[Time: 3 minutes. Read below or listen here.]
In the mid-1700s, Hermann Reimarus did something quite detrimental to the understanding of the Bible. He believed that there was, somewhere, a deity, but did not feel the need to be any more specific. He rejected Christianity outright. These beliefs, or lack thereof, might certainly have been detrimental to him, but he did something that affected the study of the Bible to this day.
Reimarus (1694-1768) decided to write the real life of Jesus by following the rationalist assumption that God could not and would not intervene in any non-natural way. Removing all the miracles and any reference to the supernatural, he focused on the history of the early first century to portray Jesus as a Jewish revolutionary who suffered an ignoble death at the hands of the occupying Romans. This “Quest for the Historical Jesus” continues in the twenty-first century in book after book that tries to remove the supernatural features of the Gospels from the historical features.
This does violence to the Bible, because the books of the Bible firmly root God’s supernatural interventions in the history of specific people at identifiably specific times and places in history. It is easy to over-react to the kind of ruthless application of history that Reimarus introduced. In reaction, some Christians have leaned toward focusing on the supernatural aspects of God’s Word while eschewing all historical references. If you ignore the historical setting of a Bible passage and look only for verses that could apply to you today, you will tend to misunderstand the meaning of those verses. It makes the Bible fundamentally unreal.
The Bible is solidly supernatural and firmly rooted in human history. Both.
If you have not yet read or listened to all of Genesis, go ahead to Steps 7 and 8 to discover something of the Bible’s overall Story to watch for as you read. You will need to complete the reading/listening before going to Step 9.