"Has God Indeed Said?" - Biblical Blueprints

6 • Has God Indeed Said?
are based on is found in Egypt, a place that had no letters sent to
it, but where most of the early heresies originated. 10
Humanistic versus Biblical Presuppositions
Majority Text advocates are often criticized for bringing
Biblical presuppositions into the study of texts rather than being
neutral. But while objectivity is important, neutrality is
impossible. Evaluation of the evidence is always driven by prior
presuppositions.
The presuppositions that drive modern textual criticism are
thoroughly humanistic even when evangelicals use them. It is
ironic that evangelicals who shrink in horror from the humanistic
assumptions found in "higher criticism" have adopted the same
assumptions when it comes to textual criticism. For example,
Edward John Carnell rightly rejected higher criticism because "a
fundamental presupposition of the higher critic is that the Bible
is just another piece of human writing, a book to which the
scientific method may safely be applied, not realizing that the
Bible message stands pitted in judgment against that very
method itself." 11 However he advocated textual criticism with the
same presupposition.
Warfield and all later textual critics within the evangelical
camp treat it in the same way they treat the transmission of
secular documents. L Harold De Wolfe, a liberal complained
about the inconsistency saying,
"The intimate and inseparable relation between textual and
historical studies of the Bible seems not to be adequately
appreciated by some conservative scholars. For example,
Edward J. Carnell praises unstintingly the devotion, skill,
and results of textual criticism ... On the other, when the
10
On this last point, Pickering deduces some major implications in the last
chapter of this book.
11
Edward John Carnell, An Introduction to Christian Apologetics (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), p. 194.