Education for Such a Time As This

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E.A. Sutherland Education Association

The Biblical Foundation for Adventist Education

Ed Zinke

1. The Knowledge of God in Nature

2. The Authority of the Bible in the History of Theology: Pre-Reformation

3. The Authority of the Bible in the History of Theology: Reformation to Present

4. History of Methods in Biblical Study

5. Principles for Biblical Thought

6. The Biblical Worldview and Adventist Education

7. Doctrine and Personal Relationship with God

So, this next section is going to be the last theoretical section, and I'm going to get into biblical materials and biblical worldview.

The reason I want to go through this is because it describes the way the Bible has been studied up until about 20 years ago, for a period of up to 200 years.

And that method of studying the Bible has infiltrated itself into our church.

In fact, when I get there, I'll describe a couple of papers that have been written by some Theadmonist theologians.

My son David Zinke did a lot of the illustrating and then Carol Rainey at Southern Adventist University came along and enhanced and modified and added some PowerPoints.

And then my son, Doug, is kind of the energy that I need to do this.

When he was a little boy, he would sit on the front row and he would make sure I had my illustrations at the right time.

Actually he got them to me ahead of time.

It was so cute to have him sitting there just waiting to bring this illustration up.

So anyway, And the other thing I showed you, my family, and the reason I'm willing to do something like this rather than sitting in Florida with my toes in the sand is I want my kids to, my grandkids to grow up in a church that accepts the Bible as the authoritative word of God, and the foundation for its teaching and thinking and acting and so on.

So my prayer is, you know, that this will be a little bit of an impetus.

I know that you folks already come from that background, and I appreciate that.

A little bit of an impetus to even more clearly use scripture as the foundation for your teaching.

So we're going to deal with historical critical method.

Historical critical method, remember we said with Origen we had a method that came out of Platonism and with Aristotle we had a method that came out of, I mean with Thomas Aquinas we had a method, well with Aristotle a method that came out of Aristotelianism which was then used by Thomas Aquinas for his study of scripture.

Okay now we have a new philosophical system.

We saw that there's a new concept of God, deism.

By the way, we aren't absent from that, but deism.

And now we have a new method that coincides with the new philosophical systems.

And that method is called the historical critical method.

So within that method are a number of sub-methods and we'll only deal with a few of them, have a dictionary of historical criticism that's about like that, and I suspect if 1 were written today, it would be twice that.

There's a criticism for this and a criticism for that.

It's amazing how many different critical methods you can have.

So it accepts the norms of historical science as a means for studying scripture.

So instead of the reformers, how did they study scripture?

So the Bible was the context, and the Bible provided the method for interpreting itself.

So here the norms of contemporary historical science are the basis for studying Scripture.

It is a new metaphysic, a new way to understand the world.

So, the old metaphysic, what is rational is real.

The new metaphysic, that which is studied within the flow of history can be accepted as real.

So the historical critical method, the norms of historical science are employed to determine the nature of the Bible and to test all of its truth claims.

So if the Bible says something happened, well, I'm going to go, I'm going to check history and history will tell me whether that's true or not.

The method presupposes that the Bible is not the inspired Word of God.

Remember, what did we say we were going to presuppose?

That the Bible is the inspired Word of God.

Okay, it presupposes that the Bible is not the inspired Word of God.

And if the Bible is the Word of God, that will be determined by the method itself.

It's not going to be determined by the Holy Spirit or anything like that.

It's going to be determined by the method itself.

So contrary to the claims of the Bible in general, historical critical method and the satenant methods presuppose that the Bible is not the inspired Word of God and assume that the Bible came by the will of man rather than by the will of God.

As such, the Bible must be studied by the same methods as are applied to any other piece of literature." So when you're reading the Bible, you know, think of Homer and the Iliad and think of Shakespeare and think of this poet and this historian and so on and so forth, but don't think that the Holy Spirit is behind what you're reading, because you're thinking falsely if you're thinking that, that is from the standpoint of the historical critical method.

Okay, as such, the Bible must be studied by the same methods or as applied to any other piece of literature.

So if it's not the inspired Word of God, then you're going to study it like you would any other piece of literature.

So the method was popularized at the end of the 1900s by Trolich.

It started with the principle of criticism.

So you can have, It's not necessarily negative.

You can have a concert and you can have a music critic that is quite complimentary of your performance.

So it means that human reason is the determiner of truth, of what actually took place.

Anything that happened in the past has to have an analogy in the present.

So have any of you been to a cemetery in the last 5 years?

Did you see a resurrection while you were there?

Did you read about 1 in the Washington Post or the New York Times?

Okay, well then there wasn't a resurrection 2, 000 years ago either.

The present determines the truth of any event recorded in the past.

Next 1 is correlation, and that is that everything is cause and effect.

You know, kind of like this car caused this accident, caused this accident, caused this accident, caused this accident.

And so you start here and you work back until you finally get back to the, this car started the whole chain of events.

Okay, so everything is connected by cause and effect.

So you have this cause that produces an effect, which produces a cause, which produces an effect.

And nothing breaks that chain of cause and effect.

Okay, well if nothing breaks that chain of cause and effect, what do you do with God?

He can't come and perform a miracle because that's not cause and effect.

You're breaking that chain of cause and effect.

Okay, so those 3 principles were the basic principles of historical critical method.

Now as I mentioned, there were a bunch of sub-methods that came under the historical critical method.

Source criticism, this is Wellhouse in the end of the 1800s, came along and said, the Pentateuch was not written by Moses.

In fact, 1 of my wife's professors 1 day said, Moses and God and Sinai never crossed paths.

And the 10 Commandments came from the Hittite Treaty.

And my wife said, OK, so I'll cut this part out.

And he paused for a moment and said, well, I don't really know.

Well, 2 weeks later we found out he was playing around with his secretary, and so he had to leave.

It didn't matter what he was doing to the minds of the kids.

It was okay to say that the 10 Commandments and God never met, but it wasn't okay to be engaged in that kind of activity.

So anyway, okay, so J-E-D-P, the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of the Old Testament were not written by Moses.

Over a period of a long period of time, there was a group of scholars or maybe 1 scholar or maybe a tradition or we don't know for sure what.

Anyway, they wrote document J And that contained a little bit of the story of creation and a little bit of the story of the flood and so on and so forth.

And a hundred years later another group of scholars came along and they wrote document J.E.

And a hundred years later another group of scholars D, another group of scholars B, a hundred years later.

And at the time of the exile, somebody pulled all of these manuscripts together.

So it's like, suppose you're writing a story about the general conference and you go back and you take an article from the 1850s and you find an article in the Washington Post and 1 in the New York Times and so on and so forth.

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The Biblical Foundation for Adventist Education

4. History of Methods in Biblical Study

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