Becoming Awakened to the Issue

In the fall of 1969, when I entered Belhaven College, my grip on the authority of Scripture was loosening. I had spent the previous season continuing under the preaching of a pastor who proclaimed his politics—especially his anti‑war convictions—more fervently than the gospel. At the same time, I was being influenced by a Neo‑Orthodox intern from Columbia Theological Seminary who dismissed evangelicals as mere “Bible‑thumpers.” Under that pressure, my confidence in Scripture began to erode.

But once I arrived at Belhaven, I discovered something unexpected: The “Bible‑thumpers” could defend their position far better than I could defend my doubts. Slowly, my hold on Scripture tightened again. Yet I still carried a lingering awe for the supposed erudition of liberal scholarship. God, in his Providence, cured me of that awe.

One of the great strengths of my professors at Belhaven was their insistence that we read liberal theologians directly, so that we would not argue against straw men. J. Knox Chamblin assigned J. A. T. Robinson’s In the End, God in a course on apocalyptic literature. In that curious book, Robinson claimed that Paul was uncertain about the resurrection because he wrote, “If Christ is not risen from the dead . . .” (see 1 Cor. 15:14).[1] I remember thinking that even a child can see Paul is using a contrary‑to‑fact conditional—an argumentum ad absurdum—which he immediately resolves with the triumphant declaration: “But now Christ is risen from the dead and has become the firstfruits of them that sleep.” I thought to myself, “A man who reasons like this is not a man whose reasoning I need to fear.”

Rudolf Bultmann gave me another such moment. In his Theology of the New Testament, he argued that demythologizing is necessary because no modern journalist would attribute an unusual occurrence to a supernatural cause—as though the contemporary newsroom were the standard of truth and right thinking.[2] I remember reading that and thinking, “This is not argument; this is fiat decree.” The entire edifice of his method rested not on exegesis but on the unexamined assumption that the modern world is closed to divine action.

Those two encounters—Robinson’s misreading of Paul and Bultmann’s appeal to the journalist as epistemic gatekeeper—did more to free me from the intimidation of liberal scholarship than any apologetics text could have done. God used their very arguments to show me that the authority of Scripture does not tremble before the cleverness of its critics.

The value of these moments extends beyond the individual lessons they taught. They revealed a pattern of reasoning that, for lack of a better term, I can only describe as intellectual gymnastics—the elaborate lengths to which doubting scholars will go to avoid bowing to the authority of the Word of God. Red flags appear whenever reasoning becomes circuitous, strained, or evasive in order to prevent the Holy Spirit from speaking in the way he plainly intends to speak.

The Modern Impulse to Rehabilitate the Ethics of Scripture

A recurring feature of modern biblical scholarship is the quiet but persistent confidence that contemporary ethical norms—whatever their source—are more reliable than the ethics of the inspired authors of Scripture. When a biblical narrative portrays God speaking or acting in ways that trouble modern sensibilities, the instinct is not to question the sensibilities but to reinterpret the text. The biblical writer must be “rescued” from the moral embarrassment he would cause if his words were taken at face value. The scholar becomes the moral arbiter; the prophet becomes the one in need of rehabilitation.

This dynamic is evident in Donald J. Wiseman’s treatment of the destruction of the first two captains and their fifties in 2 Kings 1:1–16. Wiseman rightly rejects the charge of “inhumanity,” yet he does so in a way that leaves the reader unsure whether he regards the event as historical or merely theological drama. His language subtly shifts agency away from God and toward Elijah. He writes, for example, that Elijah was “protecting the Name of God,” as though the prophet—not the Lord—were the active cause of the consuming fire, however one wishes to picture it.[3] The narrative itself, of course, attributes the fire explicitly to the LORD. By framing Elijah as the one who safeguards God’s honor, Wiseman unintentionally blurs the line between prophetic obedience and divine action. The effect is to soften the force of the text by making Elijah the moral agent and the fire a symbolic vindication rather than an act of God in history. This is precisely the kind of interpretive move that reveals a deeper discomfort with the biblical portrayal of divine judgment. His reluctance is understandable once one recognizes the scholarly tradition he is interacting with. James A. Montgomery, in his influential commentary, explicitly labels the episode morally problematic and historically doubtful. For Montgomery, the severity of the narrative reflects the prophet’s zeal or the narrator’s ideology rather than the actual action of God. The “problem” is shifted from divine justice to human imagination.[4]

This move is not isolated. It reflects a broader hermeneutical reflex: When the biblical text attributes judgment to God, the modern scholar attributes it to the narrator. When the text presents divine wrath, the scholar speaks of ancient Near Eastern conceptions of deity. When the text depicts God acting decisively, the scholar speaks of prophetic interpretation. In each case, the inspired author is treated as ethically primitive, and the modern interpreter as ethically enlightened.

