Forget the
documentary hypothesis, brother. No serious theologian uses that anymore, despite it still being found in most of our modern Bibles, up until recently. It was developed over the course of the 19th century and put in final form by Julius Wellhausen.
Basically, it teaches that Moses didn't write the Pentateuch (the first 5 books of the Bible, in canonical order: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, Deuteronomy), instead it was written, or more precisely, put together as a sort of mix-and-match copy-paste frankentext from at least four documentary sources: J, E, D, and P.
- The "Jawhist," Southern, primitive source, from around 900 B.C.
- The "Elohist," Northern, less primitive source, from around 800 B.C.
- The "Deuteronomist," ethical/preachy source, from around 600s B.C.
- The "Priestly," decadent ritualism, from around the exilic period or later.
This entirely new hypothesis makes irrelevant the old canonical order of the Pentateuch, where the organizing principle were the dealings of God with man:
- Creation
- The Fall
- The Consequences of the Fall
- The Calling of Abraham
- The formation of the people: giving them land, laws, promises, promising to bless the whole world in and by them.
Instead of the canonical order, the Documentary Hypothesis claims "J" comes first, then E, then D, then P. So, it uses the same material to tell an entirely different story. The Pentateuch is now read from the completely novel framework of
evolution, the shiny new toy in the 19th century's intellectual tool belt.
The story told by the reordered Pentateuch of the Documentary Hypothesis is now
the gradual growth and development of human religion, from the primitive anthropomorphic "J source," which Wellhausen compared to the pagan Arabs before the coming of Islam, all the way down to the decadent ritualistic "P source," which he compared to later rabbinic Judaism with its abstruse legalism and preposterous taboos. It's now the story of religious development: from the primitive apocalypticism of the earliest sources, to a more developed sapiential teaching, suitable to the needs of the later communities that wrote them.
Close your ears to their blandishments, brother, because these theories twist our religion into an entirely new thing where we no longer worship the God who thundered from atop Mount Sinai in cloud and Majesty and awe, where we no longer worship the Divine Savior who was crucified and risen for our salvation.
In this new religion, we and our community, not the God we worship, are the protagonists of our religious narrative. The story is now self-centered, rather the God-centered, it's about our own growth: from primitive tribes who believed in things like "miracles," to sophisticated, self-aware, and mature believers who tell hard truths and congratulate ourselves on how nuanced and critical we are.
The great struggle for the survival of the Church this century is over the authority of Scripture. Not women's ordination, not gay marriage, contraception, or whatever, those are all secondary; the determining factor for the survival of our Church will be Scripture.
This is where we stand or fall. Faithfulness isn't something you have to apologize for,
lean into it.
