of existence’;Footnote ⁴⁸ and she pleads for a return to making in this way behaviour the basis of religion.

Like Armstrong, John Hick, who Keith Ward (Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford) has called ‘undoubtedly the greatest living philosopher of global religion’, is much exercised by the question of the value of myth. He explains that by ‘a true myth’, he means ‘a story, description or statement that is not literally true, but that nevertheless expresses and/or tends to evoke an appropriate dispositional attitude to the subject matter of the myth’.Footnote ⁴⁹ He gives as an example the idea of Jesus's incarnation which he regards as ‘a powerful metaphorical idea’, according to which ‘Jesus embodied an overwhelming awareness of the goodness and love of God’; ‘he lived out – that is, incarnated – the ideal of agape, self-giving love; and in so far as he was doing God's will on earth, God was (metaphorically) incarnate in his life’. In due course, this ‘metaphor of divine incarnation is expanded into the mythological story of the Son of God coming down from heaven to earth to be born in Bethlehem as the child of a virgin mother and dying on the cross as an atonement for the sins of the world’. Hence, although we may continue to celebrate Christmas, ‘we should be aware that the story behind it is symbolically rather than literally true’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Hick thinks that the doctrine of the resurrection can likewise be reinterpreted rather than abandoned, making Easter into ‘a joyful symbol of a central element of the Gospel, God's gift of renewal, of everlasting new beginnings, of rebirth,… our Christian symbol of hope… and an intimation of life beyond death’.Footnote ⁵¹ Letters from his readers have shown him that there has been ‘a good deal of double bluff going on’, in that lay persons felt they could not tell their minister about their doctrinal reservations and ministers with similar reservations felt they could not tell their people.Footnote ⁵²

Making old doctrines into metaphors, myths and symbols puts an end (as Hick is glad to see) to any Christian claim to be the one and only true religion: but abandoning such exclusiveness risks promoting scepticism about all religion – particularly now that the forms of religious instruction provided in the educational systems of modern multi-cultural Europe are ‘moving away from a mode based on catechesis to modes of teaching that offer information about rather than in religious beliefs’.Footnote ⁵³ Alan Billings observes:

Hick's account of religious truth is not linked with claims that it can be discerned by the exercise of some faculty or capacity that is independent of reason and of normal human consciousness. Although he holds that ‘religion consists primarily in experiencing life in its relation to the Transcendent’, and that the Transcendent is ‘Infinite Spirit’, he nevertheless maintains that ‘the epistemological character’ of such experience is ‘not… peculiar to religious consciousness’ and ‘is not fundamentally different in character from what is going on in other forms of awareness which we take to be awareness of our environment’.Footnote ⁵⁵ He believes that ‘reason’ can ascertain the possible existence of God; hence he recognizes that, for the solution of speculative problems, mankind has no other resources than the ideas and methods which serve them in more practical fields. For Hick, ‘consciousness’ is already sufficiently august; science can investigate its ‘neural underpinnings’, but ‘not consciousness itself’.Footnote ⁵⁶

We may see from the writers I have discussed a wide variety of responses to the higher criticism. Nearly all the higher critics themselves began as believers in the faith, and many of them have remained religious, practising what has been called ‘believing criticism’, which aims at clearing away dead wood so that what is valuable in the documents is the more readily discernible. Jacques Berlinerbau notes that ‘to their immense credit, biblical exegetes – who are rarely secularists – have produced all the explosive raw materials. Secular hermeneutics differs mainly in its critical orientation – its eagerness to detonate’.Footnote ⁵⁷ (He is concerned with exegesis of the Hebrew Bible rather than with the Christian scriptures, but his comments are applicable to the critics of both the Old and New Testaments). His point is that, whether we wish to ‘detonate’ or whether we find continuing faith plausible, we should be grateful to the higher critics; for to them we in good part owe it that in some countries people are free to believe or disbelieve traditional religious claims without penalty.