The selective appeal to Jesus often reinforces this pattern. Wiseman, for example, cites Jesus’s rebuke of James and John for wanting to call down fire on a Samaritan village, as though this rebuke invalidated all divine judgment.[5] Yet he overlooks the far more severe woes Jesus pronounced on Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum—judgments that make Elijah’s fire look mild by comparison. Jesus rebuked misdirected judgment, not divine judgment. To invoke Jesus selectively is not to follow him but to filter him.

Underlying all of this is a deeper issue: the assumption that modern ethical intuitions are the standard by which Scripture must be judged. But this assumption is not only theologically misguided; it is logically self‑defeating. Today’s ethics will inevitably be judged inadequate by tomorrow’s. The generation that rehabilitates Elijah today will be rehabilitated by the next generation in turn. A morality that shifts with cultural winds cannot serve as a judge over the Word of the living God. If Scripture must be corrected by contemporary ethics, then Scripture will be endlessly corrected—and never authoritative.

The biblical writers, however, operate from a different premise. They assume that God’s character—not human intuition—is the standard of righteousness. They assume that God’s judgments are true, his actions just, and his words trustworthy. To treat divine action as the narrator’s projection is to reverse the relationship between God and his creatures. It is not humility before Scripture but moral paternalism toward Scripture.

Implications for the Church

The church must resist this impulse. Our task is not to rehabilitate the ethics of the inspired authors but to receive them. The God who spoke through Elijah is the same God who spoke through Christ. The God who judged the captains is the same God who judged Capernaum. The God who acts in 2 Kings 1 is the God who still acts in history. To read Scripture faithfully is to let God’s Word judge our ethics—not to let our ethics judge God’s Word.

If ministers are to help congregations read the Scriptures faithfully, they must resist the modern instinct to blush at the judgments of God. Embarrassment is not a fruit of the Spirit; it is the reflex of a culture that has forgotten both the holiness of God and the weight of sin. The task of the pastor is not to soften the text but to shepherd God’s people into a deeper confidence that the Lord is righteous in all His ways. Judgment narratives are not moral embarrassments to be explained away; they are revelations of the God who is both just and merciful.

Pastors can begin by reminding their people that divine judgment is never arbitrary. It is always measured, purposeful, and consistent with God’s character. The fire that fell in 2 Kings 1 is not a divine tantrum but a divine testimony: The Lord will not be mocked, and his Word will not be defied with impunity. When congregations see that judgment flows from God’s holiness rather than from human cruelty, they are freed from the need to apologize for Scripture.

Second, ministers must help their people see that the God who judges is also the God who saves. Judgment narratives are never ends in themselves. They expose the seriousness of sin so that the grace of God might be seen in its true brightness. The humility of the third captain in 2 Kings 1 is a reminder that God delights to show mercy to the contrite. The same Lord who consumed the arrogant spared the humble. This pattern runs through all of Scripture and finds its climax at the cross, where judgment and mercy meet in perfect harmony.

Finally, pastors must teach their congregations to trust the ethics of Scripture more than the ethics of the age. Modern moral sensibilities shift with remarkable speed, and what seems humane today may be condemned tomorrow. But the righteousness of God does not change. When believers learn to anchor their moral instincts in the character of God rather than in the fashions of the moment, they will no longer feel the need to rehabilitate the biblical authors. Instead, they will receive the Word of God with reverence, confidence, and gratitude.

In this way, ministers can help the church read judgment narratives, not with embarrassment or evasion, but with the humble recognition that the God who judges is the God who saves—and that his Word, in all its severity and all its mercy, is good.

Endnotes

[1] John A. T. Robinson, In the End, God: A Study of the Christian Doctrine of the Last Things (Fontana, 1968), 32–35.

[2] Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1, trans. Kendrick Grobel (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), 38–40.

[3] Donald J. Wiseman, 1 and 2 Kings, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (IVP Academic, 1997), 208. Wiseman exhibits a similar tendency later in his commentary when he treats Elijah’s ascension as though it were analogous to the death and hidden burial of Moses (2 Kings 2:1–14). He suggests that the narrative may reflect a tradition of Elijah’s disappearance rather than a literal ascent, despite the text’s explicit statement that Elijah “went up by a whirlwind into heaven” (hashamayim). This interpretive move mirrors his earlier hesitation in 2 Kings 1, where he speaks of Elijah “protecting the Name of God,” a formulation that subtly shifts agency from the Lord to the prophet and leaves the historicity of the consuming fire ambiguous. In both cases, the narrative’s plain affirmation of divine action is softened in favor of a more symbolic or literary reading.

[4] James A. Montgomery, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Books of Kings, International Critical Commentary (T&T Clark, 1951), 146–47.

[5] Wiseman, 1 and 2 Kings, 206.

Brian T. Wingard is missionary emeritus, retired from Mukhanyo Theological College, KwaMhlanga, South Africa, presently residing in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Ordained Servant Online, November–December, 2026