The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason, empiricism, and skepticism toward traditional authority, gave rise to the naturalistic approach to scripture and modern textual criticism. These challenged transcendental and fideistic views of truth and the belief in the providential, divine, and perfect preservation of scripture. This shift occurred through a convergence of intellectual movements—empiricism, German rationalism, and Romanticism—that prioritized human reason, historical context, and critical inquiry over divine revelation.
Enlightenment Empiricism
Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and David Hume emphasized empirical observation, reason, and evidence-based knowledge over faith. Empiricism demanded that claims, including those about scripture, subject to scrutiny and be verified through observable data rather than accepted on divine authority. This led to the questioning of scripture’s supernatural origins and the notion of its perfect preservation.
Scholars began treating biblical texts as historical documents subject to the same critical analysis as any other ancient text. For example, Baruch Spinoza and Richard Simon applied historical-critical methods to scripture, looking for inconsistencies, manuscript variations, and historical contexts, which undermined the idea of a divinely preserved, inerrant text.
Empiricism eroded fideistic reliance on faith alone, replacing it with a demand for verifiable evidence. This fostered textual criticism, which sought to reconstruct the original texts of scripture through manuscript comparison, linguistic analysis, and historical evidence, rather than assuming divine preservation.
German Rationalism
German rationalists like Immanuel Kant and Gotthold Lessing prioritized reason as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Kant’s “religion within the bounds of reason” and Lessing’s “ditch” (the gap between historical facts and metaphysical claims) challenged the idea that scripture could provide absolute, transcendent truth.
Rationalist scholars like Johann Semler and Johann Griesbach pioneered higher criticism, which analyzed the Bible’s composition, authorship, and historical development. Semler’s distinction between “scripture” (human writings) and the “Word of God” (divine truth) decoupled the text from divine perfection, treating it as a product of human culture and history. Griesbach’s work on New Testament textual variants formalized textual criticism, focusing on manuscript evidence to determine the most likely original readings, rather than assuming divine intervention in preservation.
Rationalism rejected the transcendental view that scripture inherently carried divine authority, instead subjecting it to human reason and historical analysis. This naturalized scripture, viewing it as a fallible human artifact rather than a divinely preserved text.
Romantic Movement
Romanticism, reacting to Enlightenment rationalism, emphasized emotion, intuition, and the historical context of human experience. Thinkers like Johann Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher highlighted the cultural and historical specificity of texts, including scripture, viewing them as expressions of human creativity and historical moments. Romanticism influenced biblical scholarship by encouraging a focus on the historical and cultural contexts of scriptural texts.
Johann Herder’s emphasis on the “spirit” of a text’s historical setting and Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, which treated scripture as a product of human religious experience, further naturalized the Bible. This approach prioritized understanding the human authors and communities behind the texts, rather than seeing them as divinely dictated.
Romanticism’s historical sensitivity reinforced textual criticism by encouraging scholars to study the Bible’s development within specific cultural and linguistic contexts. This led to source criticism (e.g., the Documentary Hypothesis for the Pentateuch) and form criticism, which analyzed the oral and literary traditions behind the texts, further undermining claims of perfect preservation.
Rise of Modern Textual Criticism
The convergence of empiricism’s evidence-based approach, rationalism’s critical reasoning, and Romanticism’s historical focus gave rise to modern textual criticism. Scholars like Lachmann, Tischendorf, and Westcott-Hort developed systematic methods to compare manuscripts, identify variants, and reconstruct the most likely original texts. This relied on naturalistic assumptions, prioritizing textual evidence over theological claims of divine preservation.
A movement arose to seek and embrace a few older manuscripts with thousands of textual variants, which challenged the belief in a perfectly preserved text. Higher criticism, building on rationalist principles, examined the Bible’s historical development, authorship, and redaction, treating it as a collection of human writings rather than a unified, divinely inspired text. The multiplicity of textual variants and the historical complexity of the Bible’s composition led scholars to reject the idea that God had supernaturally preserved a single, perfect text. Instead, they sought the “best” text through critical reconstruction.
Unseating Transcendental and Fideistic Views
The transcendental view held that scripture was a direct conduit of divine truth, inherently authoritative and unchanging. Enlightenment empiricism and rationalism challenged this by demanding evidence for such claims, while Romanticism’s focus on human experience relativized scripture as a product of specific historical moments.
Fideism, which prioritized faith over reason, was undermined as scholars insisted on rational and empirical scrutiny of scripture. The naturalistic approach treated the Bible as a human artifact, subject to errors, alterations, and historical contingencies, rather than a divinely protected text.
The doctrine of providential preservation, prominent in Reformation theology (e.g., the Textus Receptus), was challenged by the empirical evidence of textual variants and the rationalist critique of divine intervention in textual transmission. Textual criticism demonstrated that no single manuscript or textual tradition could claim absolute fidelity to the original, leading to a probabilistic approach to reconstructing the text.
Cultural and Theological Implications
The naturalistic approach shifted authority from divine revelation to human scholarship, aligning biblical studies with secular disciplines like history and philology. This democratized interpretation but also sparked theological debates, as traditionalists defended the inerrancy and divine preservation of scripture against critical scholarship.
The Enlightenment’s legacy persists in modern biblical studies, where textual criticism remains a cornerstone, relying on naturalistic methods to study manuscripts like the Dead Sea Scrolls or Codex Vaticanus, confining fideistic and transcendental views to Bible preaching and practicing churches and conservative theological circles.
The Result of Naturalistic Movements
The empiricism of the Enlightenment provided the methodological rigor, German rationalism the critical framework, and Romanticism the historical sensitivity that together birthed the naturalistic approach to scripture and modern textual criticism. These movements dismantled transcendental and fideistic views of truth by subjecting scripture to human reason and historical analysis.
Instead of believing what God said He would do and the history of the doctrine of the preservation of scripture, individual men and institutions embraced textual complexities and human origins. Scholars unseated belief in providential, divine, and perfect preservation as they prioritized evidence-based reconstruction over theological assumptions, fundamentally reshaping the study and understanding of scripture.