This guide to the state of biblical studies features 20 chapters written by scholars from North America and Britain, and represents both traditional and contemporary points of view.

Many introductions to biblical studies describe critical approaches, but they do not discuss the theological implications. This timely resource discusses the relationship between historical criticism and Christian theology to encourage evangelical engagement with historical-critical scholarship. Charting a middle course between wholesale rejection and unreflective embrace, the book introduces evangelicals to a way of understanding and using historical-critical scholarship that doesn't compromise Christian orthodoxy. The book covers eight of the most hotly contested areas of debate in biblical studies, helping readers work out how to square historical criticism with their beliefs.

An introduction to one of the core methods of approaching biblical texts.

Richard Popkin's meticulous translation--the most complete since the eighteenth century--contains selections from thirty-nine articles, as well as from Bayle's four Clarifications. The bulk of the major articles of philosophical and theological interest--those that influenced Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Voltaire and formed the basis for so many eighteenth-century discussions--are present, including David, Manicheans, Paulicians, Pyrrho, Rorarius, Simonides, Spinoza, and Zeno of Elea.

A former liberal scholar and student of Rudolph Bultmann and Ernst Fuchs tells how modern biblical scholarship has drifted far from the truth, and why its assumptions are nonetheless so influential and thereby dangerous.

"Gerhard Maier is a German theologian who created a bit of a 'stir' when this book was published in Germany in 1974. Essentially, he argues for abandoning the 'critical' approach to biblical studies, and a return to treating it as 'revelatory.' Here are some quotations from the book: 'The Bible itself gives no key with which to distinguish between the Word of God and Scripture, and along with that, between Christ and Scripture (Pg. 16).' 'Accordingly, the historical-critical method is of necessity concerned with differences of content and judgments about facts, whereas the Bible wants to be a witness of personal encounter and the declaration of the divine will. A suitability of method to subject matter is again diminished or destroyed (Pg. 19).' 'This method would take human reason out of the fall into sin and use it critically, i.e., to discriminate and make judgments in matters of revelation. In actual fact this method has thereby already withdrawn reason from claims to revelation. What blindness! (Pg. 23)' 'The assumptions of the historical-critical method--founded on human arbitrariness--logically lead to this, that man himself appears as the norm in the real canon. Man, who began critically to analyze revelation and to discover for himself what is normative, found at the end of the road: himself (Pg. 35).' 'The theologian is different. He must methodologically begin with the assumption that a given event here is possible, and therefore he must ensure an openness to the methodological principle which will not hastily and insolently curtail divine revelation at any place ... Therefore the historical-critical method is to be replaced by a historical-Biblical one (Pg. 52).' 'Our starting point was the methodological insight that, at least initially, we must let revelation determine its own limits. Consequently revelation defines itself (Pg. 63).' "The often sadistic desire to elaborate on contradictions has no support in the Biblical method (Pg. 71)'"--Amazon.com.