REVIEW OF DENNIS NINEHAMS THE USE AND ABUSE OF THE BIBLE

Gordon James Klingenschmitt

Dennis Eric Nineham was Warden at Keble College at Oxford, who wrote the book The Use and
Abuse of the Bible 1 in 1976 to fulfill a promise to publish the lectures he had prepared to deliver
at Birmingham University in 1969.
My general impression of the book and the author is that Nineham is writing to defend the use of
historical critical method, as he was apparently influenced to appreciate by Bultmann, but also to
help us appreciate the intentions of the writers of the Bible as powerful storytellers, not primarily
as historians. The summary of the book is best exemplified by a quote from one of his final
chapters: One of the valuable contributions of form-criticism has been to bring home to us that
every periscope partakes of this dual character; insofar as it is historical at all, it is precisely
history AND storyhistory embedded in a context of interpretive story. 2 Sifting which parts of
the Bible are story and which parts are history is the job of the skilled historical interpreter.
With this overview in mind, I shall attempt to sequentially engage Nineham by offering what I
believed were his defining quotes of each chapter, with my personal reactions.
Nineham begins the book by talking about the importance of recognizing our own weakness as
interpreters, since we are likely captive to our own pre-suppositions, and cannot remain impartial
when approaching any text, or any subject in human history: He says, individual human beings
have had virtually no freedom of choice about the way they understood their humanity and its
environment and relationships. Their understanding has been almost entirely controlled by the
understandings of the matter, and the categories of interpretation, available in the various
communities to which they belonged. 3
While this may be a well-argued point, it seems too pessimistic to assume the text doesnt have
the power to change our hearts and minds, all by itself. Of course we approach the text with our
own flawed presuppositions. Yet our greatest hope is that simply reading the Bible with an open
heart may be sufficient to dislodge certain pre-suppositions we hold about human nature or the
nature of God, and its entirely likely the Bible has indeed transformed many lives. In this way I
disagree with Nineham, suggesting the possibility the Bible actually reads us, and with Gods
grace it communicates its message into our hearts, if we are willing, perhaps more frequently than
we read our flawed interpretations into the text.
Nineham believes, however, that our understanding is governed by our presuppositions, or more
specifically, its governed by those pre-suppostions taught to us by other interpreters of the Bible.
In practice the absolute presuppositions Christian readers have normally felt obliged to accept in
interpreting the Bible have been the presuppositions not so much of the biblical writers
themselves as of those who have interpreted the Bible in whatever periods patristic, medieval or
reformation the readers in question have regarded as classical and authoritative. 4 Nineham
believes it very difficult for any interpreter to come up with an original modern interpretation, or
even understand the original intent of the authors, since we are too captive to the interpretations
held by our Sunday school teachers and college professors, to really understand the text.

Dennis Eric Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible (London: The Macmillan Press, 1976).
Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 5.
3
Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 4.
4
Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 37.
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Gordon James Klingenschmitt

He further states, In reading the Bible Christians have usually taken for granted the truth of the
classical creeds and of the formularies of the denomination to which they belonged, and, with
varying degrees of self-awareness, allowed them to influence and dictate their interpretation of
the text. 5
This seems again a pessimistic outlook for the relationship between God and man, however, since
nowhere in the book does Nineham express appreciation of the living nature of the Spirit of God
and His Divine ability to express Himself in our hearts as we engage the text. If we are truly
captive to our pre-suppositions, Nineham makes no allowance for the Holy Spirits ability to
break through to our minds and express what HE meant for us to know, when He inspired the
evangelists to write the Bible as a message to us about God.
Nineham articulates another challenge to modern biblical interpretation, that since human nature
changes over generations of time, depending on what lessons the culture learns, the
understanding and expression of it change so radically as to raise a major problem for the current
understanding of the bible and of earlier interpretations of it. 6
Our modern cultural understanding of astronomy, for example, has changed greatly in the last 500
years, in such a way that modern biblical scholars understand the much greater magnitude of the
Old Testament miracle when God stopped the sun in the sky for a day, than the original audience
understood.7 Because humanity has evolved in our understanding, we cannot possibly think the
same way about a text as its original recipients thought. I consent to Ninehams reasoning here,
and appreciate the difficulty faced by 21st century scholars in trying to discern the original
meaning of 1st century authors, considering (if nothing else) the great cultural divide between us.
Nineham examines the nature of religious authority of the early church fathers, and predicts
how that likely has irreparably caused greater pre-suppositions in our minds, even more difficult
to overcome. For example, early church doctrines fought to codify groups of doctrines into
orthodoxy and heresy based on the authority of the particular bishop asserting the doctrine.
Early church expositors were therefore governed by presuppositions of apostolic authority
depending largely on which third or fourth century apostle they chose to follow.
Nineham points out, exegesis was understood essentially as the translation of biblical statements
into the categories of that form of the dominant philosophical tradition which appealed most to
the exegete doing the work...the philosophical tradition went a long way towards defining the
nature of the traditional biblical interpretation. 8 He concludes that now that we have these
notions of the traditional biblical interpretation it becomes harder to discover the original
meaning of the text, since we would have to fight against our own tradition to arrive there.
Nineham praises the methods of modern liberal academics, however, who have taken a turn away
from reliance on authority of the previous interpretation, toward autonomous empirical
analysis. Men have learned instead to base their statements and convictions solely on
experimentation and on what can be empirically verified, whatever the appropriate method of
empirical verification may be in any particular discipline. It is by now inconceivable that in any
branch of study a conclusion grounded on sound empirical evidence should be contested simply

Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 37.

Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 39.
7
Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 33.
8
Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 53.
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Gordon James Klingenschmitt

because it does not accord with the dicta of some authority or with what Christians have
traditionally been accustomed to believe. 9
With appreciation for Ninehams quest for impartial and empirical analysis, however, I must point
out that liberals also have many pre-suppositions, inherited from their own saintly modern
scholars, and it seems a little high-minded to claim their pre-suppositions are less intrusive than
ours. Why shouldnt the early church fathers tradition be more trustworthy than our modern
novel interpretations, since, if nothing else, they were closer in time to the teachings of Jesus,
and likely therefore have 18 fewer centuries of filters through which they received his
interpreted words? Would Nineham have me believe the interpretive methods of Hegel, Hume,
Bultmann, Nietzsche (or myself), are more trustworthy than Augustine, Tertullian, Paul, or John?
Nineham acknowledges a push-back of resistance to counter this modern liberal scientific
turn, by reformers like Karl Barth, who returned our attention to the authoritative nature of Gods
revelation as given to certain men, throughout the history of Gods intervention in our lives.
Gods supernatural revelation to the disciples, for example, who walked with Jesus and
understood him in a highly specialized manner, actually gives them authority to explain Jesus in
ways that other historians (like Josephus) cannot. As William Temple wrote, the revelation was
in events or in a person. 10
Nineham criticizes Barth, however, saying Indeed in reading the Dogmatics one gets an
impression of a very determined attempt by a twentieth century writer to make sense of biblical,
and traditional ecclesiastical, categories at all costs. 11 He sees Barth as a defender of the
traditional interpretation, not an exegete trying to discern the original meaning of the text. This
accusation could be leveled at Nineham just as easily, however, as a defender of liberal presuppositions (even his own) as intellectually superior to the traditional ones.
As a case example, when interpreting the life of Jesus, Nineham admits Barth would deny
outright that there is any point in letting the historian as such...loose on it at all. If it is
investigated in a historisch manner, he says, then the result will inevitably be a false abstraction
of the most misleading kind...the history of Jesus which is central is the testimony of the biblical
texts themselves....there is no need to dig out the so-called historical facts...Jesus Christ is
present to us and speaks to us in the logia that have been handed down. He acts among us to-day
in the records of his miracles, the story of his passion, the accounts of his resurrection on the third
day. 12 With respect to both sides, Barths arguments have more merit than Nineham credits. It
seems equally likely that some modern liberal academics abuse historical method beyond its
capacity, overreaching to eagerly criticize which parts of the Bible are fictionalized, such that we
fail to believe the message of the evangelists or even Christ.
Yet Barths dismissal of historical critical method is insufficient for Nineham, for two reasons:
First, Christians are continually being challenged by doubts about the veracity of the accounts,
and second, we feel an obligation to be more certain about the occurrence of certain past
events. 13 So he recommends historical investigation, as a means to increase our confidence in
the historicity of the stories in the text.

Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 61.

Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 74.
11
Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 80.
12
Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 86.
13
Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 93.
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Nineham turns to appreciate historical methodology of hermeneutical scholars, such as Bultmann,

claiming their motive has been their belief that if only the appropriate hermeneutic techniques
can be discovered and employed, the New Testament will be found to yield, in a form fully
intelligible and acceptable today, an account of that once for all divine intervention which has
been [authoritative] for all Christian totalities from New Testament times onward. 14
Having brought us half-way through his book by arguing the importance of using historical
method to make the Bible more believable, however, I notice Ninehams application to Old and
New Testament exegesis achieves the opposite result, and arrives at the opposite conclusion,
making the historicity of the text far less believable than any plain face-value reading of the
text might suggest.
For example, on the probability of historical miracles in the Old Testament, Nineham expresses
doubt of their literal historicity: ...on analysis, some of the events generally put forward as key
divine interventions have themselves proved to be what I may call constructions-out-of-faith, that
is, imaginative reconstructions by the later Jewish community of what, given their assumptions,
must have happened in the past for their relationship to God in the present to be what they
believed it to be. 15
On the probability of historical miracles in the New Testament, Nineham criticizes the early
church fathers for playing the God card in promoting the scriptures as divinely inspired, and
therefore creating stronger presuppositions which elevated the Bible beyond criticism altogether.
What they said in effect, though they did not consciously formulate it in this way, was: if the
divine-human event A occurred, then (given our presuppositions) B C D...must also be true. 16
By teaching early church followers of the early church fathers that B, C, and D must also be true,
Nineham suggests theyve overstated the actual truthfulness of their case, creating false presuppositions that have carried on (unchecked) throughout church history.
The position we are now discussing would appear to make those who framed the classical
Christian doctrines the ultimate authority in relation to Christian belief...it would make them
superior to Jesus himself...it emerged not directly from Jesus himself but from fourth and fifth
century theologians working on the tradition about him. 17
Nineham concludes by lamenting how our pre-suppositions are strengthened by reading the Bible
through the lens of our catechism, for example, with well-entrenched understandings of doctrines
like the trinity, and the divinity of Christ, and pre-assuming the messianic prophecies about Jesus
before we read them in the Old Testament, which color our ability to impartially exegete the text.
The job of the interpreter is not to use the Bible (or even just read the Bible) in order to justify our
pre-suppositions, but to properly understand the original meaning we must try to put ourselves in
the original shoes of the original writer. The exegete, then, must think the thoughts of the
biblical writers after them. 18 If he means that Jesus words must influence us more than
Tertullians or Augustines, of course there can be no disagreement.
Yet Ninehams frequently repeated appreciation of Bultmann reveals his liberal bent. In the
language of Bultmann...some things in the Bible are geschichtlich, as opposed to historisch, that
is, historic as opposed to merely historical, or past; like other things which we call historic, they
14

Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 114.

Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 136.
16
Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 171.
17
Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 173.
18
Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 214.
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still have influence and significance for our time....Bultmann claims that everything depends, in
the interpretation of a thing, on your Vorverstandnis, your pre-understanding, that is, the set of
preoccupations, questions and expectations with which you approach it. 19
And yet, so far as Nineham casually dismisses the inspired interpretations of the early church
fathers, I can offer him no praise or appreciation. Out of respect for church history, if nothing
else, I invite and respect the religious authority of the apostles (and their students), since their
interpretations of the meaning and significance of the life of Jesus are at least more authoritative
than my own. I am their student, not their teacher, and from personal experience (and the shared
testimony of centuries of disciples), the Spirit of God has made greater progress in my personal
transformation and sanctification during those seasons I simply believed the plain meaning of the
text, or gleaned from the teachings of the early fathers, than he has made in me during those
seasons when I intellectually resisted the plain meaning of the text with doubt and reasoning
about which parts may not be true after all. Ninehams first presupposition is that of doubt,
while my first inclination is to believe. If both presuppositions (his and mine) were equally
authoritative, faith and trust in the early fathers would remain morally superior to unbelief, since
love believes all things and always trusts.20
While Nineham suggests its important to separate the story from the history of the text, I
conclude quite the opposite. The story of the text, even if it were not historic, still has spiritual
significance toward molding our character and helping us understand the evangelists
interpretation of events they reported as historic. I would rather understand their interpretation,
than develop my own novel interpretation, since I respect their spiritual authority as more
Christlike than my own. Nineham, however, spends more effort in his book calling into question
the authority of the early church fathers, and the traditional interpretations of doctrine, than he
does encouraging Biblical scholars to learn and assimilate the intentions of the writers of the text,
as carefully handed down to us by centuries of trustworthy followers of Christ.
For this reason, Id rate Ninehams book only a C+ on the Klingenschmitt scale. It may be
important to learn and appreciate historical method and form criticism for academic reasons, and
to learn to join in their liberal discussion, but devotionally the book didnt serve to inspire greater
love toward Jesus Christ and Biblical truth. The Use and Abuse of the Bible instead provided a
flawed academic attempt to undermine the trustworthiness of church history and the early fathers,
ultimately inspiring more doubt than faith.

19
20

Nineham, The Use And Abuse of The Bible, 216.

1 Cor 13:7 (NASB), 1 Cor 13:7 (NIV)