Bernard Ramm on Textual Criticism (1957)

For Christmas, Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of American evangelicals founded by Billy Graham, has opened its full archives. These go back to 1956 and make for educational reading on the history of American evangelicalism.

Pertinent to this blog is an article from CT’s second year by Bernard Ramm. Ramm was a key figure in the neo-evangelical movement of the mid-20th century. He was, according to CT’s obituary, “best known for drawing evangelical theology into dialogue with science and culture.” Given the importance of both Ramm and CT in evangelicalism, I note here a brief comment from a 1957 article that Ramm wrote titled “Are We Obscurantists?” In it, he touches briefly on textual criticism.

The evangelical has no means of settling the text of the Scripture outside the usual methods of scholarship. There is no official copy of either the Hebrew or Greek Testaments. There are only copies of them. There is only one conceivable method of settling the text of Scripture and that is by the employment of the general science of textual criticism modified to fit the peculiarities presented by the biblical texts. When Calvin treated the text of Scripture, he employed the methodology he learned as a humanist and attempted scientifically to determine the true readings (cf. B. B. Warfield, Calvin and Augustine, p. 58). Warfield himself affirmed in another place that “processes that are valid for the ascertainment of a secular are equally valid for the ascertainment of a sacred text” (Critical Reviews, p. 81).

Evangelicals may believe that God has remarkably preserved the text of the Old and New Testaments, but to determine the precise text of Scripture is a problem for scientific criticism. This is the essence of the evangelical position, and there is, therefore, no place for obscurantism here.

Since the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies in the 1930s, American evangelicals have sometimes suffered a nagging inferiority complex when it comes to academics. (It certainly doesn’t help when our finest historian says we have no mind!) All that makes for interesting background to Ramm’s appeal to textual criticism as one way to say we’re not, in fact, backwoods idiots. I suspect if Ramm were alive today, he would still agree with his assessment from 1956.